Nowak, an 18-year-old from Essex, reportedly told officers, “I can’t breathe,” and “I’ve been stabbed.” Officers mocked him, denied that he had been injured, and debated whether they had any obligation to check. The case has drawn comparisons to George Floyd in the United States. The comparison is imperfect, but the contrast is obvious: In Nowak’s case, the police had every reason to believe the man on the ground needed urgent medical care.

In December, Nowak was walking home from a pub while recording himself on social media. He encountered Vickrum Digwa, a 22-year-old Sikh immigrant, who claimed Nowak intentionally bumped into him. The recording stopped during the initial encounter, so the exact sequence remains unclear. When it resumed, Nowak called Digwa a “bad man” before Digwa grabbed his phone and the recording ended.

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Digwa then allegedly stabbed Nowak multiple times in the jaw, legs, and heart with a ceremonial dagger. Britain imposes strict anti-knife laws on its native population, yet Sikhs receive exemptions to carry kirpans. That fact turned Nowak’s death into a symbol of Britain’s two-tier society.

Digwa did not immediately summon help. He recorded himself mocking Nowak as the wounded teenager tried to escape over a fence. Nowak told his attacker more than once that he was dying. Digwa’s brother eventually called police with a story that Nowak was a violent racist who had insulted and assaulted the Sikh man before injuring himself while climbing a fence.

The police appear to have accepted that story instantly. They treated the bleeding English teenager as the threat and the immigrant suspect as the victim. They handcuffed Nowak, and he reportedly choked to death on his own blood in police custody.

Even before the bodycam footage emerged, Nowak’s death had become a flashpoint in a deeply divided Britain. Despite the clear wishes of voters, British politicians have allowed mass migration to transform the country. Immigrants have strained the welfare state, crowded the job market, driven housing pressure, and changed the country’s culture. But nowhere has the transformation become more obvious than policing.

The Pakistani grooming-gang scandals revealed the pattern. English girls were raped across the country while police, terrified of being called racist, ignored or minimized the crimes. In some cases, victims were treated as the problem. In others, fathers who tried to protect their daughters faced the law instead. The message was clear: The state feared accusations of racism more than it feared the destruction of its own people.

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Immigrant stabbing attacks have also helped justify sweeping bans on defensive weapons, including knives and pepper spray. Yet Nowak died from a ceremonial blade Digwa was permitted to carry. Immigrants enjoy exceptions while native Britons face disarmament. That is not equal justice. It is hierarchy.

After a stabbing spree last year left three young girls dead, riots broke out across Britain. The government response was brutal. Authorities did not merely arrest violent offenders or street protesters. They escalated social media arrests so aggressively that Britain now jails people for speech and political offenses at levels no free country should tolerate. At every turn, the government has privileged the comfort of foreign communities over the safety and dignity of the native population.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

That escape has narrowed. As media and universities became more radical, their disciples moved into rural America through government-mandated institutions like schools and libraries. Progressivism became harder to avoid no matter how far someone moved from the city. Thus the hicklib was born.

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The hicklib is usually a social outcast, a failson who needs a moral explanation for why he hates the community he never fit into. His resentment searches for a theory that will dignify his rage, and the progressive missionaries installed in local institutions are happy to provide one.

Teachers tell the hicklib his country is evil. His family and neighbors are racist, sexist, backward religious fanatics destroying the lives of minorities who do not even live in town. The white Christian culture that dominates rural America is primitive and responsible for the evils of the world. The hicklib’s failure to fit in becomes proof of moral superiority.

So the hicklib shows up at town council meetings in a Black Lives Matter shirt to denounce minority oppression in a community with no actual black people. That absence, naturally, becomes further proof of the town’s intolerance. He loudly organizes Pride events attended by two other hicklibs. The clique stages protests, distributes flyers, and imitates urban activist rituals.

By practicing the sacraments of their faith, they hope to summon the spirit of the age to judge their reactionary little town.

The hicklib has become one of rural America’s petty plagues. But as the value of college degrees collapses, a new breed is emerging: the fail-lib.

The fail-lib worked hard in high school and gave progressive teachers every approved answer. She wrote her college entrance essay on the oppression of transwomen of color in coal mining. On campus, she became an activist. She secured a degree in some woke humanities discipline and earned straight A’s by repeating everything her communist professors told her.

The path to success was laid out before the fail-lib was born. She followed it perfectly. All that remained was the cushy corporate HR job and her rightful place making ordinary people miserable.

Then the plan failed.

The college degree that cost $100,000 was supposed to guarantee success. The debt would be worth it because the credential would deliver a salary large enough for an apartment, a car, and monthly student loan payments. But the degree was not merely about financial security. It was also a symbol of status. College graduates were supposed to rule over the simple plebs who never left home.

The degree would confer wealth, power, and privilege. Instead, it turned out that too many people held degrees and too few jobs required them. Corporations began cutting HR departments that wasted resources and reduced productivity. Poor oppressed immigrant workers somehow found work while the fail-lib remained unemployed, though a good progressive would never complain. She could never explain how, but she knew the white Christian patriarchy was responsible for this injustice.

Earlier generations of college students had an insult for the ordinary residents of college towns: townies. The townie was contemptible because he was not merely passing through before collecting a credential and moving on to rule the world. He belonged to the place the student planned to use and abandon.

The arrogance required to insult the permanent residents of a community while you are a temporary visitor is staggering, but the slur was common. It revealed the sneering condescension of the would-be liberal elite. Now the tables have turned.

The college degree was once a ticket to the top. Now it is an expensive lottery ticket with worsening odds. More graduates emerge from extended stays in higher education with mountains of debt and few prospects.

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The fail-lib spends a year unemployed, desperately seeking even the entry-level positions her fancy degree was supposed to let her bypass. After burning through savings and taking on more debt, she accepts a management job at the local Starbucks or retail outlet. If she gets lucky, she might run the local Apple Store.

The hicklib may be insufferable, but the fail-lib is worse. She was destined to leave the college town behind and move to a big liberal city like New York. She was supposed to be the person ordering lattes and $30 burrito bowls for important work lunches, not the person making them. Once, she mocked the parochial townies trapped in their backward existence. Now she is stuck among them with no escape.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

That failure should have created an obvious opening for libertarians. Governments shower data-center projects with subsidies, wield eminent domain to seize land, and help politically connected corporations reshape local communities in the name of technological progress. A coherent libertarian response would attack the merger of state power and corporate power.

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Instead, many libertarians have chosen to cheer the expansion without asking what the technology will be used for or whom it will serve. Their quasi-religious loyalty to capital has pushed them into another foolish position and exposed the danger of turning an economic theory into a full worldview.

The tech elite insist that AI will revolutionize the world, but they have done almost nothing to tell average people how their own lives will improve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spin wild stories about superhuman intelligence and the automation of tens of millions of jobs. That does not sound like a sales pitch. It sounds like the setup for a science-fiction dystopia. The one concrete justification they offer is strategic: AI will supposedly define the future of warfare, and America must stay ahead of China.

