Two men in a Los Angeles suburb were seen on camera brazenly leaving a TJ Maxx store with their arms full of shoplifted items.

“They didn’t even run out, they walked out,” Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz told CBS LA of the incident. “And so, that’s sending a message that we, the criminals, are winning.” [Fox News]

It’s the death of civilization. Not only is criminal behavior tolerated. Not only are police instructed to enforce the law selectively, based on the political affiliation of the criminals. Theft is now openly celebrated by the looters in D.C. who enable the looters on the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere. Theft isn’t merely cool; it’s a sign of moral virtue.

For now, it’s a looters’ paradise and a long cherished leftist dream: Communism in America, at last. That’s why looters walk, don’t run. For now, they’re winning.

The only thing they failed to consider: What happens when the people who make all the loot stop making it? What happens when there’s nothing left to loot?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Citizenship as mere residency

Two million people are anticipated to cross the southern border, en masse and illegally, over a 12-month period. If that absurdity were to continue, we would be adding the equivalent of a major US city every year. The new arrivals have three things in common. Their first act was to break US law by entering the country. Their second was to break the law by residing here illegally. And their third will be to find false identification or other illegal means to continue breaking the law. You do not arrive as a guest in a foreign country and immediately violate the laws of his host — unless you hold those laws in contempt.

Arrivals now cross a border that had been virtually closed to illegal immigration by January 2021. In the cynical and immoral logic of illegal immigration (that cares little for the concerns either of would-be legal immigrants or US citizens), arrivals will be dependent upon the state and thus become constituents of progressives who engineered their arrival.

Yet the issue is not illegal immigration per se. If protests were to continue in Cuba, and one million Cubans boated to Miami, the Biden administration would stop the influx, in terror that so many anti-communists might tip Florida red forever.

How strange that the US government is considering going door-to-door to bully the unvaccinated, even as it ignores the daily influx of thousands from Mexico and Latin America, without worrying whether they are carrying or vaccinated for COVID-19. Meanwhile, the progressive media shrilly warns that the new Delta variant of the virus is exploding south of the border. Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.

Crime as construct

Crime is another current absurdity. There exists a mini-industry of internet videos depicting young people, disproportionately African American males, stealing luxury goods from Nieman-Marcus in San Francisco, clearing a shelf from a Walgreens with impunity or assaulting Asian Americans. These iconic moments may be unrepresentative of reality, but given the mass transfers and retirements of police, and the frightening statistics of large increases in violent crime in certain cities, the popular conception is now entrenched that it is dangerous to walk in our major metropolises, either by day or at night. Chicago has turned into Tombstone or Dodge City in the popular imagination.

Scarier still is the realization that if you are robbed, assaulted or find your car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.

So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where you can go, where you cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of São Paulo, Durban or Caracas.

The campus con

The universities over the past 40 years were intolerant, hard left and increasingly anti-constitutional. But they also fostered a golden-goose confidence scheme that administrators dared not injure, given the precious eggs of federally guaranteed student loans that ensured zero academic accountability and sent tuition costs into the stratosphere. There was an unquestioned supposition that a degree of any sort, of any major, was the ticket to American success. In cynical fashion, we shrugged that most prestigious institutions were little more than cattle branders that stamped graduates with imprints that gave them unearned privilege for life.

Yet universities now have both hands around their golden goose’s neck and are determined to strangle it. The public is becoming repulsed at the woke McCarthyite culture on campus, and will be more turned off when campuses open in the fall in 2019-style. At the Ivy League or major state university campuses, admissions are no longer based on proportional representation in the context of affirmative action, but are defined increasingly by a reparatory character.

Grades, test scores and ‘activities’ of the white and Asian male college applicants are growing less relevant. Only ‘privileged’ white males with sports skills, connections or families who give lots of money are exempt from the new racial reparation quotas. The new woke admission policy ironically is targeting the liberal suburban professional family, the left’s constituency, whose lives are so fixated on whether children graduate from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford or like campuses.

Given the radical change in incoming student profiles, the faculty increasingly will have to choose between accusations of racism or grading regardless of actual performance, given thousands of new enrollees do not meet the entrance standards of just two or three years ago. Remember that since wokeism was always a top-down elite industry, minority progressives still will fight it out with white leftists in intramural scraps over titles, salaries, and managerial posts.

The public has had enough. For the first time, people will ask why are we subsidizing student loans, why are multibillion-dollar endowments not taxed, and why do we think a BA in sociology or psychology or gender studies is an ‘investment’ that prepares anyone for anything?

Commissars and Jacobins

The critical race theory craze is reaching peak woke or is already on the downslope. No complex and sophisticated society is sustainable with a Maoist creed of cannibalizing citizens for thought crimes. Commissars do not produce anything or serve anybody, but only monitor thoughts and speech to ascertain the purity of diversity, equity and inclusion. They are not just a drain on the productive sector but will insidiously destroy it, since their currency is to ensure a timid, obsequiousness and banal orthodoxy.

