California legalized pot 5 years ago, but you couldn’t tell that from the scale of the drug war.

Every few months brings another massive bust. A 40-acre illegal pot farm in an obscure part of Death Valley, the "most elaborate illegal marijuana" setup in Mendota with 50,000 pot plants that was so big that police could smell it from 1,100 feet in the air, “vast groves” worth $169 million in the eastern Sierras, and $285 million in the old Shasta region of the gold rush.

In 2019, California seized almost 1 million pot plants. One busted operation not far from San Francisco was processing 500 pounds of marijuana a day.

Governor Newsom had kicked things off with an address announcing that he was pulling the California National Guard from fighting what he described as President Trump’s “manufactured crisis” on the border to “refocus on the real threats facing our state”, like “illegal cannabis farms”.

Next year, 7 Laotians were brutally murdered at an illegal marijuana operation in Riverside by Mexican cartel members over Labor Day. With helicopters piloted by the Air National Guard and black SUVs full of DEA agents showing up in small towns, it’s like the drug war never ended.

Somehow the drug war in California is worse than ever.

Pro-pot advocates promised that legalizing drugs would bring in the money. And it did. Billions of dollars have been spent on “legal drugs”, but far more is being spent on illegal drugs.

The old drug war was fought by Republicans who believed that drugs were bad, but the new drug war is being fought by Democrats who love pot, but love drug money even more.

The issue isn’t morality: it’s money.

An ounce of pot is estimated to cost as much as $100 more bought legally than on the street. The profit margins are great and decriminalization expanded the illegal market even more than the legal one. Buyers no longer fear being busted, sellers have little to worry about, and even the growers who take much of the risk don’t have to worry about the stigma. Illegal growing has become an environmental and financial violation. The only real thing to fear are the cartels.

Mexican cartels now control much of the wilderness that California’s militant environmentalists had insisted on protecting from development. But while developers might fear the Sierra Club and its government allies, the cartels and the immigrant growers under their control don’t. What they’re afraid of is having their throats cut in the middle of the night. And as massive marijuana growing operations take off in wilderness areas, it turns out that the environmentalists were saving all that land so that drug lords from south of the border could grow millions in pot.

While California’s legal agriculture industries are dying: its illegal pot industries are prospering. If you want to grow avocados, good luck getting the water. Instead, Californians are buying Mexican avocados, from which the cartels take their cut, while the water goes to illegal operations that aren’t worried about permits or environmentalist pressure groups in Sacramento.

California's rice production will fall by 20% and its avocado production fell by nearly half in 2019 from 338 million pounds to 175 million pounds, while its illegal pot production vastly increased.

The old drug warriors wore suits and ties. The new drug warriors are the “entrepreneurs” who spent fortunes lobbying politicians in the hopes of cornering the market only to be stuck with a small slice of it aimed at upscale buyers willing to pay premium prices at boutique pot shops.

The environmentalists who once got high to commune with nature are among the most vocal special interests urging an aggressive war against this new form of agriculture which can’t be regulated. Behind them are identity politics groups and unions which want their cut of the cash.

A glance at the members of the Cannabis Advisory Committee shows some of the special interests involved from the pot workers branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union to the head of the California NAACP to environmentalists. Legal drugs means money for unions and community groups, which really means money for Democrats.

Mexican drug cartels don’t pay consulting fees or offer donations to environmentalists, they don’t provide a cut to the black caucus, or hire unionized workers. It’s not the beheadings or rapes that bother California Democrats who shrug at such things from their gated communities.

But the illegal drug business is cutting into the profits from their legal progressive drug cartel.

That’s why Governor Newsom claimed that massive invasions of the country by illegal aliens are a “manufactured crisis”, but illegal pot farms that don’t pay his party are a serious threat. Illegal aliens build the power and wealth of the Democrats, but illegal pot farms steal from it.

Karl Marx observed that history repeats itself as farce. California’s Marxists are doing everything possible to live up to their leader’s teachings. After spending two generations fighting against the old drug war in the name of civil rights, they’re fighting a new drug war for civil rights.

Civil rights being anything that increases the power and wealth of California Democrats.

That’s why California’s Democrat majority passed a $100 million bailout for the “legal” pot industry. The widely reported bailout is really for the Democrats because it pays cities to hire experts to work with the industry on environmental compliance. What’s really going on is that the Democrat machine is paying its own environmental consultant class nine figures to navigate the roadblocks that same consultant class created in order to profit from the pot business.

That’s part of why an ounce of pot is $100 cheaper from the street than from a store.

Social justice is just a bunch of Marxist rhetoric behind which the same political mafia is moving money into its own pockets while laundering them through whatever ‘ism’ it’s fighting this week.

Whether it’s the environment or systemic racism, it’s another way for Democrats to get paid.

The old drug war was justified as a battle against a serious social ill, while the new drug war is just corrupt rent-seeking. The new drug warriors ridiculed the idea that locking up people for the harm caused by drugs was morally justified, but insist that locking up people because they haven’t paid the Sacramento mafia its share of the vigorish is completely morally justified.

California Democrats legalized drugs, further wrecking working class families, trashing what’s left of local agriculture and water supplies while feeding organized crime, to score $1.8 billion in tax revenues. But the illegal market is estimated at $8.7 billion. The new drug war is about the Democrats getting their hands on those extra billions by going back to the old drug war.

Why did California Democrats legalize drugs? It wasn’t to end the war on drugs, nor to make marijuana accessible to users with medical problems, or any of the other lies and excuses.

It was to make billions of dollars.

California’s new drug war pits socialists against drug lords over control of the drug market. It’s a familiar dynamic in South America that, like so much else, has crossed over the border.

The Democrats cloak their new social justice drug war in racial justice, offering “reparations” from their drug money to black people, in environmentalism, decrying the impact of illegal grows, in unionization, and in the whole colorful spectrum of leftist virtue signaling. But virtue signaling is no match for the ruthless determination of the cartels and their state sponsors.

In the battle between the legal drug cartels of the Democrats and the illegal drug cartels of South America, the illegals are winning as they have won everything else in California.

When Obama wanted to defend his ties to Jeremiah Wright, he began his speech by denouncing America's "original sin of slavery". The phrase is widely and unthinkingly used. And its consequences are the 1619 Project and critical race theory. If slavery is America’s original sin, then the purpose of America and her people becomes striving to atone for that primal sin.

Suburban Democrat housewives reading Robin DiAngelo and corporate struggle sessions forcing members to affiliate by race are just striving to atone for America’s “original sin”.

And if they resemble a cult, it’s because civil rights moved from the legal to the spiritual.

Dismantling the legal infrastructure of segregation took on religious and psychological overtones. The legitimacy of ending school segregation was tainted by psychosocial nonsense like the ‘Doll Study’ which found that children preferred white dolls to black dolls. Even then the original sin of civil rights was that its more academic proponents could not properly define rights, and sought affirmative remedies that transformed how we thought rather than what we did.

What we do can be in the legitimate purview of government, what we think is not. And yet over the years civil rights became obsessed with the origins of discrimination in the human mind.

Countless tests were devised, many absurd, (“What color is a gorilla’s skin underneath the fur?” one particularly awkward racist test for racism asked) that were meant to measure our thoughts.

The less racist our society became in function, the more civil rights fixated on a gestalt of psychosocial racism which explained racial disparities by blaming hidden thoughts leading to assumptions that perpetrated systemic racism even as its white perpetrators remained unaware.

The truly dangerous part of this conclusion was that the focus of discrimination had moved from actions to thoughts. Critical race theory is being imposed on everyone from schoolchildren to soldiers because civil rights violations had been redefined from the physical to the mental. Civil rights was no longer fighting separate drinking fountains, but unconscious and implicit biases.

The National Guard wasn’t being sent to open up schools, but to open up the human mind.

When the government tells you what to do, it risks becoming a tyranny, but when it starts telling you what to think, it becomes a theocracy. Critical race theory, like most of America’s experiments in secular theocracy, came out of academia whose experts have failed miserably when it comes to tangible policy results, but excel at telling people what to think.

The original sin of academia is constructing grand theories. The social sciences found the root causes for its grand theories in the interface between society and psychology. Their solutions begin with having the government change how people live and then when that doesn’t work, changing how they think.

The sociologists who wrecked the black industrial communities of the north with welfare refused to accept responsibility for the disaster they helped cause and instead began blaming racial disparities on the hidden workings of society and the human mind.