That argument would carry more weight if the same people pushing AI were not also so committed to building the kind of technology most likely to be used against Americans. They are not preparing some noble shield for the republic. They are building tools that can make the United States look a lot more like the techno-authoritarian China they claim to fear.

Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity, sometimes drawing as much power as a moderate-sized city. They also use enormous volumes of water, create nonstop noise, and disfigure the landscape. Developers have found ways to soften some of those costs by building new power infrastructure and improving cooling efficiency, but none of the problems have been solved. In the meantime, local communities absorb the burden.

The economic case is weak as well. Data centers create construction jobs while they are being built, but once construction ends, they employ surprisingly few people. Governments usually justify subsidies by promising long-term economic activity and job growth. In the case of data centers, corporations collect the incentives while communities get very little in return.

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A sane political movement would notice that. Many libertarians have not. Instead of challenging subsidies and land seizures, they have fought to champion the projects. Nick Gillespie of Reason recently posted a chart showing that almond farms use far more water than AI data centers. Almonds are notoriously inefficient in water use, and agriculture probably does consume more water overall.

But the comparison gives away the problem. People eat food. AI, at least so far, mostly offers job displacement and surveillance.

Libertarianism grew, in part, out of the Austrian school of economics, which is useful for understanding markets. It was never meant to serve as a complete theory of human life. Like Marxists, however, many libertarians have turned an economic framework into a totalizing ideology. Free markets, contract law, and voluntary exchange become an all-encompassing lens through which everything must be judged. Once that happens, it becomes difficult to see anything that does not show up in GDP.

The real question is not how much of a resource gets spent, but for what purpose. Most people would not give up a hand to save a cockroach. Most would give up their lives to save a child. On paper, preserving the cockroach may look like the more efficient transaction. Only a lunatic would fail to understand why no sane person would ever choose it over the child.

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Recent data shows the dismal marriage numbers in the United States. The percentage of married couples, average age at which couples are marrying, and number of children are all in catastrophic decline. The numbers represent a dramatic collapse in the institution that serves as a foundation for successful civilizations.

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Conservatives will often place the blame on a lack of individual virtue, and there is plenty of truth to that claim, but the most important factors are baked into the structure of our society in a manner that Republicans are terrified to address.

When a movement refers to itself as “conservative” you would think the preservation of marriage would be its top priority. However, when marriage does receive any attention from conservative pundits and politicians, it is in the form of glib advice directed at young men telling them to get out of their parents' basement and stop playing video games.

Part of the marriage problem is certainly the lack of initiative on the part of young males, but this is also the easiest and most cowardly attempt to explain away the issue. Our culture encourages placing the blame on young men, who are one of the few groups that can be attacked without consequence. The real answers require taking on far more sacred cows.

When conservatives are feeling a little more adventurous, they will admit that some aspects of our economy are antithetical to family formation.

The fact that the average age of first-time homeowners is pushing past 40 signals how difficult achieving stability for young families has become. College is now required for even the most entry-level jobs, and the cost keeps exploding, consuming the capital that once went into a starter home.

The costs of health care and food continue to skyrocket so that most households require two incomes, forcing mothers to work, while the price of child care also increases rapidly. The economic issues are real and important, but even they do not tell the whole story.

Love, duty, and honor are all factors that hold our social bonds together, but it is dependence that makes them necessary in the first place and continues to undergird them when everything else falls away.

Modern people do not like to hear this fact because they believe that maximizing freedom and independence is the ultimate good, but there is a point at which autonomy rips society apart.

Men are, of course, dependent on many things, but women, due to their biological vulnerability, were always directly dependent on men.

Women are physically weaker, less aggressive, become pregnant, must care for children, and regularly need the direct intervention of others to ensure their safety and security. Women could not work outside the home while pregnant or raising children, so they remained dependent on their husbands’ income.

People will have sex — we are hardwired to pursue it — so the reality was that women and men needed to get married early to secure the safety of mothers and their children. Family formation was part of the rhythm of life. It was largely unavoidable, and this kept marriage rates among young people relatively high.

Once birth control and abortion made pregnancy a choice instead of an inevitability, everything shifted. Single women became a larger part of society, and the state expanded its reach to provide them with broader physical and economic protections.

The newly emancipated woman needed her own stream of income, and corporations were more than happy to provide it. Women doubled the labor pool, driving down wages. In large bureaucratic organizations, where compliance is key, the more agreeable nature of women is considered an asset in a way that it would not be in a more entrepreneurial economy.

Advantages were built into every level of our system to help elevate women due to the perceived biases that existed when mothers were expected to stay home. Universities gave priority to women, who now earn more degrees than men. Corporations gave hiring priority to women, who now make up a majority of their workforce.

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Government assistance and scholarship programs were established to ensure that working mothers did not fall through the cracks. It is not that women stopped getting married — every female must be married at some level — they simply became dependent on the men running the government and corporations instead of traditional husbands.

Women do not date men who earn less than they do, even if they think of themselves as independent. Deep down, females know that in the modern world, income signals status and status means protection.

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Today, however, people often use this explanation when it comes to political disagreements. Abortion, hatred of Christians, the mutilation of children — these beliefs are so horrible that they can only possibly be explained by a malfunctioning brain. But that is not the only explanation. The other option is that some people have a very different set of values that drive them to pursue goals we view as evil.

The average American would like to avoid this truth, because it comes with an unnerving conclusion: Your political enemies are not crazy; they are sane people who hate you and want to hurt you.

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As sophisticated and modern people, we tend to avoid language that implies some form of objective metaphysical truth. Evil is a concept that conjures up images of old churches, judgmental Sunday-school teachers, and medieval peasants trying to explain a drought.

We have the technology and understanding to explain everything in the world around us. Explanations that call on unseen forces or divine intervention are no longer required. In this thoroughly materialistic view, humans are simply animals with more sophisticated brains. Any undesirable behavior, therefore, can be understood as a malfunction of that brain.

There is no evil; there is only mental illness.

Modern Americans are universalists in a very strange sense. We assume that our values, beliefs, and customs are the default for all humans everywhere. Americans believe that all our assumptions about the way life ought to be lived are arrived at through individual human rationality, so if another person has a functioning brain, he will, of course, come to the same conclusion.

When we are confronted with someone who has very different understandings or goals, it is assumed that something has happened to his faculties of reason.

We try to argue with these people in hopes that rational debate will help them see the error of their ways. If debate does not work, we begin diagnosing the dissenting individual with all kinds of pathologies that explain why he doesn’t see the world the way we do. The explanation for divergent morals or goals is always a defective mental process, never a genuine difference in how we view the world.

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The obsession with material explanations accounts for half of this phenomenon, but the other half is explained by our desperate need to avoid real conflict.

One of the major selling points of liberalism was the reduced need for violent conflict by removing existential questions from the political arena. Who is right about God? What is the ultimate good? To what end should we orient our society? These are all important but dangerous questions. The answers are exclusive and all-encompassing.

These are the things that people are willing to kill and die for, so better to make them off-limits and focus on something everyone can agree on — making more money and increasing the standard of living.

