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For the past ten or so years, the right wing has been sounding the alarm about the greatest threat to American democracy. This great danger that threatens our way of life to its very core is not gun grabbing liberals, radical jihadists, or even burdensome bureaucratic regulations. All these things, to be sure, are overhyped as existential threats to the viewers of Fox News day in and day out. But the most feared and loathed of them all?

Political correctness.

Conservative politicians, commentators, and celebrities warn us over and over again that we have become a nation of thin-skinned weaklings who are left bruised at the slightest offense. They rail against college students who demand safe spaces; minority groups who call out racism, homophobia, and other prejudge; survivors of trauma and abuse who find use in trigger warnings for sensitive content; and anyone else they deign “snowflakes” incapable of dealing with their version of the harsh truth. This meme is arguably so prevalent in right-leaning discourse that it was a major factor in driving a patently unqualified candidate all the way to the White House solely on the basis of his supposed ability to “tell it like it is.”

But what happens when the offenders become the offended? We found out just the other night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

In a particularly pointed portion of her collective roasting of Washington, comedienne of the night Michelle Wolf took aim at President Trump’s Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. While her full menu of targets ranged from Hillary Clinton to Scott Pruitt and Rachel Maddow to Vladimir Putin, Wolf laid into Sanders specifically for her day-in, day-out defense of the administration’s incompetence, absurdity, and corruption.

Wolf did not, it should be noted, attack Sanders’ appearance (though many falsely alleged that she did). Instead, she took aim at the simple fact that Sanders lies very often in her work for the Trump Administration. And she does: from the podium, Sanders has lied about the healthcare debate, voter fraud numbers, the president’s words encouraging violence, the private positions of anyone from FBI agents to GOP senators, the rigors of immigrant screening processes, wiretaps on Trump Tower, and the women accusing President Trump of sexual assault – to list just a smattering of topics.

The right’s own snowflakes, however, found Wolf’s willingness to challenge Sanders’ lies none too amusing. The Five’s Greg Gutfeld, who once gleefully mocked a female air force pilot with his colleagues on live TV, decried the “misogyny” in Wolf’s routine. Sean Spicer called the entire dinner a “disgrace,” despite the fact that he himself, once in Sanders’ position, famously lied that Trump had the most well-attended inauguration ever, period, ,(despite obvious photographic evidence to the contrary). And Sanders’ father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, bemoaned the bit’s “bullying” – despite his own attempts at comedy on Twitter, which frequently include racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

Unfortunately, the temper tantrum was in large part rewarded. The liberal media came to Sanders’ defense, with the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association going so far as to issue an apology. The whole pitiful episode showcased the extreme vulnerability of a media industry paralyzed by an inability to call out untruths and willing to be co-opted by bad faith criticism. It was also, perhaps, an eye-opening look into the common discomfort that people of power on both sides of the aisle feel when anyone gets to loose-lipped in challenging the status quo.

But where was the biggest opponent of political correctness throughout all this? The man whose political appeal is supposedly rooted in both his toughness and his willingness to say anything, no matter who it offends? Cowering, per usual. Far too fearful to attend a dinner where past presidents have been mocked – let alone shown a willingness to mock themselves – President Trump was exactly where his fragile feelings demanded he be: safely coddled by a rally full of his adoring fans.

Wolf’s routine has already all but faded out of public discussion; perhaps that was inevitable, given the age of Trump’s frantically rushed news cycle. But next time a talking head on Fox News gins up a fury over the latest complaint from the snowflakes on the left, it would be good to remember how they couldn’t even stomach a simple comedy routine – and one with a lot of underlying truth, at that.

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Copyright 2018 Graham West, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Graham West is the Communications Director for Truman Center for National Policy and Truman National Security Project, though views expressed here are his own. You can reach West at [email protected].

It was beyond reassuring to hear a robust, principled speech in favor of liberal internationalism on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Less ideal, of course, was that the speech came not from the President of the United States, but instead the President of France: Emmanuel Macron.

Predictable media narratives are already emerging about the speech. First, the American left is inevitably being criticized for preferring another president’s ideology to our own; there is often similar right wing media whining when Democrats take a shine to a foreign leader (e.g. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau). It’s an ironic claim now, given that same right wing media spent years allowing the GOP – including the sitting President and Vice President – to sing Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s praises in comparison to U.S. President Barack Obama.

But beyond that, the speech is being portrayed as an attack by President Macron not just on President Trump’s policies, but in some sense on the man himself. After days of palling around together and posing for all the photos a state visit affords, how could President Macron offer before the U.S. Congress such a scathing rebuke of so many principles that his American counterpart held dear? But whether or not it was what President Trump wanted to hear, President Macron’s speech was the right one for this moment.

France knows something about the dangers of heightened nationalism, which – coupled with fake news, foreign influence, and vicious xenophobia – almost saw its presidency fall to an outrageously far right leader in May 2017. President Macron referenced the danger in his speech and deliberately warned it would only be inflamed by isolationist foreign policy, urging the United States not to close our doors to the world. It was an obvious caution against everything baked into President Trump’s America First platform, from its protectionist trade policies to its flirtations with (and origins in) far right extremism.

