I’m tired of hearing conservative friends apologize for President Trump’s “go back to where you came from” tweets about the likes of Ilhan Omar. The president has the moral high ground, and the weasel war dance of the mainstream media shouldn’t distract us from this fact.

Even his worst enemies (e.g. ex-conservative David Frum) concede that Trump’s attacks on the anti-American extremists in the Democratic Party are smart politics. As Tucker Carlson observed in his June 16 keynote at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, a new Axios poll gives the Jew-baiting Somali an approval rating of 9%: “Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — another member of The Squad — was recognized by 53% of the voters; 9% (not a typo) had a favorable view.” Not a typo, indeed. When is the last time any American politican had a 9% approval rating? Americans really detest this wretched character, and with good reason. It has nothing to do with race, but with rhetoric that breaks the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, America-hating and Jew-baiting.

But this isn’t about trolling the Democrats. It’s about principle. President Trump has a gift for asking the obvious questions that the elites avoid, for example: What idiot let Omar into the United States in the first place? Come to think of it, why should we admit immigrants who hate us and hate everything we stand for? I believe that new Americans are as good as old Americans, and sometimes better, if they become Americans with a passion for our principles and love for what we represent. But we are under no obligation to open our national home to our enemies. The liberal globalist idea that we need to bow, scrape and apologize to every foreigner with a grudge against us rankles the American people. That inanity appeals to a few Americans–maybe about 9%, judging from the Axios poll. The rest of us have had it up to here.

Where were our holier-than-thou Democrats when the detestable Ilhan Omar dismissed the murder of thousands of Americans on 9/11 with a wink and a nod and the words, “Some people did something”? We know where they were then Omar claimed that Jews buy the votes of congressmen with cash (“It’s the Benjamins, baby”). The Democratic-controlled House passed a limp-noodle resolution deploring anti-Semitism along with hostility to Muslims after 9-11 — in response to overtly racist statements by Omar. That’s right — racist. Mind if I say it again? Rep. Ilhan Omar is a racist, because anti-Semitism is a species of racism. The false allegation that Jews buy pro-Israel votes with money is an old racist caricature. No-one in the Democratic leadership has the honesty to denounce Omar as a racist.

President Trump’s remarks had NOTHING whatever to do about race. He attacked America haters. The color of their skin is irrelevant. By attacking him as a racist, the Democratic leadership has debased the concept of racism. Racism is a wicked and terrible thing. People should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Race hatred and race prejudice are detestable. But the racist here is NOT the president of the United States, but rather Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Omar’s racism has consequences. Synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego were the victims of recent mass shootings. Physical assaults against Jews are routine in parts of New York City. Omar’s racist rabble-rousing puts lives in danger. According to the FBI, hate crimes against Jews comprised 58% of all hate crimes in the United States during 2018, although Jews are about 1% of the U.S. population. Anti-Semitic lies of the sort that Omar propounds are an incitement to murder and mayhem. The Democrats refuse to discipline their own rogue elements. Someone had to call them out, and President Trump did.

The genial Tucker Carlson observed to the National Conservatism conference that liberals accuse conservatives of exactly what they are guilty of doing. “It’s not Orwellian,” he joked. “It’s Freudian.” You discover that there are ten cookies missing from the cookie jar, he said, and ask your kid what happened. A normal kid will say, “Uh, I only ate three of them.” But if your kid is a liberal he’ll point his finger at you and scream, “I didn’t eat them! You ate them!” Carlson is exactly right. The Democrats harbor disgusting and overt racists in their party and close ranks to defend them, but when the president points out that racists don’t belong in American politics, they scream, “You’re the racist!” Every liberal publication from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the New Republic recited this meme obsessively. That doesn’t make it true.

The Democrats aren’t fooling anybody. Americans are big-hearted towards those who wish us well, but their righteous anger is aroused against those who wish us harm. We are fortunate to have a president who can tell the difference, unlike his predecessors.

Postscript: A friend observes that I failed to mention the most important thing about President Trump’s tweets. The liberals have redefined the term “racism” to include any reference to obvious and undisputed facts that might reflect badly on “people of color,” for example, the fact that countries like Somalia are hopelessly ungovernable whirlpools of corruption and chaos–just as Trump said. Because Somalis are non-white, the liberals declare, it is “racist” to call attention to the fact that their country is a revolting mess. Of course, Somalia’s problems have nothing to do with the skin color of its inhabitants, but rather with Islamic fundamentalism–but to mention that is ‘Islamophobic’, and therefore also “racist.” In liberal Newspeak, the president is guilty of racism prima facie. The object of this totalitarian Inquisition against common sense and attention to facts is to destroy our ability to think in the first place, just as Orwell warned. For many of us, the penalty for stating the obvious is dismissal from employment, especially for teachers. Trump has the most powerful job in the most powerful country in the world, and he can speak the truth that so many of us are forbidden to speak–although not without consequences. The House Democrats’ resolution condemning Trump as racist is an unprecedented descent into the sort of mendacious hypocrisy that we associate with Stalin, Hitler or Mao. Nonetheless Trump had the guts and thick skin to break the ban on truth-telling, and thereby empowered the rest of us to speak the truth.