Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

All throughout sub-Saharan Africa — in Nigeria, Mozambique, the Central African Republic, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo — Muslims are terrorizing and slaughtering Christians, and have been for many years now.

Nor is there any hope on the horizon, for problems that cannot be correctly and objectively addressed are doomed to persist in perpetuity.  As far as the Western “mainstream” is concerned, all such persecution and terrorism is a byproduct of economic grievances — or, in the words of an April 16, 2021 report, titled “How poverty and corruption fuel terrorism across Africa,”

On March 24th, a group of jihadis struck the town of Palma in Mozambique, killing dozens and burning government buildings to the ground.  ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack — but doubts have been cast over who was behind the siege[.]

The remainder of the report argues that such attacks, which  “are on the rise across the African continent,” are “a consequence of poverty, domestic grievances new and old, and Africa’s resource ‘curse,’ which paradoxically impoverishes people living on land which is rich in natural resources.”

This has been the mainstream media’s argument, and they’re sticking to it — no matter all the mountains of contradictory evidence.

Take the little-known genocide of Christians that has long been going on in Nigeria.  “Not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists” between just 2009 and the first quarter of 2020.  According to the most recent report, between January and April of this year alone, 1,470 Christians were hacked to death.  On average, this comes out to about 368 Christians killed every month for four months straight.  Since just 2016, 13,000 churches have been destroyed by “Allahu akbar”–screaming Muslims.

The full name of Boko Haram, the premier terror group that dominates northern Nigeria, is “Sunnis for [Islamic] Propagation and Jihad.”  “Boko Haram,” their nickname, means “Western education is a sin” (not “we kill because we’re poor”).  Their stated goal is the establishment of a pure sharia state in Nigeria and the brutal subjugation or slaughter of the nation’s Christians.  Moreover, the Muslim Fulani herdsmen, who in recent years have terrorized more Christians than even Boko Haram, are acting on jihadi teachings and hate for Christians.

Despite all this, the Western “mainstream” remains committed to describing the jihad in Nigeria — and increasingly all throughout sub-Saharan Africa — as a byproduct of “inequality” and “poverty,” to quote Bill Clinton, when once explaining what is “fueling all this stuff” (“stuff” being a reference to the aforementioned genocide of Christians in Nigeria).

Or, in the words of Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Johnnie Carson, speaking after the bombing of a church that left nearly forty Christian worshipers dead on Easter Sunday, 2012 — one of countless churches to be burned or bombed before and since that Easter: “I want to take this opportunity to stress one key point, and that is that religion is not driving extremist violence” in Nigeria.

But as the Nigerian nun Sister Monica Chikwe once observed, “[i]t’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.'”

Similarly, the Christian Association of Nigeria once asked: “How can it be a [secular or economic] clash when one group [Muslims] is persistently attacking, killing, maiming, destroying, and the other group [Christians] is persistently being killed, maimed and their places of worship destroyed?”

Such is the current state of affairs: a jihad of genocidal proportions has been declared on the Christian population of Nigeria — and has since spilled over into several other sub-Saharan nations — even as Western media and analysts present Nigeria’s problems in purely economic terms that defy reality.

The inability to accept these straightforward facts; the inability to factor ideological or existential motives, seeing only material motives (money, land, etc.); the almost instinctive conclusion that Muslim violence is proof positive of a legitimate grievance — all of these are so ingrained in the predominant paradigm, from the mainstream media to mainstream politicians, and all of these are poisoning Western civilization from within, and eroding its influence and capacity to act from without.

And, in the context of what is happening in Nigeria and other sub-Saharan states, it means that, for Western media and politicians, black lives most certainly do not matter—at least not when they’re Christian, and being terminated by Muslims.

Iran is one of the most dangerous nations on earth and has been identified as being the greatest state sponsor of international terrorism.

For decades the leaders of Iran have chanted, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Virulent anti-American chanting by Iran’s leaders is only the tip of the huge Anti-American Iranian iceberg.

President Abraham Lincoln sagely observed that, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

The United States is currently in the midst of a battle for the minds and souls of Americans.

Rather than teaching critical thinking in American schools and universities, students are now being indoctrinated in anti-American Critical Race Theory that pits Americans against Americans along racial lines that were erased by America’s Civil Rights laws.

There are many reasons that this toxic ideology has taken hold in America but let us not forget that as America falters, the enemies of our nation are rejoicing.  Indeed, while we have heard much about supposed Russian interference in the Presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, as it turns out, Iran has been heavily involved.

On June 7, 2021 Time Magazine published an important report, Exclusive: Iran Steps up Efforts to Sow Discord Inside the U.S.

That report began with the following two paragraphs:

Iranian state actors are intensifying their disinformation campaign on social media to spread discord and anti-Semitic tropes inside the U.S., two U.S. intelligence officials say.

