Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It seemed to me, even as a child, that when the Berlin Wall came down that something big had just taken place. As it was explained to me at the time: “The bad guys lost, Harry. The world’s seen that Communism doesn’t work, that evil doesn’t work. We’ve won.” Only we haven’t.

For the better part of the last century, the whole of the free world fought, and in the long run defeated, the Red scourge. Our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, children, friends, and neighbors, put their lives on the line, in defense of the world and those that we would leave it to, in open opposition of the boot of tyranny. We pushed back the darkness and made the world safe for democracy. Yet it looks like it’s that same democracy that’s getting the fires started again.

In the 50’s (a decade that I’ve developed a nostalgic for, even though it was dead and gone two decades before I was hatched) there was a stigma, even a fear, of being identified as a Communist. It’s easy to condemn the HUAC, but at the same time I can’t point and shout, “Evil men! Shame on you!” Because, even though the charge of Communist was used as a political move as often as not against those that had no Red ties, there were those that were in philosophical revolt against the principles set forth in the Constitution, and for that They could have been lined up against the nearest brick wall and sent off to meet their demonic maker.

My how things have changed. It’s not a shameful thing to be identified as a Communist anymore. In many places—I’m looking down my nose at you, New York—it’s actually a selling point. Because I suppose the people that have voted for these “Democratic Socialists” (see: Communists) must have missed fully a century of world history that showed them, in every single instance, that Communism not only doesn't work, but inevitably leads to bloodshed, and the complete loss of individual freedom.

This has been pointed out before, by many more articulate that myself (for these instances see any of the back issues of The Libertarian Enterprise), yet it still falls on deaf ears. Even when the ears aren’t deaf, however, the notion that these people are wrong-minded, if not plain evil, is ignored or disregarded. Just in the past few weeks there have been many instances of these media darlings—Nazi Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to bemoan a few—have said and done things that would have gotten a Republican tarred and feathered, and yet are not only not shoved under the rug, but openly flouted, knowing as they do that the talking heads that feed us our news will do and say nothing against them.

I saw a meme a few months ago that asked Why Republicans had to stop voting on November 6, but the Democrats could keep going until they won? It’s one of those jokes that’s funny until it isn’t. Because that’s the mentality that we’re dealing with. A cluster of anti-Americans, about as left leaning as Stalin, only held in check by the Constitution of the United States, going out of their way to remove all that makes us great. To turn us into USSR version 2.0.

A smart person once wrote that the second amendment is so important because it gives you the ability to protect, and insure, the others. When I see these folks talking about stifling, if not outright revoking, the second amendment, my paranoid meter goes off the charts, and I think to myself, “This is the first step in an armed incursion against the law-abiding folks of the United States.” The problem is that it’s not all that paranoid-sounding anymore, and feels less so all the time.

I’ve read that paranoids always have a They that they’re trying to get away from. A nameless person or group of people that they see as the root of all that troubles them. We don’t have a nameless They. We have Pelosi, Oman, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Clinton (pick one), and a plethora of other Communists that would take from us all that we hold dear, and reduce us all to the lowest common denominator. They have no interest in holding all people up to a similar standard; they have a pathological need to hold us all down to one.

Every day I look at the news and wait to hear one of these cretins calling for open revolt. Every night I go to bed amazed that it hasn’t happened yet. But I fear that it will, and when that happens this little Cold War that’s being fought in the streets and Capitals will warm up fast, with no one left unscathed. Because the road to the future has always been paved in blood. I only hold my breath, waiting to see just what kind of a future that road leads to.