I grew up in the 1960s and saw first-hand how easy it was to dehumanize soldiers returning from Vietnam as racist killers. Nowadays it is politically correct to decry that horrific treatment and talk about it as an aberration of American decency, but it was much more than that.

It was part of a well-planned campaign by the antiwar left to destroy confidence in our government and our institutions for the purpose of overthrowing our “imperialistic” overlords. Sadly, that campaign continues, only today it is not an underground movement but one led by members of Congress.

Indeed, the revolutionary theater of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling out the Border Patrol as dangerous jack-booted thugs goes a long way toward accomplishing in one afternoon what it took years for the antiwar movement to do to Vietnam-era GIs.

The freshman congresswoman visited two border facilities managed by U.S.Customs and Border Enforcement on July 1, including the one at Clint, Texas.

“In that last facility, I was not safe from the officers,” Ocasio-Cortez lamented to the reporters who were trailing her like hyenas waiting for a lioness to corner its prey.

They didn’t have to wait long. AOC had her bloody claws fully extended and in an interview with Yahoo News later that night she went in for the kill.

“Are we headed for fascism? Yes. I don’t think there’s a question. If you actually take the time to study, and to look at the steps, and to see how government transforms under authoritarian regimes, and look at the political decisions and patterns of this president, the answer is yes.”

Such is the rhetoric of a true believer. Whether you are talking about Che or Mao or Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground, the absolute moral certainty of the revolutionary left is what allows them to spit in the face of soldiers returning from Vietnam or to call ICE agents Nazis or to vote against funding for border camps so that they can complain about lack of funding for border camps.

But make no mistake. The socialist-communist attack on the Border Patrol or on Immigration and Customs Enforcement as fascist is no accident or mere theater. It is part of a long-range plan to delegitimize the government of the United States as a whole. Here’s what Ayers and his co-authors wrote in their 1974 manifesto for the revolutionary Weather Underground:

“Fascism in this country is not a challenge to those in power by some more reactionary gang on the outside. Fascism is perpetrated on Third World people from the seats of power: the Pentagon, the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court. In these places liberal and fascist tendencies compete, but they also connive and conspire. Our strategy must be unity against existing fascism for the liberation of all oppressed people.”

It is the institutions of power in the United States that Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders want to destroy, and they will take any opening to do it. It was the United States Army in 1969. It is the Border Patrol in 2019.

But it isn’t just the target that has changed in the last 50 years. Ayers and his cohort dreamed while living underground in the 1970s of seeing their generation of revolutionaries put on coats and ties and infiltrate the seats of power to effect change from within. One measure of their success is that coats and ties are now largely passé. Another is that Congress is now full of members who have adopted the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s as their own. Thus, the Democratic leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, did not chasten his colleague from the House for her outrageous attack on uniformed Americans, but rather threw gasoline on her anti-American rhetoric. He tweeted the following:

“Acting @CBP Commissioner Morgan and other top leadership at U.S. Customs and Border Protection should be fired. A new, untainted team must be brought in to begin reining in the toxic culture at the border patrol. … Internal investigations aren’t enough. The leadership at @CBP, particularly Acting Commissioner Morgan, are too callous about the way children & their families are treated. That's why we need untainted professionals to be brought in from outside the @CBP structure immediately.”

Did you get that? Mark Morgan, who at the time Schumer tweeted had not even taken over at Customs and Border Protection, is “tainted.” The Border Patrol itself is “toxic.” This is all highly reminiscent of the rhetoric of the antiwar movement when soldiers were called “baby killers” and street marchers chanted, “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" But Ocasio-Cortez has a flair for the dramatic that surpasses anything we have seen in Congress for many years.

She was able to leverage her power as a member of Congress into a cudgel to attack the Border Patrol, claiming not just that the illegal immigrants in the detention center were being mistreated, but that somehow even the mighty AOC herself had been in danger just by entering the facility. Remember, she had already compared border detention facilities to “concentration camps,” thus escalating the rhetoric to the point where U.S. law officers were likened to Nazis.

“I see why CBP officers were being so physically and sexually threatening towards me,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. “Officers were keeping women in cells w/ no water & had told them to drink out of the toilets. ... This was them on their GOOD behavior in front of members of Congress.”

Forced to drink water out of toilets? Well, no; actually, that was just one more convenient lie told by AOC. From what anyone can tell, the cells in the immigration detention facility utilize standard-issue jail plumbing in which a toilet and sink are both incorporated in one stainless-steel fixture. If you had a toilet, you also had a sink. The idea that the cell had “no water” is therefore ridiculous, and just one more rhetorical flourish from a woman who will say anything to get attention.

What matters to the socialist left is creating discontent and isolating an enemy. During the Vietnam War, that meant the soldiers fighting overseas and the police maintaining order at home. Today it is the Border Patrol and ICE. Bill Ayers described the importance of creating the enemy as a “pig” in the 1969 manifesto “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”:

“[T]he pigs are ultimately the glue — the necessity — that holds the ... movement together; all of our concrete needs lead to pushing the pigs to the fore as a political focus.”

The Democratic left likes to call Trump “the divider in chief,” but the rhetoric of Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, Schumer and Nancy Pelosi shows who truly wants to divide the country. For the socialist left, a demonized Border Patrol is “the glue — the necessity — which holds the … movement together” as the Democratic Party pursues its globalist, open-borders, anti-American agenda.

AOC knows exactly what she is doing, and anyone who isn’t afraid of her and her fellow revolutionaries in Congress doesn’t know which way the wind is blowing.