Alan Keyes is out with a column today suggesting that President Obama, his opponent in the 2004 U.S. Senate election in Illinois, is using the riots in Baltimore to begin “consolidating dictatorial power” in order to impose “totalitarian central control” over the nation.

“Though many refuse to admit it, the American people are already into the first courses of a new civil war,” Keyes writes, claiming that the nation is divided between those who call “upon the Creator, God” and Obama and the demonstrators in Baltimore who believe in “raw, material power, where justice is the good of the stronger.”

He then compares the current Baltimore protesters to the Confederate sympathizers and Lincoln opponents who rioted in the city in 1861 against the Civil War: “Baltimore is ablaze with riotous violence, as it was in early courses of the last Civil War. This time, too, that violence may come, on demand, from those who hate the premises of America’s Declaration of right, rights and justly delimited government.”