About 15 years ago, I was at a party where I met a young lesbian couple who had a baby thanks to a sperm donor. The baby was cute—and nattily attired in a Che Guevara onesie. The couple was manifestly unaware that Che despised homosexuals, presided over thousands of deaths, and enthusiastically executed people himself. They just knew they were hip and transgressive.
I thought of that couple when I watched the video of Bill Maher’s monologue calling out the rising number of real communists in the Democrat party:
Although Maher’s reflexive attacks against Trump and Sarah Palin (talk about yesterday’s news) are irritating, he’s quite right that the new Democrats, whether officially in the Democratic Socialists of America or still claiming to be just plain old Democrats, are simply Marxists.
The problem with the video, though, is that I could actually hear in my head that lesbian couple, and tens of thousands of other younger Americans, saying to him, “Okay, Boomer. You’re just being greedy.”
As it is, young people, thanks to decades of Democrat-run indoctrination in the public school system and through American entertainment, are as disconnected from the reality of socialism and communism as were those lesbians. According to a Cato Institute and YouGov poll, “62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a ‘favorable view’ of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.”
It’s fine for Maher to make cutesy jokes to an audience as old as he is, one that still has a lingering distaste for communism, even as they vote for the American government to get ever bigger and more powerful. They’ll gasp and laugh like trained seals.
The problem is that nothing Maher says will change young minds because he doesn’t offer any information about why communism is bad. He just states a conclusion. The same is true for all the old-line Boomer Democrats who have suddenly realized that the Jacobins are about to line them up for the guillotine.
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The only way to shift the generation is to break through the indoctrination that has them believing that socialism and communism will spare them from work, suffering, and war. They’ve been educated to accept that socialism will create the Marxist dream of a perfect world in which all people work just a little bit, with the resulting communal basket of goods and services providing for all needs, and leaving healthy, happy people to pursue their passions and gender identities.
They need to be forcibly, brutally reminded of all the deaths socialism has caused. It’s not enough to say, as the Cato Institute article quoted above says, “that communism is responsible for 100 million deaths worldwide and is rooted in socialism, the same philosophy that spawned both Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism.” Instead, American education and media need to rub their noses in the truth.
When I was about ten, PBS, which was still run for the public interest rather than for the Democrat party, had a show on the Holocaust, complete with actual footage of the piles of dead in the concentration camps that the Allies found at the war’s end. I’m not sure why my parents let me watch it, given my young age, but the scene showing bulldozers shoveling emaciated dead bodies into mass burial sites left me crying until I vomited. I never forgot.
Maher’s snark does nothing to tell the post-Boomer generation what happens when socialists take control. Unless we change that very quickly (including emphasizing that the “Z” sound in the word “Nazi” stood for the German pronunciation of socialism), we’re about to go down a path that leads only to death and destruction. If we’re to win this ideological war, snarky jokes and dire predictions that will elicit nothing more than an “Okay, Boomer,” response will not do that trick.
A good start for American young people would include learning about America’s experiment with socialism. You can listen to the great Rush Limbaugh here or enjoy this more recent John Stossel video:
Given the trends of the 21st century, that 100 million body count from the 20th century will seem like chump change. If we don’t stop this trajectory, we’ll have a 21st-century American tyrant giving a modern reworking of that statement so often attributed to Stalin, by proclaiming that “When one man dies, it’s a tragedy. When billions die, it’s a statistic.”
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Image created using AI.