President Trump has taken significant criticism for his recent comments on low-income government housing from a speech in Texas late last month:

You know the suburbs, people fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home… There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs.… It’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.

These comments speak to the current state and local dynamic. Americans, in the past, would move to rural or suburban areas in order to separate from hostile persons, be near those more like themselves, and protect their rights. However, this time-honored American tradition is now threatened by the anti-America forces. For a glimpse into America’s post-2020 future, look no further than the Old Dominion.

Virginia has been turned blue, as demographic replacement of actual Virginians continues apace. Your correspondent was once a resident of Loudoun County, Virginia, historically known as the heart of “Mosby’s Confederacy,” the stomping grounds of John S. Mosby’s partisan Confederate Cavalry during the Late Unpleasantness. I can testify to the astonishingly rapid transformation of one of America’s most beautiful counties in the last 20 years, as Loudoun was paved over and demographically reshaped, a transformation driven by mass immigration. During my last visit there a few years ago, much of the county was unrecognizable, and Loudon is now irrevocably “blue.” Indeed, nowadays one can conduct an internet search for “the best mosques in Loudoun County” and get an answer.

Support for the demographic inundation of our homeland by foreigners—the more exotic, the better—is the core element of a naked power grab by a political and economic establishment hell-bent on nullifying the electoral power of Middle America. The Trump impeachment farce was indicative of what The Swamp has been telling us for some time: the powers-that-be fully intend to proceed with their plans, regardless of the results of national elections. Time is not on America’s side. Anti-America has largely managed to slow down, stymie, and sabotage efforts to control immigration, illegal and otherwise. America as we knew her is rapidly vanishing, and Middle Americans, the Euro-American ethnic core of the nation targeted for replacement, are facing the existential question of survival in an increasingly hostile environment. The clash between America and anti-America is moving to the state and county level, as I noted in a previous Chronicles editorial (“The End of Politics,” May 2019).

Virginia is a bellwether in that regard, and the battle lines for the struggle were drawn this past year. Following the Democrats’ 2019 electoral victory, the victors passed various laws aimed at disarming Virginia’s legal gun owners. “Gun violence,” largely perpetrated by non-white minorities, was used as an excuse to go after the people anti-America really hates. The new legislation included “red flag” laws, gun registration, expanded background checks, and limits on gun purchases, measures that in practice have done nothing to end the lamentable “gun violence” the left uses as a stage prop in its Kabuki theater effort to disarm Middle America and head off the actual resistance now taking shape.

Since the 2019 state elections, a pro-gun movement has prompted no less than 91 of Virginia’s 95 counties, as well as 15 towns and cities, to adopt “gun sanctuary” resolutions protecting gun owners’ right to keep and bear arms. What’s most striking about the pro-gun measures is that the National Rifle Association was not the driving force behind these efforts to challenge Governor Ralph Northam and his allies in the State Assembly. Local groups, such as the Virginia Citizens Defense League, led the campaign. Thousands of local groups’ supporters turned up at county board meetings demanding that their county administrations act. 

This past spring, Northam and his legislative allies responded with a budget bill that provided additional funding for the enforcement of their new gun control measures, including provisions for an anticipated increase in operating costs for “correctional facilities” when said measures would come into effect, as they did in early July. This included $250,000 for the increase in prison beds as a result of their new gun laws. Thus, Virginia’s rural gun owners, the most militant champions of pro-gun sentiment, can’t expect to benefit from any “prison reform” the “woke” State Assembly may enact. Showing great foresight, gun sanctuary advocate and sheriff of Culpeper County, Scott Jenkins, back in December, called the pro-gun movement a defensive counter to an outright assault on the culture and way of a life of traditional Virginia. The last seven months have proved him right. Indeed, this is a battle over identity and the existence of Middle America itself. 

In this battle, rural Virginia may gain allies in the suburbs. In the weeks following their electoral victory, the looney left in the Virginia State Assembly was feeling its oats and considering flexing its muscles through proposals that would override local zoning laws and “bring high density housing, including public housing, to every neighborhood statewide—whether residents want it or not,” as the Daily Caller reported at the time. Supporters of such legislation in the Virginia State Assembly made it plain that “upzoning” was necessary since, “Suburbs are bastions of segregation and elitism.” Abolishing “low density neighborhoods,” we were told, is necessary for “equity.”

The message to Middle American suburbanites was clear: you can run, but you can’t hide. And soon enough, you won’t be able to run, either. COVID-19 put “upzoning” on the backburner, but if the reaction to Trump’s recent comments prove anything it is that Anti-America still wants it.

Anti-America has used nullification (“sanctuary cities,” for instance) to undercut immigration laws, and historic America is following suit in forming a “resistance” of its own. “Gun sanctuary” language, which amounts to a declaration that local police will not enforce anti-gun legislation, is becoming a Middle American battle cry in Illinois, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, New Jersey, Florida, and Tennessee.   

Historic America’s resistance does not stop there, however. Aside from his recent comments, President Trump has taken measures aimed at sharply reducing the number of “refugees” accepted by the United States, and signed an executive order giving states, counties, and localities the right to veto refugee re-settlements in their jurisdictions, which adds some muscle to the bone and sinew of the Middle American resistance movement that is beginning to take shape. In Tennessee, for example, several localities in the past year have adopted resolutions rebuking Governor Bill Lee’s approval of State Department resettlement of refugees in the Volunteer State. Add to that other signs of Middle American resistance in recent years, such as red inland California contemplating secession from the blue coastal region to form a “New California,” and the broad outlines of a Middle American resistance movement begin to come into focus, one that would use nullification and secession to build redoubts from which we can defend ourselves.

We don’t know where a Middle American resistance movement may end up, or what other tools it might employ (“sanctuary” from “upzoning” could come up), but if analogues to the Virginia gun proposals are raised at the national level, they may act as the catalyst for the consolidation of historic America’s self-defense. Anti-America has no intention of leaving anyone alone. We can fight or capitulate; there are no other options.