Getting the United States out of Afghanistan is relatively easy compared to getting Afghanistan out of America. The latest stage of the withdrawal is accompanied by frantic calls to “save Afghan interpreters” coming from the same media that also wants us out of Afghanistan.

But what’s the use of leaving Afghanistan if we’re going to bring it with us to America?

The “interpreter” scam is one of the longest running immigration hoaxes on record.

Before the withdrawal, there were some 2,500 American soldiers in Afghanistan. After the withdrawal, there are around 600 soldiers left behind.

And there are 20,000 Afghan “interpreters” applying for SIVs or Special Immigrant Visas.

How can there be 20,000 interpreters for 2,500 soldiers?

It’s not as if we haven’t been handing out SIV visas like candy already.

70,000 Iraqis and Afghans came here on the so-called translator/interpreter visas from 2007 to 2017. And 48,601 of those SIVs went to Afghans. At its peak, under Obama, there were 100,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan. That’s an “interpreter” to every 2 soldiers.

By March 2021, 100,000 Afghans and Iraqis had been approved for SIVs.

But the vast majority of “interpreters” aren’t interpreters. They were “Afghan allies” working in some capacity with or for the United States. While the media keeps talking about 20,000 “interpreters” embedded with American forces, hardly any of the SIV applicants fall into that category. Applicants didn't even have to work for the United States. They could have worked for any of the over 50 countries taking part in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. Not to mention any of the local subcontractors or aid groups that were being funded by the United States.

In 2016, 58 translators and 165 family members received visas. As did 4,283 government workers and 10,100 family members. In 2020, 19 interpreters and 58 family members received SIV visas and 1,829 government workers and their 6,134 family members. When the media claims that we’re leaving Afghan interpreters to die, it’s lying. There are few actual interpreters actually applying for SIVs. The vast majority of applicants were just making money from the U.S.

The visa inflation is driven by family members. Of the 100,000 SIV immigrants, 31,000 were the actual applicants, while another 69,000 were family members. The current list of applicants in the pipeline breaks down to 700 "interpreters" or principal applicants and 1,800 family members.

With 20,000 principal Afghanistan applicants, that means we could easily be looking at over 60,000 total Afghan immigrants in the short term. And the numbers may go as high as 100,000.

The long term numbers under family reunification programs would be absolutely staggering.

And the 20,000 number is still not the full total of principals. Just the ones in the system now. With a current deadline for applicants set to expire in December of next year, there’s plenty of time for more applicants to hop on the gravy train. And as Afghanistan collapses, there will be less scrutiny possible of the applicants, some of whom will already be waiting as refugees.

What’s the cost of all this to Americans?

The "interpreters" function more like refugees and “are eligible for the same resettlement assistance and federal public benefits as refugees”. In the past, 85% of SIV migrants, in partial numbers at least 60,000, received refugee aid and were resettled across the country.

The media claims that SIV migrants will quickly be able to adapt and adjust. Government data however shows that 60% of SIV migrants remained unemployed after 90 days, including 58% of those with "good spoken English" and 65% of those with "post-secondary education".

By 2017, SIVs made up a quarter of migrants receiving refugee resettlement assistance.

In one year, SIVs managed to account for 13% of the State Department’s resettlement programs and 8% of HHS’ refugee resettlement programs.

Even those SIV migrants who were employed could still be living off American taxpayers with a GAO report noting that, “of those SIV households receiving earnings from employment, 89

percent were also receiving income through Refugee Cash Assistance, Matching Grant, or TANF programs, which is slightly higher than the rate of the overall refugee population.”

Aside from the financial expense of bringing tens of thousands of migrants from a failed state to America, there’s the terrorism and criminal risks.

The media keeps claiming that all of the applicants have been screened and aren’t a threat.

Even a pro-SIV report noted, “As of 2019, the State Department only had one analyst conducting security checks for the backlog of over 18,000 applications.”

Immigration authorities ask an American “co-signer” to “certify that, to the best of his or her knowledge, you present no threat to the national security or safety of the United States” even if the co-signer only has a relationship with the Afghan’s “contract or sub-contract supervisor.”

