From a financial perspective, a small commercial and residential district called Buckhead is maybe the single most important neighborhood in all of Atlanta.
Taxes from Buckhead pay for roughly 40% of the city’s annual revenues, which isn’t surprising, because it’s a relatively affluent area in Georgia. But starting in 2020, like so many other cities, Atlanta chose to demonize police officers. So inevitably, Buckhead became extremely dangerous. Shootouts and carjackings became common, even in broad daylight, at the central mall. Instead of protecting their cash cow in Buckhead, officials in Atlanta allowed the mob to run rampant.
In response, the residents of the town attempted to do something radical, at least by the standards of modern politics. They tried to secede from the city and establish their own independent government — one that actually respected police officers, and paid them well. The plan nearly worked, but about a year ago ten Republican state senators in Georgia joined with Democrats to prevent it. Apparently, there is bipartisan disapproval in Georgia of any proposal that involves enforcing the law. That’s one of the few things you can get both Democrats and Republicans to agree on. So Buckhead’s secession was shot down.
At the time, it was easy to dismiss Buckhead’s effort as a lark — as the vanity project of a few affluent conservatives living in gated communities in northwest Atlanta. And indeed that’s what most of the media did, as you’d expect.
Vox called the idea a product of the “white power structure” in Atlanta. Politico mocked the secession effort as “mighty.” To the extent that the mainstream, Left-wing corporate press talked about Buckhead, it was to emphasize that the residents of Buckhead are radicals — insurrectionists, even — who have nothing in common with most of America. But that wasn’t true.
As NewsNation pointed out, Buckhead was just one of several municipalities throughout the country that were thinking of seceding. Watch:
So it’s not just Buckhead, as it turns out. Counties in Long Island, Idaho, Oregon, Illinois, and San Bernardino, were thinking of doing the same thing. That looks like a pattern — but it’s one that didn’t get much attention at the time. Now we’re learning that this pattern is far more widespread than it may have appeared.
Researchers at YouGov have found that roughly quarter of U.S. adults — 23% — currently want their state to secede from the United States. Only 51% of respondents opposed secession, while another 27% were unsure. At the state level, the highest percentage in favor of secession was in Alaska, where 36% of adults want out. The next highest is California, at 29%, followed by 28% of New Yorkers. Oklahomans are at 28%. Nebraskans, Georgians, Floridians, and Washingtonians aren’t far behind.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
In a country that had any interest in self-preservation whatsoever, this poll would be leading every primetime television news broadcast. There would be all kinds of experts trying to figure out what could possibly explain these figures, and what our elected representatives could do about it. These polls are yet more evidence that Americans have nothing fundamentally in common anymore. We aren’t bound by race, creed, or ancestry like people in most other countries are. In lieu of that, we used to have shared principles, a shared basic belief system to unify us. We don’t have that anymore. We can’t even agree that “all lives matter,” which you’d think would be a pretty basic starting point. We can’t agree that only women have babies. We can’t agree on basically any fundamental fact of reality.
Meanwhile a major political party demonizes white people as a matter of course. Our politicians seem far more concerned about the sovereignty of foreign states than they care about our own. We are people from different philosophical universes all crammed together, and that’s reflected at every level of our leadership.
The other reason that secession is so popular is that people rightly feel the federal government does not have our interests at heart. When the government prioritizes citizens of other countries over our own, people become disenfranchised. There’s certainly no sense of loyalty to the federal government, as it clearly has no loyalty to us.
Maybe no story in the past few days has made that clearer than the murder of Laken Riley. She was a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University, who was jogging on February 22nd at the campus of the University of Georgia. Watch:
As you saw, very quickly, the authorities identified that the suspected killer was an illegal immigrant. That’s an important detail, but most of the major media simply ignored it, or downplayed it. For example, the Associated Press reported that the accused killer was an, “Athens resident.” They also refer to the suspect as a “26-year-old man.” But they don’t report that he’s an illegal alien until the seventh paragraph of their story. That’s because they’re not interested in talking about the fact that the Biden administration deliberately lets killers like this illegal alien into this country.
