Jeffrey Lord

Over there at Fox News, Victor Davis Hanson, a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness, has posited an uncomfortably on-the-mark question. That question: Is America headed down the same road to perdition that built, ran and finally destroyed the old Soviet Union?

The latter, recall, was the gold standard of Communism. It was the ideal state as imagined and built by Lenin, run by Stalin and a succession of Communist dictators. President Ronald Reagan, pushing hard to win the Cold War with the Soviets outright – over the opposition of his left-wing American critics – predicted that the Communist state would eventually collapse in on itself and be relegated to the “ash heap of history.” Reagan was right.

But why? What were the dominant characteristics of the Soviet Union in its brutally harsh run from its birth pangs in the 1917 Russian Revolution and then from its formal 1922 beginning until its collapse in 1991? Hanson lists ten characteristics of the vicious, brutal Communist regime that should give Americans considerable pause at their increasing familiarity right here in the good old USA. They are:

1. There was no escape from ideological indoctrination – anywhere.

2. The Soviets fused their press with the government.

3. The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.

4. The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought.

5. The Soviet Union was run by a pampered elite, exempt from the ramifications of their own radical ideologies.

6. The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality.

7. The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons for rooting out all potential enemies of the people.

8. Soviet prosecutors and courts were weaponized according to ideology.

9. The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought.

10. The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom.

As always, Hanson, a serious historian and student of the ways of Communism has hit the mark here, and I would encourage you to go over there to the Fox site to read his piece in detail.

But to offer a few examples of my own of current events matching Hanson’s description?

Take # 8 – “Soviet prosecutors and courts were weaponized according to ideology.”  The other day Americans learned there had been a dawn raid on the home and office of Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, of course, is now the lawyer for former President Trump, not to mention having served President Reagan as the United States Associate Attorney General, the  U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and, famously, as the Mayor of New York during 9/11. Yet here is the federal government, run by the leftist bureaucrats of the Biden administration, literally swooping in on a private lawyer, demanding and collecting all of his “devices” – ie: cell phones and computers – and specifically refusing to take the copies of the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop legally in Giuliani’s possession.

Then there’s  # 6 – “The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality.”
As we speak the Left is pushing the so-called “1619 Project” on American public schools. The project is a deliberate and false re-writing of American history to claim that the United States of America was founded not in 1776 with the objective of freedom from Great Britain but was rather founded in 1619 when slaves first landed in Virginia.

And don’t forget # 1 – “There was no escape from ideological indoctrination – anywhere.” As of this moment, Major League Baseball has pulled the All-Star game from Atlanta because Georgia passed a voting rights law that was disapproved by the far left – in spite of the law expanding voting rights for all Georgians. Over at the NBA, basketball fans have been subjected to one player after another “taking a knee” during the playing of the national anthem to protest America. Turn on your cable television and there is one network after another constantly presenting news through the lens of leftist ideological indoctrination. The Oscars were awash in leftist presentations in a ceremony that was originally designed to simply recognize excellence in film making. In other words, from sports to television, film, education, big business and more, the leftist “woke” crowd is force-feeding ideological indoctrination into one American institution after another, exactly on the model of the Soviet Union.

The real question now is will Americans begin to fight back against all of this distinctly un-American – and dangerous – nonsense?

The betting here is yes. And the sooner the better.