With that sort of screening, it’s no wonder that some SIVs who have come to the United States have carried out violent attacks and allegedly became involved with Islamic terrorism.

Last month, the Biden administration demanded 8,000 more SIV visas. While the Democrats can’t directly bring all the applicants immediately here, they intend to move them to third countries from where they’ll be able to continue applying to enter the United States.

“The idea here is to be able to facilitate their departure from Afghanistan to another location so that they can complete the SIV process. Whether that leads to all of them coming to the United States or some, I mean, we just don't know. It'll be done on a case-by-case basis, but the idea is to be able to facilitate their departure from Afghanistan so that that processing can continue,” the Pentagon’s John Kirby said.

More radical voices however want to fly as many Afghans as possible to America right now.

Some media outlets, including the New York Times, are reporting potential numbers as high as 100,000 Afghans. That would mean evacuating some 2% of the population of Kabul here.

Such an invasion would have catastrophic consequences for Americans.

The United States has already handed out 100,000 SIVs to Afghans and Iraqis. We’re now looking at the possibility of another 100,000 with no real end in sight even after that.

Americans will have resettled an entire Tallahassee or Chattanooga worth of "interpreters".

Senator Mark Warner and Senator Marco Rubio have claimed that failing to bring the Afghans to America would be "a stain on our national conscience". The real stain on our conscience is politicians who put Americans last and put open borders migration first. Americans have spent countless blood and treasure fighting for the Afghans. But the Afghans won’t fight for themselves. As American forces leave, they’re deserting, surrendering, and retreating.

That’s their choice.

Over 2,000 Americans died for Afghanistan. No more Americans should die at home.

SIV visas have brought violent rapists and terrorists to America. Every single visa puts American lives and national security at risk.

The move to bring 100,000 Afghans to this country is a warning that it’s much easier to get Americans out of Afghanistan than it is to get Afghanistan out of America.

"Any religious idea, any idea of any god at all, any flirtation even with a god, is the most inexpressible foulness," Vladimir Lenin

The rise of political craziness is intertwined with the decline of religion. The political cults aren't necessarily attracting atheists or agnostics, though there are plenty of both, rather they're drawing on the growing number of people who may be formally religious, but who aren't finding inspiration in faith.

After George Floyd’s drug overdose death, military leaders declared an emergency.

From former Secretary of Defense Esper’s false claim that, “racism is real in America, and we must all do our very best to recognize it, to confront it, and to eradicate it” last summer to Secretary of Defense Austin’s fight against “racial disparities”, the focus has been on the supposed oppressed status of black people in the military. That’s despite the slate of black leaders, including Austin and Air Force Chief of Staff Brown, holding top military positions.

But the supposed statistical racial disparities that are being used to conduct a racial witch hunt against the bogeyman of systemic racism in the military ignores the biggest racial disparity.

The suicide rate among white soldiers is 20.2 out of 100,000 person years and 12.8 among black soldiers. Suicide is the real indicator of high stress and nearly every group in the military, such as Hispanics at 16.0 and Asians at 21.5, have a higher suicide rate than black people.

Suicide rates in civilian and military life prove that systemic racism is a hoax. And that’s why they are a deeply uncomfortable subject for diversity experts because, despite claims that white men are the most privileged group in society, and that minorities, especially black people, are the most oppressed and are suffering unbelieable stress, white men are the ones actually committing suicide in much higher numbers than the “oppressed” minority groups.

A recent New York Times article struggled to explain why "social stressors — lower socioeconomic status and racism among them — are more prevalent and severe for the black population than the white one" yet "the black suicide rate is about one-third that of whites".

Given a choice between an inescapable statistical fact and the myth of systemic racism, politicians, experts, and the media dismiss the facts and stick with their racist myth.

Suicide rates show who is actually being pushed to the brink… and who isn’t.

And while the suicide rate is a serious enough problem in the country at large, it’s a crisis in the military where four times as many military personnel killed themselves as were killed in combat.

The 30,177 suicide death toll for current and former military personnel since 9/11 is horrifying.

In the fourth quarter of 2020, while military leaders obsessively focused on fighting racism, there were 156 known suicides across the services marking a horrifying 25% rise.

The suicide rates testify to the fact that we didn’t just lose a war, we lost a culture war.

