My home county of Fairfax, Virginia was once a safe suburban area with some of the best performing public schools in the nation. It's now a blinking warning sign to America as it hangs on the edge of complete disaster thanks to unchecked immigration and Democrat takeover of the government.

Even with the high concentration of government workers, Fairfax County was once a Republican bastion before it became a political battleground. The Bush/Cheney ticket won the county in a close race in 2000 and then lost it badly in 2004 due to a significant increase in Democrat votes.

Fairfax's descent into its current state started with a wave immigration, much of it illegal, into the area which washed away Republican political viability.

Fairfax County became a nullification (sanctuary) county in 2018 and now puts a significant chunk of money into its budget to defend noncitizens from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, although the problem started long before that. By 2015, 30% of the county was foreign-born.

MI-13, a brutal criminal gang, is now more active than ever, and the once marquee schools have started what will be a long slide through mediocrity to abysmal.

Fairfax just ranked seventh among the highest-crime sanctuary jurisdictions, ranking just below Chicago and tied with a nearby Maryland county that has had at least nine illegal alien sexual assaults since its sanctuary policy was declared in late July. That's staggering. Fairfax County now is on a list of shame with Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco.

Even apart from the rapidly deteriorating safety, the schools are sinking under the fiscal and social costs. It costs on average $15,283 to educate each of the 188,000 students in the county. That's an enormous bill, and the cost for limited–English proficiency students is likely about $10,000 higher per student.

Back in 2015, when the problem was nowhere near as acute as today, nearby Alexandria County spent over 45% of its instructional funding on limited English proficiency students.

In this context, flooding the county with noncitizens who are contributing little tax revenue must result in worse schools and far higher taxes. It's a mathematical certainty.

But the flood of new residents achieved its primary purpose, which was to make the ground here far more hospitable for Democrat politicians. Nearly 12,000 county residents were in deportation proceedings late last year, which the county is vigorously fighting in the interest of political power.

This once Republican bastion is now a no man's land for Republicans. On the single greatest day of 2016, Donald Trump was way ahead in Virginia with most of the vote counted. But anyone who dared to hope that this was still a battleground state was in for a rude awakening when the votes from the northern Virginia counties were added to the tally.

Virginia is gone. The only difference between Virginia and California is in the shade of blue. The state will trend ever darker blue barring a significant change in the voting patterns of the newer residents.

The dominoes continue to fall. Fairfax fell early, even as neighboring Prince William County remained in Republican hands. But that county is also now in deep trouble, and other dominoes will spread out from there, county by county. This is the same path that Texas is on, only it is a little farther behind.

The Democrat votes brought a Democrat school board, along with local county leadership. This meant the adoption of a policy framework called "One Fairfax" in November 2017.

"One Fairfax" is representative of what is happening across the country. A constellation of groups with backers like George Soros are active across America, subverting local governments and education. As the Daily Caller noted, these groups are already active in 33 cities and counties, covering 10% of Americans.

The "One Fairfax" name brings to mind Sauron's one ring to rule them all from The Lord of the Rings. Like that ring, One Fairfax is intended to destroy all dissent or resistance and to force absolute subservience and surrender. The key buzzword used to squash dissent is "equity," which is intended to shut down debate.

All policies are now looked at through the rubric of race and the liberal conception of social justice with the goal of absolute political power. Liberals use friendly terms like "equity" to hide their true goal, which is a complete reshaping of the county in a Marxist image, where the only thing that matters is some conception of equality of outcomes.

One can almost envision the superintendent holding a map and redrawing lines, muttering, "My precious."

The social engineering leftists of the school board were secretly plotting to redraw district lines for the express purpose of achieving equal racial balance across the schools, to include reinstituting failed busing schemes of yesteryear. They were only temporarily thwarted in this agenda when county residents grew wise to their scheme and stormed their meeting.

There is scant attention paid to actually improving the schools and equipping the teachers to deal with the challenges created by failed policies. My wife is a teacher in the county and brings home horror stories beyond belief. The teachers, who all must attend equity training, have little authority to discipline increasingly unruly kids, some of whom barely speak English, even as class sizes grow.

Even as the teachers face incredible challenges due to the bad policies that wrecked the schools, the school board recently spent an hour debating "International Menstrual Equity" in the belief that what was really hurting student achievement was that girls had to go all the way to the clinic to get free menstrual products and had to conduct a "walk of shame." This is apparently a dire problem even in elementary schools. Lack of discipline or support in overfilled classrooms? No problem. The lack of tampon Pez dispensers scattered throughout the hallways? Major crisis.

The lens of race is now the primary weapon, even at the local level, used to justify the most corrosive and destructive policies, and anyone who objects to their social engineering schemes is automatically branded as a racist.

Their "race lens" is outrageously racist, since it assumes that some races need their social engineering help. There is little difference between the schools with more resources going to schools in less affluent areas. So they are tacitly arguing that the difference is in the students themselves. They would rather move the students great distances to achieve a racial balance than focus on providing education where they live.

In the politicians' quest for power, the kids and teachers are sacrificed as pawns, left to fend for themselves in failing classes that have been social engineered into lunacy.

Fairfax is our country in a microcosm. What happened here is happening all over America. If we don't reverse the trends, both at the local and national level, the long-term prognosis on America is not promising. While the battle will rage on at the local level, Virginia is lost to the Democrats at the national and soon state level. Other states, to include Texas, aren't far behind.

Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.

Image: Famartin via Wikimedia Commons.