People afraid to speak plainly, censoring themselves to please the ruling regime, knowing their lives will be ruined if they dissent from Party dogma, banning books and changing school curricula to teach Party-approved lies.

Not Hong Kong. America. Right now.

Read the news from Hong Kong after the Chinese Communist crackdown and you won't find ONE SINGLE THING the Left isn't doing to Americans and their children right now. The details differ slightly - which parts of history must be erased, which ideas are forbidden - but not by much.

In the 2010s we marveled at "liberals" making common cause with profoundly illiberal Islamist regimes - gay rights obsessives sticking up for ideologies that throw gays off buildings or bury them under brick walls. How could they not understand the dangers?

Today's anti-racism Legacy of Slavery 1619 Project obsessives are partners with the Chinese Communist Party, a regime practicing actual human slavery and racial supremacy RIGHT NOW, as state policy, not just a few loudmouths popping off on social media.

How can this be? Simple: the American Left, Islamists, and the Chinese Communist Party agree on essentials of how "social justice" should be enforced. Speech codes, punishing dissent, no inalienable rights, totalitarianism, elite rule, steep curbs on what people get to vote on.

They disagree on some of the particulars - who should be allowed into the elite, what speech should be banned, how dissidents should be punished, whether to allow voting at all - but these are minor quibbles that can be settled later. They are in complete agreement on the basics.

One thing they all agree on is that society should be designed from the top down by its masters, who must have the power to enforce their vision. They all want Year Zero: destruction of the past, elimination of an old system that grew and changed with public input.

It's not a coincidence that the American Left is acting like the Taliban today. They're doing what they do for the EXACT SAME REASON. They understand that people have to feel afraid, destabilized, unsettled, cut loose from the past and its glories so they accept the new order.

You know how conservatives always needle the Left by saying Marxism has never worked anywhere it's been tried? Well, the Left KNOWS that perfectly well. That's why they need to murder the past. They need Americans to forget they were once giants.

Just as China needs Hong Kongers to forget all that they were, all that they had, everything great and glorious they inherited, and begin from a Year Zero moment where they remember only that they are slaves to Communism, so the Left will force Americans to forget what they were.

China is banning every book and school course in Hong Kong that might give young people funny ideas about nonviolent resistance, independence, or revolution. Of course they're banning all talk of Tiananmen Square, but they're also banning Gandhi and MLK.

If the Left takes power in November, MLK will be banned in American schools before too much longer. Just wait. He said too many things that dissent from hard-Left orthodoxy. The "I Have a Dream" speech is pure poison to the Woke Taliban. It's anti-matter to Black Lives Matter.

They might not erase MLK as the Chinese Communist Party would, but they'll rewrite his story to remove all the problematic parts and remake him into some kind of proto-Woke Taliban, or they'll say he foolishly overestimated the moral capacity of white America. Just wait.

Read any story about what's happening in Hong Kong right now, and I guarantee it won't take you more than five minutes to find a parallel story in the United States, looking no further back in the news than the beginning of 2020 - probably the beginning of last MONTH.

In the long run, the Chinese Communists will utterly annihilate and dominate the woke poseurs of the American Left. Whiny nincompoops who claim words leave physical scars on their bodies will be no match for the hard men of the CCP.

And if the American Left insists on imposing its shrill, psychotic version of Marxism, why shouldn't the rest of the world turn to the CCP for leadership? Beijing can argue it practices totalitarianism with decades of experience, effective leadership, and a firm vision.

Who on Earth is going to prefer being ruled by the rolling nervous breakdown that is the American Left and its tiny warring bands of single-issue neurotic fascists? They will forever be defined by what they hate, not by what they build. They'll never stop squabbling and purging.

Here's a cold, hard fact: Hong Kong under ruthless Chinese Communist domination will be a heartbreaking hell for its brave democracy activists... but it will function better, it will be safer and more prosperous, than any American city run by the Democrat Party. /end