I woke up this morning, looked at the results, and had the feeling you get when you check your bank account after a weekend in Vegas. You knew it might be bad. You didn’t know it would be this bad.

And no, this isn’t about my team losing. I don’t care about the jersey. I care about the stadium. America isn’t a piece of land between two oceans. Canada has land. Mexico has land. What makes America America is a set of ideas: free speech, the right to defend yourself, the government works to protect your rights, not give you handouts.
 Take those away and you still have the Rocky Mountains. You just don’t have America. You have a very large Venezuela with better highways.

This country was built by people from everywhere. The Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles, the Jews, the Chinese. They brought their food, their music, their weird uncle who dances at weddings. Wonderful. Bring the lasagna. Bring the pierogi.

But everyone used to understand the deal: you bring the food, you leave the old country’s politics at the door. You don’t move to the land of the free and start campaigning against the free part. That’s like joining a gym and lobbying to remove the weights.

Which brings us to the Senate.

Start with the patron saint of this movement, Bernie Sanders. When normal Americans honeymooned at Niagara Falls, Bernie went to the Soviet Union. Nothing says romance like breadlines and a KGB minder. Then he spent decades trying to bring the souvenir home.

Now he has company.

Texas, the state of cowboys, oil rigs and “come and take it”, just elected a seminary student. Somewhere John Wayne is spinning fast enough to power Austin.

And Michigan elected Bernie’s guy, Abdul El-Sayed. Let’s look at the record, because the record is fun.

In 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt. Their president grabbed sweeping new powers. And a group of Egyptian-Americans wrote him an open letter cheering him on, urging him to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.” According to the New York Times, one of the signatures belonged to a medical student named Abdul El-Sayed.

Purge the media. Purge the police. That’s not a policy platform. That’s a to-do list for a dictatorship. And within months, that government was arresting journalists for insulting Islam.

His family? Don’t take my word for it. Take his sister’s. In 2012 she wrote, publicly: “My family has long been MB.” The year after: “I have had family jailed for being a part of it.” When he was asked on national TV, he said no ties. None. So either his sister doesn’t know her own family, or somebody’s being creative with the truth. I’ll let you decide who.

Now, I don’t care what a politician prays to. I care what he votes for and what he believes about how a country should be run. And here’s where people get squeamish, so let me say it plainly.

Islamic law, as written and enforced from Tehran to Riyadh, is the antithesis of America. In America, everyone is equal before the law. Under that system, a woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s. It’s in the text. In America, you can mock any religion you like, mine included, and the worst you get is an angry comment section. Under that system, criticising the religion can get you jailed, flogged or killed. Blasphemy laws, apostasy laws. Not ancient history. Today.

I learned that firsthand. I’ve travelled around the Middle East, Syria, Egypt, UAE, Jordan, Turkey and it took me about five minutes to figure out the house rules. Question anything about the religion and you aren’t having a debate. You’re filing an application to have your head separated from your body. Nobody was subtle about it. The threats were overt.

Are there millions of Muslims who just want to raise their kids and grill on the weekend? Absolutely. They’re my neighbors too, I live next a mosque actually.
 But I’m not talking about the guy at the grill. I’m talking about a political system, and the people who want to bring it here.

And when you point any of this out, what happens? You get called a bigot. “Islamophobe.” Which proves the point: the one religion you’re not allowed to criticise is the one whose law says you’re not allowed to criticise it. They’ve imported the blasphemy rule without passing a single law. They just shame you into enforcing it on yourself.

Here’s the paradox of tolerance, which a philosopher named Karl Popper figured out eighty years ago: if you tolerate the people who want to end tolerance, eventually you won’t have any tolerance left. Being open-minded is great. Being so open-minded your brain falls out is a medical condition.

There’s a parasite called toxoplasma. It infects mice and does one thing: it makes them stop fearing cats. The mouse walks right up to the cat feeling brave, enlightened, above its silly prejudices. The cat is delighted.

That’s a lot of good, decent voters right now. Convinced that their survival instinct is a character flaw. That fearing the cat makes you a cat-ophobe.

“Relax,” they say. “It’s one senator out of a hundred.”

Today it’s one. Tomorrow it’s three. Then ten. At what number do you finally say, “Hang on, what happened to my country?” There’s never a big moment. That’s the trick. The line moves one election at a time, while everyone congratulates themselves for being so open-minded.

So save this video. Come back in ten years. If I’m wrong, rub it in my face. I’d love to be wrong.

But I don’t think I am.

Wake up, America. You only get one of you