Communism is clearly a modern form of slavery, as I’ll explain below. Yet recent opinion polls show that communism is ridiculously popular with younger generations of Americans, especially when it’s presented as “socialism.”

In 2020, 49 percent of Gen Z and 47 percent of Millennials said they viewed socialism favorably, numbers that dipped slightly in 2022. That same year, 58 percent of young Democrats said they had a positive view of socialism (compared with only 29 percent who had a positive view of capitalism). These numbers are all the more horrifying when you consider what communism actually demands of us.

Communism is slavery that poses as justice. This has been proven over 100 years of history and by at least 100 million murders at the hands of communist regimes treating their human subjects as chattel. Socialism is the weasel word that paves the path to the slavery we politely call communism or Marxism.

I’ve grown frustrated with well-meaning people who bend over backward to try to explain how Marxism doesn’t work or how capitalism is so much better for a healthy economy. These perfectly reasonable arguments fall flat because they’re incomprehensible to the vast majority of Americans today.

We occasionally see statements that compare slavery and communism. They’ve come from a survivor of Maoist China, a public intellectual, the Victims of Communism Foundation, a 19th-century political philosopher, and even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. But it simply isn’t enough.

The similarity between Marxism and slavery must be shouted from the rooftops,

Imagine going out to take your dog for a walk on the National Mall and ending up in handcuffs, all because your dog was not on a leash. This scenario sounds absurd in America. But it happened to Fox News commentator Dana Perino’s husband under the National Park Service’s regulations for the National Mall, which have criminal consequences.  

The National Park Service is not an outlier. Across the federal government, federal agencies have seized a broad grant of power from Congress to write whatever regulations they deem “necessary” and back them with the power of criminal enforcement. These regulations are quietly passed through rule-making, where only the very most attentive of people would notice. The result is many people are regularly violating criminal laws that they do not even know exist.  

To make matters worse, many of these regulatory crimes do not require that an individual know what they are doing is wrong. Our criminal law traditionally requires someone to have a “guilty mind.”  But with many of these criminal laws, no such “mens rea,” or mental state, is required.  

The problem is out of control. No one knows how many separate crimes there are, including the Department of Justice. Researchers have tried counting, with one 2019 effort identifying at least 5,199 statutory crimes. Regulatory crimes are orders of magnitude greater, with estimates of the number of regulatory crimes ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 separate offenses.

This is inconsistent with basic ideas of self-government and the intentions of those

It must be said that it was nice to spend a Saturday afternoon in a tightly packed movie theater full of people who are enthusiastic to see a movie. That doesn’t happen frequently anymore, shy of hyper-successful films like “Dune: Part II” and “Barbie.” It is rare nowadays to get turned away at the box office because the theater is full, as the guy behind me was; my local theater is still having trouble giving away free “Furiosa” posters.  

However, it shouldn’t be surprising that animated films would be the things that break the trend. “Kung Fu Panda 4” grossed $545 million this spring primarily because it was the only animated movie in theaters through three months, and “Despicable Me 4” is currently tracking for an $80 million opening for the July 4 weekend. April’s rerelease of “Shrek 2” grossed more than Pixar’s last three releases combined. 

Naturally, the surprise comes in the fact that this opening is for a Disney film — coming from a studio that is facing enormous amounts of burnout and controversy due to its perceived partisan slant, declining quality, and proclivity for anti-creative decision-making, and that doesn’t include this week’s Project Veritas sting. In 2019, Disney produced eight of the 10 most popular blockbusters of the year, and seven of them broke the billion-dollar mark at the box office. In 2023, seven of their eight films were box-office disasters. Disney is an unwieldy unprofitable sinking ship, and the majority of its franchises are battered and exhausted.  

An animated family picture like