While academic civil rights was psychoanalyzing America, the civil rights movement had soured from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christian emphasis on national redemption across racial lines to the Islamic tribalism of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in whose mythology black people were chosen and white people were a tainted race created through eugenic breeding. America was an evil empire doomed to be destroyed by the arrival of UFOs protecting the master race.

The next generation of activist clergy was outwardly Christian, but had come either directly, like Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s mentor, or indirectly like James Hal Cone, Warnock’s mentor, through the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam. When Jeremiah Wright shrieked, "God Damn America! That’s in the Bible," he meant it literally with America as Babylon and Rome. To the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose movement has been linked to a number of recent terrorist attacks, America is Edom. The common theme is that America is a mythic evil to be destroyed.

The set of ideas that people associate with critical race theory fuses the two corrupt successors of the civil rights movement, academic racial psychoanalysis and racial nationalism, through the writings of second generation black nationalists who had come through academia, like Ibram X. Kendi, and journalism, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The modern proponents of critical race theory fuse academic beliefs in subconscious systemic racism and black nationalist convictions that America and white people are inherently evil.

That’s where critical race theory becomes critical race theocracy.

This brand of ‘wokeness’ is legitimately theological because its origins lie as much in black religious identitarian movements as in the academic jargon in which it cloaks its racism. The synthesis of the two very different literary genres results in strange poetry, personal confessionals wrapped in bad sociology and worse history, mythic appeals and nonsense jargon, that runs through everything from the 1619 Project to ‘Between the World and Me’.

Critical race theory’s defenders insist that it’s an academic movement, that its proponents are experts, and that it just wants to discuss its ideas, but it operates like a theocracy, silencing and suppressing opponents, critics, and even insufficiently radical supporters. Its entire rationale is built on denying that anyone can legitimately disagree with it or that debate is even possible. A movement that dismisses reason and objectivity as forms of oppressive whiteness has no interest in dialogue, only in terrorizing its way to power as racial nationalists seek to do.

The Nazis decreed theories and creative works off limits because they believed that ideas could not be separated from the race of their creators. Critical race activists agree that theories and works carry the race of their creators in their intellectual DNA. The Nazis banned some works over ‘Jewishness’ while critical race theory activists seek to ban them over their ‘whiteness’.

The most brutal theocracies are those which are the most pessimistic about human nature. The Nazis believed that people were animals who could never transcend their biology, Islamists believe that people must be ruthlessly conquered and ruled to bring peace, and leftists believe that power relations doom humanity to cycles of exploitation without an enlightened tyranny.

Critical race theory is infused with the academic pessimism of the Left, the identitarian racial pessimism of black nationalists, and the spiritual pessimism of black nationalist theology. It exists in a perpetual state of struggle and its exceptionalism is rooted in its victimhood. It needs white people as an ultimate enemy whose existence gives it its negative meaning.

Whiteness abstracts white people as a perpetual enemy for a racial and a spiritual struggle.

America’s fall into the grip of this racist theocracy obsessed with a struggle against whiteness, driven by racial paranoia and moral despair, is a direct legacy of the intellectual and moral failings of the aftermath of the civil rights era. These failings were as much white as they were black. While the black family disintegrated in the grip of the welfare state, white elites lost their religion and built an alternative culture whose meaning came from politics and pop culture.

Wokeness is just the horrid synthesis of white secularism and black nationalism, of a society where music is worship, politics is religion, self-medicating is meditation, and activism is faith. The endless narcissistic refractions only produced a victimhood culture whose great crusade is enforcing conformity through the only means possible in a fragmented society that has lost its moral and intellectual underpinnings: online bullying and political terrorism.

Kingian civil rights is inaccessible to a secular society with no concept of forgiveness or humility. It’s also inaccessible to people whose warped version of religion teaches them to hate others.

To paraphrase John Adams, "Civil rights was made only for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for any other." Critical race theory is the inadequacy of a political society trying to come to grips with moral and religious questions, but with no other tools than power and the abstractions of a scientism that is suited to studying distant galaxies, but not people.

The Founding Fathers, now the enemies of critical race theory whose statues are being torn down, were humble enough to limit the ambit of government to the realm of government. And they made it clear that it was not their role to tell people what to think or to believe.

America held together through conflicts that should have torn the country apart because we fought over the nature of government, not over the nature of man. The Confederate statues that have occasioned so much ire were the legacy of a country that was able to knit together its wounds as former enemies forgave and honored each other in the aftermath of its worst war.

Even when we were a moral and religious people, we did not go to war over what was in our souls. The leftist theocracy terrorizing millions of Americans is particularly unfit to judge souls, but the intellectual failures of academia and the moral failures of elite culture and leftist clergy has localized the failures of the black community in the psychosocial gestalt of systemic racism.

The only way to save black people then becomes controlling how everyone thinks.

Liberal theology had made the civil rights movement into the epochal moral event of America as their ancestors had made the civil war the defining event that transformed the soul of the nation. This was exactly the brand of moral narcissism that Lincoln found so frustrating about the abolitionists long before their distant descendants put on black and began toppling his statues.

Civil rights became a force that gave white liberals meaning. And that was another way of saying that civil rights became a religion. The devolution of civil rights legislation from inhibiting state discrimination based on race to enforcing state discrimination based on race was the trajectory of a theocracy based on the same sort of realpolitik that corrupts religions.

The Founding Fathers removed government restraint while the new theology of civil rights imposes government restraint, first over actions, then over ideas, and finally over thoughts.

Equality has made way for equity and the human mind is the new lunch counter. The only way to achieve civil rights is, as in the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, and every leftist tyranny, by removing civil rights from all and distributing them to the most deserving. The hypocritical corruption of the system demands not just tyranny, but theocracy, not just control over bodies, but over the minds whose owners might question this self-serving arrangement.

What was once a supremely achievable goal, the end of government restraint, has made way for the usual unachievable utopian goal of an ideal society of the supremely enlightened.

The paradoxes of critical race theory come from its paradoxical intellectual origins through the social science academics who believe that everyone can be reeducated and the black nationalists who believe that white people are inescapably evil. They compromise by believing that white people are inescapably evil and must be constantly reeducated anyway.

It’s a compromise that allows white leftists to pursue meaning through civil rights and black nationalists to pursue racial identitarianism while leaving out non-misanthropes of all races.

Ending this nightmare will require confronting the corruption of civil rights. Positive rights lead to tyranny and negative rights to freedom. When we define rights as things the government does for us, rather than things the government stops doing to us, we all end up as slaves. Civil rights cannot and should not be used to achieve equity by chasing racial disparities. That sociological and theological rabbit hole inevitably takes us into the realms of psychology and sin.

Those are places where the government does not belong and should not be allowed to venture.

Critical race theory is less a theory than a theocracy, but both a theory and a theocracy can be torn down by attacking its fundamental assumptions. The failure to challenge theories leads to theocracies. If we want to defeat this theocracy, we need to start with its fundamental assumptions about white evil and black victimhood, and about an original sin that passes not only from fathers to sons, but from plantation owners to recent immigrants.

America and Europe did not invent slavery, but they were the first to comprehensively destroy it. The presumption of guilt that traces every Third World blight or domestic inadequacy to some combination of colonialism, imperialism, and other nonsensical ‘ism’ is false and wrong. We do not need to constantly redeem ourselves for doing what no other civilization managed to do.

We already have.

There is no room for a racial theocracy in America, not in our colleges, our institutions, or our military. Its existence is a declaration of war on not only our past, but our present and our future.

Destroying a village won’t save it and destroying civil rights in the name of civil rights is a farce.

When civil rights isn’t regulating how you treat others, but how you think about them, and how you think about the theories that explain why they’re the victims, that’s an uncivil theocracy.

Joe Biden is celebrating July 4th by proposing a massive expansion of the IRS. How better to celebrate the colonists who chased British tax collectors out than by replacing them with Biden's tax collectors.

But every progressive person knows that Independence Day is for extremists. The dream of the new post-national nation is Co-Dependence Day in which we all live happily together in a planned economy. 

The old British entity that Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and a bunch of other dead white men fought to be free of, has been recreated. The new London is in Washington D.C. whose bureaucrats throw fits if they're asked to leave the imperial city. The new social welfare empire is built on redistribution.

A few centuries ago, some young white men had refused to have their property and their political autonomy redistributed to an elite thousands of miles away. 

The very idea of having a revolution over such a thing seems entirely absurd to today's wokies.

