Editorial cartoonist Branco recently designed artwork showing an Antifa donkey with BLM explosives in its hand threatening America with, “Biden wins or the country gets it.”
At first blush, it seems extreme. But is it?
Most liberal “woke” do not participate in violence. But their blind silence on riots and authoritarianism perpetrated by their fellow leftists is a mindless stab in the heart of their own future liberty.
They refuse to view anything that doesn’t fit what they believe is their compassionate narrative, and seem oblivious to the human cost of socialism and its better-dressed uncle, communism. Thinking Constitutional protections only apply to them, they holler “love not hate” while normalizing censorship and threats to anyone who disagrees with their left-wing talking points.
It is almost as if history doesn’t exist for the woke. Yet Americans who have fled oppressive regimes know the erosion of human rights at the core of leftism and socialism doesn’t occur overnight.
Like Katarina Lindley, a successful family physician who is a leader in the osteopathic family physician community, and a board member for DPC Action, an organization supporting doctor/patient-based healthcare reforms.
She started out as Katarina Sokolic, a Croatian girl born in Soviet Yugoslavia in the 1970s behind the Iron Curtain of hunger and despair.
Katarina learned about oppression early when instructed to keep her family’s religious faith secret as it could cause her father to lose his job in a time of unrelenting unemployment. She escaped her homeland in its early post-Soviet phase, trading violence and suffering under a different leftist regime for America.
According to Katarina, “it took years to realize Yugoslavia was not ‘utopia.’ Eventually, everything was controlled by government, and freedom of thought was highly discouraged.”
Midwest physician “Elizabeth Williams” fled Liberia at 14. Her family was chased off ancestral lands by leftist Liberian president Charles Taylor after her father spoke against Taylor’s suppression of speech.
As Elizabeth notes, “first they didn’t allow us to air our views. That led to their stealing our entire lives.”
Left-wing violence destabilized Colombia for decades, and led to wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands and displacement of millions. Young “Enrique Velez,” who now lives in the Washington, DC area, recalls “my family saw kidnapping and extortion of friends and family.
“My parents made the difficult decision to join millions of displaced people after my father was held up and threatened by leftist groups. In America, we finally felt safe. Many families do not get the opportunity to flee here. We pray this country never experiences the same thing.
These now-liberated Americans have real fear for our future. The obliviousness of the woke heightens that fear.
Socialism was previously abhorrent to Americans, but has been sold to America’s youth as “progress,” thanks in part to the false, glorified view Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders presents of central control. It has permeated the ranks of the Democrat’s progressive leaders.
The socialism embraced by the wokes has a history of global oppression. Chairman Mao “freed” Chinese peasants by murdering 45 million of them. National Socialist Adolf Hitler harnessed his leftist power base by murdering six million Jews. Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to “Mass killing under communist regimes.”
Totalitarianism starts out as the rhetorically more benign socialism. First they come for books and newspapers, then guns, then property, then people’s lives.
The woke may argue these horrors would never come to America. But if they opened their eyes and their minds, they’d know it’s already here, and they are ushering it in.
Social and mainstream media are suppressing and censoring content critical of the Democrat candidate for president. Citizens participating in a New York Jews for Trump convoy were attacked and children threatened with pepper spray by a leftist demonstrator. Liberal officials are closing houses of worship but allowing leftist riots.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter are radical left/Marxist groups who do not embrace peace. Their rioting and blind eye toward looting has cost countless billions and robbed minority and immigrant business owners of life savings and livelihoods. These groups and their woke supporters do not free people—they enslave them to tyrannical mobs and oppressive government.
History is a lesson book. Americans who lived it, or understand it, must explain to the woke that they are sleeping through a montage that heralds an oppression which will eventually include them.
Thanks to liberal educators and entertainment culture, young people are not even aware that socialism is the precursor of abject misery, and the loss of even the smallest of freedoms.
Kat Lindley says America is a beacon of hope. Katarina Sokolic fears a nation that loses its liberties to the deliberately misinformed will never get it back.
That would leave freedom seekers nowhere left to go.
Kerri Toloczko is Vice President for Policy for the American Constitutional Rights Union Action Fund, a non-partisan public policy organization dedicated to protecting Constitutional freedom for all Americans.