1. ACT for America and Brigitte Gabriel I first met Brigitte Gabriel, the Lebanese-American founder of this national security organization, at CPAC in 2015. Gabriel grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, and recalled spending years living in an 8x10 underground bomb shelter. "I lost my country of birth to radical Islam -- I do not want to lose my adopted country, America," she told me in 2015. She said Lebanon was once known as the "Paris of the Middle East." It was the banking capital and the only majority Christian country in the region. "We had the best economy in the Middle East, even though we didn’t have any oil," Gabriel explained. In 1965, National Geographic called Lebanon "the Eden of the Middle East." "We had an open border policy -- we welcomed everybody into our country because we wanted to share with them the Westernization we had created in the heart of the Middle East," she explained. Sadly, that Westernization was not to endure.