Or as another Englishman once again, "Imagine there's no countries". It's easy if you live in the EU.

All that the Crown really wanted was for the colonists to pay their “fair share”, a share that was determined thousands of miles away. All that the colonists wanted was the rights of Englishmen that they believed they were entitled to. After a great deal of bloodshed, the colonists won the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning personal freedom and limited government. Now we have free things, unlimited government, and our freedom shrinks in proportion to the growth of our free things and of the government that hands them out.

To the denizens of public housing watching the fireworks burn briefly in the sky,  who get a free ride on everything from food to housing by taking away everyone else's freedom and future, the fireworks are just one more free thing in the sea of free things that they swim in. 

To the Democrat voters of the welfare state, this is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free. The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British were racists or weren’t providing free transgender surgery to the colonies. 

If only they knew about the NHS, they would vote to undo the American Revolution in a flash.

There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. A free country isn’t obsessed with free riders, only a country of free things obsesses with making everyone pay their fair share for the benefit of the people who want the free things. Rugged individualism has given way to stifling crowds, co-dependent on each other, lined shoulder to shoulder, clutching at each other’s wallets, crying, “Take from him and give to me."

We are a nation overflowing with the right to things paid for with other people’s money. 

The fireworks that shoot up in a wonderland of blue and red, silver and gold, are a faint echo of the real thing, the gunpowder that blasted back and forth between the lines of government troops, their Hessian mercenaries and the rebel colonists who chose to ride free, rather than bend their necks to the plans of an expanding empire. The faint smell of gunpowder and the dark shapes of the barges only mime the war that was fought here. A play of light and shadow whose meaning reaches fewer and fewer people each year.

The expected speeches will celebrate some notion of independence, but did so many men risk their lives just to end up with a system that made the one they escaped seem positively libertarian by comparison? If they had known that they were going to end up with some version of the NHS, along with death panels, in a co-dependent system where everyone is looted for the greater good of the looters—they might have stayed home on their farms, sadly watching the fighting from a distance.

JFK’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was always a hollow lie. Half the country is expected to ask what their country can do for them, while the other half is expected to ask what they can do for their country. This simmering civil war is often pegged as a class war, but it isn’t about class. There are billionaires and paupers on both sides, and the divide cuts across the Middle Class, dividing those who derive their income from private business from those who receive it from government and government-subsidized employment.

The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but every other day is Co-Dependence Day, the days we celebrate our integration, our volunteerism and our compliance with a vast system which makes everyone dependent on the government and which makes the government dependent on everyone who still works for someone other than the government.

 Empires function by draining every drop from their possessions to cover their costs. The British Crown tried to drain America to pay down its debt, resulting in growing protests from the population and eventually a revolution. Now the Empire of Co-Dependency is draining its independent subjects for the benefit of its dependent subjects and the dependency infrastructure that employs its numberless bureaucrats who govern it all.

A new crisis is always here to justify higher taxes and bigger government.

The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.

A nation where everyone is part of one great co-dependent community, a centrally planned marketplace that can only be balanced if everyone is forced to buy what they are told to buy, is not a free nation. It will not even be independent for long. The logic of co-dependence is to expand that dependency beyond the borders and make the region and then every part the world dependent on one another to balance out the numbers.

Co-dependence required an end to states rights. It will eventually require an end to the rights of nations.

Like all pyramid schemes, the burden of dependency is passed on to greater and greater systems until its weight is more than that of the entire world. That burden of co-dependency is like a rock rolling downhill; it gathers more and more mass to itself, increasing its momentum, until it crashes.

The system attempts to stay ahead of the inevitable crash by making sure that every productive person pays his “fair share”. It hunts for individuals and nations who still aren’t rolling downhill, tips them over and pushes them off the mountain. All in the name of the greater good.

 The new Crown is not a person, it is an idea. The throne at whose foot a formerly free people kneel is the golden seat of the welfare state. While the fireworks light up the sky, a counterrevolution undid the revolution. There is a new king and his face is on every magazine cover in the land. His bounty is a jagged bear trap that turns everyone into a ward of the state at their own expense.

As the last wave of fireworks die out, the shooting stars sinking to earth and vanishing into the darkness, the light of Independence Day fades and the crowds slowly trudge away from the brief spectacle, past the lines of police barricades, through narrow streets, past government buildings, back to their co-dependent lives in a co-dependent nation where the will of the people and the rights of the individual matter less than the latest proposal to solve the problems of their independence by making the country a more dependent place.

A few hundred years ago in these streets, men and women celebrated the end of tyranny, and in its darkest hour, lines of grim men marched along the waterfront up to the highest point on the island to mount a final defense. Sometimes the older buildings still wear their shadows on their brick walls and by the golden light of the fireworks you can almost see them, shadows moving in the darkness, their footsteps taking them north, a faint song on their lips, muskets in their hands, their lives lost and gained in defense of their freedom.

Ijeoma Oluo spends a lot of time complaining about her single white mother who took care of her when her black father returned to Nigeria and never came back.

Like Obama and Kamala, Ijeoma built a marketable identity by identifying with a father who abandoned her. But the author of such racist texts as So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America takes it even further by identifying as Nigerian-American. The Nigerian part is very hypothetical as she was born and raised in America, and her Nigerian father left when she was a year old and broke his promise to return.

White people are absolutely terrible, Ijeoma, who is half-white, insists.

"I have never been able to escape the fact that I am a black woman in a white supremacist country," Oluo declaimed at the beginning of So You Want to Talk About Race. The ugly racialist book never broke through the way that Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi did, but it was a modest success and is regularly featured at corporate critical race indoctrination sessions.

Like other pop critical race theory texts, Oluo began the book by berating the leftist white women who were its target audience. It’s a topic she had practiced with her mother.

The woman who raised her and her brother, when they were abandoned by their black father, is a favorite topic for both siblings. But where Ahamefule Oluo, a jazz player and comedian, has done shows honoring his mother while emphasizing the subjective nature of race as he found that people in Nigeria saw him as white, Ijeoma Oluo has taken the opposite approach.

Ijeoma’s mother is a popular topic and punching bag. In essays and books, she decries her mother’s ‘whiteness’. “Our mom never thought that our blackness would hold us back in life—she thought we could rule the world. But that optimism and starry-eyed love was, in fact, born from her whiteness,” she complains in So You Want to Talk About Race.

When her mother asks, “How come you never identify as white, too? I mean, you’re half white”, she retorts that "I did not feel that whiteness was something that any person with brown skin and kinky hair could inherit". Lots of white people have kinky hair. Certainly plenty of half-white people, like Ijeoma, do. And Ijeoma is obsessed with white supremacy’s threat to her hair.

Touching her hair, she rants, "is a continuation of the lack of respect for the basic humanity and bodily autonomy of black Americans that is endemic throughout White Supremacy."

Your average white supremacist probably doesn’t want to touch non-white people’s hair.

But for all the attention that Ijeoma lavishes on complaining about her mother’s insufficiently woke views on race, she never mentions her father in So You Want to Talk About Race. At one point she rants, “If our mothers were raped by white men and we were born with lighter skin, we could almost be seen as attractive.” But her mother was white and married an African student.

Ijeoma’s father was 53, but apparently told her mother he was 30 years old. After abandoning the mother of his children with a toddler and a one-month old baby, the African chief and doctoral student went back to his own country and promptly impregnated a woman there.

Her brother describes him as a “selfish and contemptible man”. Ijeoma instead wrote her second book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Her first book is full of shots at her present mother while her second book attacks an imaginary white father.

Mediocre was released by a Hachette imprint, alongside such critical race theory rants as Vicky Osterweil's In Defense of Looting (The French publishing giant also suppressed Julie Burchill's Welcome to the Woke Trials and fired Kate Hartson who had published pro-Trump books.)

An imprint named after a 19th century upstart French leftist publisher, Louis Hachette, a white man, released a mediocre book claiming that there was a crisis of white male mediocrity.

The incredible mediocrity of Moses, Hippocrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein might give some people pause, but Ijeoma explains that, “when I talk about mediocrity, I talk about success that is measured only by how much better white men are faring than people who aren’t white men”.

Success becomes mediocrity, and mediocrity becomes success.

Sadly for Ijeoma, Mediocre was mediocre and failed to match the success of So You Want to Talk About Race. Ijeoma had gambled that there was an audience of white leftist women who wanted to hear that white men were awful without enduring attacks on themselves.

