If you were alive in 1940, for an even dollar (or for 83¢ if you were an annual subscriber), you could have bought a copy of Fortune magazine and read the results of its July 1940 survey that shed light on the prevailing political views of your fellow Americans.  If you had done this, you would have learned that 37.8 percent of respondents thought communist sympathizers should be jailed or deported. 

As Americans fought in World War II and then in the Korean War, staunch anti-communist sentiment continued.  In 1954, 71.8% of Americans thought communists should not be allowed to make speeches in their communities, and 93.6% thought communists teaching at American colleges should be fired.

While in the 1940s and 1950s, one might have expected a public debate about whether we should jail or deport communist sympathizers, limit their speech, or fire them from their teaching jobs, today, these notions seem a bit over the top. 

Instead, today you can be a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America as well as a self-proclaimed communist and still graduate from our military academies.  Just ask Spenser Rapone and his mentor at West Point, Professor Rasheed Hosein.

Today, not only can you work for the United States government as a communist sympathizer, but you can even become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  Just ask John Brennan.

Americans should not be surprised by any of this, as far-left ideologies have become the mainstream.  Today, the majority of Democrats, 57%, view socialism favorably, while only 47% of them view capitalism favorably.

This massive shift within the American polity will no doubt manifest itself the next time the Democratic Party takes power of the federal government.  Just ask the DSA member and the Democratic Party's nominee for New York's 14th Congressional District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

So to answer the original question as to whether it is too late to jail John Brennan: yes, it is too late.  We are about 75 years too late to jail Brennan...for being a communist sympathizer, that is.

But for being the "puppet master of the entire scheme to violate the civil liberties of Donald Trump and his [campaign] team," we very well may be just a couple years too early.

Image credit: Donkey Hotey.