It is usual, among our liberal friends, to use the phrase "burn the place down" to characterize brave activists conducting mostly peaceful protests in the face of the all-powerful racist-sexist-homophobe patriarchy and its assault weapons.

But as usual, they are lying to themselves. Brave activists are nothing of the kind. They are merely regime flunkies, putting on a show for the cameras. They are fools, knaves, that know nothing, because they do not need to know anything, beyond The Thing that all regime supporters instinctively believe this week.

Thus, Alvin Bragg has just indicted Donald Trump, because that is what a regime flunky is doing this week to "burn the place down."

It is telling that Nancy Pelosi's deputy assistant DEI social media coordinator should put out a tweet talking about how in America everyone "has the right to a trial to prove innocence." Does your average deputy assistant DEI social media coordinator not know that, in Anglo-American criminal law, the government must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? Poor little girl: why would she be expected to know a thing about Anglo-American law? It's all a front for the patriarchy, anyway.

When the left decides to "burn it all down" it is always because their latest wizard wheeze has failed. The Jacobins and Robespierre did not burn the French monarchy down; by 1791 they had already replaced the monarchy. In the Reign of Terror they burned the Revolution down. Great work, Maxie! See you in Moscow with the Grande Armée! And France has never been the same since.

Same with Joe Stalin. He burned the place down in the Great Purge because he had already wrecked Russia with his dumb Five-Year Plan. Hey, Joey! Have the bureaucrats run the economy! What could go wrong! Russia has never been the same since, Vlad.

In fact, experts agree, Stalinist Five-Year Plans were such a stunning success -- equaled only by Maoist Great Leaps Forward -- that the only thing to do is to repeat the whole thing with World War Climate to transform the energy economy with windmills and batteries. It's the science: here we are in a multi-millennial interglacial in the current ice age, so what could make more sense than making the planet wooly-mammoth-friendly again?

You know, I am an old man who's going to be 77 in 2023. At my age we geezers are supposed to be set in our ways. But for some reason I find myself getting blown away by new ideas. Back in my twenties The Wall Street Journal introduced me to the Austrians: Mises and Hayek, and I was perfectly happy with them and similar thinkers like Michael Novak and his proposal that politics and culture/religion and the economy should be separated, otherwise totalitarianism.

But then came the day that I watched Jordan B. Peterson being interviewed by North London leftie Helen Lewis, who mentioned Nietzsche as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." Okay, so I had to read Nietzsche from stem to stern. Then Curtis Yarvin mentioned Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his Concept of the Political, writing that "there is no politics without an enemy." It's odd, isn't it: there is something shameful about reading Nietzsche and Schmitt. I wonder why, dear liberal friends.

Do you know, dear liberal friends, why everything you have forced upon us has been a failure? It is because politics reduces to mobilizing the people in a state to fight the enemy, and using politics to reward your friends. For everything other than fighting a war, politics Makes Things Worse.

I am sure that Maxie Robespierre and Joey Stalin could tell us, now that they possess the wisdom of eternity, that politics is a very blunt instrument good for only a few very limited uses, such as defending food-growing territory from the tribe across the river. I would have checked with the murderous Mao for his opinion, but President Xi says he could not be reached for comment.

Our liberal friends are determined to use politics and the state to create a world of equality -- "equity" is the latest version. But then I read Francis Fukuyama who decrees that the only egalitarian societies were pre-state tribes. States like ours have armies and bureaucracies and that means a powerful government that first takes care of its supporters and sics the intelligence community and the tame prosecutors on the enemies of the regime. "Equality" translates as loot for the regime supporters.

Of course, all these great thinkers cannot tell us what will happen next. We cannot fearlessly forecast whether Donald Trump will spend his last years in durance vile, or lead ultra-MAGA Republicans to a glorious national future.

But I think that our liberal friends and their devoted activists will keep doing their best to Burn the Place Down. Because that is the only thing they know to do.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

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