Ijeoma had underestimated the masochistic tendencies of the average white leftist woman.

Mediocre’s author imagines that she’s an “exceptional talent”, writing that, “most women and people of color have to claw their way to any chance at success or power, have to work twice as hard as white men and prove themselves to be exceptional talents before we begin to entertain discussions of truly equal representation in our workplaces or government.”

What exceptional talents has Ijeoma shown beyond bashing white people on the internet?

Mediocre is a random mess of intersectional clichés and historical sketches from periods that she clearly doesn’t understand as tries to roll them into her argument. “Stalin ended up being another white man who would distort entire movements to serve his purposes,” she insists.

That’s almost coherent compared to chapters where Ijeoma leaps from attacks on cowboys to complaining about Bernie Sanders supporters on Facebook. None of this has much to do with the book’s supposed theme of white male mediocrity. The only common thread is that white men are terrible because they’re white and they’re men.

White male conservatives are evil, but so are white male leftists who only join causes to maintain their power. White men are locked “into cycles of fear and violence” and the “white male glorification of violence has saturated our action films”. It’s a curious claim for a woman whose African father wrote his thesis on the Biafra-Nigerian Civil War and whose country, which she identifies with, has been in the middle of one kind of civil war or another for generations.

Women have to “divorce ourselves from the lure of proximity to white male power” even “when those white men are our friends, our husbands, our fathers, or our sons,” Ijeoma Oluo argues.

And yet Ijeoma followed her father, the “Honorable Chief Dr. Sam Oluo”, into political science. While her brother courted her father’s disapproval by playing music, she tried to imitate her absent father. And has spent her life making excuses for him and his culture.

When as a teenager she contacted Nigerians on the internet and they began to scam her, she processed it as the "legacy of colonialism" so that "every white person scammed out of their life savings felt, in a way, like a bit of retribution for the ravages of colonization and slavery."

Except that the Nigerian scam artists were just as happy to scam her as they were anyone else.

“My Nigerian father was Catholic for the same reason why he spoke with a British accent,” Ijeoma snapped on Twitter. “Because his oppressors forced him to.”

Why did he abandon her? Probably because of those white oppressors. Like her mother.

There’s a story there about racial identity and hatred, gratitude and ingratitude, and the primal way that children can identify with a father who isn’t there while hating the mother who is.

But it’s not a story that Hachette would publish or Ijeoma Olou would be likely to write.

Last year, Ijeoma posted a tribute to the white grandfather who had not abandoned her when her black father had. "My father returned to Nigeria when I was two and was more of a story than an actual person in my life. But my grandfather, my Bob Bob, loved me so completely that I never felt lacking.”

The photo that came with it showed an older white man holding a young black girl in his arms.

Later that year, she published Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Barack Obama turns 60 over the summer. The AARP cover with Barry posing next to a basketball and a shelf of bestselling non-fiction books he hasn’t read can’t be too far away.

Once the symbol of youthful hipness, the former boss of Hope and Change now lectures “young people” on what they should be doing. His legacy is being carried forward by 78-year-old Biden and the 81-year-old Pelosi. That’s above the average age of 80 of the House Dem leadership.

The average age of the Biden cabinet is two years older than President Trump’s cabinet.

The gerontocratic technocracy uses AOC as its younger foil, but she’s been a stalking horse for Bernie Sanders who will hit the big 80 in the fall. The big donors behind the American Left are even older with George Soros due to hit 90 the same month Obama gets to 60. The even bigger reservoirs of cash flowing into the leftist machine are coming from the foundations of men who were born in the 19th century like Henry Ford, John D. MacArthur, and John D. Rockefeller.

That’s about right for a 19th century ideology whose followers keep trying to make it look young.

Youthful leftism is anarchic. It’s CHAZ, BLM, and Antifa. It’s open air heroin markets, smashed store windows, and political assassinations. Turning that anarchy into collectivism requires hysterical propaganda and rallies that appear anarchic, but are actually tightly controlled, ideas that seem edgy, but are actually the work of men who were born during the age of the steam.

If you think Bernie’s old, Karl Marx celebrated his 203rd birthday in May.

Obama’s policies have aged as badly as Marx, Biden, or their front man. But instead of moderating as they grow older, they only grow more radical. Obama equivocated on gay marriage, while Biden entirely erases the existence of women by calling them “birthing people”. Obama covertly weaponized the government against conservatives, while Biden is doing it openly. Everything from election rigging through H.R.1 to indoctrinating every government employee with critical race theory is happening more openly and blatantly under Biden.

Youthful leftist revolutions break the system while leftist gerentocrats impose the tyranny.

Making tyranny look like freedom requires hefty doses of chaos and outrage that make it appear that the system is being broken when it’s actually being built up. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The revolution is the thing it’s revolting against.

The end of history keeps arriving only to vanish like a mirage when the youth reach for it.

"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal," Obama told his followers. Two years later, he privately snapped, "What does he think I'm supposed to do? Put on my f------ Aquaman gear and swim down there myself with a wrench?"

Thirteen years have passed and if the planet has begun to heal, Democrats won’t admit it.

The moment of epochal change can never be allowed to arrive because it would interrupt the permanent crisis. Salvation is always here and also always out of reach. But there’s always a new generation available to be fooled again because they know the past doesn’t matter.

History is radically revised every generation not just for what it teaches, but for what it doesn’t.

A revisionist history work like the 1619 Project doesn’t just impose a radical new racist history, it displaces the past. Another revisionist history will come along to displace the 1619 Project because manufacturing history churn is vital to destroying any continuity with the past. All the academic lenses being swapped one for the other like a mad ophthalmologist leaves a new generation with a lot of theories, but no clue that they’re being indoctrinated into a lost cause.

The Left has no new ideas. Like Hollywood, it makes old ideas seem new by rebooting them, by making them appear hip and trendy, and by destroying a meaningful connection with the past. And that way audiences don’t realize they’re just seeing the same movie remade over again. What might be creative bankruptcy in a movie theater is a more seriously sisyphean problem described by Churchill as, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

But how does a new generation learn from a past that isn’t allowed to exist on its own terms?

Demonizing the past is a convenient way of obscuring it. The only thing students are taught about the past is that it was a horrible time, its people backward, its customs savage, its learning wicked, its institutions racist, and its ideas horrifying. In postmodern history, the past exists only as a cautionary tale gleaned for historical struggles that fit into the new narrative.

History is an incomplete present whose revolutions were never fully fulfilled. It’s a revolutionary story of a world ruled by villains until they were overthrown by the forces of good. And this revolution against history must continue until all of the past is negated by the present.

The destruction of statues and burning of books forces ‘presentism’ for the past to conform to the dogmas of the moment. The biggest problem with the past isn’t that it’s politically incorrect, but that it’s repeating itself. The Black Lives Matter movement transparently harkens back to the 70s. So do most of the radical social impulses in which the Left cloaks its real power agenda.

The revolutionary chaos is doomed to fail again, but each oscillation breaks the country more.

The social activism is window dressing. A proper Marxist regime has little use for militant minorities, feminism, gay rights, police defunding, transgender bathrooms, pipeline protests, abortion, or any of the other issues the radicals have been using to waste our time. If you doubt that, go look at how many of any of the above you can find in China, Cuba, or North Korea.

The Russian Futurists vowed to throw the art and literature of the past overboard from the “steamship of modernity”. But the Bolsheviks were not looking for disruptive art and when the revolution arrived, modern art was tossed overboard and the former revolutionaries settled down to producing socialist realism and recreating the art of the past for the Soviet Union.

After a brief permissive period, the Soviet Union criminalized homosexuality and insisted on traditional marriages and roles for women. Those feminists who resisted were soon shown their place with one of the more notorious free love figures being forcibly married off by Lenin.

The dictatorship had eclipsed the revolution and the past was quickly rewritten all over again.

As Obama approaches his sixtieth birthday, the age at which Khrushchev struggled for control of the USSR and Mao launched his Great Leap Forward, two events that would require a good deal of historical editing, our American past is already being rewritten. Only those who are at least in their thirties will remember that there wasn’t a racial crisis before Barack Obama.

And there hadn’t been such a crisis for a generation before he took power.

Our racial crisis is not a legacy of 1619, but of 2008. Obama’s victory was not a revolution against a crisis, but the revolution that created the crisis. To a new generation, the racial crisis is a permanent feature of life. They have always lived under the crisis and expect to always live under it. That is why critical race theory and white privilege rants have become so pervasive.