While American military personnel were killing themselves at unprecedented rates, their “leaders” were fighting an imaginary crisis of racism with critical race theory, commissions, surveys, and assorted witch hunts searching for a problem that they know doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile they were ignoring a problem that was there because the people committing suicide had the wrong gender and the were the wrong skin color for military leaders to care about them.

Not only are black people not the worst off in the services, but in one study the black suicide rate among VHA users actually fell from 15.6 in 12.76 while the white rate rose 46.16 to 48.51. Among black female veterans, the suicide rate fell from 14.83 to 2.60 even as the white female rate held steady at 25. “Non-minority males”, also known as white men, remain the likeliest to kill themselves even as military leaders focus on the sham of “diversity and inclusion”.

Air Force Chief of Staff Brown has a racism sob story about not being recognized in his parking space, other racism stories unleashed by the brass during its “conversations about racism” remain equally petty and trivial, meanwhile white men are actually dying at disturbing rates.

While the Air Force lectures airmen on “unconscious bias”, there were over 100 suicides among personnel in 2019 and 2020. “The last two years have not been the best for the United States Air Force,” Brown admitted. “The goal is to actually get it as close to zero as we can, and get those who are having challenges.” Those who are having challenges are white men.

They’re the same group that Brown and other military leaders have smeared as racists.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday has urged naval personnel to read the racist ravings of Ibram X. Kendi and rolled out videos claiming that racism is endemic in the Navy.

“Being African-American in America is not fun,” an aviation technician claimed in an official Navy video. As Gilday falsely accused whites of racism, white Navy personnel kept killing themselves.

A suicide rate of one a month is normal at Fort Hood as the brass focus on more important things like changing the name of the base because Civil War history has become offensive.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the military. In 2018, there were 304 male suicides and only 21 female suicides. There were 234 white suicides and 42 black suicides.

In total, 400 white people from active duty to the reserves to the guard killed themselves and only 72 black people. If black personnel are more oppressed, under more stress, and need more special care than white personnel, why are white personnel under so much stress that they’re killing themselves at high rates while black suicide rates are some of the lowest?

The new politically correct military leadership is working hard to cover up the crisis.

As white enlisted men keep dying, Rand's National Defense Research Institute, which is funded by the Department of Defense and the Navy, among others, commissioned a report claiming that the Pentagon should focus "attention on suicide attempts, particularly among non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Asian military personnel.”

Everyone except the white men actually killing themselves.

The Rand report also fussed over high drinking rates by "bisexual service members" while insisting that “socially disadvantaged groups—such as racial/ethnic minorities, women, and sexual-orientation minorities” were the ones actually at risk in the military.

Rand focused on self-reported suicide attempts while ignoring actual suicide rates.

And as the Pentagon worried about "socially disadvantaged groups" and bisexual drinking habits, 75.6% of the active duty personnel killing themselves were white.

Even though only 65% of active duty personnel are white.

Among the National Guard, white people made up 67% of the force and 83% of its suicides.

The crisis of white male suicides is unglamorous and politically incorrect. The dead are disproportionately young white enlisted men. Very few officers kill themselves. The white men committing suicide at unprecedented rates believe that they have no future. And a military leadership obsessed with diversity and inclusion is doing everything it can to prove them right.

While Pentagon elites focus on breaking the ‘brass ceiling’ through affirmative action, ordinary soldiers trying to support a family on food stamps and seeing no future are killing themselves.

They’re doing it while General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defends imposing the ugly racism of critical race theory on the military while whining that he wants to "understand white rage".

The Ivy League grad with degrees from Princeton and Columbia might do well to start with the internalized rage and pain that is driving the white men in his charge to take their own lives.

If only he gave a damn.

While the brass play their academic and political games, our soldiers are dying, not on foreign battlefields, but at their own hand. What’s driving them is not white rage, it’s white despair.

Austin, Milley, Brown, Gilday, and other military leaders have invented a crisis of racism because it lets them unleash diversity initiatives and hector the troops about unconscious bias. Like so many corporations and government institutions which have embraced critical race theory, political correctness allows them to avoid tackling the real crises they are responsible for.

