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The Coronavirus Fifth Column: Lockdowns are a sight for sore socialists’ eyes – Governors ‘continue to hold people hostage to their dictatorial impulses’

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/the_coronavirus_fifth_column.html

By Eileen F. Toplansky

Excerpt: Leftists the world over are exploiting the pandemic in order to create their alleged utopias.  Vanessa Vallejo, a Colombian activist and columnist explains that

Whenever they come to power, communists work hard to create a clientele network that will vote for them and support them in the future. So instead of looking for real solutions to lift people out of poverty altogether, they offer them subsidies or useless jobs where citizens are dependent on politicians. At the same time, they make life difficult for entrepreneurs, resulting in more and more unemployed people who can be hooked into their clientele network. Many of them will not be able to get subsidies, but plunging them into poverty will make them easy prey to convince so long as the government offers them aid and blames right-wing entrepreneurs and politicians for their misery.

Sound familiar?  This is happening all across the United States.  The governors of states like Michigan, New York, New Jersey, California, and Pennsylvania continue to hold people hostage to their dictatorial impulses.

After all, “[c]ompanies have been forced to close, people cannot leave their homes so they can not ‘seek’ income on their own, many are sick or have sick relatives, and in this crisis, they have no way to pay the expenses raised by the calamity. In just a few weeks, government spending and the people who need help have both increased dramatically because people have lost their jobs.”

Eric Levitz  at Intelligencer can barely conceal his glee as he writes

Now, the world is besieged by a pandemic that threatens to kill 100,000 Americans if we’re lucky [emphasis mine] before triggering a global economic depression.

He believes that the COVID-19 pandemic has “expanded the spectrum of imaginable futures and political possibilities. And some of those possibilities have been a sight for sore socialists’ eyes.”

Thus, “there’s good news for progressives” as they see a golden opportunity to assert that employer-based health care system is inadequate and the market economy which results in “gross inequality” must be dismantled.  To the Left, the pandemic “provides a vivid reminder that the state is perfectly capable of sheltering its constituents from the market’s mercilessness [.]”  Enter a “progressive movement defined by the twin goals of Medicare for All and Green New Deal [that] might thrive in COCI-19’s wake.”  Leftists assert the need to

  • mount a robust, progressive response to climate crisis
  • transcend the nation state
  • establish “cross-class and inter-ethnic solidarities”
  • include the undocumented by providing cash assistance
  • assist “stigmatized constituencies”, i.e., people in jail

The ultimate goal for the Left is “to fortify the progressive project” by “cultivat[ing] border-collapsing modes of social identity and secur[ing] a modicum of political power for the world’s disenfranchised and dispossessed.”

At the Jacobin, an American socialist, Marxist quarterly based in New York, Ben Burgis emphasizes that

Progressives and democratic socialists need to make the case that there’s a third alternative to business-as-usual centrists running the states Trump wants to ‘liberate’ and the cynical demagogues who want to feed low-income workers to the capitalist death machine by prematurely ending the lockouts [emphasis mine].

Consequently, he emphasizes that “the pandemic can be an opportunity for the Left if [they’re] prepared to fight for bold measures.”

In fact, the “Democratic Socialists of America have an estimated 10,000 new members — growth that organizers attribute, in part, to the coronavirus pandemic.” Since “[t]he financial toll will be felt for years — maybe decades — to come, and with Congress’s push to expand the social safety net, more and more Americans could be open to government playing a bigger role in their lives. There is, in other words, great potential for systemic change in this as-yet-unwritten future — a potential that [Democratic Socialists of America DSA] members recognize.”

Madeline Osburn reports that “[a] network of Democratic non-profits and super PACs are funneling millions of dollars toward advertisements in key swing states, with the intent of politicizing the Wuhan coronavirus crisis and blaming the pandemic on President Donald Trump.”

The Washington Post reported the group Pacronym is planning to spend $5 million on ads attacking Trump’s response to the pandemic. Pacronym, whose board of directors includes former Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, said its ads will target key 2020 swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona.

Money is distributed to progressive causes by a number of Democratic PACs, e.g., Sixteen Thirty Fund. In fact, “in 2018, Politico reported that the Sixteen Thirty Fund ‘funneled millions of dollars to progressive causes’ by setting up a secret-money network of other groups, which were the ‘most prolific political advertisers of 2018’ when combined.”

Trevor Loudon has documented how “communists and socialists are infiltrating the Democrat Party — some openly, some secretly and some even running for public office on the Democratic Party ballot line.”  In reality, “politicizing the growing fears, illnesses and deaths of American citizens” is a potent weapon in the Leftwing arsenal.

And, yet, as Vanessa Vallejo states, “What is happening in the United States is a novelty that, once again, shows us how strong and important are the values and ideas on which this great country was built. In different parts of the U.S., there have been protests, including armed ones. Also, in different parts of the U.S., police have declared that they will not comply with orders to keep people completely confined by preventing activities that do not represent any danger and are necessary for the survival of many people.”

The declarations that we are seeing in the United States these days on this matter are shocking to those of us who come from countries where people have simply become accustomed to obeying any nonsense spouted by the ruler of the day. To see a policeman telling the media that he will always ‘put constitutional rights before political opinions’ and that therefore, he will not abide by draconian measures that go against common sense is encouraging for those of us who defend freedom.

The coronavirus has cleared the field for communists. It is an opportune moment for the left in general, but above all, for those who already wield a certain amount of power and want to perpetuate themselves and implant their totalitarian paradise once and for all.

Freedom-loving Americans need to understand the existence of this fifth column and then assiduously fight the penetration of enemies to the state.

Eileen can be reached at [email protected]  

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