Without a generation coming of age in a world shaped by the toxic idea that all white people are evil and all minorities are victims, no one outside academic circles would have willingly accepted them. And if that generation seems all too easy to radicalize into supporting the most insane policies, that’s because it grew up in a world defined by the hysteria of manufactured crises.

The world as they know it is doomed by melting ice caps, the rich getting richer, and the genocide of black people at the hands of the police. Every radical program is backed by a sense of urgent crisis which is killing people and destroying the future. They can’t imagine a present without the crisis and don’t remember ever living in a world not defined by crisis.

As Obama gets closer to his AARP cover, a generation lives in the world that he made.

Like Obama, his radical political movement speaks endlessly about the past, but has no actual past. Its past is always being reinvented and retold through new narratives, but with no facts.

The Obama revolution has come and gone. We have skipped past it to the Soviet Union of Chernenko and Andropov, of gerontocrats building the tyranny with the beams of revolution. The decline is everywhere as the theories fail, the factories close, and the stores stand empty.

The youth are being rallied to cheer for the revolutionary tyranny of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer who are promising a new era in history no one believes in anymore. Since the election their cause is no longer free college, it’s federalizing elections through H.R.1.

Federalizing elections, eliminating the filibuster, and packing the Supreme Court are compelling issues in Washington D.C., but the regime plotting new coups has little to say to the ordinary people facing high prices for gas and bread. Land, Bread, and Peace has given way to a race for total power over the country as the revolution of Hope, Crisis and Change comes of age.

There’s no change without crisis, and without hope, there’s only hate.

Ever since Amazon created its own delivery service, the blue vests of its drivers and the dark blue trucks with the monopolistic giant’s arrow have become as ubiquitous as UPS brown or FedEx purple and orange on every street and highway in America. And with good reason.

Amazon’s package volume is expected to surpass UPS and FedEx as a host of men and women in blue rush to deliver orders from Chinese third party sellers and drop shippers.

But on the first Friday of June, a delivery in California instead ended in a violent assault.

Usually Amazon rips off customers, companies, and entire countries, but it doesn’t beat them. This time there was an exception as Itzel Ramirez, an Amazon driver in her twenties, was caught on video violently assaulting a 67-year-old woman who had asked about her package.

While Ramirez claimed self-defense, the video shows her assaulting the elderly woman from behind, punching her in the back of the head, and seemingly using a key ring in the assault. The beating caused the victim to collide with the door and reportedly left her with a broken nose.

It was not the first assault by an Amazon driver on an elderly person caught on video. An Amazon driver had previously assaulted a 73-year-old man in Miami Beach. But this time the Amazon delivery person had used a politically correct slur thereby turning it into a hate crime.

Ramirez had accused her victim of “white privilege”.

Despite that slur, she has not been charged with a hate crime. In a state where critical race theory is being forced into schools and on employees of major corporations, it’s not likely that a violent racist echoing an official dogma that demonizes white people would be held accountable.

Amazon claimed that the violent assault on one of its customers “does not reflect the high standards we have for drivers" and assured everyone that "this individual is no longer delivering Amazon packages.” But it may be worth examining what Amazon’s standards really are.

Like every Silicon Valley company, Amazon has gone all in on critical race theory.

The Amazon assault happened the same year that Jeff Bezos, the company's founder and CEO, announced that he was stepping down. Bezos was ruthless, cruel, and amoral, but beyond using the Washington Post to become a D.C. power broker had less interest in conventional corporate virtue signaling.

Andy Jassy, his right-hand man who will replace him as CEO after being in charge of Amazon's cloud platform, is a more traditional Big Tech wokester.

Jassy falsely accused police departments of "murdering black people", supported illegal aliens, and made the decision to shut down Parler. His wife is a Bernie Sanders donor.

The incoming Big Tech CEO has vowed to focus the company on “diversity and more inclusion.” If its employees weren't feeling abused enough by having to pee into cups, Amazon mandated that all employees complete a 90-minute "Strengthening Our Culture of Inclusion" program.

Amazon had already banned non-inclusive language like "blacklists" (which didn't stop it from blacklisting all sorts of people), but now it was going further with identity politics affinity groups and its Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) events featuring extremists and racists.

CORE events packed thousands of Amazon employees into massive meetings to be accused of racism by a series of racist and extreme leftist speakers.

The Big Tech monopoly’s first CORE event had already featured Robin DiAngelo, whose famous idea is that white people are all racist and evil, as well as Carmen Perez, the Farrakhan supporter who served as one of the leaders of the Women's March before being forced out.

Amazon also invited Ijeoma Oluo, a self-described “internet yeller” who had written a book arguing that “white male mediocrity” is a theme throughout history. That’s exactly the message that a company of white male engineers needed to hear. Oluo had berated her own mother, who raised her after being abandoned by her Nigerian academic father, over her “white privilege”.

Also at Amazon’s first CORE was Michael Welp whose White Men As Full Diversity Partners stirred a backlash when its training at Lockheed described white men as racists and privileged.

Welp was also present at the second CORE event while stigmatizing white people.

Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the racist black nationalist hate group Black Lives Matter, appeared on a CORE panel together with DiAngelo and Perez.

Also there was Latasha Gillespie, the head of global diversity and inclusion at Amazon Studios, who has claimed that police murder black people while ranting about "white privilege".

The second CORE event also included rabid hatred for America with Edgar Villanueva showing a slide that described America as being based on colonization and genocide.

What impact did all of these racist and hateful ideas have on Amazon employees?

Amazon, like many other major corporations, has submerged its employees in the dogma of critical race theory. And while this is meant to lead to the discrimination and mistreatment of white employees in the name of equity, could it also lead to violence against white people?

The Big Tech monopoly has relied on independent contractors to build its delivery network. However Amazon also exercises a great deal of control over these drivers. And as its statement after the “white privilege” assault in California shows, it ultimately controls their employment.

Amazon has embedded equity into its Delivery Service Partner push and encouraged existing employees to become DSPs. Did any of its existing racist CORE programming have an influence on the cultural ecosystem of the DSP that employed Itzel Ramirez?

That is unfortunately a question that no one in the media appears to be asking.

The rise of the DSP system paralleled the rise of critical race theory at Amazon. Even while Amazon was finding new ways to virtue signal, it was also finding new ways to exploit workers.

Amazon’s DSP program evades accountability for delivery drivers like Ramirez who wear its blue vests and drive its vans, but who are actually working for small contractors, many of them minorities, who are being deliberately kept small so they can never compete for a better deal.

The Big Tech giant will insist that it had no responsibility for the assault on one of its customers by a racist driver who had absorbed the critical race theory slur of “white privilege” that Amazon had endorsed by featuring racist figures and rhetoric at its CORE inclusion events.

Amazon’s white leadership encourages racism against white people while remaining insulated from minority workers who might want to lash out at the nearest white person they can find.

When BLM and Antifa created CHAZ in their Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone, the epicenter was about a dozen blocks away from Andy Jassy's 1906 mansion on the outskirts of Capitol Hill. But there's a world of differences between the local small businesses that were terrorized by black nationalists and anarchists in CHAZ and the sedate tree-lined street of multi-million dollar Victorian homes where Jassy and his pro-Sanders designer wife comfortably reside.

The incoming Amazon CEO may rant about the police and his home may boast the ubiquitous "Black Lives Matter" "No Human is Illegal", and "Science is Real" lawn sign prefered by wealthy woke suburbanites, but his estate is protected by a spiked gate and high walls disguised by massive hedges. Defunding the police is an experience to be lived out by other, poorer people.

Some people may be beaten by Amazon’s critical race theory drivers over their white privilege, but Amazon executives have spiked gates to make certain they’re not the ones being beaten.

Briana Sykes spent over a year broadcasting the racist hate of the Black Lives Matter movement. Last year, she reposted a message from Senator Bernie Sanders, promoted by BLM activist Shaun King, stirring up anger over false claims about Breonna Taylor, who was killed when her drug dealer boyfriend opened fire on police.

“Our criminal justice system is racist,” the Sanders smear of the police falsely claimed.

Shortly afterward she posted an anti-police cartoon distributed by the Black Berner Coalition.

Briana promoted a Black Lives Matter "economic boycott" and the claim that BLM rioters were "compelled to burn s___ down" because they're an "oppressed group".

