The movie explores the lives of tenants of the Wah Ha cage-house, who try to resist to stay in their cage-homes after the landlord announces he will take the building back and demolish it.

Set in an oppressive, post-apocalyptic future, resulting from a world-wide biological war, people live in small cement modules with little more than a computer which connects them to their job, food and entertainment. Some people work to control drones, which survey the outside world and capture humans. Darwin, a young boy is left in a pod by his mother, who promises to come back for him. After nine years, Darwin (portrayed by Nick Krause) is forced out into the real world when his module and alarm is left without power by a lightning strike and discovers truths about the world and his own life that he never dreamed of. He comes across a family in hiding living together in the wilderness, and becomes part of their family. He becomes friends with Dara, a young woman who teaches him how to speak. Darwin makes the difficult decision to leave in order to search for his mother. He finds his mother's pod and after a close encounter with a drone, realizes there's people watching, but nobody capturing. After kissing his mother goodbye, he returns to his life in the wilderness with Dara.

During the Civil War, Judah P. Benjamin, CSA Secretary of State and chief advisor to Jefferson Davis, successfully convinces France and Britain to aid the CSA militarily by framing the issue as one of "states' rights", not slavery. The combined troops defeat the Union at Gettysburg, and Ulysses S. Grant surrenders to Robert E. Lee in 1865. Abraham Lincoln attempts to flee the country with the help of Harriet Tubman, who disguises him in blackface, but the two are arrested by CSA troops in Michigan. Tubman is executed, while Lincoln is convicted of war crimes, imprisoned, and eventually exiled to Canada, where he stays until his death in 1905. The CSA annexes the North, Dixie becomes the nation's national anthem, and northern cities are burned and pillaged. Lee becomes remorseful when seeing the atrocities and advocates for emancipation, but Virginia congressman and wealthy slaveowner John Ambrose Fauntroy successfully campaigns for the continuation of slavery. The Davis Plan, which is overseen by Fauntroy and quickly revives the institution of slavery in the former Union, levies an income tax on all non-slaveowning northerners. Slave status is legally extended to all individuals of mixed-race descent per the one-drop rule. William Lloyd Garrison convinces 20,000 abolitionists to flee for Canada, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Wendell Phillips, and Susan B. Anthony, who will help lead Canada toward women's suffrage in 1912. After a slave murders two white children and runs away, doctor Samuel A. Cartwright uses his theory of drapetomania to encourage torture for potential runaway slaves. Fauntroy receives the Democratic presidential nomination in 1880, but suffers a stroke and dies two years later. Nevertheless, his family will become such a powerful influence in CSA politics that many will consider them royalty. In response to a gaunt period known as the "American Holocaust", Garrison and Frederick Douglass form the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement for Chattel People), which smuggles hundreds of slaves into Canada. The CSA demands Canada return all 'property', but Douglass's rhetoric sways Parliament into refusing, though many Confederates still demand reparations to this day. Native Americans are crushed in the 30-year Plains Indian Wars and their children sent to boarding schools; meanwhile, Congress in the 1890s legalizes the enslavement of Asian immigrants and bans all religions not based in Christianity (Catholicism will fall under Christianity after 'much debate'). Davis, close to death, strongly opposes the act because of Sec. Benjamin and his pleas convince young congressman Fauntroy II to add a clause allowing a small number of Jews to stay on the 'reservation' of Long Island. Literature of the time aims to reconcile and romanticize relations between the North and South by minimizing the desire to preserve slavery and the suffering of the enslaved in favor of the 'heroism' of both sides' white soldiers and the quest for the states' freedom. Seeking a 'tropical empire', the CSA conquers the Caribbean in 1900, then Mexico. The former reinstates a slave-based plantation economy, while the latter institutes apartheid. The CSA then exposes existing divisions within South America to conquer the entire continent, marking its bloodiest event since the Civil War. ' Manifest destiny ' becomes associated with a God-given right to dominate the entire world, not just the American West. By 1929, the entire Western Hemisphere, except Canada (and potentially Alaska), is under CSA rule, with the captured territories now named Mexican America, Southern America, and the Confederate Islands. The Great Depression cripples the Confederate economy and sends the nation into isolationism until Fauntroy II, now a senator, revives the slave trade with African nations, though it is implied these nations only participate on the basis that the CSA will now otherwise leave them alone. Meanwhile, the CSA builds friendly relations with Adolf Hitler, who invites the nation to collaborate with him to implement the Final Solution, though Secretary of State Fauntroy III tries to convince Hitler to enslave the Jews instead. While Hitler declines, he nonetheless becomes a good friend of the Fauntroy family. While the CSA remains neutral regarding World War II's European Theatre, they are the ones who bomb Japan on December 7, 1941, not the other way round, as they deem its empire a threat to CSA territorial expansion. The casualty rate of the Pacific War is so high that the enslaved are recruited to fight, starting with enslaved Japanese-Americans in the west and later extending to African-Americans under the promise of freedom. The 129th Fighting Bucks are assigned to the war's most dangerous missions and fight valiantly, but once the CSA declares victory, they are returned to their owners. The CSA enjoys a peaceful postwar boom until the John Brown Underground, a splinter group of the NAACP, wages 'a war against slavery' by attacking major cities across the CSA. The CSA demands that all JBU members be extradited, which Canada refuses. The events spur a nationwide paranoia against abolitionism and the construction of the Cotton Curtain, a wall against the Canadian border. When the JBU supposedly assassinates Fauntroy IV, the CSA launches an airstrike on Canada. The Summit Nations institutes a global embargo on the CSA to prevent further aggression against Canada (only South Africa remains an ally), causing the economy to contract and nationwide support of slavery to dip to less than 30%. As a result, Republican John F. Kennedy defeats Democrat Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, becoming the first president from the North since the CSA's founding. He promises a progressive new frontier for the CSA likely to include emancipation and women's suffrage, but is too distracted with international affairs, notably a cold war with Canada and the Vietnam War (which is deemed an 'expansion effort'), to enact many of these reforms. Meanwhile, Black Canadians prosper, and Canada becomes a hotbed of Black-inspired literature, music, and art, with talents like Elvis Presley and James Baldwin residing there rather than being censored and arrested in the CSA, whose culture has evolved little beyond 'government-inspired propaganda'. Canada also outperforms the CSA in the Olympic Games thanks to Black athletes. As close as social reform may seem, JFK's assassination shatters all progress, and violent slave rebellions flare up in L.A. and Newark. The Family Values Initiative of the 1980s and early 1990s, sponsored by Ronald Reagan 's Commerce Secretary Fauntroy V, attempts to steer the nation's moral track back toward trust in slavery, patriarchy, and heterosexuality, and modernizes the institution of slavery with innovations such as online slave shopping, which popularizes slave ownership amongst younger generations and generates $500,000,000 for the CSA annually. Fauntroy uses the momentum to launch a bid for the 2002 Democratic presidential nomination and invites BBS interviewers to boost his public image. However, the reporters are secretly given instructions to a rendezvous organized by JBU leader "Big Sam". There, the reporters are met by Horace, whose family has been enslaved by the Fauntroys for generations. He reveals on tape that Fauntroy I had an affair with Horace's great-great-grandmother, and that Fauntroy V is a descendant of the affair, making him mixed. The tape is published, and Fauntroy denies the accusations, claiming, " my great-granddaddy did not have sexual relations with that woman ", but declines to submit to a DNA test. The allegations cost Fauntroy the election, and he commits suicide on December 12, 2002. A mandatory DNA test is ordered and released days later; the results prove negative.

