Sometimes, things come together in a way that’s striking enough to merit comment. For me, the combination has been a journey through the Midwest, combined with a Christopher Rufo video about how our society has become deeply, dangerously pathologized.

So, first, the journey through the Midwest. For family reasons, I’ve spent a fair amount of time driving through the Midwest and staying either in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, or around Madison, Wisconsin. Both of course, are quintessentially upper Midwestern cities. They’re in the heart of the region that leftists now speak of derogatorily as “the flyover states.” But once, they were called the “heartland” because they embodied true American qualities.

And once upon a time, they did embody true American qualities. Back in the day, the government promised people that, if they could clear the land and make it usable, they could have the land. On the one hand, it was a giveaway but, on the other hand, there was nothing “free” about it. Instead, it was payment for painful, backbreaking, heartbreaking services rendered.

You see the products of these labors all over the Midwest. Beautiful, thoughtfully laid-out cities, charming small towns, endless green fields. Just a few years ago, even the Democrat-run cities, while they had their bad sides and poverty, were mostly nice places—really nice places—to live.

Image: Screaming woman. Internet meme.

Now, though, when you get to the Midwest’s big cities, what you see is a new level of degradation that didn’t exist just a decade ago when I first started traveling there. I believe that degradation can be tied directly to three left-wing policies: seeding American cities with drugs; the BLM/Antifa riots; and COVID lockdowns.

The first thing is leftist drug policies. These are a package of policies: changing drug laws, loosening enforcement, and opening the southern border. In formerly law-abiding cities, you see a level of human decay that’s gotten worse every time we travel through those cities. More people who are obviously in thrall to addiction dot the urban landscape.

Sadly, the greatest number of those who fell victim to drugs, if one is just eyeballing them, seems to be blacks. It’s as if the Democrats are determined to do a slow, cruel genocide by encouraging drug dependency. Yes, numerically, more whites probably do drugs, but that’s because there are more whites, with blacks at only 13% of the population. Again, eyeballing the urban landscape, it seems that this 13%, sadly, is killing itself.

The second factor in the Midwest’s decline is the BLM/Antifa riots that tore apart America—and that started in Minneapolis itself with George Floyd’s drug-related death while in police custody. I used to visit Minneapolis/St. Paul frequently before the riots and was invariably impressed by what a lovely duo of cities it was—well-ordered, beautiful, and safe. Now, though, the young people I knew who lived there are leaving because it’s too dangerous.

The third thing is COVID. We were driving through Gary, Indiana, and were struck by the recent decay in an already impoverished neighborhood. We could see which buildings had died long before COVID, but you could also tell by the signs on closed businesses which buildings were the victims of the COVID (and Biden) economy. The neighborhood had gone from sad to utterly desolate.

The people who built the Midwest were self-reliant, resilient, frugal, law-abiding, and God-fearing. They created clean, safe, well-managed cities. Leftists believe that the infrastructure is hard-wired to be clean, safe, and well-managed. That’s wrong. Without the values, all you've got are buildings. And as we see with BLM’s destruction and the planned squalor of drug policies and COVID economics, buildings do not make a community. Destroy a community’s values, and all you’re left with is decaying shells.

Of course, it’s not just crazy leftist economic and social policies that are the problem, and the problem is limited to the Midwest (it’s just very obvious there). Today’s leftism runs much deeper than that, for it targets people at their deepest psychological cores.

And that’s how I get to an impressive Christopher Rufo video that starts a bit slowly, but that needs to be watched to the end. Regular readers know that I’ve been open about my disdain for the crazy women who are at the vanguard of modern leftism and lead the direction of the Democrat party. Rufo elegantly explains the planned psychopathology that hits women hardest and that I’ve only been able to vent about:

American culture has been sent adrift. In a new short film, I show how a strange new pattern of psychopathologies has deranged our institutions and plunged our public life into hysteria, narcissism, and moral theatrics—all in the name of "care."

Welcome to the Cluster B Society: pic.twitter.com/f6d2EN0yQH

— Christopher F. Rufo вљ”пёЏ (@realchrisrufo) September 20, 2023

In case you’re wondering, after the despair of losing WWI and the economic and social breakdown of Germany following that war, Naziism found an easy foothold—and it did so displaying many of the traits Rufo describes. I’m not saying that today’s leftists are Nazis (they’re not calling for genocide or world domination…yet), but they are traveling down the same political and behavioral path.