It's no wonder that one of the first acts of all communist regimes is to round up and murder anybody not hysterically committed to the "cause."  Communism, like its COVID-1984 kissing cousin, only thrives when mass formation psychosis takes over.  In practice, this entails killing an awfully large number of people who are too old or experienced to believe in fairy tales told to them by government agents with one hand on a loaf of bread and the other on the butt of a gun.  

And you say if we collectivize our farms, we'll be able to feed the whole nation?  An end to property rights will bring about utopia in our own time?  Tell me, what kind of mule kicked you in the head, son?  Hey, wait, let me go...

It is a sad fact that communism depends on the young, naïve, or brain-dead to push an ideology that brings nothing but poverty, unhappiness, and death.  "Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world," Vladimir Lenin boasted.  Transform?  If not for friends of freedom, perhaps so.  But by capturing generations of children, he was certainly capable of breaking their futures into pieces.  Venezuela, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Korea — wherever communism is allowed to draw breath, mass murder and dystopia follow in quick succession.  

Barack Obama spoke endlessly of "fundamentally transforming" the United States, and given that America was founded and forged in a dedication to liberty and a rejection of government tyranny, it was always clear which side of that dichotomy he fervently supported.  For his efforts, the American population has rarely been more divided, urban crime and murder rates have spiraled out of control, and the Department of (in)Justice has descended into a death spiral of wretched partisanship.  As if Americans needed any reminders, the ridiculous double standard in the way Black Lives Matter and other darling "activists" of the political left are celebrated by the U.S. government and regularly absolved from the repercussions of their criminal conduct while J6 Capitol protesters are politically persecuted and held in solitary confinement should shock the conscience of anyone committed to due process and the rule of law.  Likewise, Republican politicians not vociferously denouncing this vile double standard (or worse, actually condoning it as Lindsey Graham, Dan Crenshaw, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger have done) have made it clear which side of the freedom/tyranny battlefield they've chosen to defend.  

As with any communist system, social division is the price of conquest.  Cultural unity in the U.S. was shot in the back of the head so that Obama and "wingman" Eric Holder could segregate black and white Americans from each other, tear open gashes in the body politic that had mostly healed after many decades, and rub enough salt in those fresh wounds to ride artificially-constructed public anger to electoral victory.  Obama spoke of nothing but "hope," spread nothing but hate, and left America in nothing but shambles.  It may have been the "Chicago way" of politics, but it was most certainly the "communist way" of stoking imaginary grievances until the social fabric could be torn asunder and replaced with something "new."  And by "new," I mean the same old putrid rancidness of Lenin's communism but dressed up in the paper-thin disguises of "racial justice," "climate justice," "equity," "fairness," "multiculturalism," and all the other false idols worshiped by the "woke" pagans on their Marxist journey to salvation.  Obama was glorified as a false messiah by his devout followers, and like any false prophet, he brought them misery, death, and war, instead of peace.

What he did give his political disciples, though, was a grand lesson in the efficacy of propaganda, punishment, and power.  If you repeat lies long enough, many former skeptics will start to believe.  If you punish your enemies savagely enough, you can convince some to accept many implausible things.  And if you toss justice, law, and morality out the window and concentrate exclusively on the applications of propaganda and punishment, you can accumulate power quickly without fretting over the existence of political opposition.  He got socialized medicine, open borders, and a Supreme Court too cowed to stop the expansion of the administrative state.  American citizens got the worst economic growth since the Great Depression, fractured communities suffering from illegal immigration, and a repurposed national security deep state dedicated to targeting ordinary Americans who dared to object to the government's new authoritarianism on steroids.  And anybody who called out the Obama government for its blatantly un-American policies was ridiculed from all quarters of the mass media complex as being racist, nativist, sexist, homophobic, unenlightened, deplorable, or even Russian (irony alert).  

So that they alone control the flow of information, communists on the march usually take over a nation's radio and television stations before worrying about winning physical battles.  In America, too, this is exactly what has happened.  Our corporate news propagandists have become a veritable Ministry of Truth.  We are treated to endless lies about Russian collusion, secure elections, and the life-or-death imperative of COVID (which magically arose in nature but certainly not anywhere near China) compliance.  For the Ministry of Truth, freedom is always the enemy, and duty to the State is always virtuous.  Unnamed and anonymous government sources should always be trusted (when they serve the Marxist cause), and critics of the State should be publicly targeted, "canceled," and ruined.  Gun crimes are always the gun's fault unless a non-Marxist can first be blamed.  Mass illegal immigration is always capitalism's fault for creating "climate refugees."  Crime is never the fault of the criminal unless the criminal happens to be a police officer accused of excessive force.  And anyone who opposes official proclamations from State "scientists" is a "denier" deserving of being deleted.  We now live under the yoke of censorship where anything at odds with the Marxists' worldview is summarily condemned as "disinformation" or "misinformation" and yanked from the public sphere, while the Ministry of Truth corporate news pumps out actual disinformation and misinformation all day long.  Where the corporate propagandists fail to convert the masses, Hollywood steps in to finish the job, and it has never been happier to play its part.  There's a reason La-La Land gets along so well with the genocidal maniacs of Communist China: They share a common communist cause.

What Obama unleashed has now snowballed into a world fit only for the deranged — a cage with rubber walls where delusional men who believe they're women are treated as heroes and people who refuse to share those delusions are treated as crazy; where parents are "domestic terrorists" for protecting their children's education; where COVID communists refuse healthcare to the unvaccinated in the name of "saving lives"; where people who demonize oil and natural gas are flabbergasted when the cost of food skyrockets; where people who protest government power are called "fascists" and government authoritarians are celebrated as "democrats"; and where anyone who questions that a corrupt, senile, and unpopular "president" legitimately received the most votes in history is considered a "threat to democracy," while the political operatives caught stuffing drop boxes with mail-in ballots are ignored completely.  If you went back fifteen years and tried to convince people this is where America was headed, they'd call you crazy.  Now they call you crazy for not succumbing to the madness. 

Thus has it always been with communist regimes: The State's first victim is the truth.  As the truckers in Canada protesting that oppressive regime know well, this is the time to "speak now or forever hold your peace."  There are no second chances.  Because after publicly executing all truth, the communists have only the sane to eliminate next.

Hat tip to the knights of the road.

Image via Pixabay.