This is for all the GOP “pragmatists” and nuanced realists who wasted so much time (and in some cases continue to do so) identifying Obama for who he is and has always been — in so doing, allowing progressive policy and bureaucratic lawlessness to reach troubling speeds, the formula for which can only be adequately figured out using some advanced physics theorem.

I’ve written before about the feds’ tracking the racial makeup of neighborhoods — for reasons we all know are forthcoming:  diversity!  Fairness!  People have a civil right to live in a gated community!  And so on.

Similarly, I’ve written for years, as have many others, about the commingling of the Marxist agenda with the environmentalist agenda, the goal being to rein in the populace, to keep us less dispersed and easier to manage by “nudging” us into cities and keeping us near public transit lines.  For the good of the earth!  But the truth is, they want us in pens because at base, they think of us as economic units who need to be managed, corralled, controlled.  And once we’re in that existential state, we’ll become more reliant on government largess, which in turn will increase the scope of government and entrench its outsized (and unconstitutional) social and legal reach.

Obama’s executive orders and policy desires have all been part of an effort to move society in this direction.  Because far from being a garden variety liberal Democrat, as the editors at many “conservative” sites have argued while trashing conservatives who recognize just how wrongheaded are these supposedly nuanced (and frankly ostentatious and needy) conclusions, Obama is a movement radical.  Which is obvious and should have been from the start:  pant crease or no, a virtually unknown political figure with a lot of missing pieces in his past and a couple of autobiographies written before he was really anyone, should have been a major red flag to anyone with a degree of skepticism.  What we did know of Obama pointed to his socialist leanings, his training in movement and academic Marxism and its leftist/progressive off-shoots, be it Fabianism, post-colonial theory, Black Liberation Theology, critical race theory, et al.; his associations, from Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrne to Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Francis Piven, and Saul Alinsky — coupled with his known prior vocation as a community organizer (what used to be known as an “outside agitator”) — all pointed away from the Manchurian candidate created by the media and through “his” autobiographies:  the “Barack Obama” we were being fed was never the Barack Obama who was living inside the carefully managed and manipulated political simulacrum.

So when Rush Limbaugh famously noted that he hoped Obama failed, he was absolutely speaking a conservative and constitutionalist truth, as many are only now coming to realize and reluctantly coming to admit, if only in private.

With his lame duck status and this being his “year of action,” we should be terribly wary of what institutionalized edicts he’s putting in place — and especially, those we haven’t really heard much about.  Because fundamental transformation has been given its legal go ahead through ObamaCare, and the offshoots of that re-imagining of the relationship between the people and the government, with the citizens as subjects and the government the sovereign, will be used in any number of ways to constrain liberty and choice, all in the name of the greater good.

Kurtz, who did some of the most important work in exposing Obama’s actual past and real-life ties, teasing the fictional “Barack Obama” apart from the man who has a demonstrable, if largely hidden, trail of associations and inculcations, is here once again ahead of the curve, waiting for the media to take notice (or rather, stop pretending there is no notice to be taken).  Because what is being put into place can complete the transformation Obama and the progressives have long had in mind for us; and virtually no one knows about it.

Kurtz:

[…] not a word has been heard of late about a truly transformative Obama executive action, his rule on “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH).  That rule will push Americans into living how and where the federal government wants.  It promises to gut the ability of suburbs to set their own zoning codes.  It will press future population growth into tiny, densely-packed high-rise zones around public transportation, urbanizing suburbs and Manhattanizing cities.

You won’t see a more ambitious Obama administration initiative than this.  Yet Obama never discusses AFFH.  Although a preliminary version of the rule was released in July of 2013, the president didn’t mention it in his State of the Union address.  The controversial rule was the subject of a Weekly Standardcover, yet as far as I can tell neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post has ever done a story on AFFH.

Now it emerges that the Obama administration released its planned regulatory agenda quietly on Friday, just ahead of the three-day holiday weekend.  The object, of course, was to minimize press coverage of controversial rules like AFFH.

As I read it, the long-delayed issuing of the finalized version of AFFH is now scheduled for December of 2014, right after the midterms.  The Obama administration seems to specialize in short-circuiting democratic accountability.  Obama’s reelection bid would likely have failed had he not delayed the implementation of Obamacare until after 2012.  His scheme to nationalize Common Core was developed out of stimulus funding, with no public debate.  Now Obama plans to launch a housing initiative dedicated to gutting suburban independence and urbanizing America, but only after the midterms.