Over the summer, the same account linked to Briana Sykes spread disinformation that the Trump administration had "literally killed hundreds of protesters in front of the White House". The #DCBlackout hoax was spread by pro-BLM accounts. It was not clear who was behind a seeming attempt at inciting violence, but researchers suspect it was an enemy government.

And then after over a year of hate and Bernie Sanders memes, Briana Sykes tried to murder a police officer at a Juneteenth parade in Flint, Michigan.

According to authorities, Briana drove up to a police officer and opened fire on him. The officer shot back, wounding the 19-year-old woman. While the officer wasn’t hit, according to a black eyewitness, he “fell to the ground crying because… he didn’t want to do whatever he had to do.”

A fellow officer, black, is seen assisting him on the video.

Cell phone video appears to show that the unnamed white officer was still trying to give her a chance to surrender, shouting, “Show me your hands!”

Risking his life to avoid another police shooting didn’t pay off. It happened anyway.

The local BLM chapter’s social media responded to the shooting with hate and incitement.

“We have been inculcated to accept Native Black people being MURDERED at the hands of “PROTECT AND SERVE”!“ one poster shrieked. “WE ARE NOT IGNORANT! We also call for first degree murder charges and that this killer cop’s pension be forfeited!”

Briana Sykes died at the hospital and now authorities are trying to figure out her motive.

But the motive is all over her social media which is littered with BLM anti-police hate. Some of that hate intersects with Bernie Sanders material. The two vectors of radicalization are clear and outside the new domestic terrorism guidelines drawn up by the Biden Administration.

Senate Democrats, led by Senator Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, had already pressured the FBI to stop monitoring black nationalist hate groups.“So, you no longer use the term Black Identity Extremism,” Booker had grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray. “That's great news.”

It was terrible news for local police and the Jewish community in Jersey City which came under attack by two black nationalist terrorists. But the new Biden domestic terrorism guidelines compound the problem that may have led to the mass shooting at a Jewish supermarket by separating out white nationalists while classifying black nationalists as “anti-government”.

The Biden terrorism guidelines describe Micah X. Johnson, the black nationalist activist who murdered 5 white Dallas police officers, as an anti-government extremist. Johnson was one of a number of BLM supporters who killed or tried to kill police officers. Briana Sykes is just the latest. And while Democrat House members have celebrated Capitol Police personnel, they’ve shown no interest in the hundreds of police officers wounded in their BLM race riots.

That’s because the Democrat establishment is deeply entangled with the racist hate group.

In Flint, the scene of the latest BLM terrorist attack, Mayor Sheldon Neeley had created a Black Lives Matter Advisory Council for the local police and had joined the hate group's local rallies. Chief Phil Hart had forced Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation training on the police.

Pandering to the black nationalist pro-crime hate group backfired in Flint, as it did everywhere else, with a 32% increase in murders while non-fatal shootings doubled. By the time the Juneteenth parade arrived there wasn’t much to celebrate in Flint. Just more killing.

What role did the promotion of Black Lives Matter by Flint Democrats play in the radicalization of Briana Sykes? And what impact did the Bernie Sanders fanbase, who have become notorious for promoting disinformation and extremist material, have on her state of mind?

In 2017, James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders supporter, opened fire on Republicans at a charity baseball game in D.C. The FBI covered up the terrorist attack by falsely claiming that Hodgkinson had been trying to commit suicide and had not been targeting anyone despite his possession of a target list and a conversation in which he specifically sought out Republicans.

Hodgkinson, like Briana Sykes, had spent a lot of time spreading hate on Facebook. He had even belonged to a group named, “Terminate the Republican Party”.

It’s likely that this latest shooting by a radicalized Bernie Sanders supporter will be treated the same way. But even while the Biden administration defines Trump supporters as terrorists, the Bernie Sanders base and Black Lives Matter remind us who the real terrorists are.

What made Briana Sykes open fire on a police officer? The answer is right in front of us.

Democrats and their media are inciting violence against the police. It can’t come as a surprise when someone takes their big lie that police officers are racist killers and acts on it.

Briana Sykes was an ordinary product of her environment. She spent her time online listening to music celebrating violence and imbibing political propaganda demonizing the police. We don’t know exactly what went through her mind, but after being told for years that police officers plot to kill black people, she might have decided that any officer she saw was coming to kill her.

While the media has demanded that Facebook and other social media platforms censor conservatives, it has shown no interest in shutting down the kind of leftist disinformation that may have radicalized Hodgkinson and Sykes. That’s because it’s their disinformation.

Briana’s death will only feed the cycle of extremism as BLM supporters use her death to transform her into a martyr to their racist cause. Like any terrorist organization, the death of its own people fuels the BLM momentum. Every black person killed in a confrontation with a police officer incites more violence and more payouts. The ugly reality of Briana’s death is that she died trying to murder a police officer so that the Democrats who ruined her city and state can rig more elections, and so that BLM leaders can buy more mansions.

That a battle over Atlanta would play nearly as pivotal a role in the country’s second civil war as it did in the first might have surprised few historians. What might have surprised them is that the battle would involve civic meetings rather than bullets. There are plenty of bullets in Buckhead, a part of Atlanta coping with runaway crime under the pro-crime rule of Mayor Keisha Bottoms, and those bullets have inspired local residents to secede and form their own police force.

Buckhead is not the first part of Atlanta to try and secede. Sandy Springs had already successfully seceded from Atlanta and a number of cities in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, have tried to break away to form Milton County. These efforts to escape the blight and corruption of Atlanta aren’t new, but Buckhead’s fight to escape Atlanta’s pro-crime government has captured the imagination of millions of Americans from one coast of the country to the other.

The cold civil war is being shaped not by national, but local secessions like the one in Buckhead as neighborhoods try to secede from cities, cities from counties, and counties from states in a powerful struggle by conservative and centrist communities to define their own way of life.

Most Americans might associate Roswell with UFOs, but a proposed bill by Senator Cliff Pirtle of Roswell would have allowed it and other counties located near Texas to secede with the possible intention of joining the Lone Star State. In Oregon, 7 counties voted to secede and join Idaho, Weld County is considering seceding from Colorado to join Wyoming, and western Minnesota has seen proposals for its counties to leave and unite with South Dakota.

Secession talk isn’t new. Northern Californians have kept the dream of a breakaway state named Jefferson alive for generations. The Democrat machine illegally suppressed a ballot measure that proposed to split California in three. The secession proposals that succeed are more modest and limited in scope. Breaking up states may be a moonshot, seceding from states might be an uphill battle, but the rate of local secessions is growing rapidly.

The most popular form of secession is also the smallest and involves school districts.

An average of 5 school districts secede every year. And while such secessions may get less publicity than plans to split up entire states, they’re commonplace and effective. They also represent the same trend of communities escaping the social and political wreckage of urban rule. Even as Democrats go to war against the suburbs, the suburbs are fighting back.

The political geography of the new civil war is a tug of war between Democrats seeking to concentrate authority in as few places as possible and an opposition seeking independence.

While Democrats and their media complain about the electoral college and the composition of the Senate, the nation and its states are largely ruled by a handful of metropolitan areas. The wealth that buys and sells elections nationwide mostly flows out of New York and California, and, more specifically, out of New York City and Silicon Valley. Geographic regions of less than 1,000 square miles in total rule a nation of 3.8 million square miles with an economic fist.

The meltdown of the urban areas drove suburbanization. And the spreading blight of urban areas into suburban communities due to the concentration of statewide political power in the cities has led to a secondary exodus from suburban bedroom communities to other states.

California not only went blue, but it ‘blued’ Colorado, Wyoming, and a range of other states. The final casualty of California’s blue wave may even end up being Texas. New York has had a similar effect, not only regionally, but even to the south, driving an exodus to Atlanta.

The tide of blue state invasions has the potential to transform the state of states and the nation.

Neighborhoods and school districts seceding from failed urban centers are trying to halt the problem at its source. Rural counties, especially in western states, are pushing back against larger demographic invasions that have transformed smaller states into miniature Californias.

Polls show that most people prefer to live in communities with people that share their values. As politics becomes more tribal, the number of neighborhoods with an even share of lawn signs for both parties is decreasing. In a political system that forces cake makers to bake cakes, indoctrinates elementary school students with radical views on race and sexuality, and cancels anyone who doesn’t go along, coexistence with a radical leftist system is no longer an option.

