How does one conquer a superior enemy?
Not, how does one conquer a comparatively tiny enemy. That’s easy. When it’s a million troops to a thousand, it’s difficult to lose.
But how does a lesser nation conquer a much greater nation? That is a challenge as old as time.
How, for example, did little Rome – a city amongst the hills, in the middle of the Italian peninsula – conquer the known world of its time?
It takes more than people and talent; it takes logistics.
What will your troops eat as they travel? Where will they sleep, where will they stay, as they prepare and lurk, waiting for the opportunity to strike?
Mastering military supply logistics enabled Rome to conquer Europe and turn the Mediterranean Sea into a Roman lake; and a lack of supply logistics contributed to the failures of Rome’s many enemies, from northern barbarians to the Carthaginians.
Until, of course, Rome stopped paying attention, and their enemies finally did prevail… at least in part, through superior logistics.
Leaving that aside for the moment, we turn to the present.
There are states, counties, cities, today in open rebellion. Governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, mayors like Barbara Lee of Oakland and Brandon Johnson of Chicago – all declare that they would rather their current crime waves continue than support federal law enforcement in the enforcement of federal law.
They would rather have their own cities be danger zones than see them made safe by federal assistance. The burning of America’s metropolises must not be interrupted; not on their watch.
Why not?
To understand, we must look beyond the Trump administration’s current crackdown on illegal aliens. We must look beyond the politics of today, and look instead at the timeline of the past half century or more, and the many seemingly unrelated changes that have put us where we are today.
Long before Barack Obama and Joe Biden had even entered politics, the Democratic Party was gradually allowing illegal aliens to enter the nation.
Legal immigrants are vetted, to see if they are literate, healthy, skilled; illegal aliens are not vetted, they may have diseases, criminal records, a lack of skills.
And they began reinterpreting the citizenship process – not legally, not officially – they just stopped enforcing the existing bans on importing other countries’ criminals, other countries’ gang members, other countries’ communist activists.
Instead of welcoming the anti-communists fleeing Poland and Cuba, the American Left started welcoming marxist insurgents from Central America and Africa instead. By the hundreds of thousands. Then by the millions. Why?
And they reinterpreted the 14th Amendment – which everyone always knew was designed to confer full citizenship upon newly-freed former slaves after the Civil War – to instead confer “birthright citizenship” upon the children of illegal aliens, in complete contradiction to the amendment itself and the debates that authorized it. Why?
We have long had a welfare state. Not from our Founding era, of course, not even for the first 150 years of our nation’s history. But welfare was born in the 1930s and expanded in the 1960s, until the point that, by the 2020s, our cities, states, and the federal government were paying billions of dollars per year, per city, not just for our own citizens, but to fund the lifestyles of illegal aliens, from healthcare to housing, from food to education, from cellphones to transportation.
Gradually – oh, so gradually – the Democrats (yes, only the Democrats, always the Democrats) started broadly interpreting federal criminal justice law. Employ talented free counsel to serve murderers, muggers, rapists and drug dealers, while sending green and underfunded prosecutors into court against them. Plea bargain serious felonies down to misdemeanors, then grant sentences of “time served” on the rare occasion there’s a conviction. Make sure criminals get ten chances, then twenty, then fifty. Make sure they never really do time.
Empty the jails; demand that the police be handcuffed and that the criminal element run free, until a few thousand criminals are committing tens of thousands of crimes, crimes that could never happen if we just took the sentencing process seriously and locked up the known perpetrators. Why? Why leave them loose to terrorize our neighborhoods?
In recent years, these big city Democrats pushed the envelope even further. In many cities and counties, and even some entire states, they have eliminated cash bail (meaning they set criminals free, literally, for free, until their long-distant trial date). They have set ridiculous value levels – below $500 or below $1000 in stolen goods, they won’t even be bothered to prosecute a robber. And they don’t have enough police to answer the calls.
In Illinois, last year, for example, over 400,000 calls to 911 went unanswered, unfilled, because Chicago simply doesn’t have enough police to respond to them all. They would, if they’d allow us to lock up the criminals we catch, but no, we must set them free to commit more crimes, so that no amount of policemen could ever be enough.
More and more carjackings and rapes, drug sales and overdoses, muggings and robberies, beatings and murders. Completely unnecessarily, because we catch them all – we are just forced to set them free. Why? What are they practicing for? And what are they being allowed to practice for?
