One morning in January of 1981, my mother figured out that a nice older couple who lived in our neighborhood would be driving right past our house on their way to the airport. They were on their way to an important event, she explained: one of them was going to be the new president.

She handed me and my toddler brother little American flags. We stood on the lawn and watched as a black limo, flanked by a pair of motorcycle cops, cruised down the quiet suburban street. Ronald Reagan smiled and waved at us through the window. We waved our little flags. My mother cried.

When I was growing up, being an American felt like being a little bit magical. You had magical powers! You could step smartly into any city in Europe and instantly be swept into vibrant expat communities. People from other countries would call you “Yank” or “the American” and marvel that you came from such a wonderful place. You felt so lucky! You were the same nationality as Madonna! Walt Disney! Michael Jordan! Rocky!

My mother also loved the Ukrainian comedian Yakov Smirnoff, maybe because he sounded like her grandmother. “What a country!” was his catchphrase, and it became hers after she saw Moscow on the Hudson. Her family lore consisted of story after story of how America was the greatest thing since noodle kugel. I was taught early and often that it had saved all my great-grandparents, and my grandparents generously repaid the favor by heading back to Europe to defeat National Socialism and Communism.

They wiped the floor with the Nazis. The Communists, not so much. It took Reagan, of course, to finally end Communism in Europe. Democracy and freedom finally could flow freely around the world!

Yet here we are, more than 30 years later, facing down an old foe. Not the Soviets this time. Not the Chicoms. Not the Cubans and not the Madurans.

In 2020, the Communists use perfect postmodern American English, or as some call it, Bugspeak.

Fear the Kids of America

Look around you. Soak it in. Congratulations, you’re living in the last days of disco, the hushed twilight before the steel jaws clamp tight around your ankles. “When did these Marxists get here?” you ask, bewildered, as your grown kids and their college friends show up to requisition your house for the local autonomous zone.

You stare at these bugspeaking wokies like Timothy Busfield when he finally sees the ghosts playing baseball out in the corn field. A spectre is haunting the United States, and its disembodied form is swiftly taking shape. Communists! Reds! Pinkos! They’re heeeeeeere!

From deep within our bluest cities a mindless mob has been raised. Gun stores are emptying out as sane people with things to protect prepare to protect them. Many are terrified and say nothing that might enrage the mob. Instead they whisper to friends about plans to flee to Texas or Montana or even abroad. Will Israel let me in? How hot does it get in Australia? Because how can a normal person fight back against the mob? Weakness and appeasement rule the day. To paraphrase C-3P0, it’s the “let the wokie win” strategy.

I guess the Left saw their opening once the pandemic caused the sudden economic collapse of millions of households. They pressed their advantage with the Floyd murder (“never let a crisis go to waste!”) and then charged forward unopposed and unstoppable. Who can stop them now? How are you supposed to stand athwart history yelling STOP when not a single GOP “leader” (LOL) has your back, and instead shrugs and heads to a fundraiser as you are cancelled, tarred, fired, feathered, and doxxed?

Black Lives Matter, Inc., a self-declared Marxist organization, may be the International Left’s cudgel du jour (and the newest billion-dollar corporation in America), but the armies of the woke are mostly college-educated millennials. Our enemies are not AWFLS (affluent white female liberals); they’re the sons and daughters of the AWFLS.

I call them BARFs: Bisexual Angry Radical Feminists, and they have been guzzling Milk of Marxnesium since elementary school. BARFs hate three things most of all, in this order: white people, Trump, and the United States.

No Senate speech or GOP bill or strongly worded tweet will stop them, either, because they believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing but the total and unconditional immolation of the country. Communism’s 103-year march: 1917 to 2020.

Maybe the Great Filter is what happens when half the sentient beings on any given planet read a few pages of Marx in some senior seminar and take a wrecking ball to the only functioning parts of their home.

Spenser Rapone, you tried to warn us!

