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What does it take to break a country? Not much, as it turns out — just some determined leadership and enough eager shock troops.
Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution wrecked Communist China for a decade, starting in 1966 as Mao's justification for eliminating his rivals at home and displacing the complacent Soviets abroad as the vanguard of a global Communist revolution.
It was a time of such murderous chaos and ideological-driven oppression that even The Guardian denounced the Cultural Revolution on its 50th anniversary in 2016. "Its bewildering complexity and almost unfathomable brutality was such that to this day historians struggle to make sense of everything that occurred during the period," the (usually) garbage-lefty paper wrote. "The Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives and thrust China into 10 years of turmoil, bloodshed, hunger and stagnation."
The Cultural Revolution didn't police itself, of course. For that, Mao relied on his Red Guards — young Communist zealots who had never known life under anything but Mao and whose intolerance and energy Mao set loose on the rest of China. Not even cats were safe after the Red Guards denounced them as symbols of "bourgeois decadence." Historian Frank Dikötter wrote, "Walking through the streets of the capital at the end of August [1966], people saw dead cats lying by the roadside with their front paws tied together."
There are few things more dangerous than a young lefty zealot, programmed by propaganda from the cradle, whose beliefs and actions are untempered by compassion and humanity that the Party never allowed to be inculcated. Whether they wore Mao tunics, swastikas, or the red neckerchief of Stalin's Komsomol is immaterial. Their use as the Party's shock troops and ideological enforcers was universal.
Shock troops like the Red Guards or Hitler's brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (SA) are so dangerous that once their mission is completed — whether or not they even truly understand that mission — they must be dispensed with before they turn all that fury against the Führer or the Party Chairman. Once the SA helped Hitler consolidate power, he ordered the smaller and more professional Schutzstaffel (SS) to wipe out the SA's leadership. The SA largely withered on the vine.
Long before the Cultural Revolution ended (with Mao's death), Mao had gotten enough use out of his Red Guards. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) disbanded Red Guard units, starting in 1976, and Mao ordered 17 million of them spread out and exiled to the countryside where their power was effectively neutered.
Among Mao's internal exiles was a young Xi Jinping who, we may safely presume, learned valuable lessons in both how to take power and (more importantly) how to keep it.
In 2025 America, you can see a nascent effort to break this country, at the very least financially, by means that Mao (or Xi, for that matter) would find familiar.
The first time an American lefty gave me real chills, it was supposed to be a funny meme, but what I saw was the murderous intent of a Red Guard.
The infamous screencap — that went immediately viral — came from 2016 during a heated confrontation between some Donald Trump supporters and a group of progressive Hillary Clinton supporters. One of them stood out.
No, not this one...
...I can laugh at her all day and still have plenty of schadenfreude remaining to keep laughing long after the sun goes down.I mean this one, the one who became the Triggered Feminist meme:
It's been almost 10 years, and I still get chills along with the laughs.
Strip away the anger in the set of her face and the tension in her neck, and just look at her eyes. What I see is what Robert Shaw's Quint from "Jaws" saw in the eyes of a shark: "lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye." Hers are the eyes of one human being who would happily — if that's the correct adverb — corral other human beings into cattle cars.
"Coldly" might be closer to the mark. There doesn't seem to be much capacity for joy in those eyes. To be fair, the camera does sometimes lie. Maybe our anonymous progressive friend was just caught up in the heat of the moment.
But I think there's more to it than that because I've spent the last eight-plus years looking for similarly dead eyes set into the faces of America's professional protest class, and they aren't difficult to find. At all.
And Another Thing: I should mention that the use of youthful shock troops for the benefit of government authorities* got going under America's first (and hopefully only) red-diaper president, Barack Obama. Obama was a disciplined radical, rarely pushing things any harder than a rhetorical "get in their faces" and "punch back twice as hard."
(*As opposed to youthful shock troops being used against the government, like the protest movement of the 1960s.)
What does it take to accuse anyone who opposes allowing male predators into women's space of violent sexism? What does it take to don the kaffiya of a genocidal terrorist group and insist it's the Israelis committing genocide? What does it take to be an environmentalist and burn down a Tesla dealership? What does it take to appear smug and calm when explaining you were inspired by the execution-style murder of Luigi Mangione?
Don't believe that last item? Watch this clip.
TERROR: Valerie Costa of Seattle, WA, openly admits to stalking and threatening Elon Musk and Tesla, claiming she draws inspiration from Luigi Mangione. pic.twitter.com/SUvCJPCqUa
— @amuse (@amuse) March 10, 2025
If that's more than one small step away from loading Tesla drivers, Trump voters, DOGE enthusiasts, and other Untermenschen into cattle cars, it isn't much more than that.
Anyway, the answer to my question about what it takes to pursue such blatant lies or oxymorons is quite simple: devotion to the Cause.
"Even in the most extreme scenario, the actions of Elon Musk and DOGE do not come close to the scale of routine private-sector layoffs," Data Republican (small r) posted to X the other day. "The real-world impact on everyday citizens is minimal—yet the response has been escalated into a campaign of terror, where violence and intimidation are used to punish those who associate with DOGE."
"Make no mistake," she concluded, "this is not about economic hardship—it is about power. The corrupt elite feel their grip slipping, and they are resorting to domestic terrorism to hold on."
To be fair, not all of today's protestors are filled with the intolerant zealotry of a Red Guard enforcer. Some of them are just sad and laughable.
LOL: Federal worker, wearing a mask outdoors, says it was “frightening” to receive an email. pic.twitter.com/jmb475BM4A
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 10, 2025
Should the Revolution come, that sad excuse for a revolutionary won't even be dispensed with against the bullet-riddled wall — a simple push into one of the Party's thousands of mass graves will do.
It seems like only earlier this week [it was only earlier this week, Steve —Editor] that I reminded readers there's ONE TRILLION DOLLARS at stake — just in this year's budget! — and that people will murder over a whole lot less than a trillion dollars. So what's committing a little arson against the Left's current Two Minutes Hate target compared to murder? They're still in the friendly warning stage.
There's much more going on than just violence against Teslas and the dealerships that sell them — going back much further.
Lachlan Phillips is a former member of the radical environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion, who said on X this week that he "produced over 60 videos for them and helped with several protests." From his insider position, he says he "can tell you directly [that it] was never about the climate. It was about controlling you."
"Specifically, it was about mobilising 3.5% of the population into permanent revolutionary protest in order to trigger a Communist revolution. (Per Trotsky, Sharp, Hallam, Mao)."
Once the darling of the environmentalist Left, Tesla founder Elon Musk and his company became objects of scorn. "After years of pushing against fossil fuels, they were suddenly vehemently opposed to Elon Musk and his EVs. It was mind-boggling to witness." All it took was DOGE gutting the Left's free ride on taxpayer dollars via USAID.
“The issue is never the issue," an SDS radical baldly admitted more than five decades ago. "The issue is always the revolution.” To that, fully recovered red-diaper baby David Horowitz added, "In other words, the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause, which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution."
Nothing has changed on that score.
What has changed — at least since the 1980s, when I became politically aware — is the hate-fueled brazenness of America's domestic Red Guards in the streets, our digital Brownshirts online. They are lefty street thugs whose job it is to make life unlivable until we give them what they want, and what they want is the same as it ever was. When out of power, the Left desires the destruction of whatever society the Left inhabits and the establishment of a lefty dictatorship. Or perhaps "theocracy" would be the better word, given the zealotry.
Cut off from their government funds — thanks, DOGE! — and with a deeply cynical senior leader who seems happy enough hanging out at Martha's Vineyard and counting his Netflix money, America's progressive revolutionaries don't stand much chance.
But that doesn't mean that things won't get worse before they get better. Absent that senior leadership, Lord only knows what trouble our young lefties will get into.
There is also a deadly irony, the thing young revolutionaries are too blinkered by youthful enthusiasm to see. Should we ever give today's young mobs what they want, it will only hasten the day that the Party elders dispense with them — like Mao's Red Guards or Hitler's SA — by whatever means are convenient to the Party.
We are the only thing standing between our would-be destroyers and their own destruction.
What a shame it is — time after time, country after country, revolution after revolution — that a self-preserving sense of irony comes only with age that successful revolutionaries rarely live long enough to appreciate.
Last Week's Essay: Off-Ramps to Nowhere