Secession is. The new civil war is being fought locally. It’s not a regional movement, but a communal one. What brings together rural areas and suburban communities is a desire to control their own way of life and escape the destructive centralization of urban regimes.

The new civil war isn’t being fought between the North and the South, but between the cities and the rest of the country. It’s an economic and social war whose objective is independence.

That’s why the smallest scale secessions have paradoxically been the most successful.

Whether it’s the Buckhead movement or the Texas Senate passing a bill allowing Lake Austin residents to secede from Austin only to see it die in the House, the secessions are gathering strength. But so is the Left's battle to stop them through lies, racism smears, and judicial fiat.

Just because the public votes to create a separate school district or a city doesn't mean that it won't be blocked by Democrat activist judges who decide to override the will of the people.

The attempt by Gardendale to secede from the failed Jefferson County Public School system in Alabama was illegally blocked by federal judges. The Left is struggling to block the creation of the city of St. George in Louisiana with equally illegal lawsuits. But the pace of secession proposals is only growing as more communities struggle to escape abusive governments.

And as Democrats seek to illegally rig elections across the country with H.R.1, to transform the government city of Washington D.C. into a state, and to exercise total control over every local decision through its massive urban bureaucracy, the rate of secessions is only increasing.

Some only seek to restore control over local schools and police forces to communities, while others strive to reconfigure the borders of states to enable rural representation.

Though the term ‘secession’ and the idea of dividing a land summons to mind civil war, the more apt analogy may be the original secession of the United States from British rule.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.

America’s revolutionaries wanted self-government on their own terms. Their modern descendants are breaking away from New York and San Francisco, from Big Tech and Wall Street, the way that their ancestors sought to escape from London and its mercantile interests.

The fundamental issue at stake in the secessions is whether communities will be governed centrally or locally. Democrats and their media have worked to cloud the issue with false accusations of racism, but it’s not only white neighborhoods that are talking secession. A generation ago, black Boston residents proposed to create the breakaway city of Mandela. That movement has recently come in for a reexamination. It’s time to reexamine all of them.

The new generation of secessionism is driven by the unbearable pressure imposed on communities by the expansive ideological programs of radical leftist technocrats which leave little room for either individuality or human needs. Rather than learning from the profound failures of urban areas during the pandemic, all they learned is a need for greater control.

Secession is the natural human response to the control freak madness of cities which control entire states. Communities are confronting radical power grabs by taking back the power.

The cold civil war is being fought in civic meetings. The battles are local and the battle maps cover streets rather than continents, but it is a conflict driven by the impetus of revolutions and civil wars in which one people, as Jefferson wrote, seeks to part ways with another, not to rule over them, but to be free of their thievery, their abuses, and their tyrannical rule.

As the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, Joe Biden has made it clear that he doesn’t intend to fight Al Qaeda. Instead he’s going to fight other Americans.

The Biden administration’s newly released National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism mentions Al Qaeda only once in its 30 pages. Even though the FBI continues to break up Islamic terrorist plots against America, the document only defines Muslims as victims.

Just last month a Seattle Muslim convert was arrested. The convert had discussed driving a "semi-truck" through "the gay pride parade in downtown Seattle". Even though the arrest came shortly before the anniversary of the ISIS massacre at the Pulse nightclub, both Biden and the media ignored the potential plot and the fact that the Pulse shooting was Islamic terrorism.

“I wish to see the kuffar (non-Muslims) as I kill them, I want to strike terror in them and make Allah pleased for doing so,” the Seattle convert had boasted.

That same month another Muslim convert pled guilty to plotting to attack an Ohio synagogue and murder a rabbi. A third Muslim convert in Brooklyn was also sentenced that month for promoting terrorist plots against Americans. American converts to Islam are a major source of recruits for domestic terrorist plots. Despite that, Biden’s strategy ignores their existence.

In a flashback to the Clinton era, the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism claims that the only serious terrorist threats come from the militia movement and racists.

And the only racists whose existence the Biden administration will admit to are white racists.

Micah X. Johnson, a black supremacist who murdered 5 police officers in Dallas, is described as an “anti–authority violent extremist”. Racist and supremacist terrorism can only be practiced by members of the majority against “minority populations”. It can’t work the other way around.

Antifa is also rolled together into “anti-government”, a category that encompasses the militia movement, black supremacists, white anarchists, and everyone who isn’t a white racist.

Islamic terrorists, like the three in May, don’t even make the list.

The two categories, anti-government and racists, tell us little about the actual domestic terrorist threat, but a great deal about the Biden administration’s agenda for exploiting terrorism.

Either you’re with the Biden administration or the “anti-government extremists”.

The National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism redefines the terrorist threat as coming first and foremost from political opponents of the Biden administration. And it defines that threat as a primarily political and ideological battle rather than a violent threat.

The new strategy doesn’t come up with any new ideas for fighting terrorism. Its ideas fall into the murky territory of preventing terror through everything from internet censorship to critical race theory. Biden is rebooting Obama’s CVE or Countering Violent Extremism program to target Americans in a battle of ideas against “misinformation” and “racism”.

This also defines the administration’s two approaches: indoctrination and suppression.

The National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism redefines domestic terrorism as a domestic ideological struggle against people who disagree with Biden and his partisan party.

The strategy’s concluding sentence speaks of “finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.” It warns of “an information environment that challenges healthy democratic discourse” and cautions that, “today’s digital age requires an American population that can utilize essential aspects of Internet–based communications platforms while avoiding vulnerability to... harmful content deliberately disseminated by malicious actors online.”

The binary model is a choice between people who believe everything the media tells them or terrorists. Fighting terrorism requires a national security system that indoctrinates its citizens.

The strategy blithely notes that “the Department of Homeland Security and others are either currently funding and implementing or planning... digital programming, including enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills, as a mechanism for strengthening user resilience to disinformation and misinformation online for domestic audiences.”

A one-word term for this is ‘propaganda’.

The “broader priority” is “enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation” on the internet.

Elected officials don’t address “polarization”, they’re a product of it. They enhance faith in government by keeping their promises instead of indoctrinating and censoring the people.

Governments that suppress “misinformation” to fight “polarization” are totalitarian states.

The Democrats and their media had previously blamed President Trump’s election on “misinformation”. The new strategy blames “misinformation” for domestic terrorism.

And the best way to fight “misinformation” is with suppression and indoctrination.

The strategy document suggests that the Biden administration will be engaging in more “robust” efforts to “assist online platforms with their own initiatives to enforce their own terms of service”. It defines “private–sector online platforms” as the front line in this new suppression campaign.

But censorship is very 2016. The 2021 terrorism strategy is much more ambitious than that.

The Biden administration will only acknowledge two terrorist threats. The first threat comes from “anti-government extremists” which justifies a crackdown on any kind of political opposition and a suppression of “conspiracy theories”. The second threat comes from racists which creates an urgent need to tackle “the threat posed by domestic terrorism” with “substantial efforts to confront the racism that feeds into aspects of that threat”.

That “means tackling racism in America” with a civics education that covers “when racism and bigotry have meant that the country fell short of living up to its founding principles”.

That’s code for embedding critical race theory in schools to teach students that America is evil.

It’s hard to think of anything more likely to encourage new recruits to ISIS and other terrorist causes than divisive racist materials that devalue our country and our common heritage.

But the strategy is also much more ambitious than that, “prioritizing efforts to ensure that every component of the government has a role to play in rooting out racism and advancing equity.”

It’s easy to miss the significance of what the Biden terrorism strategy is doing here.

The National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism has defined domestic terrorism as being caused by conspiracy theories, misinformation, racism, and hostility to the government. Fighting domestic terrorism means recreating the government bureaucracy and its policies around “equity” and the agendas of “critical race theory” while rooting out their opponents.

Just as Biden’s purge of the military defined military readiness and national security around a willingness to embrace critical race theory, identity politics, and hatred of America, this new counterterrorism strategy makes it the basis for national security across the government.

Every arm of the government is not only being tasked with imposing the racial discriminatory and wealth redistribution elements of “equity”, but with viewing any opposition as terrorism.

Or a gateway to terrorism.

The Obama administration abused national security to target its Republican political opponents by falsely accusing them of treason and acting as foreign agents of Russia. With Biden appeasing Putin, the Russian smear is no longer viable, but the domestic terrorist smear is.

The new strategy document will serve as a basis for using national security to target Republicans as domestic terrorists.