We know from the failed Soviet system and from the French Revolution that the most mediocre in society became its most eager auditors of correct behavior. The arbiters of proper thought — the self-righteous paid toady, the perpetual victim employed in service to government payback, the freelancing snitch — were always the villains of freedom, productivity and humanity, whether we read of the killing off of Alexander the Great’s inner circle, the forced suicides of the Neronian circle, the Jacobin murder spree or the nightmarish world described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

That the Biden administration has now joined with Silicon Valley to hunt down on social media any dissenters from this month’s official policy on vaccinations and mask-wearing was not so shocking as to be expected from a media that banned coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In Cuban fashion, millions of judge-jury-executioner online snitches, with government encouragement, will help root out incorrect thoughts at light speed.

Inflation is a mere construct

We used to know what inflation was, its pernicious role in past civilizations, and how to combat it. The danger of worthless currency is a staple of classical literature from Aristophanes to Procopius. The scary fact is not just that we are destroying the value of our money — the exploding price of gas, food, appliances, lumber, power, and housing are overwhelming even Joe Biden’s entitlement machine — but that we are constructing pseudoeconomics to justify the nihilism.

Right now, we witness a multitrillion-dollar fight over borrowing beyond our $30 trillion debt to build ‘infrastructure’, a word that has been expanded to include mostly anything but roads and bridges. What exactly is so liberal about the farmworker paying $5 a gallon for gas to commute to the fields, the small contractor doing a remodeling job with plywood at $80 a sheet or the young couple whose loan qualification is always a month behind the soaring price of a new home?

Our people’s military

Americans during this entire descent in madness sighed, ‘Well, at least there is the military left.’ By that, I think they meant John Brennan had all but wrecked the CIA, while James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, et al. had weaponized the FBI. But the military was still a bastion of traditional, nonpartisan service, whose prime directive was to defend the country, win any war it was ordered to fight, and to maintain deterrence against opportunistic enemies. It was not envisioned as a ‘people’s army’. It was not a revolutionary Napoleonic ‘nation in arms’. And it was not a ‘liberation army’. The Constitution, 233 years of tradition, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all reassured America of its wonderful defense forces.

And now? We are in the process of a massive reeducation and indoctrination campaign. The revamping not only draws scarce resources away from military readiness, but targets, without evidence, the white working class and defames it as insurrectionary — the very same cohort that disproportionately died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If only Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, had been as animated, as combative, and as fired up in congressional testimony about winning in Afghanistan or deterring the Chinese in the waters off Taiwan as they were in defense of their recommended lists of Marxist-inspired critical race theory texts!

One purpose of the Uniform Code of Military Justice was not to prevent retired top brass from attacking beloved presidents or even blasé ones. Its aim was to remind the country that it is the business of civilians, not pensioned retired military subject to recall in times of crisis, to galvanize opinion against loudmouth unpopular presidents like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon or Donald Trump.

The reason why the ‘revolving door’ became a bipartisan worry was that four-star officers had mastered the navigation of Pentagon procurement. They possessed a rare skill easily — and hugely — monetized upon retirement, and thus its use was to be discouraged wholeheartedly.

And now?

The code is a mere construct. The revolving door is an advertisement for advancing to high rank. Policing the thoughts of American soldiers is apparently more important than fathoming the minds of our enemies on the battlefield.

Keep Cuba Castroite?

What was so hard about understanding that Cuba since 1959 has been a communist gulag, antithetical to human freedom and consensual government? What was so difficult about conceding that Cuba had been an ally of the nuclear Soviet Union, always egging it on to war against the United States?

Yet here we are with protesters against a failed, evil state in the streets of Havana, and our own government, media, and professional classes are worried that ossified communism in Cuba may fall.

After opening the US southern border to pseudo-political refugees, the Biden administration is terrified that thousands of real ones might come to Miami in the fashion it invited millions to storm into Texas. The Biden administration, and the left in general, finally revealed what many of us have known: it had no real ideological view on illegal immigration. Its immigration policy was entirely utilitarian and hinged only on whether illegal immigration altered the demography of the electorate in the correct way.

The United Nations über alles

Finally, almost all Americans used to agree that the US Constitution was unique and guaranteed personal freedom in a way the United Nations charter could not. Dozens of fascist, communist, totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes, usually the majority of governments on earth, ensured that any General Assembly or UN committee ruling would parrot the views of its illiberal and corrupt members.

Not anymore. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has invited in the UN to assess whether the United States meets global standards of justice or, in fact, is racist and in need of global censure: ‘I urge all UN member states to join the United States in this effort, and confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia,’ he said last week.

That is like asking Libya in 2001 to assess whether our airline pilot training met proper standards or having China adjudicate the conditions in US prisons.

America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive, and frightening place by July 2021. It went not so much hard-left, as stark-raving mad.

That abrupt descent, too, is not workable and millions will collectively decide they have no choice but to push back and conclude, ‘In the 233rd year of our republic, we tens of millions are not going to cede freedom of thought and expression to thousands of Maoists. Sorry, no can do.’

Victor Davis Hanson

Karl Marx is often portrayed as the hero of the masses.  After all, he believed in the creation of a “worker’s paradise” following the temporary reign of the “vanguard of the proletariat” — that small, highly educated, elite group that would rule in the interests of the workers until such time as they were capable of ruling for themselves.  In Russia, that was 73 years and counting.