Rather than just bemoan the dangers of the status quo, however, President Macron also praised the virtues of robust liberal internationalism in the 21st century. In laying out the collective action challenges that that will define our generation in the history books – including refugee admissions, climate change, and nuclear proliferation – he made a persuasive case for nations with common values to work together. Built into that plea, of course, is the need for President Trump to stop withdrawing from the very international agreements and institutions meant to address those problems.

There may be a cost to President Macron’s stand, of course. He has clearly worked hard over the past few days to curry his American counterpart’s favor through congenial interactions, personal flattery, and enthusiastic participation in the pomp and circumstance that President Trump is known to love. Those efforts to build a personal relationship are obviously far more useful in working with President Trump than, say, painstakingly building policy consensus. But they may be for naught if America’s foremost cable TV viewer hears a talking head say that the Frenchman’s speech was an all-out assault on his ideology.

But perhaps that is one of the things that made President Macron’s speech so refreshing. Standing for liberal values and showing political courage are both, fundamentally, about accepting whatever cost may come. It’s an approach that stands in stark contrast to President Trump, who constantly drifts from position to position based on which conniving advisor he talks to last or what he thinks the rally crowd wants to hear.

In any case, with an utter lack of acceptance of – let alone praise for – multilateralism, multiculturalism, and multifaceted American leadership in the world coming from the White House, it was reassuring once again to hear a chief executive speak before Congress with a forward-looking vision for nations working together. President Macron’s words may incense President Trump, or they may simply fall on deaf ears. Either way, they were the right thing to say.

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Copyright 2018 Graham West, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Graham West is the Communications Director for Truman Center for National Policy and Truman National Security Project, though views expressed here are his own. You can reach West at [email protected].

This week in less-discussed national security news, a federal jury convicted three would-be terrorists. While their story hasn’t exactly dominated headlines, I personally was relieved to hear of the end of their trial-because two years ago, they were plotting to attack a place that I love.

Garden City, Kansas is located in the middle of the western half of a state many Americans know little about. It’s a town of about 26,000 people-not tiny by any means, but smaller than the city suburbs in which I grew. While I’m not a native of Kansas, my family has roots in Garden City; it’s where my parents went to high school, where my maternal aunt’s family lives, and where my paternal grandfather was a city councilman and the mayor for a number of years.

In October of 2016, a place I know as the site of many happy Christmases and Fourths of July appeared in my Twitter feed for an entirely different reason. Three men connected to local, far-right militia movements were arrested for their plot to bomb an apartment complex there that housed many Somali refugee families. Their target was chosen deliberately; the goal was to “wake people up” and initiate a much wider conflict between Islam and the West.

Thankfully, the thorough and professional work of the FBI meant that these evil plans never came to fruition. And with a guilty verdict marking the end of their four-week trail, they move one step closer to justice: a sentencing on 27 June.

Even with a happy ending, the story gives me pause, first and foremost for personal reasons. Previously, terrorism had been something I studied and thought about in the abstract; I was never forced to think about its impact in visceral terms. Knowing a place I loved-specific, real people that I loved-had been targeted struck fear into my heart, and it helped me understand one lens through which many Americans see issues of national security.

But there’s a wider lesson too in how this story has been covered. If three immigrants from Muslim-majority nations had conspired to commit a bombing, the national-level reaction would have been wildly different than a flash in the pan wire report-aside from provoking a maelstrom of presidential tweets, the story would have lead the major cable networks for well more than a day.

This is even more backwards considering that right-wing extremism like the would-be bombers’ plot is quantitatively far more dangerous to Americans than any other kind of terrorism. Peter W. Singer, a prominent national security scholar and former official in the Departments of State and Defense, wrote not long ago that far-right extremists were responsible for 71 percent of Americans murdered by terrorists in the past decade. They have a far higher American body count than ISIS, yet we rarely discuss them-and when we do, the conversations are often short, muted, or distorted.

The attempted Garden City bombing appearing as a blip on the national news is far from the only case of minimization. The murderer of 17 students and teachers in Parkland, Florida indulged in anti-Semitic rhetoric, yet it is young gun control activists most often likened to Nazis by hysterical commentators. A virulent racist killed nine African American worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 but was taken into police custody alive; meanwhile, young black men across our country are gunned down by law enforcement officers for the tiniest-and sometimes completely imagined-infractions. And time and again, we eschew the world ‘terrorist’ in describing these types of men, too often painting sympathetic pictures of ‘troubled loners’ in the headlines.

This imbalance in our national conversation is why it is especially heartening to see justice served in the case of the would-be Garden City bombers. I am thankful for the law enforcement professionals who stopped them, but also for the reporters as well as the judge and jury who have called them what they are: terrorists, whose ideology threatens not just Somali families, but the whole of America. With a little more attention on the national stage, perhaps their case can serve as a wake-up call that our nation must take all threats-not simply those that are politically convenient-deadly seriously.

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Copyright 2018 Graham West, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Graham West is the Communications Director for Truman Center for National Policy and Truman National Security Project, though views expressed here are his own. You can reach West at [email protected].