The desire to end the terrible wars that were fought over religion or identity is entirely understandable, and it is difficult to argue that the focus on economic cooperation did not produce significant benefits, but this was always a trade-off that could never last.

We may like to pretend that we are too advanced and sophisticated to get hung up on these primitive concerns, but under the surface, they continue to define us. Those conflicts do not disappear, and when they re-emerge, you have stripped your civilization of the tools needed to identify and address them, which is exactly what we are seeing now.

Americans no longer have the moral language to discuss good and evil, so they simply apply a clinical diagnosis to their opponents instead. Believing a radical leftist is mentally ill is far easier than addressing the alternative. If the progressive is a perfectly sane person and still wants to take your son if you do not chop off his genitals, then the calculus for what must be done changes radically.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

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While Democrats will deliver tired platitudes about political violence having no place in our country, the truth is that violence has been central to their strategy for a long time. From the race riots of the 1960s to the terror bombings of the 1970s to modern-day assassinations, leftists have regularly wielded violence. It is comforting to pretend that our political system is one in which peaceful negotiation and intellectual debate drive every outcome, but that simply is not the case. Whether it’s the intimidation of Supreme Court justices or the shooting of members of Congress, Democrats understand the power of violence and do not hesitate to use it.

Violence is the ultimate political argument, the most powerful tool one can deploy in furthering one’s cause. This is why our founding fathers referred to the revolution as an “Appeal to Heaven,” the final attempt to secure their rights as Englishmen when all else had failed. Violence is powerful but destabilizing; no one wants to live in a constant state of war, where every political and personal disagreement is resolved by force. That is why the first duty of the state is to secure a monopoly on sanctioned violence, taking that powerful but dangerous weapon off the table.

Some political systems believe the civil magistrate has been granted stewardship over violence by God; others see it as a social contract in which we collectively give up our right to violence in exchange for the protection of the state. However you frame it, a monopoly on violence is critical to maintaining order. A country that allows other entities inside its jurisdiction to use violence, like gangs or cartels, is generally considered a failed state because the citizens cannot rely on the government to maintain order. The population will feel compelled to go outside the sanctioned system to meet their security needs, and whoever reliably delivers on those needs tends to become the new government.

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This might all sound obvious, but in the modern world, it must be repeated because we have lost touch with this basic truth. America and much of the Western world have been safe and stable for so long that we have forgotten the historical norm. Free debate and inquiry leading to a democratic consensus that is then peacefully enacted by a civilian government is fantastic, but it is far from the standard throughout history. Amazingly, we have been able to enjoy this extended period of stability, but it can also blind us to reality when the nature of our situation changes.

The cliché is that violence is never the answer; the truth is that violence is the ultimate answer, and we forget that at our own peril. That is why the state must take violence off the table by maintaining its monopoly on violence. Once violence is introduced into the equation, it quickly spreads across all domains because it outcompetes all other political strategies. In an orderly society, political violence must carry the ultimate taboo, not because it does not work, but because it works all too well.

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To its advocates, UBI is the obvious answer to a future in which machines displace human labor. But beneath the sleek language of innovation lies the same old welfare-state promise: material comfort in exchange for dependence. Its supporters speak as though it were the natural companion of progress. In reality, it threatens to rob millions of the work, structure, and purpose that give life meaning.

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UBI attracts supporters for very different reasons. For Andrew Yang and others on the left, it promises relief from poverty through guaranteed cash transfers. For Charles Murray, it has represented a simpler and more streamlined alternative to the sprawling welfare state. For Elon Musk and many AI boosters, UBI solves the problem of those with too little cognitive ability to compete, left behind in an increasingly IQ-based economy.

Their motives differ, but they share a revealing assumption: that UBI is an inevitable response to progress rather than a political choice with deep moral and social consequences. In each case, the individual is treated less as a citizen with duties and aspirations than as a materialist problem to be managed.

Welfare for all

A version of UBI basically already exists in the United States. With the vast web of interlocking welfare programs offered by the state for things like disability, poverty, child care, minority status, and educational attainment, most people can find a way to qualify for assistance with food or housing. It might not provide a comfortable or desirable life, but if someone doesn’t want to work to survive in America, they often do not have to.

As artificial intelligence drives fresh excitement in the tech world, major figures such as Elon Musk are reviving an old political fantasy: universal basic income. The idea has drawn support from a strange coalition, from progressive politicians like Andrew Yang to libertarian thinkers like Charles Murray.

To its advocates, UBI is the obvious answer to a future in which machines displace human labor. But beneath the sleek language of innovation lies the same old welfare-state promise: material comfort in exchange for dependence. Its supporters speak as though it were the natural companion of progress. In reality, it threatens to rob millions of the work, structure, and purpose that give life meaning.

UBI attracts supporters for very different reasons. For Andrew Yang and others on the left, it promises relief from poverty through guaranteed cash transfers. For Charles Murray, it has represented a simpler and more streamlined alternative to the sprawling welfare state. For Elon Musk and many AI boosters, UBI solves the problem of those with too little cognitive ability to compete, left behind in an increasingly IQ-based economy.

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Their motives differ, but they share a revealing assumption: that UBI is an inevitable response to progress rather than a political choice with deep moral and social consequences. In each case, the individual is treated less as a citizen with duties and aspirations than as a materialist problem to be managed.

Welfare for all

A version of UBI basically already exists in the United States. With the vast web of interlocking welfare programs offered by the state for things like disability, poverty, child care, minority status, and educational attainment, most people can find a way to qualify for assistance with food or housing. It might not provide a comfortable or desirable life, but if someone doesn’t want to work to survive in America, they often do not have to.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

So the question everyone is left asking is: If liberalism ultimately makes nations fragile, how did it come to dominate the most powerful countries in the Western world?

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Most people are lazy, selfish, and impulsive. Successful civilizations are created by accumulating low-time-preference behaviors that collectively enable them to overcome the negative aspects of human nature. Those lessons are costly to relearn with each generation, so these prosocial behaviors are encoded in the traditions, folkways, and institutions of civilization. The systems that allow society to function work their way into language, religion, literature, song, and art until they are almost invisible to the people who live inside them. The people could not imagine living any other way.

This thick network of embedded folkways and traditions does a great job of cultivating virtue in the citizenry and perpetuating the society that gave birth to them, but it makes cooperation with other nations difficult. In many cases, even the inhabitants of the society cannot really articulate what the behaviors are or what makes them work because they have become second nature. The very thing that makes them work for the host nation makes them very difficult to explain or implement in other cultural contexts.

A small, tight-knit society is great for a time, but eventually it gets outcompeted by larger civilizations. The advantages of scale are too great, and to compete, the small, successful nation must learn to expand through cooperation. The civilization with more troops, more crops, more trading partners, and more allies will eventually crush smaller societies, no matter how virtuous those societies might be. This is where liberalism enters the equation.

Liberalism, in the classical sense, not the modern Democratic Party, was a project that allowed civilizations to scale. Specifics of religion, custom, tradition, and even financial transactions had been too deeply territorialized in particular civilizations to allow cooperation or commerce between different peoples. In many cases, the differences were so severe as to spark wars. To enable cooperation and scale, the scaffolding that allowed cooperation at the local level needed to be removed from these divisive, conflicting cultural contexts and reterritorialized into a neutral space where different peoples could access it.