Sigh. Well, we’ve got no choice. We must, yet again, stand athwart history and stop the madness, if we can. I’m starting with the address below. I humbly offer it here for President Trump and warmly suggest he crib freely from it, Joe Biden style. Perhaps he can deliver it in a stirring July 4th speech delivered in front of the World War II Memorial in D.C.

If it hasn’t been torn down by then.

Independence Day 2020: Keep America America

My fellow Americans:

In July of 2017, I traveled to Warsaw and addressed the wonderful people of Poland. In my speech that day, I praised Poland for its tireless battle against the Nazis, and then against Communism. With America’s help, the great nations of the world finally defeated both. Today, the people of Poland live in peace and enjoy all the blessings of freedom.

That was just three years ago. Little did we know that the same failed ideology that swept across Eastern Europe after World War II would be reborn as a virulent new political movement here in America in the year 2020.

It is no coincidence that this movement emerged just months before a crucial election. The radical Left knows that I remain their greatest obstacle to a full socialist takeover of our great country.

It’s why they spent three years trying to convince the world that I was a Russian asset. It’s why they spent another year trying to impeach me for their own corruption in Ukraine. It’s why they attack me so ferociously. But make no mistake—their real goal is not to defeat me, but to permanently defeat and dismantle the American way of life. I’m just the one guy in their way.

Today, just turn on the news and you can witness for yourself this new form of radical leftwing terror that is stalking our streets, tearing down our monuments, burning our buildings, and destroying everything in its path. To those who study history, the tactics are familiar: brutality, humiliation, public shaming, and hatred.

Blue cities, led by Democrats for decades, have been run right into the ground. Democrat mayors and governors have allowed mass homeless populations to take over public spaces and parks, leaving them unusable by hardworking taxpayers. This year, these same Democrat leaders stood by as looters pillaged and destroyed small businesses, vandalized synagogues, terrorized residents, and burned down entire police precincts. Mobs were allowed to take over parts of cities and establish lawless zones patrolled by armed felons.

So far several people have been shot, one killed, in Seattle alone. The police in these blue cities have been turned into the enemy. Unable to properly do their job, many have been forced to pull out. In the absence of law enforcement, the promised peace has not arrived. Imagine that. Crime has not gone down in these cities—instead, it has skyrocketed. Democrats in these cities are getting exactly what they voted for.

If the radical Left ever get their hands on the White House again, make no mistake—this will be our future, everywhere.

Because these local Democrat mayors have decided to cave to the young, radical leftists who hate America. These radicals seek to totally destroy the country we love.

We seek to strengthen America, to make it great again and keep it great for future generations.

These vicious mobs even hate their fellow Americans. They hate people with different political views, and they especially hate good people of faith. They allow antisemitism to fester among their ranks. They tear down statues of saints. They even seek to demolish Christian depictions of Jesus Christ. They seek to divide us by color and ethnicity and anything else they can think of.

They want us to descend into the depraved depths of political purges, cancellations, doxxings, and ruin, anytime someone says or posts anything that does not adhere perfectly to their false liturgy of hate.

Ronald Reagan was the last American leader who deeply understood the threat to freedom posed by Communism. He fought against it in the 1930s as the head of the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood, and he fought against it as governor during the protest movement of the 1960s. He saw it for exactly what it was, which is why he always stood against it.

He helped bring down Communism in the East. But now, in the middle of a cruel pandemic, it has been reborn anew in the West. This insidious movement has had many names: Marxism, Socialism, Communism. But it’s always the same: they seek to build a bleak fascist regime as they promise a Utopian fantasy world. In this fictitious utopia, everyone is equal, everyone is the same, and there is no dissent, because everyone can finally be happy.

In reality, this loser ideology brutalizes and destroys the human spirit everywhere it has ever been tried. It delivers its false utopia by first destroying existing society and traditions, starting with the family. It first must separate children from their parents so it can more effectively brainwash and indoctrinate them with its poisonous ideas.

