On a tip from Jack Bauer.

The best way to gauge the progress progressives have made is to compare the current state of the USA to North Korea, where statism has been taken to its last extreme. Yeonmi Park grew up there before escaping to the West, only to find herself back amid leftists. Liberals will be encouraged by her progress report.

Regarding her experience at Columbia University,

“They were demonising capitalism, free markets and Western civilisation. Anything that was white was bad,” she said.

“I couldn’t believe it. This is the same thing that I was learning in a North Korean classroom“.

Americans still enjoy cushy lives compared to the inmates North Korea…

“But what I am pointing out is the similarities with what is happening in America. And that is scary and that is where Americans are not understanding,” she said.

Inevitably, living standards will catch up with ideology, as Democrat economic policy has begun to illustrate.

Already, our state ideology has surpassed North Korea’s for sheer lunacy:

“For instance, professors have to say that genders were a social construct made up by white men to oppress minorities.

“In North Korea, we believe that men cannot get pregnant, they cannot breastfeed… In Columbia [if you say that], you are a bigot.”

Stand by for a blast of irony:

[W]hen she pushed back on discussions around gender, a professor told her she had been “brainwashed”.

Park wanted to study human rights, but found that the term has been coopted to mean its opposite, like the word “liberalism”:

“For these people, human rights means free education, free health care, universal income, free housing – which means a socialist state,” she said.

“In North Korea, the regime promises the same thing.”

North Koreans had leftism imposed on them by force. Here, fools choose it voluntarily. That’s what it means to be brainwashed.

“Human rights doesn’t mean these free things… Free [to me] means that you have a right to pursue happiness, the right to start your own business, the right to practice your own religion and freedom of speech.”

Nice to see we still have Americans in this country, even if we have to important them from North Korea.

On a tip from Anonymous.

Meanwhile, as liberals shriek about the need to “decolonize” and the US military focuses on promoting sexual perversion and punishing whiteness, our communist Chinese adversaries extend their colonial tentacles into the Western Hemisphere:

The pressure and influence of communist China on Argentina’s leftist government has increased in recent weeks, as China seeks to take advantage of Argentina’s economic and social distress to take control of its strategic sectors, according to a report published by the Argentine news website Infobae on Thursday.

The report states that Chinese diplomats, led by China’s ambassador to Argentina Zou Xiaoli, are demanding shorter deadlines for the takeover of a large part of Argentina’s energy sector and are urging the Argentine government to grant them management of the country’s canals and navigable rivers, which would grant the communist regime sizeable control of the region’s grain trade.

China attempted to seize control of Kenya’s Port of Mombasa using the same tactic of infrastructure “investment” but encountered pushback. It appears that leadership in Argentina will be more accommodating:

Argentina, under the leftist government of president Alberto Fernández, has adopted a notoriously pro-China stance, joining China’s predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in February 2022 during Fernández’s official visit to Beijing — where Fernández laid a wreath to honor communist mass murderer Mao Zedong. …

Shortly after joining BRI, both countries signed a Memorandum of Accession to grant Argentina a two-part Chinese financing package for “strategic infrastructure works.”

That’s how colonialism works now. The British Empire had the Maxim gun. The ChiComs have money, as a result of unions and environmentalists forcing the outsourcing of Western manufacturing.

Argentina is only a foothold:

The Infobae report further states that … both countries will discuss granting China the exploitation of the Paraná-Paraguay waterway, a more than 3,400 kilometer long natural river transport corridor that extends through the Paraná and Paraguay rivers that allows for continuous navigation between the ports of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay.

China has already built a military space station in Argentina.

In 2019, Pentagon officials warned about the potential threats that the base represented, expressing their growing concerns that the Chinese could use it to monitor and potentially target U.S. and allied satellites.

But then came the election of 2020. Now, Pentagon officials are more concerned with alternative pronouns and hyping the global warming hoax.

Argentina is essentially a European country — more so than the USA by demographics. But it succumbed to leftism under Juan Peron. Thanks to inflation and government dependency, it has never been able to recover.

The Monroe Doctrine holds that the Western Hemisphere is America’s sphere of interest and that interference in it by a foreign power constitutes aggression against the USA. But James Monroe was a cisgender white guy who no doubt has been slated for cancelation.

On a tip from Bert B.

On a tip from Occam’s Stubble.

Following the horrific failure of communism everywhere it has been tried, resulting in the death of 100 million people and miserable enslavement of hundreds of millions more, it is a mystery why people keep trying it. Marxism has been called the greatest catastrophe in human history. Yet even in a country that has been wealthy and free, Democrat politicians are in the process of imposing it on an incremental basis, as if we didn’t all know that it doesn’t work.

The answer to the mystery is that communism does work, as Lis Cuesta’s handbag demonstrates. Lis Cuesta is the wife of Miguel Diaz-Canel, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.

