OPINION:
The rapid rise of the authoritarian left in America — busily undermining free speech on college campuses, street bullying political opposition and fomenting class warfare — is intent on harnessing big government and wealth redistribution to coerce its socialist utopia, demonstrating that a free society is never more than one generation removed from tyranny.
This tyranny draws nearer every day through the combined efforts of mainstream journalism and public and higher education systems that have morphed into effective propaganda apparatus of the left and the Democratic Party. These propaganda apparatus demonize American founding values while working to assure that we, especially our future leaders, forget American greatness was built on faith, family, individual freedoms and private property, not by some gigantic entitlement state.
They foment identity politics and multiculturalism to balkanize society and weaken traditional values, rendering us all the more vulnerable to their cultural transformation. They borrowed the propaganda tool of political correctness from Vladimir Lenin’s Communist revolution to attack and delegitimize dissent. The left’s virulent contempt for the U.S. Constitution, private ownership, civil society, traditional moral values and religious faith and even national borders nibbles at civil society and our founding institutions. Hitler, if he lived today, would be awed by the accomplishments of the American left’s propaganda apparatus.
The left’s message is that big government (better yet, global government) provides the moral and economic foundations of free societies. And after big government becomes the guarantor of our health care, why not become the guarantor of our housing? Our clothing? Our food pantries? This is called socialism, and when its guarantees come to pass, Americans will become dependent government subjects, servile to its favors. This time is drawing closer than anyone realizes. The left is deadly serious. Are you?
KEN BECKERT
Abingdon, Miss.
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