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By identifying and extracting the behaviors that enabled social cooperation from their cultural contexts, liberalism created a framework that enabled different nations to engage in commerce and other forms of exchange. A minimum viable morality was reached among nations, allowing them to sign business contracts, diplomatic treaties, and trade agreements that each side understood and could adhere to. Rather than go to war, people with very different ways of life could buy, sell, and even ally with each other productively. Capitalism was born, and with it came vast gains in wealth and standard of living.

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America, in other words, has always kept its eyes on the horizon.

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But once the frontier had been settled, the U.S. seemed to turn inward, focusing its boundless energy and notion of destiny toward a social crusade. The progressive civil rights movement became the story Americans told about themselves more than any other. A nation built on outward expansion turned inward. The energy that once drove settlers westward and engineers skyward was redirected into a different kind of project: a moral and social crusade at home.

This narrative is so powerful that it now dominates both the conservative and liberal mind. This means that the U.S. no longer really has a conservative movement, but rather two competing versions of the same progressive teleology that only disagree about the pace at which the social revolution should be pursued.

The philosopher Aristotle is famous for his discussion of telos — the end or purpose of a thing. Many modern thinkers have discarded this notion of ultimate purpose in favor of a more materialistic understanding of the world, but Aristotle is right, and they are wrong. America was always a nation in tension, recognizing the need to solidify its identity as the first true product of the New World even as it was immediately compelled forward by ambition. Restless people settled the U.S.; we barely complete the conquest of one challenge before some group splinters off to brave the next frontier. The American advance has always been relentless. Our nation is one of great purpose and great energy that will be directed toward whatever end we put our minds to.

For most of its history, America’s telos was expansion. Not merely territorial, but civilizational. A restless people moved outward, solved one problem, then immediately sought the next. This produced enormous dynamism. It also produced tension. The country had to define itself even as it constantly outgrew its previous definitions.

The civil rights myth

North America is the natural domain of the United States, but once the West had been truly settled, there was nowhere left for that pioneering spirit to expand. World War II proved to be the nation’s most radical period of transformation, during which it emerged as one of only two real superpowers dominating the globe. There were attempts to redirect that impulse. The space race briefly reopened the horizon. The competition with the Soviet Union offered a global stage. But these proved temporary. The deeper shift was happening at home.

The civil rights movement had begun as a reasonable request for legal equality, but was quickly merging with hippie culture and anti-Vietnam protests into a full-blown revolutionary deconstruction of America. The story of the civil rights movement was no longer the effort to seek a temporary solution for a wrong done to a specific group. Instead the movement fully embraced the progressive and Marxist themes of its contemporaries. America was no longer a great nation that needed to make some adjustments to integrate black citizens better; it was an eternal oppressor that had to be entirely reconstructed.

That shift matters because it supplied a new telos. If the old purpose had been expansion, the new one was equality, understood not as a condition to be achieved, but as a process without end. Every disparity became evidence of unfinished work. Every institution became suspect. The project could not conclude because its logic required constant renewal.

Conservatives initially stood against the civil rights revolution. Barry Goldwater famously opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not because he supported Jim Crow, but because he understood the legislation as a revolutionary attack on states’ rights. Many conservatives initially objected to Ronald Reagan enshrining the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday into law because they still remembered that King was a communist sympathizer and serial adulterer who supported what we would later call DEI.

It was very clear that the CRA had already mutated well beyond its initial purpose and that civil rights law was expanding to consume every area of American life. But every movie, television show, novel, and news broadcast was selling the civil rights revolution as the new story of America. Conservatives never stood a chance.

The new telos of America was one of equality. The framers had written that “all men were created equal,” and it was now the purpose of the U.S. to make that a reality. While Thomas Jefferson may have penned those famous words, it is very clear that neither he nor most of the founding generation meant them in the way modern Americans do today. The continuation of slavery is the obvious example, but early American immigration laws restricted naturalization to whites of good character.

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Alexis de Tocqueville, author of “Democracy in America,” famously argued that American blacks and Anglos were incompatible and that a race war would likely come before any national civil war. Even Abraham Lincoln was not optimistic about the integration of black and white America, with plans to send former slaves back to Africa once the Civil War was concluded. Whatever previous generations meant by that famous phrase, they obviously did not believe in a never-ending quest to remake society in the name of equality.

Predictably, leftists took the revolution as far and as fast as they could. America’s original sin was slavery, and the country’s entire purpose was now a never-ending mission to atone for this great evil. The suppression of black Americans was systemic, so the United States had to deconstruct all previous hierarchies to avoid oppression. First race, then gender roles, then marriage, then religion, then the concept of biological sex itself. No matter how absurd the exercise proved itself to be, the hunt for one new oppressed minority to grant civil rights to became the telos of America.

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It reminded Americans that our culture is not only real, but vivid enough that another people can see its beauty even when we have been taught to sneer at it ourselves. If Americans and Japanese are to continue to enjoy our distinct cultures, we must fight to maintain the true diversity that makes a civilization worth preserving.

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Most Americans know that there is a strong current of appreciation for Japanese culture in the U.S. Americans eat Japanese food, watch anime, read manga, practice karate, and revere samurai movies. While we were once in a brutal war, Americans have come to respect the noble and beautiful traditions of the Japanese. What many Americans did not know is that the Japanese also have a robust subculture of appreciation for American culture.

Americans are constantly told that they have no culture, or that what they do have is shallow, vulgar, and unworthy of defense. In much of elite life, status comes from mocking the tastes and traditions of ordinary Americans. Status in the U.S. and many other Western nations is acquired by looking down on the folkways of the average American.

It is not just that the Japanese love American culture, but that they seem to focus specifically on rural Southern and Western archetypes. Banjos playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” barbeques grilling comically large steaks, monster trucks crushing everything below them. The Japanese love and celebrate everything that American elites have trained the population at large to sneer at.

Recently, many people have been asking the question “What is an American?” But the Japanese seem to know right away. There is no confusion, no debate. The answer is obvious and plays itself out in the memes, re-enactments, and celebrations the Japanese enjoy while honoring American culture. Sometimes another people can identify your defining traits more clearly than you can, especially after your own institutions have spent years trying to dissolve them.

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In a period when many people in the United States feel estranged from their own inheritance, it was oddly heartening to see ourselves reflected in a nation we admire. If the Japanese know who Americans are, then the least we can do is be proud to act like the Americans the Japanese love.

This sudden outburst of cultural appreciation also puts to bed the idea that Americans are xenophobes who hate other countries. Japan’s love for the U.S. is reciprocated with great fervor by Americans. But why are Americans so willing to appreciate and embrace the Japanese while being dismissive of so many other countries? The answer is simple: The Japanese are worthy of admiration. Not all cultures are equal, and the Japanese have emerged from the devastation of war to rebuild a high-trust society on a foundation of rich history and honorable conduct. It turns out that Americans don’t hate other cultures; they simply save their appreciation for those that deserve it.

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Democrats have held up funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid their ongoing war over ICE, and after a month without pay, TSA employees have started refusing to come to work. The result has been crippling delays at major airports, with waits stretching four hours or more and turning an already degraded flying experience into something closer to a public humiliation ritual.

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The brutal truth is that one political party is willing to disrupt travel across the country to protect illegal immigrants and preserve a future voter pipeline. Even after assassination attempts, lawfare against political opponents, and an open push for demographic replacement, conservatives still hesitate to admit that our political battles have become existential.

In theory, the United States remains the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. In practice, basic air travel now is a dysfunctional disaster. Seats are cramped, service is miserable, fellow passengers are often feral, and airlines charge extra for every scrap of convenience in the hope of squeezing one last dollar from exhausted travelers.

For a while, the indignity at least purchased speed. Flying still got you from one place to another faster than anything else. But incompetence, cost-cutting, and crumbling infrastructure have made significant delays routine. Travelers now regularly build an extra day into both ends of a trip because same-day arrival has become an increasingly reckless assumption.

Adding four-hour TSA lines to that ordeal is more than just another inconvenience. It’s simply insulting.

To his credit, President Trump has moved ICE officers into airports to assist with screening. It is less satisfying than watching those officers execute deportation raids, but early signs suggest the move has worked. Atlanta reportedly went from nearly five hours of screening delays to roughly five minutes. ICE officers appear to be in good spirits, and the agency itself seems to be recovering some badly needed public goodwill. Tom Homan has even said ICE agents will continue deportation operations while helping with TSA duties. It is not an ideal arrangement, but Trump has once again found a way to turn executive action into a political win.

Still, the TSA mess raises a larger strategic question, one that extends well beyond airports.

During the COVID lockdowns, public schools across the country shut their doors. Conservatives had spent years correctly describing government education as a progressive propaganda machine and a patronage network for Democratic clients. Yet when the system buckled, the right did not use the opening to challenge the legitimacy of the whole structure. Republicans begged for schools to reopen as quickly as possible. Faced with a rare chance to dismantle an atrocious institution, conservatives instead demanded a “return to normal.” But normal was already a disaster.

The same pattern now applies to the TSA.

The agency did not even exist before 2001, and it has performed badly almost from the start. Most contraband still gets through screening. The TSA has not stopped a single terrorist attack. Like the public school system, it functions largely as a jobs program for Democrat clients while draining billions from taxpayers and making ordinary life demonstrably worse.

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Rather than using this crisis to argue for dismantling the TSA, Republicans have rushed to prove that it is indispensable. The short-term political benefit is obvious enough. No administration wants to own airport chaos. But every such rescue reinforces a deeper assumption shared by both parties: Any government program, once created, becomes permanent. No one is going to vote himself into a smaller state. The incentives do not allow it. America is far more likely to watch the regime collapse than to see it willingly scale itself back.

That failure of imagination points to a larger problem.

Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the presidency while holding a friendly Supreme Court, yet they still appear terrified to govern. Only Trump, in his early burst of executive orders, showed much appetite for using the moment. Even that momentum slowed once the administration ran into the courts and Congress refused to codify any serious part of the MAGA agenda. The GOP theoretically holds the levers of power, but in practice it remains terrified of disturbing the status quo.

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Plenty of commentators blame podcasts for this new disorder, and the new ecosystem gives them no shortage of bad behavior to cite. But that diagnosis misses the deeper cause. Establishment conservatives treated their audiences the same way the legacy press did: as a resource to be managed, manipulated, and occasionally milked. A movement that spent decades being lied to will not be stitched back together by scolding the people who finally stopped listening.

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After Democrats lost in 2024 to a resurgent Donald Trump, they went hunting for culprits. They blamed a new breed of podcasters who cracked the information monopoly progressives had grown used to enjoying. Talk radio always bothered the left, but it remained a kind of cultural ghetto for older conservatives. Podcasts like Joe Rogan’s reached a younger, largely male audience that rarely participated in politics at all. Democrats screamed about “disinformation,” warned about the danger of free speech, then launched research projects designed to replicate what they claimed to hate.

The right cheered the upheaval. Establishment conservatives, however, never fully grasped what the shift meant for them. The left’s control of mainstream media gave it a weapon of enormous magnitude, but Fox News and talk radio served a parallel purpose on the right: discipline the acceptable narrative, keep Republican voters inside a manageable story, and punish those who stepped too far outside it.

Institutional conservatives also abused that power. They sold narratives that served donors, careers, and comfortable assumptions. They treated their base as a captive audience. This behavior helped fuel the Trumpian revolution in the first place. Trump did not rise only as a battering ram against progressive media. He rose as a middle finger to a conservative establishment that had earned the people’s contempt.

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That plan worked, then kept working in ways many people did not anticipate. The democratization of information that destroyed the progressive narrative machine has now turned its solvent on the conservative one. Populism behaves like universal acid. It rarely dissolves only the targets you prefer.

Conservative gatekeepers now display the same panicked reflexes the left showed: warnings about “dangerous rhetoric,” demands for deplatforming, and pleas for “responsible” voices to regain control. These instincts never belonged to one ideology. They belong to institutions that sense their monopoly slipping away.

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Most Americans expected U.S. firepower to dominate, and it has. Seven American service members have died so far, but Iran has suffered far heavier losses in lives and materiel. Even those surprised by the damage Iran managed to inflict on U.S. allies can see the basic reality: Tehran is outmatched. The real question was never whether the United States had superior force. The question was whether the administration could sustain support long enough to translate force into victory.

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That challenge matters more for Trump than for most modern presidents. He was never an isolationist. His second-term foreign policy has relied on limited but highly effective strikes rather than long occupations. He has projected power through single bombing runs and midnight raids, then exited before the mission metastasized into a nation-building project. Skeptics of foreign intervention grumbled, then quieted down when operations stayed brisk, competent, and contained.

That becomes more difficult when “contained” turns into weeks and potentially months.

“Boots on the ground” has become the clearest public marker of commitment. If the conflict remains primarily air and naval, most voters will still read it as limited engagement. Costs will rise and gas prices will sting, but casualties will likely remain comparatively low. A sharp show of force followed by a clear exit would keep the war from becoming a long-term liability. Whether he intended it or not, Trump has likely gambled the remainder of his term on avoiding that trip wire.

The Iranians know it. So does the administration.

That’s why Tehran keeps daring Washington to deploy ground troops. Iran’s leaders don’t believe they can beat American infantry in a straight fight. They’re betting the war loses support the moment U.S. ground forces start taking steady casualties.

George W. Bush enjoyed a powerful rally-around-the-flag boost after 9/11, and his administration spent months building a public case for war. Trump has no comparable national trauma to unify the country, and his administration did not spend much time laying out the necessity of this war before it began. That means his narrative window of victory is narrower by default — and it can close fast.

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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth appears to understand the dynamic, but he also understands a basic rule: You don’t win wars by announcing what you will not do. If the administration takes ground troops off the table, it tells Tehran that patience equals victory — that holding out long enough will force America to go home.