The brass understands that pushing the big lie of systemic racism is good for their careers while addressing what’s driving enlisted white men to suicide would not lead to a profitable retirement.

And while they lie, white men die.

One Sunday evening an Islamic terrorist opened fire at a bus stop in Israel and hit three religious seminary students who had been out hiking. Yehuda Guetta, a 19-year-old, was shot in the head and lay in the hospital for four days while doctors labored to save his life. They failed.

Benaya Peretz, another of the 19-year-olds, was seriously wounded. He later recalled, “The terrorist stopped in front of me – he was so big. He shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and just started firing.” Amichai Hala, the third student, only realized that he had been shot in the back of the neck when he tried to get up. Unlike their friend, both of the young men survived the attack.

The terrorist, Muntasir Shalabi, a wealthy 44-year-old man, drove away in his silver SUV. Israeli soldiers arriving on the scene opened fire, blowing out the rear windshield as he made his getaway.

The Palestinian Authority’s local Fatah leadership celebrated the attack and urged Muslim settlers in the area to "get rid of the contents that were stored in the cameras of your homes or your businesses today" to protect the terrorist. Locals also helped by torching the abandoned vehicle used by the terrorist before the Israelis could get to it and recover any evidence.

Despite the best efforts of the terrorists and their accomplices, and Shalabi’s efforts to disguise his appearance, Israelis captured him. And then the Biden administration came after Israel.

Israel arrested the killer and prepared to demolish his terror mansion which is used to break up terrorist cells and deter future attacks. But the Shalabi estate was not just any home: it was the local Hollywood Hills.

Turmus Ayya, a small and wealthy Muslim town, is where you live when you have money.

Many of the residents have obtained American passports and alternate between working in the United States and using their estates in Turmus Ayya as their summer homes. The Shalabi McMansion was typically grandiose, luxurious, and vulgar, boasting enclosed glass wings and the star and crescent of Islam. And the terrorist living there had United States citizenship.

The Biden administration, which had ignored the murders of American citizens by Islamic terrorists, quickly jumped into action assigning the Shalabi case its highest priority.

While an American woman arrested in a Muslim country for not wearing a hijab or for looking at a man can expect to be ignored by the local embassy, Biden’s State Department dispatched representatives from the embassy to attend the court hearings involving the Shalabi house.

Secretary of State Blinken and other top State Department officials berated Israelis over it. The intense pressure from Washington D.C. on the Israeli government and the court temporarily halted the demolition, but then justice was done and the terror mansion was blown up anyway.

The United States embassy, now under new management, complained that, “the home of an entire family should not be demolished for the actions of one individual.”

Except that not just Shalabi, but his wife and son had also been detained after the attack. And Shalabi’s wife expressed support for her husband’s campaign of brutal violence.

The exploded terror mansion isn’t even Shalabi’s full-time home: it’s his summer place.

While the media described Muntasir Shalabi as a father of seven children, it neglected to mention that’s because he has multiple wives. Some of whom live in the United States.

A petition filed on behalf of the terror mansion by Hamoked, an anti-Israel lawfare group funded by the EU, the UK, and the UN, claimed that the terrorist “lived most of the time with his other wives and children in homes he owned in the United States”.

The pro-terrorist lawfare group also insisted that Shalabi, when he wasn’t traveling around the world to his multiple mansions to shack up with his wife-of-the-month, had psychological problems and “repeatedly stated that he was motivated by suicidal thoughts.”

That must be why after the terrorist attack, Shalabi fled and tried to disguise his appearance. And why he was taken alive, instead of dying for Allah the way a good terrorist should. But it’s not as easy to blow yourself up when you’ve got mansions and wives around the world.

That’s not the behavior of a troubled suicidal man, but of a murderous coward.

What was the source of the wealth that allowed the terrorist to own homes and set up families around the world? No one’s talking except to portray Shalabi as a victim of Israeli oppression.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who has never found a terrorist she won’t defend, tweeted, “Just this week, Israel demolished and leveled the home of a Palestinian family in the beloved village of Turmusaya. For what? To dehumanize.”

The “beloved village” is as much of a village as Beverly Hills. And Tlaib knows exactly why the mansion was blown up. It’s because it’s the home of an Islamic terrorist.

