A red dawn is slowly rising.  An alarm is ringing somewhere, but our eyes are still thick with sleep.  We hit snooze and turn our faces away from the light, but it is time to wake up.  The outrages are piling up quickly now.  Like snow in a blizzard, they make every new step more ponderous than the last.  Overwrought and overwhelmed, it's difficult to know which way to turn.  This is by design.  Absent clear and decisive action, a red dawn will become a red day, and then even the little brownshirts in the media and the universities will realize that something magnificent has been irretrievably lost, and their lives will change forever.

The mainstream media would not know the truth if they fell over it.  They broadcast the most bald-faced lies, speaking with anger and righteous indignation.  Surely, they were mentored by Joe Biden.  Biden's reckless falsehoods are accelerating, and in just the past few weeks, he has demonstrated repeatedly that his words mean absolutely nothing.  He discarded his promises not to leave Americans behind in Afghanistan or to mandate vaccines with all the aplomb and mendacity of a general who claims to worry about "white rage," while promising to pass military secrets to the Chinese.

The media are now trying to gild the likes of George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Liz Cheney.  Most of those who once offered them their sacred vote resent this.  All they can see is betrayal stretching back as far as memory will allow, with past events now seen in a completely different light.  It's gotten to the point where it's almost axiomatic: if the media support it, it can't be trusted.

The media may realize, in time, that they were the instruments of their own destruction.  The Deep State will not share its power with the media or with anyone else.  The lies that they freely broadcast today will become the "truths" that they are forced to broadcast tomorrow.  Their large salaries and lavish entitlements will fall by the wayside as they join the ranks of the "workers' paradise."

The same can be said for academia.  The rot they have willfully fed our children for generations will no longer be their free choice.  Most of their jobs will be gone, and what remains would more aptly be called the Ministry of Propaganda.  They too will take their place among the working poor.

Young people are the saddest part of this story.  Having been so thoroughly indoctrinated, they have absolutely no idea how good their lives could be.  Instead, they are taught only grievances.  If their utopian goals are realized, they will never have the chance to pursue their dreams or join the great American middle class because it will no longer exist.  They will be put to work, and their options in life will be severely limited.  You take all the tests and then work where you're assigned.  The state owns you.

All of them would scoff at this portrayal, but it doesn't take a genius to see this sad reality wherever communism has taken root in the world.  Our homegrown communists believe that they are the ones who can do communism right.  They can "build back better."  It is all folly.  Nobody ever does communism better.  Governance by coercion creates poverty, misery, and more coercion.

What about China?  China was still a communist hellhole as recently as the late 1990s.  It has evolved into something more akin to fascism, with private industry layered onto communism's dictatorial roots.

An incredible influx of capital from the West has allowed the CCP to build modern cities and what may soon be the world's most formidable military, but the Chinese people are still the property of the state.  They must toe the party line or risk disappearing.

In the cities, they're warehoused in dull, utilitarian high-rise buildings, where they are placated with broadly increasing salaries, manifold technologies, and a mobility that has not been experienced for generations.  Most of it is courtesy of the West and, more specifically, the United States.

The rural areas, amounting to roughly half the population, are still mired in abject poverty.  Lacking a free enterprise engine to drive their economy, if the Western money spigot is ever turned off, China would revert to an ugly communist pit with only the rusting material remnants of prosperity.

The United States will share that fate if we do not have the strength to turn back the red tide that now threatens to wash away our most revered beliefs and institutions.  We still have time, but we can't keep hitting the snooze.

The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills...into Shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke from the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the sea returning?

—From JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Image: China destroys 15 unused high rises.  YouTube screen grab.