So Hegseth keeps the option alive. Practically, that means he keeps getting dragged into briefings where he must say ground deployments remain possible. The media treats that as the headline. Anxiety rises. “Boots on the ground” starts to feel inevitable, even when it remains only a contingency. The administration takes a beating in the public mind with every news cycle.

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Over the weekend, the United States joined Israel in the opening salvo of what looked like an increasingly inevitable fight with Iran. Plenty of ink has already spilled over whether Donald Trump should pursue regime change abroad. The larger stakes sit at home. Trump began his second term with an all-out assault on the left and the permanent bureaucracy. Agencies were closed, and budgets were slashed. The border was secured, and deportations began. The early blitz of executive orders stunned progressives, but activist judges soon started tying the administration down. That reality demanded legislative victories.

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Congress has not delivered. Rather than spend months trying to whip spineless Republicans into motion, the White House shifted toward what it could do without them. Foreign policy offers that outlet. The result includes some impressive operations, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Iran, however, threatens to consume time, attention, and political capital that the domestic fight cannot spare.

Curtis Yarvin argues that the most valuable political win makes the next win easier. Power has momentum. Winning in the right order matters more than checking items off an ideological list. Trump’s best early moves fit that logic. They did not merely satisfy the base. They changed the battlefield.

The point is not isolation. America has enemies, and presidents sometimes must use force. The point is sequencing. Domestic consolidation makes foreign action cheaper and safer. A secure border, a disciplined bureaucracy, and election rules that prevent the left from gaming turnout strengthen deterrence.

They also insulate a president from war-party sabotage: leaks, lawsuits, and hearings meant to break public support. The same activists who file injunctions against deportations will file injunctions again against anything that smells like emergency authority. The same media class that demanded escalation yesterday will demand trials and timelines tomorrow. A president who has not locked down the home front fights with one hand tied, then gets blamed when the knot tightens.

Cutting the staff and budget of outfits like USAID and the Department of Education did more than signal hostility to the progressive project. It reduced the flow of money to Democratic patronage networks and throttled the institutions that launder liberal ideology into “expertise.” Closing the border and restarting deportations did more than satisfy a campaign promise. It slowed the importation of new dependents and future Democratic Party supporters. Even the executive order on birthright citizenship, whatever the courts decide, aims at the same long-term terrain: electoral math.

Those moves carried moral clarity and tactical advantage. Each win reduced the opposition’s resources and increased the odds of winning the next fight.

That strategy always faced a limit. Flooding the zone with executive action could only last until the legal system and the administrative state regrouped. Trump is not a dictator, no matter what progressive media claims. He needs laws. Without legislation, judges can block him, bureaucrats can slow-walk him, and the next president can reverse him with a pen.

Once the domestic agenda hit those constraints, the administration pivoted abroad to keep momentum. The question becomes whether momentum abroad strengthens the home front or drains it.

War burns political capital. Trump already took hits from the Epstein files mess and sloppy messaging around deportations. Governing by polls is foolish, but political victories still require public attention and pressure. A president can spend capital only if he has it. People love a winner. They also sour on leaders who appear distracted, trapped, or inconsistent.

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Iran poses a special risk because it collides with Trump’s signature advantage: his break with Republican foreign adventurism. He rose by mocking George W. Bush’s regime-change fantasies as disaster. That stance enraged conservative orthodoxies, then remade them. Many pundits who cheered the Iraq War now treat regime change as a punchline largely because Trump made it respectable to say so.

Now Trump bets that the problem was not regime change itself, only its execution. Maybe he wins that bet. He deserves credit for successful strikes and bold operations. Yet the odds do not favor quick, clean wars, and Iran has a long history of swallowing neat plans.

Meanwhile, the domestic agenda needs hard wins that only Congress can supply. The SAVE Act offers the perfect example of a victory that makes the next victory easier. Voter ID is moral and common sense. It enjoys broad support. It constrains the fraud Democrats exploit. It makes every future election easier for Republicans to win. Yet GOP legislators cannot push it across the finish line. The Senate wastes time on performative votes and pageant nonsense. Caligula’s horse starts to look like a personnel upgrade.

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Schools rushed into a technological revolution without asking the most basic question: What does this do to a child’s mind? Many teachers saw the answer firsthand and in real time. Administrators and “experts” ignored them because the fad sounded like “progress.”

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I taught history and civics in Florida public schools as the laptop trend took hold. Computers had sat in classrooms since my own childhood, but they played a supporting role. A few desktops in the back helped with research. A computer lab handled bigger projects. Most learning still happened on paper with books, notes, and conversation.

Then the Chromebook arrived: cheap, durable, limited, and perfect for one thing — living inside a web browser. Suddenly a district could put a machine not just in every room but in the hands of every student.

Buzzwords beat judgment

Public-school administrators love buzzwords. “Technological literacy” sounds noble, as if every ninth grader is training for Silicon Valley while working on their grammar assignment. Google did not just sell discounted laptops. It supplied a full ecosystem: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom. The whole apparatus of schooling migrated into Alphabet’s software suite. Few people in the system asked why a private company wanted to become the operating system of childhood.

The laptop push also fit the religion of metrics. District offices love anything that produces dashboards, timestamps, and “engagement” graphs. A worksheet completed on paper frustrates the spreadsheet priesthood. A worksheet completed on a Chromebook generates data. The device did not just enter the classroom; it entered the managerial imagination, where metrics matter more than minds.

Once laptops became ubiquitous, the problems announced themselves. The deeper the integration, the harder it became to control.

Cheating became routine. Students searched answers in seconds. The larger problem went beyond quizzes. Googling replaced thinking. Kids refused to read because they assumed a quick search and a copy-paste counted as “learning.” Wikipedia became the default authority. Students stopped vetting anything because they treated the first search result as truth. Even writing shifted. Instead of building an argument, students stitched together paragraphs from the internet and hoped the teacher felt too tired to fight.

The distraction machine

Schools tried parental controls. Teenagers treated those controls as a challenge. When thousands of bored adolescents share a building, they collaborate. A new filter went up; within days, kids found a workaround. Soon the screens again showed games, movies, even pornography — during class, in plain view, behind a pretense of “work.”

Students used shared Google docs as a covert messaging system. They gossiped, bullied, and planned actual crimes while keeping a document open to look studious. My school eventually held assemblies to remind students that everything typed into a document leaves a record and that bragging about criminal activity or sexual escapades can end up as evidence.

All of that raised another issue: privacy and capture. Google did not subsidize devices and software out of corporate charity. By making Google search and Google apps the center of a child’s information life, the system trained dependency. Google finds the truth. Google organizes the truth. Google presents the truth. A student’s education happens inside a Google ghetto. Pretend the company is not collecting that data if you want, but the incentives cut the other way.

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Screens also fed the attention crisis. Administrators told teachers to stop showing videos longer than three minutes without pausing to explain because students could not stay focused. The device that was supposed to expand horizons kept shrinking attention spans. Teachers began competing with the entire internet for a child’s attention, and no lesson plan can win that contest for long.