Elisha Guetta, the father of the murdered boy, blasted the Biden administration, saying that he was “shocked that the US is condemning the demolition of my son’s murderer and is supporting a terrorist who arrived from the US to carry out a vicious shooting terror attack against innocent Jewish students."

“It would be expected that the US, which has often been the victim of terrorism, would stand with terror victims rather than with their murderers,” he wondered.

Biden’s State Department is picking the terror mansion over the murdered boy.

“We attach a good deal of priority to this," State Department spokesman Ned Price warned that his administration would keep on fighting Israel over this "as long as this practice continues."

Or as long as the Biden administration continues.

"Punitive demolitions exacerbate tensions at a time when everyone should be focused on principally ensuring calm," he complained. Price might want to take that up with the terrorists his administration insists on funding. The Shalabi mansion would still be ugly and standing if the head of its household hadn’t tried to murder a bunch of students waiting at a bus stop.

But Israeli reactions to terrorist attacks are always provocative while terrorist attacks never are.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a longtime Castro shill, joined the pressure campaign reportedly putting in an angry phone call of his own. Despite efforts by Democrats to describe Meeks as pro-Israel, he had tried to halt arms sales to Israel during the recent conflict with Hamas and repeatedly criticised the Jewish State.

While the media kept portraying Shalabi as a “lone-wolf terrorist”, a Hamas group showed up to pay a solidarity visit to the demolished terror mansion. Photos of the event show a Hamas flag flying from the rubble of the home and a banner of Shalabi next to Hamas regalia.

Unfortunately for them, they announced the visit ahead of time on social media, posting, “The Hamas student faction at Birzeit University invites you to attend a visit to the family of the heroic prisoner Montasir Shalabi.” The Israelis were waiting and took the lot in for questioning.

The Shalabi terror mansion may be dust and rubble, but the Biden administration will not forget the martyred mansion and intends to fight on so that no more terror mansions are blown up.

Hady Amr, a Biden bundler and anti-Israel activist, who serves as the Democrat "point man" on the terrorist conflict against Israel, will take on the issue on his next visit. Amr, who had accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing" and responded to the death of a Hamas leader by threatening that "there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders" is on the case.

During his visit, Amr will pressure Israel over terror home demolitions.

While inflation rises and crime skyrockets, freedom fighters protest in Cuba and China escalates its crackdown, the Biden administration will go on fighting for a polygamist’s terror mansion.

In February, Biden signed an executive order which included one of the most blatant efforts to roll out a voter turnout operation across the span of the entire federal government.

The Interagency Working Group on Promoting Naturalization brought together the heads of agencies to figure out the best way to create as many new Democrat voters as possible. The agencies included the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and the USDA.

This month, the Interagency Strategy for Promoting Naturalization was released. The Obama administration had its own project for turning aliens into citizens as quickly as possible in order to get them on the voting rolls, but the new strategy goes beyond anything Obama tried to do.

The new strategy begins with using DHS to assemble all the available data on the "potential naturalization-eligible populations" and breaking it down by age, sex, and zip code, as well as other demographic details, to target "outreach".

By "outreach", the working group of agencies headed by Biden appointees means converting aliens into citizens.

That data will allow the government and a spectrum of “partners”, most of them Democrat allies, to target resident aliens the way a corporation targets potential customers of its products.

Except that the data is coming from the government and the product is voting for Democrats.

While citizenship is in theory non-partisan, the strategy makes it clear that it's targeting potential Democrat voting blocs such as refugees, asylum seekers, and agricultural workers, not to mention “underserved and marginalized communities” through "community-based organizations". What that means is that the federal government is going to be pumping even more money into Democrat community groups to encourage them to turn resident aliens into citizens for a massive voter turnout operation funded by taxpayers.

The federal government won't just be financing a Democrat turnout operation, it's mobilizing all of its resources to provide the data and the logistics across a variety of federal agencies.

But the money potentially won't just be coming from the government.

One of the more curious items mentions exploring "the feasibility of accepting private donations to support the USCIS Citizenship and Integration Grant Program". If Congress won't allocate enough money, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Democrat mega-donors might.