As the New York Post reported, citing sources at DHS who spoke to NewsNation, the suspected killer of this college student, “crossed into El Paso, Texas, from Venezuela in September 2022 …. He had been released due to a lack of detention space.” This is the excuse that the feds use now when they don’t want to enforce immigration law. They want us to believe that the jails are full of illegal aliens they’re detaining, which is of course complete nonsense. And that wasn’t the only opportunity to deport this accused killer.
Again, quoting from the Post: “Months before Ibarra allegedly killed Riley, he was apparently arrested in New York for endangering a child. … Police sources in New York confirmed a man by the same name and age as the Georgia suspect was arrested in the Big Apple last year after allegedly endangering the welfare of a 5-year-old.”
In other words, the murder of Laken Riley was maybe the single most preventable crime that has ever occurred in the history of the state of Georgia. All the feds had to do was enforce the law at any point in the past two years and throw this degenerate killer out of the country. But they didn’t do that. Why not?
The mayor of Athens — Kelly Girtz — has offered something of an explanation. Instead of apologizing to the family of Laken Riley, or explaining why authorities didn’t enforce immigration law, the mayor proceeded to deliver a lecture about Donald Trump, and the importance of treating migrant killers with the dignity they supposedly deserve. This is one of the most repulsive press conferences you’ll ever see. Here’s part of it:
Here is the Mayor of Athens, GA telling us we must respect the dignity of migrants, and tries to deflect to Trump and Charlottesville
Laken Riley was just beaten to death under his sanctuary city policies pic.twitter.com/qkD4iqTvIm
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 28, 2024
This is the exact kind of thinking that has festered for many years in this country. It’s why women like Laken Riley are dead today. At every opportunity — even when they’re confronted with murdered college students — politicians like Kelly Girtz insist that the problem isn’t with policy. They claim that the real problem is rhetoric. People like Donald Trump are too mean to Mexicans, apparently. You’re supposedly too xenophobic and uncultured to understand what’s happening. But as the bodies pile up, that position is becoming completely untenable.
Jason Rantz reported last night that an illegal immigrant who was arrested for killing a Washington State trooper (by getting intoxicated and then hitting the trooper on the side of the road) was previously arrested in a domestic violence case several years ago. Rantz reports that authorities suspected this person was in the country illegally, but they couldn’t act.
Here’s what Rantz reported:
Two days after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed Democrats’ sanctuary state legislation into law, Raul Benitez Santana, who is accused of killing a Washington State Patrol trooper on a state highway last Saturday, accepted a plea agreement for a domestic violence incident years earlier. He was in this country illegally at the time. Court documents indicate officials may have, or should have, suspected his status as an illegal immigrant.
But because Washington State was a “sanctuary” for illegal aliens, the authorities couldn’t do anything with this information. They had to allow this domestic abuser to stay in this country, where ultimately he would be accused of murdering a state trooper.
And by the way — even after this illegal alien killed that state trooper, the local media still ran cover for him, just as they ran cover for the suspected murderer of Laken Riley. For example, here’s how the local station KOMO reported the story of the state trooper’s death: “Trooper killed in three-vehicle I-5 crash identified, Lynnwood man in custody.”
Not “illegal alien.” Not “domestic abuser.” Instead, he’s a “Lynwood man,” just like Laken Riley’s killer was an “Athens resident.”
The corporate press will do everything they can to run cover for killers — at least, as long as those killers are foreigners in this country illegally, and as long as they’re killing white people. Their calculation is that people will shut up and take all of this, in the name of “tolerance.”
Whatever their motivation is — whether they just want to ensure their political survival, whether they want to bring about demographic replacement, or both — it isn’t really important. As a practical matter, the effects of these policies are finally proving to be far too destructive for most Americans to tolerate. As illegal aliens continue to indiscriminately murder American citizens — from college students to state troopers — more and more people are looking to Buckhead as a model.
That doesn’t mean they’ll secede, necessarily. But it does mean that, for the first time since the Civil War, millions of Americans are thinking about it.