Bing translation:

Beautiful the Hermes bag of 17 thousand dollars of Lis Cuesta, first lady of #Cuba. While Cubans clamor for food, decent housing conditions and basic things that are impossible for them, #socialistas dress in luxury.

Hermes handbags sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

Similarly, Castro wannabe Bernie Sanders owns three homes and charges people $95 to listen to him denounce capitalism. In terms of economic policy, Joe Biden is Bernie Sanders.

Babalu Blog weighs in:

This fashion statement by the communist first lady stands in stark contrast to the life of poverty, misery, and oppression the Cuban people are forced to live in. Cubans spend their days standing in line for rationed food, which often runs out before many of them can get a morsel. Residential buildings are in disrepair and collapsing, the pharmacies are empty, and blackouts that last for hours have become an almost daily occurrence. But that didn’t stop Cuesta from buying and proudly displaying a purse that is worth several times the annual average salary in Cuba.

This contrast is actually a perfect illustration of how socialism works.

It works all right. It is a highly efficient system for enslaving a population on behalf of an extravagantly wealthy and powerful ruling class. It is a formula for converting mass envy and idiocy into tyranny.

On a tip from R F.

On a tip from Anonymous.

The communists ruling China comprise the deadliest regime in human history, having killed an estimated 65 million of their own citizens under Mao alone. The Chinese people are so fed up with Covid tyranny that they are standing up to it. The liberal media sanctimoniously positions itself on the side of the rebels, despite being instrumental in the imposition of Covid tyranny in the West, and despite having installed in office Joe Biden, who will not take sides against his ChiCom benefactors.

Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post (best known for using the intimidation tactic of doxing Libs of TikTok) may be a ditzy moonbat, but at least she is true to her principles:

Lorenz raised eyebrows over the weekend when she defended the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero-COVID” policy while slamming her employer’s reporting on the subject.

The Washington Post on Saturday tweeted an article about China’s record number of coronavirus cases in the country.

“‘A coronavirus outbreak on the verge of being China’s biggest of the pandemic has exposed a critical flaw in Beijing’s ‘zero Covid’ strategy: a vast population without natural immunity,’ the tweet said.

The article seemingly hit a nerve for Lorenz, who responded with an extended Twitter rant praising China’s authoritarian COVID lockdowns and accusing the U.S. of killing “millions of vulnerable people” by reopening the country.

When not even WaPo is moonbatty enough…

Liberal demigod Anthony Fauci — who apparently provided US taxpayer money to help fund the ChiCom creation of Covid — also remains basically true to the cause, although the career bureaucrat is more politically astute about it:

Good thing Democrats have not finished consolidating power, or authorities would be welding doors shut here too (if only for a “temporary period of time”).

On tips from KirklesWorth and Anonymous.

On a tip from Jester.

Among the many things we have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving are the pilgrims who made the holiday possible by serving as the foundation stone for American civilization. In particular, we can thank them for rejecting socialism.

In the beginning, the pilgrims shared their economic output equally, without property rights. This unsurprisingly resulted in a shortage of food.

After the meager Thanksgiving harvest, the second season of collective farming and distribution proved equally disappointing. Gov. [William] Bradford had seen enough, recording that the system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

So before the 1623 season, he scrapped socialist farming and replaced it with private ownership of land for each of the families. As a result of becoming responsible for their own welfare and gaining freedom to choose what to grow for consumption or trade, the Pilgrims’ productivity surged.

The rest is history.

John Stossel elaborates on the expensive lesson on the evils of socialism that the pilgrims passed on to us through American heritage:

So solid was America’s respect for property rights that 500 years later, termites of the type comprising the Democratic Party have still not been able to eat it away completely. Consequently, even if turkey is far more expensive than before Biden’s handlers took power, at least most of us still have access to turkey.

On tips from Blackjack and KirklesWorth.

On a tip from Jester.

Communists have killed well over 100 million people. The Spanish contribution has been modest, at only an estimated 4,176 deaths, dwarfed by China with 82 million and Russia with 21 million. But Spain may not be done yet.

The Communist Party of Spain was formed by groups that broke away from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, which is currently in charge. On Monday, the Spanish government is issuing 135,000 copies of a postage stamp to celebrate a century of attempting to impose slavery and genocide on the country:

Counting Stars has background:

For years [Partido Comunista de España/Communist Party of Spain] was the voice of Stalin in Spain… The organization was linked to all kinds of atrocities during the Spanish Civil War, where -with the support of Soviet NKVD agents- it managed to turn the Republican zone into a de facto Soviet dictatorship, including supporting a purge against the Trotskyists of the POUM [Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification] in the purest style of Stalin’s dictatorship. … [T]oday it continues to support dictatorships like Cuba, communist China, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 2013, its youth even expressed their “solidarity” with North Korea, the world’s most brutal dictatorship.

The struggle against totalitarian evil did not end when the Berlin Wall fell. It will never end.

At least we don’t have to worry about anyone issuing a stamp with a swastika. All serious threats to liberty now come from the left.

On a tip from R F.

On a tip from Jester.