[TTP:  This is a long article, but the information is critical.]

It’s a typical afternoon in Saint-Denis, the narrow streets packed with people whose faces you cannot see.

The women move in niqab, shapes without features, eyes that do not meet yours.

The shop signs are in Arabic, the smell of cumin and lamb fat rises from every doorway, thick and permanent, as if the street itself has been marinated in another world.

From three directions at once, the call to prayer cuts through the air. Al-lahu Akbar. God is great. Come to prayer. Come to salvation.

Even the French police do not enter without backup. Ambulances request escorts before responding to calls. In the lost territories of Marseille, law enforcement officers disguise themselves as Muslims before making arrests.

France’s own intelligence service has mapped 150 such districts across the country. A former senior official of French foreign intelligence put it in numbers: these enclaves exist in 859 cities, and four million people — six percent of France’s entire population — live inside them.

There was a time when Paris was the most romantic city in the world. You could stop on the banks of the Seine at dusk, buy a baguette and a bottle of wine from the corner shop, sit on the stone steps above the water, and feel, without irony, that life was generous, and civilization was real.

The light on the river. The smell of bread. The sound of French — that particular music of a language that assumes beauty is worth the effort.

That Paris is gone. This is the story of how it fell.

This is the story of the fall of France.

I have written about this issue before, but with the midterms approaching, I thought it bears repeating. It’s so very, very important.

STOP saying liberal.

STOP saying woke.

STOP saying progressive, Socialist, or Marxist.

Those words don’t appear on any ballot.

Not anywhere, unless you live in Vermont and Bernie Sanders is running.

The word that appears on election ballots is DEMOCRAT.

We need to be perfectly clear. Those who are causing most all of America’s serious problems are DEMOCRATS.

The vast majority of our political crises and problems are caused by people who either identify as Democrats or vote Democrat.

Once something is branded — whether positive or negative — it sticks. Like Super Glue, that label is hard to shake. Whenever you speak, write, or post, identify our political opponents as DEMOCRATS.

That’s why we must BRAND the Democrat Party as anti-God, anti-America, violent, and the party of Big Government, elite socialists and Marxists: because they are. If we do not define them, they will define themselves, deceitfully.

I think after 60 years of affirmative action, DEI, racial essentialism, and racial fixation—especially in the United States, but also throughout the Western world, in Europe, Australia, and the former British Commonwealth—we are seeing the consequences.

Let me point out that our adversaries, China, Russia, and other places around the globe, don’t have this racial essentialism because they believe it is innate to human nature. And when you encourage it, you get something like Rwanda, what’s going on now in Nigeria, or what happened in the Balkans.

The natural order of men and animals is that birds of a feather flock together. So, why would you encourage that instead of having assimilation, acculturation, and integration?

We’re suffering from tribal fatigue in the Western world.

Two theologies of work built two different worlds. One tends what it inherits. The other consumes it and moves on. The qanats of Persia tell you which is which.

In the dry interior of Iran there are tunnels older than Rome. The qanat is an underground aqueduct, dug by hand, that taps the water table high in the hills and carries it by gravity across dozens of miles to fields that see almost no rain.

No pumps. No electricity. Some of them have been running for three thousand years, irrigating the same ground, kept alive by the same unglamorous labor in every generation: clearing the silt, holding the gradient, keeping the access shafts open. UNESCO lists the survivors as world heritage, because a working qanat is one of the most elegant pieces of engineering the ancient world produced.

Most of them are silted now. Dry. The fields above them have gone back to dust.

Nobody bombed the qanats. No colonial power filled them in. They failed the way every inherited thing fails when the people who inherit it stop doing….

How can we remain the same country and culture when we can’t agree on much of anything?

Not merely on policy preferences or the usual disputes of democratic life, but on the most fundamental things — the meaning of words, the interpretation of laws, the basic facts of what is happening around us.

The foundation has not merely cracked; in many quarters, it is being jackhammered from below.

Laws long passed and enforced are now subject to interpretations so tortured and remote from their original intent that the men who wrote them would not recognize their own handiwork.

Terms once universally understood are now redefined mid-conversation, or worse, intentionally misunderstood as a weapon — deployed to wrong-foot the honest and reward the disingenuous.

Language, which is the shared medium of a civilization, has become a minefield. You cannot debate someone who will not agree on what the words mean, any more than you can play chess with an opponent who moves the pieces when you aren’t looking.

The effect on ordinary people has been profound. Reasonable men and women — the kind who hold jobs, raise families, pay taxes, coach Little League, and generally ask only to be left in peace — are shopworn and threadbare from the relentless mental assault. And sometimes it is not merely mental.

The ambient pressure at this moment has a grinding, exhausting quality that is not accidental.