When did the flower children of the 1960s fall into the smoke and ash of nihilism and rage?  When did peace and love become war and hate?  When did anarchy become stifling government control and forced conformity?  The rules have certainly changed for the hippies, and it would appear as though we're all going to be made to suffer for it.

The "me generation" first came to power with Bill Clinton's election.  While I don't think they would have qualified as starry-eyed back then, they certainly weren't the jaded, angry, TDS-possessed swarm of anti-American radicals who populate the Biden administration.

The Obama years were like nirvana for liberals, but when Hillary missed her appointment with destiny in 2016, the engine block seized up.  Steam and tears spewed out like an exploding volcano, and they've been erupting ever since.  That electoral rejection has spawned a Biden-supported Deep State operation to eliminate any chance that Democrats will ever lose another election.  Biden's election provided a successful working model to show them how it's done.

The former hippies have relentlessly poured their anger onto Donald Trump — so much so that they tried to throw him out of office after he had already become a private citizen.  This was certainly a novel approach to healing the nation after 75 million Americans had just convincingly expressed love and admiration for him.

President Trump worked tirelessly, and very much at odds with his own government, to stop the endless wars and bring home the troops.  This was apparently reason enough to crank up the war machine.  It took less than a month for Biden to call in air strikes and load up the personnel carriers.  All the formerly peace-loving hippie clans and talking heads just nodded their approval.

Trump often quipped that the best way for him to get the wall built would have been for him to say he was against a border wall.  He had the seemingly magical ability to get the Democrats to do the opposite of anything he said.  While Trump used this to his advantage, the left is obsessed with reversing all the great accomplishments of the Trump years:

• Gas prices have gone up almost a dollar a gallon in less than two months, and this is likely just the beginning.
• Thousands of well paying jobs have been lost in the energy sector with tens of thousands more on the chopping block.
• Our newly-achieved energy independence, which had eluded us for decades, is already starting to slip away.
• A new border crisis is threatening to explode, bringing in millions of illegal aliens, most of whom will be eligible for government services and many of whom will supplant American workers when we can least afford it.
• China and Iran are emboldened now that their greatest obstacle has been removed — perhaps with help from their election interference.  Since there probably won't be an investigation into all the legitimate evidence of election fraud, as opposed to the no evidence or falsified evidence in the three-year Russia collusion probe, we'll probably never know the truth.
• The Paris climate agreement threatens Americans with unfair economic burdens.  Those taxes and regulations will be imposed to try to control climate fluctuations that are not of our making.  The Green New Deal, which would be the biggest waste of money in the history of humanity, is up next.
• American's Second Amendment rights are under assault.
• The government printing press is working overtime to keep up with demand.  Our debt load continues to break new ground and, should we ever lose reserve currency status, it would be "look out below" for the dollar.  The attacks on the oil and gas industries don't bode well for maintaining the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.

This is a lot going wrong in a short time, and there is more coming.  How does the Woodstock crowd react?  Applause.

To be fair, it's obviously not just the Boomers causing all the problems.  There are a significant number of Generation X–ers involved in the mix, and many Millennials are still willing to follow any pied piper into the river.

It is, however, the old Boomers who are the driving force.  They have now become the establishment that they once so despised.  They've erected an immoral and uncompromising organization that cares little or not at all for America, its founding, or its guiding principles.

Donald Trump wanted to put America first and make it great again.  Before the pandemic, he'd largely accomplished this goal.  Even during all the unnecessary economic turmoil COVID caused, America still had much to anticipate.  That's no longer the case.  As long as America's last angry beatniks hang on to the reins of power there will not be a continuing renaissance of the American dream.  Far from it.

Frank Liberato is a pseudonym.

Image: Hippies at Woodstock image in collage by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell.