Fascist is a big word not to be bandied about (though it too often is these days), so let me make myself clear.

I've spent about ten minutes of my life on InfoWars and think Alex Jones is a boring blowhard of little interest except to those who want to spend their lives worrying about whether there was a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.

Nevertheless, the group censorship of Mr. Jones, led by our friends in Cupertino, the makers of the ubiquitous iPhone -- I've had a half-dozen myself and am typing this on a MacBook -- is one of the scarier developments of our time, if not potentially the scariest.

So what Apple is doing picking on the basically irrelevant Jones is a form of corporate virtual signaling, a particularly dangerous form if you believe in the Bill of Rights.

Yes, I know they're a private company not subject to government restrictions, but they are bigger, richer, and more powerful than almost every government on the planet, maybe more, which leads me to their noxious and equally powerful comrade-in-tech-arms.... FACEBOOK.

Recently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta.

So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

I suppose Caputo meant that Trump voters intrinsically lacked either the money to fix their teeth or the knowledge of the hygiene required to take care of them or the aesthetic sensitivity of how awful their mouths looked. Or Caputo was simply rehashing the stereotypes that he had seen on reality TV shows like “Duck Dynasty” and “The Deadliest Catch.”

Or none of the above: the journalist grandee was just stupid.

That last alternative seems most likely since Caputo then escalated and called them collectively “garbage people.” What did “garbage people” mean? That by birth or training such toothless, smelly people were subhuman, like refuse?

Could he have said something similarly degrading about the attendees of an Abolish ICE! or Black Lives Matter! rally and still have his job?

Jim Acosta has the sadz.

The untalented little man who rudely shouts unimportant questions at important people while in the employ of the ninth most trusted name in news out of ten, got heckled at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. Sad panda. The hecklers chanted "CNN sucks," which, okay, is true, but they were none too polite about it.

Acosta didn't like it. He reported, "Honestly, it felt like we weren’t in America anymore."

But, like virtually everything Acosta reports, this is just a reflection of his small-minded biases. The fact is, having a group of people scream at you and denigrate you is exactly what it feels like to be in America — if you don't happen to be a coastal elite.

It has felt this way for the last twenty years at least. Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman's magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.

Every day. From every outlet. All the time. And now people are angry. Wonder why.

Having thrown in its lot with #TheResistance, the media now faces its inevitable, if not actually imminent demise.

Jobs in the newspaper industry continue to disappear, as physical publishing becomes an increasingly unprofitable occupation and advertisers bail for greener pastures.

On television, ratings for the cellar-dwelling CNN—once the premier brand in the cable-news racket—are abysmal. Yet the network stubbornly persists with an outmoded formula designed to keep its dwindling audience in a state of perpetual dudgeon, with zero appeal to anyone not already converted to its Manichean worldview.

Once upon a time, a gig in the Washington bureau was the ne plus ultra of the reporting vocation, inhabited by middle-aged wise men, who spoke soberly and dressed the part, knowing that the brass ring of Dean of the Washington Press Corps could be theirs someday.

Today, a collection of small children, the legacy sons of other network personalities, and supermodels graces the sets and standups at the news networks, chirping away in mouthfuls of clichés and infantile pronouncements about the President.

There is a scene in the 1996 movie Independence Day where the character (US President Whitmore played by Bill Pullman) mind-melds with the alien, and receives a sudden understanding of the peril the Earth is in.

“I saw... its thoughts. I saw what they're planning to do. They're like locusts. They're moving from planet to planet... their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource they move on... and we're next.”

For some time now, I’ve thought this applies to the Left.  Certainly, entire fields of endeavor, entire expanses of human knowledge, science, and interest, seem to collapse in the wake of an infestation by the Left.

I used to think this happened because of the Left’s charming habit of hiring only on political conformity, and not on talent, intellectual ability or even interest in the field.

No, Leftists really are like locusts.  They can’t help destroying.

Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . are they leading us toward an 1861?  How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?

Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.

Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.

We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife.

What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?