This is precisely what the billion-dollar Marxist organization Black Lives Matter believes. Once it has turned children against their parents, it can use them to denounce and shame members of their own families who choose not to follow the new rules. Sound familiar? This is happening as we speak, in American families today.

Next, this enemy seeks to infiltrate the educational system. They have successfully done this unopposed for over 50 years. As so many parents have discovered, America-hating Marxists have seeded school systems across the country with teachers and curricula steeped in the terrible ideas of the radical Left. American families have saved and sacrificed to send their precious children to prestigious universities, only to have their children’s minds filled with a hateful fiction: that America is evil, and only once the evil American system is destroyed can there be any justice.

Now we can plainly see the fruits of these efforts. Dangerous autonomous zones are allowed to form in cities run by leftwing mayors. These lawless Jonestowns in every town are a peek into the future if these Marxists get their way.

Make no mistake: when so-called peaceful protestors scream “no justice, no peace,” you can take them at their word. They are announcing to the world that they will not stop their destructive rampage until America as we know it is crushed beneath their feet. And by America, I mean our Constitution, our system of justice, and our entire way of life. Some families that dared to hang the American flag at their homes have even been victims of vicious arson attacks.

This civil war began under the guise of a protest against police brutality. How can looting and burning be the answer to addressing police brutality? The American people, all of us, totally disavow police misconduct, violence, and racism in all its forms. We condemn those who seek to persecute, harm, or hate others based on race, gender, and religion. We have always been a home for legal immigrants of every nation, who have found America to be a safe harbor where they could worship freely and openly, and live in harmony, side-by-side with friendly neighbors of every creed and color.

That is the America we love.

Our present enemy rejects these values totally. They hate these values, they hate you, and they hate your president. If they could, they would burn down the White House—tonight. If they had the chance, they would take over our government and the justice system and grind it to dust. Every copy of our Constitution and our precious Bill of Rights would be shredded, and the mob would cheer and call for more.

Communist utopias do have one thing going for them: they have a perfect track record. 100% of Communist utopian societies have ended in misery, mass torture, and genocide. Anytime you hear a braying Communist describe the marvelous utopian society they’ll build, start building an ark, or risk drowning in the bottomless ocean of blood that inevitably results.

Communists are strict procrusteans. They will cut or stretch you to fit the bed they make you sleep in. For your own good, of course.

From the Soviet gulags to the Cambodian disaster called the Khmer Rouge, to the terrible Cuban nightmare to our south, and the ongoing tragedy of Venezuela, true Communism has indeed been tried, and everywhere it has ended in total abject failure.

Human beings do not like Communism. The human spirit craves liberty, independence, and for the freedom to be left alone­—especially by oppressive regimes that do not tolerate dissent and punish wrongthink.

But, sadly, decades of complacent politicians, on the Left and the Right, allowed radical leftists to set the rules of speech on campuses and across social media. Free speech is now routinely curtailed and punished, at schools, in the classroom, and online. It’s now perfectly acceptable to call for the destruction of the government, to call for the death of a policeman, and to accuse innocent people of racism. But you can be banned for retweeting a meme.

American families historically have demanded little from their governments other than basic safety and security. Too often they’ve received nothing, and paid dearly for it.

Families beg their mayors and governors, their representatives and senators, for clean streets free of tents and drug-addicted vagrants. They demand a robust police force to keep criminals at bay. They expect a fair justice system. They don’t want to be burdened with crushing property taxes to pay for failed leftwing schools they can’t even send their children to. The Left has failed the people of these cities. We can no longer allow this to go on.

Three years ago in Warsaw, I pledged that America would always honor its commitment to Article 5 of NATO, the mutual defense treaty. We would defend our democratic allies against the enemies of freedom. And we will.

Today I am calling for the same countries we helped liberate from the grip of Communism to speak out against the dangerous leftwing ideology now seeking power here. We ask all NATO nations to condemn the forces of the Left attempting to weaken and destroy the greatest beacon of freedom that has ever shined its light on Earth.