The resulting "public-private partnership" would combine Democrat mega-donor cash with federal government resources for a voter turnout operation that would put the government even more firmly under the control of the Democrat donor class in order to rig the next elections.

The new strategy begins with turning refugees into resident aliens and turning aliens into citizens by utilizing the resources of the immigration system. That's not dramatically new, but the goal of the new strategy is to have every component of the government push citizenship.

The strategy doesn’t just run the expected informational campaigns through the post office or museums, but it also uses parts of the government that the aliens are expected to interact more closely and meaningfully with, like HUD, SSA, and the Department of Labor, to function as citizenship offices. Some federal agencies are barely doing their actual jobs, but will now also be tasked with finding new voters to help the Democrats survive a backlash from existing voters.

But the strategy doesn't stop there. Instead the Biden administration is going to encourage Mexico and other countries to promote the benefits of American citizenship to their own citizens.

The strategy proposes to engage in "outreach to foreign embassies and consular networks that may be interested in providing information and resources on citizenship".

Why would foreign consulates be interested in selling American citizenship to their citizens?

The answer is remittances. In just one month, Mexicans in the United States sent over $3 billion back home. Remittances from the United States make up as much as a fifth of the GDPs of El Salvador and Honduras. Citizenship means more welfare benefits and therefore more remittances as taxpayer money flows out of the United States and across Latin America.

Biden intends to “partner” with foreign governments to encourage their citizens to get citizenship in this country and reap all the benefits that would entail because it means more money taken from taxpayers and sent overseas, and it means more votes for the Democrats.

It’s a win-win for socialists on both sides of the border, and a huge loss for American taxpayers.

The strategy also seeks to use foreign consulates and embassies to "clarify" to their "nationals" the "impact of dual citizenship".

A foreigner living in the United States who visits his own consulate will have material promoting American citizenship handed to him while being assured that he can remain a dual citizen.

The next step of the campaign will push citizenship through local governments, community colleges, and labor unions by providing them with "anonymized data about potential clusters of naturalization candidates". The Biden administration will be providing targeted data for what is a thinly disguised voter outreach operation to its political partners.

This is the next best thing to handing over the data to the DNC.

Not satisfied with turning Border Patrol agents into 'coyotes' delivering illegal aliens deep into America, it will also have them hand out "information on naturalization" to resident aliens.

Refugees and other migrants, especially those with "limited English proficiency, medical conditions, and disabilities" will get a special push to speed them "on their path toward naturalization" especially "those at risk of losing SSI income and other federal benefits".

This means telling aliens who have a 7-year window for SSI payments that they'll be able to stay on the welfare gravy train if they become citizens. Future Democrat voters are being bribed with taxpayer money to become citizens and vote for more benefits for themselves.

And then just to make it obvious that this is a partisan stunt, the strategy calls for videos from "senior administration officials", proposing that "Dr. Biden, who continues to work as an English and writing instructor, could encourage immigrants to learn English" and that "as a daughter of immigrants, Vice President Harris could highlight her family's immigration journey".

Jill Biden would be better served learning the language she claims to teach, but is marginally literate in, to say nothing of her husband’s tsunami of malapropisms, and Kamala’s father was a foreign student and official, not an immigrant, but facts only get in the way of the agenda.

Meanwhile the Biden administration’s voter turnout machine proposes to promote the benefits of American citizenship through Mexican consulates, provide targeted information about the aliens that need to be turned into citizens to labor unions, and open the door to private funding of its governmental voter turnout operations. HHS, the USDA, and the military are meant to function as components of a partisan effort to find and convert as many Democrat voters as possible.

The Democrats are facing a challenging electoral map in 2022 and 2024, and they’re plotting to use the entire structure of the government to overcome those challenges by creating new voters. Even as Biden opens the borders as wide as he can, the new government voter turnout machine will try to turn illegal aliens into residents and then into citizens, while turning the people who were once Americans into displaced and powerless refugees in their own land.

California legalized theft with Proposition 47. Since then pharmacies and small businesses have been forced to shut down by a wave of shoplifters with nothing to fear from the law.

But it’s not just stores that are reeling from the crime wave unleashed by criminal justice reform.