Social media accounts tracked to troll farms run by the Iranian government have ramped up disinformation after several major events this year, including Biden’s effort to return the U.S. to the Iran nuclear deal, the April 14 announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin on April 20, and the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas that started on May 10. “It’s a significant level of activity,” one official tells TIME. “It’s active enough that we’re tracking it.” The officials did not offer details on the specific disinformation activity after the events.

The Time news report also acknowledged that Iran sought to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections to hurt President Trump’s bid for a second term:

The new spike in online provocations follows months of intense activity by Iran during the 2020 presidential campaign, when Tehran spread messages aimed at amplifying existing social divisions with the U.S and hurting former President Donald Trump’s chances of winning re-election, according to U.S. intelligence analysts. While Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections and undermine trust in American democracy have been well documented, less is publicly known about Iran’s increasing online influence operations inside the U.S. “Russia wrote the playbook, but others are using it,” says the U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal analysis.

The Time news report also noted:

Last year, Iran was behind efforts to intimidate Democratic voters in the weeks before the election by sending threatening email messages from accounts posing as the violent pro-Trump group the Proud Boys, U.S. intelligence officials have found. The same network of Iranian operatives created and distributed a video with fake allegations of voter fraud.

Now the leaders of the radicalized Democrat Party are doing the “heavy lifting” for Iran,  apparently seeking the MVP Award from that dangerous country.

As I noted in a previous article, Radical Democrats Have Become ‘Adversaries of Freedom’

If all of the above is not disconcerting enough, consider that on June 13, 2021 CNN Reported, Pelosi says House leadership ‘did not rebuke’ Omar over comments about US, Israel, Hamas and Taliban.

Bad as all of these factors are, we certainly cannot ignore the threat to America and Americans that can be found in the Biden administration’s immigration policies that fly in direct opposition to the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that was convened to identify the various vulnerabilities that the terrorists were able to exploit, enter the United States and embed themselves as they went about their deadly preparations.

I have testified before Congressional hearings that focused on the nexus between systemic immigration failures and terrorism and have also written numerous articles on this topic.  For example, my January 2020 article, Iranian Terror Threat Exacerbated by Sanctuary Policies explained how failures of the immigration law enforcement system that are exacerbated by so-called “sanctuary” policies of numerous U.S. states and cities play into the hands of the Iranian rulers and other adversaries of the United States.

That earlier article began with these two paragraphs”

The United States and Iran has been on a collision course since the Carter administration and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy at Tehran, Iran on November 4, 1979.

Iran has issued a string of threats against the U.S. since that day.  Consider my earlier articles published in 2018: Iran Threatens U.S. And Its Allies With “Drugs, Refugees, Bombs And Assassination” and Congressional Hearing: Iranian Sleeper Cells Threaten U.S. So many hearings, so little action.

Ms Pelosi has, on numerous occasions, called for the creation of a “9/11 style commission” to investigate the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Yet no one has ever asked her why she would want such a commission to be created when she, the Biden administration and far too many other members of Congress blithely, continually and spectacularly ignore the findings and recommendation of the original 9/11 Commission thereby imperiling and indeed, undermining national security and public safety!

On September 28, 2001, just about two weeks after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 the Washington Post  published a report written by Bob Woodward, In Hijacker’s Bags, a Call to Planning, Prayer and Death that began with these two paragraphs:

Mohamed Atta, one of the key organizers among the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, left behind a five-page handwritten document in Arabic that includes Islamic prayers, instructions for a last night of life and practical reminders to bring “knives, your will, IDs, your passport” and, finally, “to make sure that nobody is following you.”

FBI investigators, who found the writings in Atta’s luggage, which did not make it onto his flight, are not sure of the author’s identity — whether it was Atta, another hijacker or someone else.

The Washington Times article went on to report:

Yesterday, the Dallas Morning News quoted federal officials as saying that a copy of an Arabic-language prayer guide had been found in the wreckage of Flight 93.

The first four pages of the document obtained by The Post are handwritten on large paper and recite some basic Islamic history about the prophet fighting infidels with 100 men against 1,000. They also include prayers such as, “I pray to you God to forgive me from all my sins, to allow me to glorify you in every possible way.”

The fifth and last page is on standard stenographer paper that apparently had been ripped from a pad and is headed, “When you enter the plane”:

It includes a series of prayers or exhortations. “Oh, God, open all doors for me. Oh God who answers prayers and answers those who ask you, I am asking you for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel.

“Oh God, you who open all doors, please open all doors for me, open all venues for me, open all avenues for me.”

America’s “doors” are its ports of entry and its borders.

The Biden administration immigration policies are the fulfillment of the fervent prayers of those who carried out the deadly terror attacks of September 11, 2001.