I am also announcing today that we are planning to host a summit with the leaders of every country in the world that managed to throw off the cruel shackles of Communism. We will invite the survivors of Communist dictatorships from around the world, including Venezuelan freedom fighters, survivors of the Cambodian Killing Fields, former political prisoners from Cuba, and victims of the Chinese Communist regime. We will join together to expose and denounce fascism, totalitarianism, and the horrors of Communism everywhere and anywhere.

Next, I am calling for a total defunding of all educational institutions that allow their teachers and professors to spread anti-American hatred and indoctrination. No public school or university that accepts federal funding will be permitted to teach students the false and pernicious lie that America is evil. We will be performing a careful review of federal educational funding, and immediately defund schools and colleges that teach our children to hate their own country and their fellow citizens.

Third, we will be enforcing a 10-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of destroying a historical monument on public property.

Last month, the mob desecrated and tore down statues of General Ulysses S. Grant, a man who fought to free the slaves, and Catholic Saint Junipero Serra. Make no mistake: next they will come for the men on the face of Mount Rushmore, for the Lincoln Memorial, for our founders, and finally, for the real flesh and blood of any Americans who refuse to appease the mob. What they do to the statues and historical monuments is what they seek to do to all who stand in their way. This is domestic terrorism, and we must deal with it accordingly.

We will always condemn injustice and police brutality, but we will never support defunding or abolishing the police. Our cities are under attack like never before, and need more funding, not less. Only an insane person—or a person who craves chaos and the chance to grab power in that chaos—would choose to remove law enforcement from lawless areas.

Finally, today we urge all patriotic Americans to fly the glorious American flag proudly. Stand for the national anthem. Take the pledge of allegiance. Never take these simple traditions for granted.

The left hates our patriotism. They scorn our flag. They kneel for our anthem. But now I speak for all good and decent Americans when I say to the young people who have been taught practically from birth to hate their own nation: we love you. We have failed you by allowing you to be taught these lies, and for that we owe you a great apology. Your lives are precious, and as our fellow citizens, we want you to thrive and succeed.

We urge you to open your eyes to the poisonous history you have been taught. America is not perfect—no nation is. Why not join us and help us make a more perfect union, together? We don’t make America better by setting fires and smashing statues. We make it better by letting go of that hate and joining us in our campaign to make America great again.

We must defend America. We can never stop defending America. For we must never, ever allow the Left to win. We will not allow them to win. America is beautiful. America is miraculous. It is not just worth defending—it’s worth defending to our very last breath.

Today is July 4th, the day we declared our independence from a brutal and cruel regime that subjugated and oppressed our people. Today, I declare our independence from the radical Left and its cruel and oppressive Marxist ideology.

We have let that ideology run rampant in this country for far too long. We can no longer let it crush our young people with its lies and fictions. We must resist it, at all costs, and finally, once and for all, liberate our people, our cities, and our institutions from this all-time Biggest Loser of an idea. We will fight to maintain our hard-won freedom and liberty, and we will fight to defend our nation, from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

On this Independence Day, let’s renew our commitment to our nation, and to our long struggle against the Left. Because we must keep America great. Our very lives depend on it.

God Bless America, and may God bless each and every American.

A Final Thought

Twenty-three years after I watched the Reagans head to Washington, I attended a different sort of send-off. In the summer of 2004, I joined hundreds of others who had spontaneously gathered on the street outside a small funeral home in Santa Monica, California (the same city that the mob looted in May).

Inside the mortuary, President Reagan’s casket awaited transport before making one last trip to Washington, D.C., this time for his state funeral. The people on the street were somber, many held little American flags. Some shared stories and memories of the man. When a crazy hippie started yelling that she was glad Reagan was dead, the people around me told her to shut up.

Maybe, just maybe, there is hope for us yet.