Locked into the system

The system made escape difficult. Florida went all-in on Chromebooks and tied them to everything. Standardized tests moved entirely onto laptops. “Test prep” software got woven into daily coursework. Students with accommodations or limited English got pushed toward the device as a universal crutch. Denying a Chromebook got treated as denying an education. Teachers who resisted risked discipline.

I reached a point where my students mattered more than compliance. I rebuilt my classroom around paper, books, and discussion. Students used Chromebooks only for mandated testing and accommodations we could not meet otherwise.

The shift showed results fast. Students engaged more. Distraction dropped. Discipline improved. More assignments got finished. Grades rose.

Then COVID-19 struck.

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Whatever happens next, one point matters: Evangelical Christians tried to cancel Gay Days with on-again, off-again boycotts for decades. What finally wounded the LGBTQ leviathan was not conservative activism, but cultural apathy.

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I remember the first wave of evangelical pushback as Disney began signaling support for homosexual lifestyles in the 1990s. Conservatives already watched pop culture coarsen through music, movies, and video games, yet they still treated Disney as a family-friendly institution aimed at children. That is why it shocked them to see the company behind “Snow White” and “Cinderella” host celebrations of homosexuality and extend benefits to same-sex partners long before the Supreme Court imposed gay marriage on the country.

Evangelical denominations answered with a strangely inconsistent boycott. One year, the Southern Baptist Convention urged members to avoid Disney; the next year, churches showed up for Night of Joy, Disney’s Christian music festival.

When Gay Days began in 1991, gay marriage remained deeply unpopular. “Will & Grace” had not worked its magic on the popular imagination, and politicians such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still felt compelled to posture as defenders of traditional marriage as late as 2008. If any moment favored a decisive cultural rebuke, that was it. Christians offered sloppy, intermittent resistance, while Disney only leaned harder.

From park to propaganda

Disney’s support for homosexuality moved from park celebrations and employee benefits into its entertainment. Progressive messaging crept into television shows and movies until the woke revolution turned it into a flood. “The Little Mermaid” became black, gay couples kissed in “Star Wars,” and diverse girlbosses dominated Marvel. As acceptance of gay marriage shifted from taboo to required corporate orthodoxy, Disney replaced entertainment with propaganda.

The company then collided with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) after Florida moved to restrict the mutilation of children and limit the amount of LGBTQ messaging pumped into public schools. Legislation that the press laughably branded “don’t say gay” sent leftists into a panic. Executives called emergency meetings. Rumors flew that Disney would pull up stakes and flee the Sunshine State.

BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo helped surface video of a corporate meeting where Disney executive Latoya Raveneau announced her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to inject LGBTQ themes into kids’ shows. Disney embraced the agenda early, worked to make it dominant — especially among children — and refused to slow down once the woke revolution reached full speed.

Why Gay Days collapsed

So why did Gay Days suddenly fall apart now? Apathy.

Apathy does not mean Americans suddenly disapproved of Disney’s agenda. It means normal people stopped granting it the honor of a fight.

Many families quit watching new releases, not as part of a coordinated boycott, but because the product became preachy, weird, and dull. Others kept their subscriptions but tuned out the messaging and rolled their eyes. Either way, the ritualized drama lost its electricity.

Corporate sponsors follow attention, and attention followed the next outrage. A movement built on being shocking cannot survive once it becomes background noise. When every kids’ show feels like a lecture, even sympathetic viewers start craving something else.

Gay Days did not collapse because Christians perfected a strategy. It collapsed because the culture stopped caring enough to show up, even to cheer. Apathy is not victory, but it can starve a cause faster than protest.

Progressivism needs an enemy

Popular political movements need cultural momentum, and progressive movements feed on transgression. Leftists want to feel like they are fighting the stuffy pastor in “Footloose.” They want to feel cool, rebellious, and righteous. Without dialectical tension, progressivism loses velocity.

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When activists fought the religious right, they enjoyed the perfect enemy: just enough moralizing to spark rebellion, but little chance of sustained, effective opposition.

Conservatives could work up outrage on television and even skip a holiday trip, but they rarely sustained a boycott. Republicans generally worship business and profits, so GOP politicians avoided pressure on true pain points such as corporate sponsors and boardrooms. Conservatives served as a political battery, supplying just enough resistance to keep LGBTQ activists energized while imposing few costs. Democrat operatives could not have engineered a better environment.

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For better or worse, the Super Bowl serves as the premier civic liturgy of the American empire, a night when strangers share the same screens and offices share the same small talk. When that ritual becomes another front in the culture war, the country loses one more place to breathe.

Families fight. Politics intrudes. Resentments pile up. Holidays still force a pause. Thanksgiving and Christmas push people back to the same table, reminding them that the argument cannot become the relationship.

When even the ritual itself turns into the argument — when Thanksgiving and Christmas are no longer about gratitude or celebrating the birth of Christ but rather who can win a political debate — the family slides from conflict toward rupture. A nation works the same way. Shared ceremonies do not solve deep disagreements, but they keep disagreement from becoming total separation.

From national pastime to litmus test

Americans rarely stop living their separate lives to watch the same thing at the same time. Streaming splinters audiences. Social media isolates communities. Even big films and best-selling books now fall into ideological silos.

The Super Bowl remains one of the few national events that still compels common attention. People who hate sports tune in for the ads so they can follow the conversation at work the next day. A shared celebration, however frivolous, still binds people who otherwise share little else in common.

This year’s Super Bowl looked like a country at war with itself.

The broadcast opened with two national anthems: the familiar Francis Scott Key standard and the newer “black national anthem” that appears at more NFL events each season. The league has leaned hard into woke activism, from corporate rituals to social campaigns, and it rarely hides the moral it wants viewers to absorb. Two anthems signal two constituencies. Two constituencies begin to behave like two nations.

A cultural sorting mechanism

The halftime show sharpened that divide. The NFL chose Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican artist who performs almost entirely in Spanish, and the set centered on Hispanic identity. The stage recreated a bodega, complete with an “EBT welcome” neon sign. The performance leaned into sexual provocation, with dancers simulating sex acts and same-sex grinding played for shock and applause. The show ended with performers hoisting foreign flags, a tableau that read less like cultural flair and more like a victory lap.

A large portion of the audience did not buy what the league sold. Ratings suggested many viewers tuned out during the set. Some did so out of prudishness, others out of irritation at the message, others out of confusion. Either way, the halftime show did not function as a shared moment. It became a sorting mechanism.

Turning Point USA offered a competing halftime program featuring country artists singing about America and Jesus Christ. The stream broke records and reportedly became YouTube’s largest live broadcast. The accomplishment deserves credit. The need for it should worry anyone who wants a coherent nation. Instead of one shared celebration, Americans built parallel ceremonies, then congratulated themselves for avoiding each other.

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Who is the customer here?

The commercials followed the same pattern. One spot from a mortgage lender portrayed a family of color moving into a mostly white neighborhood and encountering casual racism until they instructed the residents on diversity and inclusion. The ad did not wink. It preached.