Throughout the Obama years, but especially throughout the Biden years, massive numbers of foreign criminals were allowed into the country. This isn’t to say they were all evildoers; there were certainly some relatively decent people amidst the throngs, some who came here to work, some who came for a decent life. But the number of known, hardened criminals, organized gang members, and even foreign-trained terrorists in that mix was incredible.
Hundreds of thousands of these illegal aliens are violent, either on their own as individuals or in groups as gang members. Thousands have been proven to be members of MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and other foreign organized crime armies of drug dealing cartels, human trafficking rings, and even worse.
Over the years, a dozen states and over a hundred cities and counties have proudly declared themselves to be “sanctuary” jurisdictions, places where their local or state governments promise to look the other way when federal agencies attempt to enforce immigration law, or even outright forbid their officials from supporting such efforts.
This is blatantly illegal, of course. Such mayors, county executives, governors, sheriffs and police chiefs are committing federal felonies by obstructing such enforcement efforts. They do it anyway.
Why?
Now that the Trump administration is proactively working to protect American citizens, by going into these cities, one by one, to at least begin to clean them up, they are encountering outright resistance not only from the criminal illegals, but also from the local authorities.
Chicago with its 573 murders per year, New York with 377, Houston with 322, the list goes on. Why?
Washington DC is a federal city; the federal government can legally move in and act there more easily than in any other city.
But the federal government can – and should – move in and act on foreign threats, in any city or state, wherever those foreign threats may be. And they are everywhere.
The result of these decades of illegal immigration, the result of these massive efforts of Democrat cities to invite, feed, house, and enable foreign criminals, is that most of our cities – certainly almost all of our sanctuary cities, at least – are already war zones in all but name.
When crime was strictly local, committed by criminal Americans, there was a limit to what the federal government could do to help.
But now that so much of our cities’ crime is caused by these foreign invaders – yes, that’s what illegal aliens are – the federal government has both the right and duty to act, to protect our citizens from MS-13, Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa cartel, CJNG and so many more.
We remember the riots of 2020 in particular, when Antifa and similar foreign-funded terrorist groups burned down the downtowns of so many cities. They were bused in, paid with not just foreign money but also US tax dollars, and granted free rein in our cities, as partners of the Democrat coalition. These mayors, states’ attorneys, attorneys general, and governors allowed countless millions of dollars of damage, the destruction of whole shopping districts and business centers, churches and private property.
Why?
It’s getting easier to see.
Today’s Democrats learned from our own civil war; they learned from the Roman empire, and they learned from every marxist insurgency of the 20th century around the world.
To truly transform America from a free country into an authoritarian, marxist state, they needed to embed foreign fighters here, amidst our urban neighborhoods. They needed to fund their arrival from Venezuela and China, from Mexico and Cuba, from Afghanistan and Nigeria. From all over the world. And so they did.
There is a foreign army embedded in our cities, that’s the only way to look at it. An embedded army funded by taxpayers, doing the bidding of corrupt mayors and governors. They are ordered to demonstrate against ICE and the National Guard, and they are gently encouraged to occasionally “go too far” – to push the envelope, to see how the public will react.
This is not liberalism. This is not part of the normal ebb and flow of domestic policy debate. This is not the unavoidable consequence of a normal political climate.
This is treason.
The sanctuary movement has been exposed – as a key element of an insurrection – perhaps not to directly overthrow our federal government in a civil war, but to so shock and terrify the public that enough elections will go their way again, as gullible voters are told that up is down and right is left, and as a desire for normalcy will erode support of the first federal administration in decades with the courage to defend America from this internal threat. Or maybe not; maybe they do want a more obvious war. Some in the Left do openly call for it already, dropping the mask and saying the quiet part out loud.
It is time for the Democratic Party – as a party – to be forced to declare what side they’re on, once and for all: this insurgency of embedded foreign criminals, or the American way of life they once took an oath to support.
If they don’t overthrow their own traitors, and they certainly haven’t so far, that tells us where the entire party stands.
And as for the individual politicians – the mayors and governors, their legislators and judges and staffs – who stand with these criminals, who fund them with our tax dollars, who forbid our police from arresting them and forbid our prosecutors from incarcerating them – it is time that these criminals, from mayors to governors, are stripped of their powers, arrested and prosecuted for treason, and locked safely away in federal penitentiaries for the rest of their unnatural lives.
Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA