“Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’... Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse?... Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!  — Sinclair Lewis, "It Can't Happen Here"

Lewis, one of my favorite fiction writers, was also a shrewd culture commentator. He understood how fickle Americans could be and how easily we could fall into fascism if the right people came into power. 

He was also something of a prophet. How else could he have so accurately described the future Joe Biden in 1935?

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

Eighty-nine years later, our nation is in shambles, and we're beginning to understand that it can happen here.

Public education has become a bastion of indoctrination, our political system seems to be irreparably broken, and the administrative state seeks to control every aspect of our lives. 

Thirty years ago, many couldn't imagine some of these things we see happening today: 

It just goes on and on. 

The way forward will not be easy. The Left has control of academia, K-12 education, and the media, to name a few, and it will take courage and fortitude to defeat them. So what can we do to stop it? Here are a few ideas: 

It can indeed happen here. In the coming years, the Left will demand that you agree that 2+2=5, and when you refuse to applaud the madness, they will "discover who the independent people" are, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in "The Gulag Archipelago." 

Be the one who refuses to applaud. Our children and grandchildren with thank you for your courage. 

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