Wherever a Marxist revolution has taken place, that “vanguard” has decided that its reign should be permanent and in its own interests.  Communist elites enslave workers just as the Democratic Party does in cities like Baltimore and Chicago.  In communist states like the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and communist Cuba and Venezuela, small bands of communists seized power but refused to cede it.  When the people protest, as they are now doing in Cuba, they are met with force, hauled off, and imprisoned or shot.

Communists pretend they are the wave of the future.  Actually, they are a throwback to the outdated system of absolutist monarchy that was abolished in most of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Marx was not a brilliant thinker — he was a stubborn fool who turned his back on democratic capitalism, the most successful and humane system in history.  That’s why he found a following in backwaters like czarist Russia and post-imperial China.  Communism has never appealed to those with deep-seated democratic traditions because they recognize its authoritarian nature and its threat to freedom.

Not ’til now, anyway.

Now the Democratic Party has been seized by self-proclaimed Marxists who plan to establish a permanent Marxist state in America.  Democrats believe they must move quickly before the midterm elections in order to pass controversial legislation granting them a permanent advantage in elections (HR-1) and enlarging their base (American Family Plan).  Once these partisan bills are passed, the real takeover begins with vast new taxes and regulations in the name of climate change, immigration “reform,” business reform, minimum global taxation, race reparations, and a thousand other cuts designed to transform America into a Marxist economy.

This economy would be run, permanently, by professional politicians — the same sort Biden has assembled for his first term.  Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Janet Yellen at Treasury, Merrick Garland as attorney general, Deb Haaland (former chair of the New Mexico Democratic Party) as interior secretary, Marty Walsh as labor secretary, Xavier Becerra as HHS secretary, Jennifer Granholm as energy secretary — all of them came directly out of political office, and all share the same vision of expanding the size and power of government.  This is doubly so for his V.P., Harris, who knows as much about rural America as Nancy Pelosi does.

It’s not just Biden’s progressive appointments that are troubling — it’s his cagey, secretive manner of instating Marxism.  Biden pretends to be “Joe Sixpack,” but he has never worked for any length of time outside government, and he displays contempt for those who do, even to the point of challenging them to fight or do push-ups.  He is the least transparent of presidents, refusing to answer questions as if he is above having to do so.  No questions on the border crisis, no questions on pipelines, no questions on Afghanistan, no questions on anything except “playing ball” — and that answer showed what he thinks about the involvement of ordinary Americans in government.  Just shut up and watch the game. 

Biden has amassed and spent millions on the backs of ordinary Americans.  According to a Forbes estimate, Biden was spending $2,000 a day on personal expenses during the four years he was out of office — not exactly an Average Joe budget.  And Biden’s declared net worth of $8 million does not accord with reports of payments from foreign governments, money that may be held in the names of family members.

Other Democrats live like royalty as well. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband have a reported net worth of over $1 billion.  Nancy Pelosi’s net worth (with her husband) is $115 million, while the richest U.S. senator is Democrat Mark Warner ($214 million).  The Clintons, who claimed to have left the White House “without a nickel,” now have a net worth of $120 million.

All of these Democrats claim to be working for “the poor,” but the poor don’t get rich under their rule — they do.  And none of these rich leftists has made large charitable contributions to benefit American working people directly.  The Clinton Foundation, for example, has been described as “a complex organization that does a variety of charitable activities,” which include funding the Clinton Presidential Center in Arkansas and health care in Africa and Asia.  What about ordinary people in Oklahoma and West Virginia?  Those less glamorous, and less politically rewarding, needs are never addressed, maybe because progressives don’t really care about Oklahoma and West Virginia and the rest of heartland America.  

At its heart, Marxism is an expression of the most primitive of human instincts — the desire to enslave others so as to establish one’s own security and superiority.  There are countless examples of dictatorial rulers who have sacrificed their own people in this way.  From Tiberius and Caligula in ancient Rome to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao, absolute power always sacrifices ordinary people — all the more easily when the brutality is masked by promises of a worker’s paradise.

But now we have promises of a worker’s paradise in America under the name of the “American Family Plan” and a deceptively titled Infrastructure Plan.  Marxism always leads to a greater concentration of power in the elite and enslavement for the masses.  Biden’s proposed $6 trillion in emergency spending and matching $6-trillion annual budget, along with his recently announced proposals to “rein in” businesses, is an enormous step toward socialism.

America is becoming less free under a president who can’t help but express his contempt for the American people — no matter how strictly his handlers prevent him from speaking off-script.  Contempt for ordinary people is not just the by-product of left-wing politics — it is the underlying motive of Marxism.  Marxists aspire to separate themselves from the people and to exploit them for their own benefit.  This explains the string of ugly gaffes — from Obama’s “guns and bibles” to Harris’s belittling of “rural America” — that reveal just what liberals think of heartland America.

What’s frightening is that Marxists don’t just feel contempt for ordinary people; they want to enslave and, if necessary, kill them.  Every American should study the record of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao and realize that communism can happen here.  In fact, it is happening, and it’s far from certain that it can be stopped, even by the millions of patriots who voted for Trump. 

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).