Ibram X. Kendi, the critical race theory prophet of his own twisted brand of antiracism, has become mandatory reading material at colleges, corporations, and in the military.

How to Be an Antiracist topped the New York Times bestseller list. Any of the progressive housewives, Fortune 500 executives, and assorted people being forced to page through the book would learn by the second chapter how Kendi’s middle-class black parents were racist.

“Both of my parents emerged from poor families, one from Northern urban projects, one from Southern rural fields. Both framed their rise from poverty into the middle class in the 1980s as a climb up the ladder of education and hard work. As they climbed, they were inundated with racist talking points about black people refusing to climb, the ones who were irresponsibly strung out on heroin or crack, who enjoyed stealing and being criminally dependent on the hard-earned money of climbing Americans like them,” Kendi writes. “My parents, along with many others in the new Black middle class, consumed these ideas.”

What makes these ideas racist? Believing that you can get ahead through hard work is whiteness talking. And expecting good habits to lead to good outcomes is racist because it ignores the systemic racism that makes success impossible for black people. Kendi’s parents, Larry and Carol Rogers, an accountant and business analyst, not only bought into the middle class dream, but they worked hard, and they succeeded at giving him a comfortable childhood.

"My parents... fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them," Kendi agonizingly recalls. And if nothing else, he partially disproved them, becoming enormously successful on the back of education, but a worthless one in identity politics, and on denying the value of hard work.

"My parents—even from within their racial consciousness—were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept black people down," he recalls.

Kendi’s problem is laziness, but it’s a particularly white kind of laziness. How to Be an Antiracist, like most critical race theory texts, leans heavily on the personal narrative of his particularly uninteresting life. Kendi manufactures victimhood out of thin air, when his father waves to him on the basketball court, he suggests that might have gotten him lynched or killed by the police.

His grandmother dies after a struggle with Alzheimer’s. "A disease more prevalent among African Americans," Kendi notes. "There may be no more consequential white privilege than life itself." Black people have a 3.5 percent higher prevalence of Alzheimer’s than white people for a disease that is the fifth most common cause of death among American senior citizens.

When your claim to oppression is your grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, you’re low on material.

But Kendi’s story is a familiar one to generations of white and then minority immigrants where the first generation labors hard to succeed, and then sends its kids to college only to have them come back as radicals who complain that their parents sold out by abandoning their dreams.

The old boomer paradigm that fed sixties white radicalism has kicked in among minority millennials of the upper middle class with a vengeance. The new black nationalist surge on college campuses largely owes its growth to privileged black men and women like Kendi, whose parents took the corporate route, while the kids rebelled and went into Black Studies.

“I always wonder what would have been if my parents had not let their reasonable fears stop them from pursuing their dreams,” Kendi whines. “Instead, Ma settled for a corporate career in healthcare technology. Dad settled for an accounting career. They entered the American middle class”.

Kendi’s racialism is reducible to that cliched radicalism of a son embarrassed by his insufficiently woke parents. It’s about as white as anything. And so is Kendi’s career which has taken him from condemning corporations to producing diversity content for corporations. Like most professional radicals, he wants to overthrow the system by becoming the system.

How to Be an Antiracist’s rants against “assimilationism” echo seventies black nationalism through modern personal identity politics that demands we acknowledge everyone’s identity. Whether it’s white people who insist that they’re Koreans, men who claim to be women, or corporate drones who insist they’re radicals, everyone wants to be who they aren’t.

Kendi’s fake African identity is a familiar brand of identity politics, but born out of the same shallow narcissism of a comfortable generation that seeks meaning in fake identities. A middle class kid named Henry Rogers is reborn as a black nationalist named Kendi. But the fake new identity doesn’t make him more authentic, but less so. The only way to assert a fake identity is for the man in the mask to go on a rampage against his authentic roots and his old past self.

If Obama’s racial memoirs were at least aspirational, Kendi’s is anti-aspirational.

Black people, whether it’s Kendi’s own parents, or black leaders from W.E. DuBois to Eleanor Holmes Norton are guilty of racism for urging achievement. Asking anyone, especially a member of a minority group, to work harder is racist. Suggesting that black people have problems that are caused by anything other than systemic racism is assimilationist.