Another strange commercial, backed by Patriots owner Robert Kraft, aimed to address rising anti-Semitism. It showed a Jewish student harassed in a school hallway as classmates mocked him and stuck a note reading “dirty Jew” to his backpack. The boy reached his locker, where a black student offered solidarity based on shared experience with hatred from whites. The ad then unveiled a “blue square” social media campaign modeled on the “black square” campaign that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020.

NFL owners did not back away from the woke script. They turned the dial higher.

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Yet Western leaders now make a parallel declaration in a cleaner suit. Their countries, they insist, have grown “too white.” The white population must fall. The electorate must change. No denunciations follow. No sanctions arrive. Corporate press treats the project as enlightened policy. A global consensus that once claimed to oppose ethnic cleansing now tolerates it — provided the target is white people in Western nations.

French writer Renaud Camus gave us the “Great Replacement.” For years, polite society treated the phrase as radioactive. Say it on television and you became a pariah. Post it online and platforms erased you. That taboo held only as long as people could be bullied into denying what they could see.

The concept’s explanatory power proved stronger than the gatekeepers. Major conservative outlets now discuss replacement openly. YouTube will still attach warnings to videos that mention it, yet the subject refuses to disappear because the policy keeps showing up in schools, boardrooms, and border statistics.

A taboo cannot survive daily evidence.

Quest for permanent power

“Diversity” served as a euphemism for replacement long before anyone had heard of Camus. When a corporation, movie studio, or university says it wants to “increase diversity,” it never means it plans to hire more white, straight men because it has too many trans black women on staff.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion never aimed at demographic proportionality. Leadership announced a preference: more non-white members, fewer white members. Declare a goal of reducing any other demographic, and the public would recognize the project as naked discrimination.

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Private institutions practicing anti-white discrimination is bad enough. Governments adopting the same objective is a nightmare. Progressive voices in the United States celebrate the declining share of white Americans and brag that demographic change will lock Democrats into permanent power. They frame replacement as destiny, then use policy to accelerate it, then denounce anyone who notices as a “conspiracy theorist.”

Project Veritas recorded a State Department official admitting that replacement migration functions as a political strategy meant to secure electoral victory. That admission matters less than the broader point: Public and private rhetoric have normalized the idea that a party may change the electorate to entrench itself.

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While CNN and MSNBC are treating ICE’s presence as a fascist takeover that every progressive foot soldier should travel to fight, they are increasingly frustrated that no one seems to really care. The left might be engaged in its own miniature insurrection, but the rest of America isn’t at war. The rest of America is watching football.

The summer of 2020 was truly a wonder to behold. After the entire country was locked down for months on end, tensions were boiling. The media had been steadily bombarding their captive viewers with different stories of police brutality against black people, the most sacred of all victims, hoping that one spark would eventually trigger a wildfire. It took a while, but once riots started, they spread to different cities quickly. Teachers had their students write essays about George Floyd, while churches baptized in his name. Statues were built, murals were painted, and companies donated millions to Black Lives Matter, even as rioters looted and burned down their stores.

It was a truly religious movement, supported by every major power center in the nation, justifying outrageous violence and property damage, while news organizations glorified the entire spectacle. Not since the 1960s has America been gripped by such a fervently spiritual devotion to revolutionary politics.

Now, Trump is back in office and the left is desperately trying to recreate the magic, but leftists can’t seem to get it done. ICE has started its deportations of the worst illegal-alien criminals. In most states, the operation has gone smoothly. Some blue states have decided not to work with ICE, forcing the agents to retrieve the illegal aliens themselves, often in very hostile environments, without the aid of local law enforcement. Minnesota has been a hotbed of domestic unrest, so it is no surprise that the state has also seen the most conflict during these ICE raids.

It isn’t just that Minnesota refuses to cooperate with federal immigration officials. The entire state political apparatus is involved in a conspiracy to foment violence. Government officials, including the lieutenant governor, have been caught in a group chat working to coordinate the revolution. Teachers’ unions and school boards collaborate to suspend school so that educators and students can join in the street protests and riots. Judges refuse to sign arrest warrants for obvious crimes because they agree with the perpetrators. Minnesota is in open insurrection. There really is no other word for it.

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Despite the incredible level of subversive coordination occurring in Minnesota, events have failed to capture the popular imagination like they did during the summer of love. Some have blamed the winter, claiming that it is simply too cold for the leftists to maintain an overwhelming presence in the streets. Others have pointed to the lack of lockdowns or some other simmering psychological factor increasing political tensions.

The most likely explanation centers around the cause itself. Black criminals have gained an almost sacred status on the left, making them a far more animating cause, especially for the black community at large. No black activist is showing up to die for white lesbians who get themselves shot standing up for child-molesting illegal aliens from Venezuela. Without the sacred victims, it is difficult for leftists to get their most violent foot soldiers in the streets or to get corporations to sign on and push the agenda. Whatever the true explanation, the consequences are obvious. The revolution is not spreading, and most of America does not care.

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That belief sustained many on the right for decades. It has become a liability.

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The sunshine conservative lives under the assumption that the American system more or less runs itself, that excesses can be corrected with minimal effort, and that power remains constrained by shared norms. Those assumptions no longer hold. The times that try men’s souls have returned, and the sunshine conservative is about to discover that comfort carries a cost.

For years, a bipartisan consensus reshaped the country through mass immigration. Call it conspiracy if you like, but incentives explain it better.

Democrats saw a reliable path to permanent power. Immigrants arrive without wealth, social capital, or political leverage. They gravitate toward the party that promises redistribution and protection. Every program — health care, housing, loans, benefits — tilts toward newcomers. Open borders grow government, entrench dependency, and expand the progressive patronage machine.

Republican incentives looked different but proved just as corrosive. Conservative voters opposed mass immigration, legal and illegal alike, but party leadership feared one thing above all else: being called racist.

Progressive programming successfully framed the idea of America as a homeland — run for the benefit of its people — as morally suspect. Any attempt to articulate national interest became “nativism.” Chamber of Commerce Republicans exploited that fear, importing millions of workers willing to accept suppressed wages while silencing critics through ritual denunciation.

While the country changed, conservatives largely stood aside. The transformation unsettled them, but lawn care got cheaper and food delivery faster. The sunshine conservative preferred comfort to confrontation. Political activism felt vulgar. Winners, after all, make money and buy boats.

Now the bill has come due.

Human trafficking. Drug flows. Violent crime. Overcrowded hospitals. Stagnant wages. Exploding housing costs. The social fabric frays under the weight of policies designed to benefit elites while disciplining everyone else.

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The Trump administration’s effort to remove the worst offenders collides with a system addicted to inflow. Obvious solutions exist — employer enforcement, E-Verify, ending the H-1B visa scam, taxing remittances heavily — but those measures threaten donor interests. Instead, enforcement proceeds piecemeal, state by state, criminal by criminal.

Each attempt to exercise authority triggers panic among mainstream conservatives. They fret about optics. They warn about norms. They clutch abstractions while the left shoots at or runs over federal agents, storms churches, and treats public order as optional. Establishment voices agonize over power even as their opponents wield it without hesitation.

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