The Biden doctrine creates a phantom terrorist movement of conspiracy theories and misinformation that is as vaporous as the Russia smear and seeks to tie any violence to political opponents who engage in “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories”.

Since the Democrats and their media have defined virtually any disagreement as “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories”, most conservatives can be accused of terrorism.

What that will do is make it much easier to surveil and monitor political opponents by manufacturing networks that are based around “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories”.

The strategy document begins by redefining terrorism from an organized, even in the loosest sense, movement to “lone actors” who “mobilize to violence with little or no clear organizational structure or direction.” The document skips over the vital question of whether they are part of any movement calling for terrorism, instead it claims that their “fluid” ideologies “connect and intersect with conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and misinformation”.

The Biden administration has turned away from dealing with domestic Islamic terrorists with a clear connection to a terrorist movement like ISIS to defining ideas as dangerous without regard as to whether those ideas, theories, or movements are actually calling for violence.

By discarding the existence of any actual terrorist movement or infrastructure, the Biden administration has set a very low bar for defining terrorism and an even lower bar for complicity.

There doesn’t have to be any linkage between the perpetrator of a violent attack and the conservatives who will be blamed for acting as a “gateway” with their “conspiracy theories”.

This will mean censorship and deplatforming, but also surveillance and worse things.

The National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism defines political opponents and anyone resistant to critical race theory or who questions the government as either a gateway to terrorism or possibly even inciting terrorism. This strategy will be used to target conservative non-profits through the IRS, to remove conservative speech from the internet, and to surveil hundreds of thousands of conservatives on the pretext of fighting domestic terrorism.

While Islamic terrorists continue to plot actual attacks, Biden is plotting to terrorize Americans.

After a former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president shared my Front Page Magazine article about the BLM Hollywood connection, WarnerMedia executives sent a boycott letter to the foreign press organization behind the Golden Globes. Their outrage was understandable.

My article had cast a light on the ties between Warner and Black Lives Matter. No one had crawled harder and deeper into bed with the racist black nationalist hate group than the company that shared little more than a name with one of Hollywood’s signature studios whose name to most people still brings to mind everything from Bugs Bunny to Casablanca.

The Warner brothers were conservatives while a typical billboard for HBO Max, Warner’s streaming effort to compete with Netflix, urges audiences to subscribe and tune in to an adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates's racist black nationalist tract “Between the World and Me”.

“Between the World and Me” featured Coates describing the firefighters and police who risked their lives to rescue people on September 11 as “not human to me” and “menaces”.

"Their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. the new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish," Coates writes in “Between the World and Me”.

While HBO Max pulled and then restored “Gone With the Wind” over its "racial prejudices" complete with a disclaimer lecture, and Turner Classic Movies, owned by Warner Bros, launched a series condemning classic movies like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (Mickey Rooney's buck teeth), "My Fair Lady" (misogyny), and "Psycho" (transphobia), it promotes the worst possible hatred of white people with million dollar contracts and massive billboards.

Warner Bros rewarded Coates’ racism further by having him write the script for a black Superman. Possible directors include Shaka King, the director of the Black Panthers propaganda flick, “Judas and the Black Messiah”, who had declared, “I haven’t needed white people to care about what I do in years now” and “a centrist is, in many ways, more dangerous than a white nationalist, because they’re really silently propping up the system”.

HBO Max’s’ Between the World and Me includes Alicia Garza, a co-founder of BLM. Garza is one of two BLM co-founders who is at home at Warner Bros. The Warner Brothers Television Group had signed a production deal with Patrisse Cullors: a self-described Marxist.

The BLM deal happened the same month that Channing Dungey became the Warner TV chair.

As ABC Entertainment boss, Channing Dungey had made the decision to fire Roseanne from her namesake show for comments critical of Obama crony Valerie Jarrett. Dungey jumped to Netflix, bringing along Scandal’s Shonda Rhimes who went on to create “Bridgerton” for Netflix, and worked with Barack Obama’s Higher Ground agitprop production company.

Dungey was one of the signers of the boycott letter.

“Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, all those deaths coming in quick succession — I think it’s opened up an entirely different conversation that particularly in Hollywood, coming in the wake of #MeToo, I think everyone is realizing that the business has been built on some systemic wrongs that need to be righted,” Dungey told Variety.

The nature of the systemic wrongs in an industry that took Dungey from a production assistant to the destroyer of genuinely talented people like Roseanne may be harder to define. But she’s a symptom of a larger problem at Warner Bros which has gone all in on black nationalism.

Along with Dungey and Rimes, Warner Brothers lured away black nationalist director Ava DuVernay with a $100 million deal. DuVernay’s “13th” series for Netflix had falsely accused America of slavery due to the high number of black people convicted of crimes in prison.

But Warner Bros also had no problem scraping the very bottom of the black nationalist barrel.

After signing Cullors, it cut a deal with Kimberly Latrice Jones, a BLM activist who made a viral video in support of looting.

"There’s a social contract that we all have, that if you steal, or if I steal, then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us. So the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken, why the f*** do I give a shit about burning the f***ing Football Hall of Fame, about burning a f***ing Target?" the activist ranted.

"Far as I’m concerned, they could burn this bitch to the ground, and it still wouldn’t be enough."

The unhinged racist rant helped get her a book deal, a movie deal, and a deal with Warner which under AT&T has been happily burning the company and its brand down to the ground.

Warner also signed a multi-year deal with Phillip Atiba Goff whose thesis adviser was Cornel West and is the author of "Saying 'No' to Whiteness", to produce social justice content. Dungey described Goff as “a leading voice of moral clarity on critical issues facing our society”.

In the rush to elevate anyone shouting about the evils of white people, HBO Max is littered with basement garbage that looks like the work of college students laboring on public access TV.

You can find “Random Acts of Flyness”, a typical episode of which is titled, "They Got Some S___ That'll Blow Out Your Back". The Terence Nance variety show features a "family mourning a high-profile case of police violence" and asks "does the Second Amendment apply to black people". One mock commercial features Mad Men’s Jon Hamm touting “White Be Gone” which promises to help those who are suffering “from white thoughts”.

In a sign of just how far Warner had toppled its intellectual properties into the gutter of black nationalism, it tried to turn over the Looney Tunes franchise to Nance to direct “Space Jam” with Ryan Coogler, of the anti-police agitprop “Fruitvale Station”, acting as producer. Coogler, who went on to direct Marvel’s black nationalist Black Panther fantasy, also produced “Judas and the Black Messiah” for Warner celebrating Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton.

But you can also find HBO pushing “Beah: A Black Woman Speaks” about Communist activist Beah Richards who played a major role in the We Charge Genocide smear to divert attention from Soviet crimes by falsely accusing America of genocide.

And if you thought John Oliver or Stephen Colbert weren’t political enough, Wyatt Cenac's “Problem Areas” is a string of diatribes about racism and social justice. Cenac is a Daily Show veteran who jettisons much of the format and instead lectures audiences about racism.

HBO Max is struggling to catch up to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, but the actual numbers show that it's far behind. While the service claims 44 million subscribers and touts ambitious plans to reach 150 million people by 2025, these numbers are suspect.

Earlier this year, activations stood at only 17 million. HBO Max no longer reports activations making its numbers meaningless. By the spring, AT&T had disposed of HBO Max and the rest of its Warner package by merging the whole mess with Discovery’s programming.

The deal also dumps CNN into Discovery under its CEO, Democrat donor David Zaslav.

While AT&T put the best possible face on this move, the $4 billion dollar bet had not paid off. And Warner’s massive investment in black nationalist programming had thoroughly failed.

HBO Max’s biggest bump came from its decision to dump “Wonder Woman 1984” on the platform at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. The movie, starring Gal Gadot, a pro-Israel actress under fire by critical race theory activists, was the antithesis of the new intersectionality. The second biggest came from the Friends reunion: a show under fire for its lack of diversity.

Despite HBO Max’s massive investment in black nationalism, its successes were all too white.

While all of its big streaming platforms rivals, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, and Paramount+ invested in black nationalist narratives to varying degrees, none did so as belatedly, futilely, and relentlessly as HBO Max which threw away its brand and its future.

WarnerMedia may have boycotted the Golden Globes, but subscribers boycotted its service.

Warner bought into Black Lives Matter and built its content brand around militant black nationalism and anti-white racism. While AT&T’s CNN was touting the looters, AT&T’s HBO Max was being looted. Like so many other companies, after the woke comes the broke.