One of the shibboleths of the left is that capital punishment is bad.

But they do believe in capital punishment.

Actually, the contemporary left believes a lot of things they claim not to believe. It is one of the reasons rational debate with them is impossible. Shifting goalposts has supplanted baseball as the national pastime. Like the Red Queen of Lewis Carroll, they sometimes have “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

To grasp this reality, one just needs to understand two things: 1) their parsing of the language and 2) they are pathological liars.

No, the contemporary left cannot kill you – yet – but they can, through cancel culture: end your career, destroy your business, ruin your reputation, prevent your children from attending the schools of their choice, have you falsely jailed or in some cases, get you killed by a proxy by inciting violence against you under false pretenses. Through their proxies in the Fascistic Oligarchy, they can send you and your family to a digital gulag by de-platforming your online presence, banning you from social media or preventing you from doing business with members of their cabal.

The contemporary left will also claim not to be socialists, bearded Marxists, or communists because their actions do not meet the dictionary definition of those word – that the government does not directly own the means of production or control the private economy, but collectivism has a secondary meaning that is harder to explain due to their use of government regulations, supervision of the private economy through alliances with private companies, societal bans on free speech, among others, to achieve the same ends.

These all play a part in the new definition of an old human desire – to have the power to rule over others.

As with almost everything else, things change and as they do the definitions should change to match them – and if nothing else, the hallmark of modern progressives is the changing of the meaning of words and phrases to fit their need of the moment. It is a battle of the denotation, the dictionary definition of a word, and the connotation, what the word means in practice. It is not unusual for something not to meet the strict dictionary definition and yet, in practice, have the same functional meaning. Collectivism (in which I lump socialism, Marxism, and communism), is such a word.

When the dictionary definition of socialism was coined, to own and central plan an economy meant that a government had to have ownership of the “means of production” which would have been the physical raw materials, manufacturing facilities and the employ of people. Today, as we have shifted away from the need for many of these physical means of “production” and toward more of an electronic society, the “means of production” has come to be more related to capital and fungible currency than a smokestack. If you control the flow of money, it is not necessary to own the physical assets because you can control the asset through money flow. It is the same with publicly financed entities, government routinely uses blackmail to force state and local governments to bend to their will – school funding is one of the more pernicious examples of how this “nice school you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it” process works.

Do not believe me? Take a gander at the just passed Covid-19 “relief bill”.

Some (not all) Americans will get a check for $1400, but to get that $1400, the taxpayer is stuck with a bill for around $5,750 – plus interest, because most of the money is borrowed. What a deal, right? Power in Washington is measured in money and to get a few peanuts, the farm was given away.

Do not be fooled, the left has no real interests in any of the philosophical aspects of any of the various forms of collectivism, save one, the fact that planning means control and control means power. They do not really give a damn whether there ever could be a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the only part of that interesting to them is the “dictatorship” part. The contradictory aspect of allying with the supposed enemy of the proletariat, the bourgeoise, in the form of giant global corporations and Big Tech, does not bother them in the least.

Their interest is not in philosophical debates over this or that economic theory, it is in statolatry, the literal worship of government.

As Humpty Dumpty told Alice, “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.”

America got a taste of what a leftist future would look like during the pandemic lockdowns. Governors like Cuomo, Whitmer, Newsome, Wolf, and Murphy showed what being the “master” was all about. And now the Biden administration and the Democrat controlled Congress are showing us what it means on a national level.

That future is a death sentence for America, capital punishment under any definition.