The nightmare in Nigeria is an urgent warning to America

I have seen the videos. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I could unsee them.

A woman dangling from a rope, a fire kindled beneath her. Allahu Akbar.

Children sawing back and forth with dull machetes to slit the throats of other children while adults scream Allahu Akbar.

Dozens of men kneeling, shackled. A crowd. A dull axe. Heads hacked off and held aloft. Cheering. Allahu Akbar.

Always inconceivable cruelty and suffering. Always blood and death. Always Allahu Akbar.

Britain didn’t wake up one morning to find its civilization replaced. It happened in phases — each one normalized before the next was introduced.

These are not rumors or Western propaganda. These are videos filmed by the perpetrators themselves, shared proudly, used as recruitment material.

I have watched them because I have to. I’m a former Texas mayor, author, and founder of Africa Arise International. I have made 16 trips to Nigeria since 2010 — built schools in displacement camps and sat with orphans who watched their parents hacked to death. I have delivered congressional testimony. I know this crisis from the inside.

What I know is this: What you are watching happen in Nigeria is coming here. And we are running out of time to stop it without a fight in our own back yard.

Six million dead. Ten million enslaved. Twenty-five million driven from their homes. This all within 222 years. One unbroken jihad — from Usman dan Fodio’s 1804 declaration to the AK-47s cutting down Christian farmers in the Middle Belt today. Working with the Nigerian government to end this genocide is like working with the Third Reich to end the Holocaust.

In Nigeria, the nation’s own government is not the patient fighting the disease. It is the disease. There is no chemotherapy left — only trying to ease the suffering while you figure out what can be saved.

America is not there yet, but we are closer than we think. And we have a preview nation to learn from.

The fall of England

Britain didn’t wake up one morning to find its civilization replaced. It happened in phases — each one normalized before the next was introduced.

The victimhood frame came first. Any examination of Islamic ideology became racism. The host culture’s own instinct to protect minorities was weaponized against itself.

Then came parallel institutions — Sharia courts operating alongside civil law, communities answering to a different authority, a state within a state. Eighty-five registered Sharia tribunals now operate in Britain.

Then came the co-opting of every system that should have stopped it. Police leadership pursued diversity metrics while ignoring gang networks. Politicians calculated electoral math and went quiet. The Crown itself has watched in silence as those values were systematically dismantled.

Media outlets that should have been sounding the alarm were busy enforcing the silence. Every lever of institutional power — legal, political, royal, journalistic — was captured, compromised, or cowardly.

Then the cost came due. Rotherham: 1,400 children systematically groomed and raped over 16 years. Police, social workers, and local officials all knew. Nobody acted — because acting meant being called racist.

Then the streets. London now leads Europe in acid attacks. Knife crime has transformed entire neighborhoods. British police advise women not to walk alone in parts of their own capital.

The window for words closed in Britain a decade ago. Britain is past the point of prevention. It is now in the painful, humiliating process of trying to recover what it still can.

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The signs we cannot miss

The pattern is the same every time, everywhere. Victimhood before violence. Parallel institutions before parallel law. Lawfare before intimidation. Intimidation before the knife. The knife before the machete.

In Dearborn, Michigan, crowds chanted “Death to America” in the streets. Across the country, pro-Hamas rallies blocked traffic, burned flags, and assaulted bystanders — and were met with police escorts and political silence.

And then there is this — the detail that would be darkly comic if the stakes weren’t so high. America’s LGBTQ political movement has aligned itself with the most violently anti-gay ideology on earth. These LGBTQ advocates march with it. They vote with it. They shout down anyone who points out the contradiction.

Iran ran this experiment in 1979. Gay activists marched alongside Khomeini’s revolution — they believed it was about liberation. By April 1979, two months after Khomeini took power, gay men were being executed on rooftops.

That is not a warning. That is a record. The LGBTQ movement in America is committing slow political suicide by making itself the useful idiot of an ideology that has a 1,400-year record of what it does when it wins.

We are not talking about misguided young men who need jobs and dialogue. They are the fully manufactured product of a system specifically designed to produce them — men for whom the severed head and the cheering crowd is not the worst day of their lives. It is the best. They have followed their founder’s footsteps.

You do not negotiate with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. You do not dialogue with it. You do not try to understand its perspective. You identify it, name it for exactly what it is, and pursue its total eradication with everything you have.

Because the alternative is your own death.

This ideology is incompatible with human civilization. It always has been. Every civilization that has ever encountered it and survived understood that eventually — and had to fight a war to take back their freedom.

We are not gone yet. But the hour is growing late.