“America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?” — Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, 7/18/21

“We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” — Jen Psaki, White House spokesperson, 7/15/21

“Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit [usa.gov] to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the fbi.” — fbi, on Twitter, 7/11/21

It Can’t Happen Here, the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel about a dictator imposing totalitarianism in America, has spurred a thousand imitators — usually some version of “It can Happen Here” or “It could Happen Here.” The “it” being fascism, tyranny, the end of our representative republic. These mostly have been relegated to fictional scenarios in political essays. They occupy the think-piece space, intellectual games of “What if…?” “Just imagine…” They are literary warnings meant to strengthen resolve: don’t let it happen here.

But those versions are passé. Sadly, it is already happening here. An alien ideology, counter to the ideals of individual liberty and limited government enshrined in our Founding documents, is spreading across the land like an iron chain, ensnaring and closing minds and capturing institutions and traditions that have kept the country free for 245 years.

This invading creed is exchanging the Bill of Rights for the surveillance state, where neighbors and family members become informants and no communication is private or safe. Wrongthink and wrongspeak can cost you your job, your schooling, your residence. It is not permitted to hold opposing views or to dissent or to even question official information. Nor is it permitted to be silent, because the wrong kind of silence is now violence.

No wonder 62 percent of Americans say they’re afraid to express their political views, according to a Cato Institute poll. Similarly, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education surveyed 20,000 students on 55 campuses and found that 60 percent of students feel they can’t express an opinion “because of how students, a professor, or their administration would respond.” A full 73 percent of Republican students feel that way.

This is no way to run a nation built on free speech. But “cancel culture” is supplanting the long-robust American culture of free inquiry, free association, and free expression. Because when you scratch a leftist, his inner totalitarian comes out. Case in point, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who demonstrated it on msnbc: “There are millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed. It’s as if they’re members of a cult, the Trumpist cult, and who have to be deprogrammed.”

And just how do you propose to do that, Mr. Robinson? The gulag, for 75 million Trump voters?

As Rush put it not long ago, “These people are not interested in democracy. They aren’t interested in a representative republic. We are in a battle for the overall kind of country this is going to be. We’re not in a battle over who is going to win every four years. We’re not in a battle over who’s going to be President, who’s going to run the Senate, who’s going to run the House. The battle we are in is literally about will this remain the United States of America as founded. That is what is being waged here.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher. At his Florida rally on 7/3/21, Donald Trump warned, “We can’t let them take away our free speech… That’s communism. That’s what they do in these communist countries. You have no voice.” He’s right; this leftist speech-stifling ideology spreading like toxic fumes over the nation has a name: communism. It is considered impolitic and impolite to say so in America, but it is now time. Because what used to be labeled “the communist threat” is not a mere forecast; it’s starting to take hold.

The question is whether America, the last best hope on earth, can long endure. Will we turn our backs on the blessings of liberty, the rule of law, and Constitutional due process to secure our Creator-bestowed rights, and instead run headlong after class war and group grievances, brute tribalism? Where communism goes, lawlessness, scarcity, and starvation follow, as day follows night. It brings ruin and death every time it’s tried — stamping out all opposition with the jackboot, the prison camp, and the firing squad.

It is, ultimately, fatal. “We Must Never Forget the 100 Million Victims of Communism,” reminds The Heritage Foundation:

When President George W. Bush … on [6/12/07] dedicated a U.S. memorial in Washington, D.C. to the more than 100 million victims of communism, both the Chinese communists and the Russian communists immediately attacked… The Chinese embassy in Washington dismissed the memorial as ‘an attempt to defame China.’ Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party, called the memorial ‘clumsy propaganda’ intended to divert the world’s attention ‘from the true bloody crimes of U.S. imperialism.’ Tellingly, what neither the Chinese communists nor the Russian communist boss tried to do was to deny the bloody crimes of communis[m].

On February 12, 1974, the great Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested. He immediately released “Live Not by Lies,” his courageous essay that answers the question, “But what can we do? We have no voice!”

This is the key to liberation, he says: stop participating in lies.

For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person. We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think — this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think! … Our way must be: never knowingly support lies!

So from this day forward, says Solzhenitsyn, you “will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting … the truth.” You “will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation.” You “will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as ”you hear the speaker “utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda.”

Yes, not participating in lies will have a cost. You might lose a job. “But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest.” The choice is “either truth or lies, … spiritual independence or spiritual servility.” Solzhenitsyn has no use for anyone “who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul.”

[D]id not a great European people, the Czechoslovaks, show us how one can stand down the tanks with bared chest alone, as long as inside it beats a worthy heart? … [W]e already have among us people … who live by the truth. And so: we need not be the first to set out on this path, ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands — they will not cope; they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands — we will not recognize our country!

The Soviet Union did not fall until 17 years later, in 1991. It took moral strength to push it from the outside, as did the then-free-world leaders Ronaldus Magnus, “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. But the monstrosity began to teeter from the inside when the people chose to live not by lies.

It’s our turn. The left’s encroaching totalitarianism is a lie. Refuse the lie, and live by the divine power of truth. To defeat this enemy, we can do nothing less.

Cartoon ©2019 image courtesy of Woods360 View