It is striking just how much leftists enjoy being dominated by Big Government.  Please make us stand six feet apart!  Please monitor and police our speech!  Please punish us for skirting COVID lockdowns!  Please mandate new experimental goop for our veins!  Every time the oppressive authoritarians in positions of power abuse that power to make outrageous and unconstitutional demands of the American people, the leftists hop to and beg for even more obnoxious restrictions.  Politicians and bureaucrats are just people (often bad people), but to leftists, they're celebrities, (needed) father figures, and the atheist's empty-suited pantheon of false gods. 

As Sam J. wrote in a righteous, all-caps, truth-telling rant over at Twitchy, no matter how nonsensical or harmful the government's often-illegal-but-always-idiotic commands, the masochistic left can be heard shrieking, "YEAH, THAT'S A GOOD IDEA.  GOVERN ME HARDER, DADDY!  MASK ME UP!  TAKE SCHOOL FROM MY KIDS!  YAAAAS!"  Nothing makes the left happier than a system that insists on ruling over leftists in perpetuity.  No group is more worthy of the left's hero worship than an army of control freaks who take pleasure in inconveniencing, voyeuristically surveilling, and intimidating the masses.  Silence the vaccine skeptics!  Force the anti-maskers into hiding!  Imprison anyone who still attends church even after the State's Marxist priests banned the unapproved exercise of religion!  In this brave new world, the cowards demand cowardice from everyone.

Or, as the Babylon Bee insightfully observes, the reason Democrats are so irrationally offended by the appearance of Revolutionary War–era Gadsden flags is because everything they have been brainwashed to believe screams out, "TREAD ON ME!"  Perhaps it is natural for those with crushed souls to plead for crushed spines, too.  If leftists didn't snuggle up next to tyranny, after all, there would be little else to keep them warm at night.  It is as O'Brien — the enigmatic Inner Party inquisitor from Orwell's 1984 — tells Winston Smith: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever."  Leftists alive today crave that boot stamping on their collective face.  They need the threat of that boot's punishment to find any sense of meaning in their otherwise empty, fruitless lives.  Receiving and inflicting pain is the only way for them to feel...something.

Leftists have been conditioned not to think for themselves and to project their fears and inadequacies onto others.  It doesn't matter if a person has twenty academic degrees and is hailed as an "expert" by all the "very best people."  If that person mutters tripe such as "the science is settled" or resorts to labeling anyone with an opposing point of view a "denier," then that credentialed crouton is still just stale bread in the left's soup of mental midgets.  No person in possession of a first-rate mind ever thinks anything is "settled."  No person with the capacity for creative thought would resort to an insult as hackneyed as "denier."  When has a thinking person ever stopped pushing the boundaries of knowledge?  When has a genius confident in his own thoughts not found more to learn from those who disagree?  Only the dogmatic insist on censorship.  Only those who lack confidence in their beliefs require other people to be punished for their own.

In many ways, leftists are like PTSD viruses infecting others with their own internalized anxieties.  Unfortunately, masks are just as ineffective at preventing the Marxist disease from spreading as they have been with COVID.  I joke about a lot of things, but I take post-traumatic stress disorder seriously.  If you have ever suffered from the condition or know someone who has, then you know how it can leave a person almost frozen in time.  

One of the most astute descriptions of PTSD that I have seen comes from an Israeli therapist, Arian Lev, who has treated thousands of civilians and IDF veterans suffering from the traumatic experiences of firefights, building explosions, missile attacks, kidnappings, and imprisonments.  Lev isolates subconscious codes that get activated by trauma — "life equals danger" and "I equals delete."  PTSD sufferers "actually delete themselves" so that "they do not exist."  "We change 'life equals danger' to 'life equals security and safety,'" and "when you change 'I equals delete' to 'I equals exist,' people become alive again.  We reprogram them.  They exist in their bodies and they are able to focus on the present and the anxiety is released."

If Lev's research is correct, and large numbers of people in society possess these subconscious codes that can be triggered, consider how the leftist worldview plays directly into these mental struggles.  Whether it is COVID, "climate change," fear of overpopulation, the threats of racism, whatever — leftists are constantly teaching people of all ages to equate life with danger.  Simultaneously, the answer to every "danger" is some totalitarian communist system that requires each individual to "delete" himself.  Life = danger.  I = delete.  Arian Lev has spent a lifetime trying to fix busted (but not broken) minds, and at the same time, the Marxist globalists are building a world that spreads doom-and-gloom fear, while programming people to view their own freedom, wants, and needs as "selfish."  In my estimation, leftists are working overtime to give everybody a bout of PTSD, and the skyrocketing rates of suicide and drug overdose in society seem to back that up.  Forget about COVID; the most lethal disease today is Marxist globalism.

Wherever totalitarianism spreads, dissenters are imprisoned for "disloyalty" to the State.  That means Marxism first attempts to infect its host with equal measures of propaganda, pain, and PTSD and then sends any holdouts straight to prison.

While thinking about these deadly leftist pathogens, the lyrics of a song called "Pets" from the '90s alternative rock band Porno for Pyros run in my head: "Will there be another race / To come along and take over for us? / Maybe Martians could do / Better than we've done / We'll make great pets!"  When I watch leftist zombies obsequiously obeying every stupid and harmful governmental edict, all I think now is, "They'll make great pets!"  

They do make great pets.  Give them a little government money.  Promise them that you'll redistribute other people's paychecks directly into their food bowls.  Pat them on the head with supercilious compliments such as "we're the ones we've been waiting for."  Assure them that they'll "save the world" by gluing themselves to the asphalt of public highways in protest of hydrocarbon fuels, so that wealthy corporate bankers can make windfall profits on otherwise uneconomic "green" energies."  Condition them with poor schooling and overt indoctrination to believe that freedom is "dangerous" and that government is "sacred."  Encourage them to assume that anybody who cherishes liberty is really a "racist," a "religious extremist," or a Nazi fascist.  Give them enough government cookies so that they never think to question how people who do not want Big Government in their private lives could be "fascists" who believe Big Government should control all our lives.  Yank them on the collar should they try to walk in a different direction from those who hold their leash.  Reward them for barking and biting anyone outside the pack.  

Why would leftists need Martians to turn them into pets when the D.C. Uniparty has already spayed and neutered the leftist horde?  You can't have babies, after all, if you're obsessed with "shouting your abortion" or castrating yourself on the way to an "authentic gender."  As any veterinarian will tell you, this kind of behavior will help decrease the number of animals in need of shelter.  And in a future world where you "own nothing" and the government provides your shelter, the pet owners prefer not to have a lot of human pets in need of homes.

Image: birgl via Pixabay, Pixabay License.