I can’t think of an issue more worthy of public debate and discussion in advance of the 2014 midterm election than the AFFH rule and the Obama administration’s “regionalist” housing policies.  You can see dry runs for what Obama hopes to do with his new housing rule in recent planning initiatives in the San Francisco Bay Area and the TwinCities.  This is a hugely ambitious program.

There is a way to break the Obama administration’s silence on the AFFH rule and its anti-suburban regionalist agenda.  San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, widely touted as a possible 2016 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, has just been nominated to replace Shaun Donovan, chief architect of the administration’s regionalist policies, as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Why not ask Castro about his intentions for AFFH, and about the administration’s regionalist policy more generally?  On AFFH, how far will Castro go to force densification?  What penalties will he levy?  What measuring sticks will he use?  What steps will he take to pressure suburban municipalities to participate in regional governing bodies?  How does he square AFFH with America’s long tradition of local governance?

On regionalism and densification more generally, does Castro see the recent planning efforts in San Francisco and Minneapolis—with crucial federal participation in both cases—as models for the country?  Does he agree with former Obama transportation secretary Ray LaHood that the administration’s goal should be to “coerce people out of their cars?”

These are the sorts of questions that the Obama administration has been trying to avoid for the past six years, even as it has systematically moved to change the way Americans live.  If ever there was an issue deserving of legitimate debate before an election, this is it.  And if Julian Castro has hopes of being Vice- President of the United States he ought to be willing to publicly defend the Obama administration’s regionalist policies.  After all, he’ll soon be enforcing them.

If ever there was a tacit initiative that, once exposed and fully implemented, could quite literally bring about a battle between states and the federal government, this is it.  Which is perhaps one of the reasons behind the heavy arming of federal agencies.  It’s fashionable to believe that violence or civil unrest on a large public scale is the bailiwick of the Other; it can never happen here, after all.

And yet it already has, many times, the most significant of which was during the Civil War.

The left is using the EPA to kill energy production in this country.  It is spending taxpayer funding creating super trains that nobody wants — but that they believe people will eventually need once they are able to control where they live, how large a house they are permitted to have, and how much they can influence the cost of fuel and the byproducts of energy shortages:  higher food prices, higher clothing prices, higher prices for goods, etc.   This will “nudge” people into lower mortgages, or even smaller rental units, which successfully gentrifies the country and does away with the gauche middle class, with its maddening initiative and its borderline offensive IKEA taste.

What the left wants — what it has always wanted — is to manage the masses, a plan it sells by promoting egalitarianism that somehow never applies to those who are doing the planning and managing that enforces the conformity.  As I’ve noted for years now, collectivism ends in liberal fascism, with cronyism, corporatism, the veneer of a market economy that is meant to quell competition and polarize the citizenry, with the self-selected elites lording over the “masses” they claim always to champion.

Alinsky argued that in order to destroy the middle class, you must first set yourself up as its champions.  This has been the playbook of the Democrats for years.  But the thing is, yesterday’s Democrats are today’s New Leftists.  They care not a whit about the little people except inasmuch as they can get them reliant on government and so wrangle them in as a permanent voting bloc.

It won’t be long now before the real social inequality becomes evident:  rich government cronies in private industry and the ruling class politicians will be the haves; the rest of us will be the have nots, or at least the should nots.  Determining where we live, the size of our houses, the number of cars we have and the gas mileage they must attain, the nature of our healthcare (and its offshoots, the nature of our dietary and leisure habits) — all of this is part and parcel of the progressive social engineering program to realign society back to its “rightful” organizing principles, namely, not some phony appeal to natural rights, but man ruling over man.

These people are not our political adversaries.  History shows they are the existential enemies of liberty and a free people.

It’s time we stopped dancing around those unpleasant facts and make the arguments, even if it means we have to endure the sneers of those who believe their hand-waving dismissals and the labeling of we constitutionalists as fringe kooks, is sufficient to shame us, silence us, or marginalize us.

Because believe me:  there are more of us out there than many of us are conditioned to think, and the left knows this.  Pointing to the naked emperor’s hoary, putrified dongle — which has been impotent as a way to grow and multiply societies historically — is the way to fight back.  Be unafraid.  Return the scorn. Refuse to let the left set the parameters of debate and dismissal.

Or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

(h/t Mark Levin)