And yet Kendi’s entire worldview, despite its trappings of sham Africanism, is white.

It’s not some imaginary whiteness, but that of academic identity politics which is absurdly white. Kendi’s parents may have been black, despite some distant white ancestor whom he makes much of, but his entire value system is derived from white political correctness.

He arrived at college "as a racist, sexist homophobe", Kendi writes. The fault was, as usual, his middle class parents. "Dad’s sexist ideas demanded he lead and Ma’s sexist ideas submitted. She would call him the head of the household. He would accept the calling." Horror of horrors.

Kendi’s parents “demonized” single mothers, along with drug dealers and criminals. He blames Reagan and internalized whiteness, but the black opposition to crime preceded Reagan and was a matter of basic self-interest that united the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, and everything in between. It took white people to redefine drug dealers as victims of white oppression.

The cult of the criminal in black activist circles is not a reflection of any organic movement within the black community, but the imposition of a white Marxist perspective. The collapse of support for police defunding in the black community in every poll shows just how alien it is. It’s every bit as alien as Kendi’s hostility to black masculinity which is equally white and assimilationist.

How to Be an Antiracist is meant to be part memoir, but Kendi doesn’t have much of a story to tell. That’s surprisingly commonplace among critical race theory memorists whose lack of interesting personal content, beginning with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, has only made their works more successful. If Obama’s memoirs offered elements of the exotic, the black middle class activist against whiteness succeeds because his story is familiarly white.

We have come a long way from Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice or Alex Haley’s dubious Malcolm X biography. Today’s black nationalist is a suburban college kid nurtured by a middle class two-parent family who denounces the suburbs, the middle class, and families like his as racist.

But the familiar problem, which Kendi only loosely describes in his chapter on dueling consciousness, and which is better embodied by the title of Black-ish, is that the generation of middle class black parents who kept their children safe from crime (Kendi’s father put up a basketball court in their backyard because he was worried about his son getting shot) succeeded all too well. Like too many generations of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Latino, and Asian parents, they raised radical woke snowflakes who are good for little except complaining.

Assimilationism has done its job all too well. The trouble is that the engines of assimilationism, universities, mass culture, and the upper middle class are assimilating the new generation out of America rather than into it, breeding dissatisfaction and nurturing radicalism as their identity.

Revolutions are made by the prosperous, not the dispossessed. Lenin, a member of a noble family, warred on the nobility. Castro, the son of a plantation owner, fought the plantations. Mao, the son of a landlord, oversaw the mass murder of landlords. The Left makes children into the enemies of the values of their parents. And How to Be an Antiracist is really a very old story about the resentments of middle class children who never really learned how hard life can be.

Ibram X. Kendi calls everything he doesn’t like racist. “Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be racist one minute and an antiracist the next,” he argues. Racism, like most identity politics tropes, is everywhere and nowhere. It’s an identity politics weapon that is an attack on identity while claiming to be a defense against attacks on identity.

Mostly racism consists of the common sense approaches of his parents to dealing with a dangerous world while antiracism consists of his clueless disregard for how life really works.

Kendi complains about the “constant fearmongering about Black drug dealers, robbers, killers,” of his parents, but young black men are far more likely to be killed by the former than by the police whom he and the Black Lives Matter movement fearmonger endlessly about.

His parents made a difficult journey that he does not understand and has no concept of how difficult it would be to recreate in his own privileged circumstances. That’s the same perch which countless of his white leftist peers occupy. It’s no wonder that he’s so popular with them.

How to Be an Antiracist doesn’t convey a racial crisis, but the crisis of an American upper middle class which has lost touch with its own roots and whose children have become an enemy of its aspirational values. That, more than anything else, is leading the country into the kind of shopworn Marxism that Kendi and other radicals peddle as narcissistic identity politics.

Defining everyone, including his parents, as racists, interpreting and reinterpreting the world through academic lenses, is the hobby of privileged people who don’t have real problems.

Ibram X. Kendi may not have real problems, but the rest of the country isn’t so privileged.

And Kendi has become another of the problems undermining the black community, destroying the middle class life his parents worked so hard to achieve, and tearing apart America.

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.