Cleric Abdul Aziz Ghazi is waging jihad against the Pakistani state. His dream is to impose a strict version of Sharia law throughout the country, as a model for the world. A flashpoint in Aziz's holy war took place in 2007, with the Siege of the Red Mosque. During a standoff with the Pakistani military, the government leveled Aziz's flagship mosque to the ground, killing his mother, brother, only son and 150 students. The filmmakers follow Aziz on his personal quest to create an Islamic utopia, during the bloodiest period in Pakistan's modern history. The film also follows the lives of two teenage students who have attended madrasas (Islamic seminaries) run by Aziz's Red Mosque network. Throughout the film, their paths diverge: Talha, 12, detaches from his moderate Muslim family and decides to become a jihadi preacher. Zarina, also 12, escapes her madrasa and joins a regular school. Over the next few years, Zarina's education is threatened by frequent Taliban attacks on schools like her own. Aziz’s foil is nuclear physicist and leading educational activist Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy. He passionately opposes Aziz through his public appearances, lectures, and the media. Opposition against Aziz comes to a head in December, 2014, when Aziz insults a grieving nation by trying to justify the brutal massacre of 132 school children in Peshawar by the Taliban. The attack ignites a movement to end extremism in Pakistan’s mosques and madrasas. Led by Hoodbhoy and others, Pakistan's moderate majority focuses on Aziz and calls for his arrest.

Using extensive interviews with colleagues, opponents and friends and archival footage, the film follows the principal's influential career, working with Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and others, culminating in the defining Bush 1988 presidential campaign and its aftermath.