Here in Hollywood, where many are employed because of Chinese capital (like the good folks at the WHO), they are collectively celebrating the fact that Bill Maher's hope for a recession is here. These leftists can hardly believe the good fortune the coronavirus is heaping upon America. They eagerly lock themselves down while anticipating the day they can download a "GULAG" app that will allow them to snap and upload photos of anyone (like me) not obeying the latest martial law directive from Governor Gavin Newsome or Mayor Eric Garcetti, who last week promised "rewards to snitches." Only four weeks ago, Hollywood and the left were in the throes of a three-year-long tantrum, hounding Americans with endless arguments as to why they should surrender their freedoms, constitution, money, and very lives to their control with slogans such as:

The sky is falling (according to our climate models)!

Some people make less income than others!

Gun violence!

There is free health care in Sweden!

Jim Crow laws were in the South back in the 1950s!

America is not a perfect Utopia; it's just not fair!

Englishmen brought slaves to North America in 1619!

All of these arguments in fact have succeeded in mobilizing large portions of the electorate to vote for Democrats and resulted in their intermittent control of the U.S. House, governorships, and even the White House. However, after eight years of fraud and abuses of the Constitution by the Obama administration, America revolted by electing Donald Trump. Trump proceeded to fight back, exposing every detail of the left's fraudulent arguments, reducing them to nothing but echoes in the wind.

Donald Trump clearly was and is, as Nancy Pelosi often repeats, "an existential threat." While she typically ends this phrase with "to the United States of America," she really means "to a socialist United States of America" as well as "to globalism." Arguably, Donald Trump, a single individual, by sheer power of personality, willpower, chutzpah, skepticism, and love of country, has the left in retreat. In response, Democrats desperately tried to remove the existential threat by using the tools of state, critical to all leftist regimes, to achieve their goals. They demanded America surrender by way of a special counsel and Congress because:

Russia helped Trump win the election!

Trump mentioned something or other about Biden's corruption to the president of Ukraine!

These efforts fell totally flat. And then, at last, the left stumbled upon an argument for American surrender, to which the American people, and even President Donald Trump, capitulated without a fight:

Because you might catch a virus!

America has indeed surrendered to the left, without even realizing it. That's how Democrats like it, because that's what works. As I pointed out in my film, Dreams from My Real Father , Barack Obama succeeded as much as he did by using "stealth socialism." The idea was for America to wake up one day in a socialist state, without ever realizing how it happened. That is the only realistic path to socialist success when you have a bunch of church-going, freedom-loving, gun-toting free-marketeers as far as the eye can see. That's why candidate Obama ran in 2008 as a moderate, promising to cut the deficit in half and proclaiming, "I believe marriage is between a man, a woman and God" and "I will obey the Constitution." Once elected, the radical Obama betrayed the voters and imposed, often by fiat, the radical leftist agenda he was known for his entire life, with a big assist from a mainstream media whitewash of his past. Then, during the Obama presidency, the media worked 24/7 to paper over and misdirect all of Obama's radical policies and abuses of power.

Because of the coronavirus, the endgame of the leftist agenda is suddenly upon us. It's not even the "soft left" Scandinavian-style socialism that Bernie Sanders would have us believe was his newly found passion (replacing his lifelong Stalinist aspirations). No, what is happening today in America is the Maoist totalitarian leftist model that Barack Obama's pals in the Weather Underground preached for years. "Maoism" was the centerpiece of the ideology of Obama's "accidental neighbor," terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, who wrote the American communist manifesto in 1974 entitled Prairie Fire, inspired by Mao Tse-Tung's saying, "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire." Ayers argued, as did Mao, that an entire communist revolution and subjugation of society could be sparked by a single event. This idea rings true. Think about the Tunisian street vendor who self-immolated after receiving a citation for selling food without a permit that ignited the Arab Spring, leading to the fall of almost every Arab leader. Think of...the coronavirus. And think of what Chinese communist society looks like today:

Government invents and dictates laws on a daily basis as it pleases

Fines and imprisonment for disobeying

No right to assembly

House arrests

No freedom of worship

Total government control of the economy

No freedom of movement without identity papers

Does this sound familiar? Rather than follow the Swedish model of government response to the coronavirus, which was simply to recommend that the population take extra care, the United States followed the draconian communist Chinese example of Maoism — apparently based on the recommendations of Democrats Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. As a result, Maoism is becoming a reality for all Americans. Leftist politicians are drooling with glee now that their collective fantasy of being elevated to leadership in a distant far-off Utopia has become a present reality. Democrat leaders are barely able to contain themselves; their authoritian nature is bursting out at the seams. Cloned characters (think de Blasio, Newsom, Northam, Garcetti, and Cuomo) are reveling in inventing new laws every day as they place new restrictions on movement and assembly while offering up threats and punishments against those who don't cooperate. "Virus free" identify cards and big tech tracking schemes are being floated. And just like in communist China, there are no checks and balances, and our courts are conveniently closed.

Conservatives and patriots are warily observing all of this, along with President Trump (shadowed by Fauci and Birx), hoping the Maoism will clear up along with the virus in a few weeks. However, Democrats and their media allies are doing everything they can to keep status quo Maoist America in place and will try to sabotage any attempt to eradicate the scourge. Governors are declaring lockdowns in some states for months to come, and Pelosi is poised to prevent any further government relief to keep businesses afloat. Meanwhile, the left's media allies feature on almost every channel images of funerals, new graphic models showing a likely resurgence of the virus, racial disparities of fatalities, and experts who say "it may last a year or two" — basically anything they can say to get Americans who surrendered so easily to "you might catch a virus" to agree to prolong their imprisonment in Maoist America.

Make no mistake: the dream of the Left is that the Maoist authoritarian state will never leave us. The one last obstacle in their way, the existential threat to their Utopian agenda (as depicted in my film There's No Place like Utopia), is a 73-year-old "unfit" reality TV buffoon who colluded with Russia and then Ukraine to keep them out of power. Donald Trump is the one man, perhaps the only thing, standing in the way of Democrats living out their fantasy as social engineers and gods of paradise on Earth.

The left has many powerful allies: Hollywood, the entire mainstream media, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence services, big tech, Canada, America's European allies, and China. All of these have a shared interest in making sure Donald Trump does not win re-election. They will work together feverishly in the coming weeks, sometimes loosely and sometimes directly, to stop Donald Trump.

If they are successful, Maoist America will be entrenched as a permanent reality based upon "Because you might catch a virus!"

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert @JoelSGilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment. Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, Trump: The Art of the Insult, There's No Place Like Utopia, Dreams from My Real Father, Atomic Jihad, and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam.