Everything seems more important, or at least more pretentious, when it’s in Latin, don’t you think?  The title of this week’s work refers to the Woke, so-called Progressive movement that’s plaguing our country, and it asks the question, “Where’s the progress?”  Another question which might be posed by someone like Cato the Elder could be, Hoc profectum vocas?  “You call this progress?”  These are questions that should be asked of the Woke imbeciles who are speeding the United States down the road to ruin.  The Woke mob proceeds full speed ahead, regardless of budget deficits, national debt, election results, or the wishes of the American people.  They do this because they’re convinced they’re always right, and they think they should be able to indulge all of their Leftist fever dreams, so long as they keep insisting that their only motivations are compassion and democracy, and that any opposition is a hateful threat to democracy.  But what are so-called Progressives doing in the names of compassion and democracy?  The first thing you need to understand is that Progressives (liberals, Leftists, or whatever you want to call them), exist in a world in which they pretend, or at least hope that you’re not intelligent enough to realize, that enormous advances have been made in the last 100 years.  Simply put, when Progressives emerged at the beginning of the 20th Century, they were fighting to bring about much needed improvements to our society to remedy urgent needs.  Anyone who has read these pages over the years knows how far I am from a bleeding heart liberal, but the early Progressives at least worked on real problems like child labor, health and safety standards, access to education, and unemployment insurance.  Then as now, early Progressives in the so-called Gilded Age, attacked the rich, and decried income inequality.  In an article in The Wall Street Journal this week, Phil Gramm and historian Amity Shlaes make a good argument for the proposition that the Gilded Age wasn’t a heartless time when robber barons got rich on the backs of the poor, but actually was a time of great economic gains for all Americans.  In 1892, Progressives railed against the 4,050 millionaires in America.  Today they rail against the 400 billionaires in America.  They ignore the fact these entrepreneurs create jobs that feed and clothe millions of people, and they ignore the fact that the top 1% of earners pay more than 40% of the taxes.  In New York City, about 1,400 taxpayers account for 50% of the tax revenue.  If half of them moved to Florida, the City would collapse.  No matter.  To Progressives they’re villains, because, “uh, income inequality,” “uh, you didn’t build that,” and “uh, you know … the thing.”  Gramm and Shlaes show that, when you add up all the transfer payments like food stamps and refundable tax credits, income inequality was worse in 1947 than it is today.  Facts mean nothing to Progressives, but the point is that Progressives are never satisfied.  Food safety, unemployment insurance, and building codes were good things.  That was progress.  These early successes ballooned during the Great Depression, resulting in Social Security, a myriad of alphabet soup agencies imposing regulations, and later welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and tax credits that redistribute revenue to people who already pay no income taxes.  The thing is that so-called Progressives pretend that all these government welfare programs don’t already exist.  They pretend that we haven’t already spent $25 trillion on the War on Poverty, and we’re not spending trillions more today.  For Freud every dream was a wish.  For Progressives, every wish is an existential crisis, which can be met only by doing exactly what they demand, regardless of cost and regardless of reality.  Progressives operate in a make-believe world.  There are but two explanations for this phenomenon.  Either Progressives are imbued with a religious fervor that prevents them from seeing reality, or they are purposely attempting to bring about the destruction of the United States.  Review with me the issues driving Progressives, and ask yourselves, “Where’s the progress?”  Take the environment.  Environmentalists in the 1970’s faced cities obscured by smog, rivers so tainted with chemicals that one actually caught fire, smokestack industries causing acid rain to fall, and leaded gasoline that poisoned the air.  Through their efforts, all these blights were cleaned up.  That was progress.  Today’s climate alarmists insist we end the use of cheap, abundant, and safe fossil fuels which will greatly increase costs, close industries, and eliminate jobs, and all to no end other than “we say so.”  Is that progress?  Look at the border.  No one lacks compassion for foreigners who are abused by their governments, but does that entitle the entire world to come here?  It’s ironic that Progressives, preach that America isn’t exceptional, yet don’t understand that the fact that the whole world wants to come here proves we are better than anyplace else.  So in the name of compassion, they erase the border, admit millions of illiterates, new dependents, suspected terrorists, criminals, the victims of human trafficking, and tons of illegal drugs that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.  Is that progress?  Progressives oppose the institutionalization of the mentally ill, and say that all drugs should be legalized.  These policies have resulted in an explosion of homeless people living, crapping, and ingesting drugs in the streets.  Progressives consider this the height of compassion, but is it progress?  Our streets have been turned into war zones because crime is out of control, police are prevented from doing their jobs, and Soros-backed prosecutors refuse to enforce the law.  In some places, looters are free to steal up to $1,000 without fear of arrest.  Hundreds of stores have closed, and some have locked up all their products, making shopping more difficult.  The store closures mostly impact people in “underserved communities,” the same people Progressives claim they want to help.  You call that progress?  The latest Progressive craze is transgender rights.  Trans people are estimated to be 0.03% of the population, three hundreths of one percent, or less than 100,000 in a nation of 330 million.  Progressives are willing to destroy all our culture, norms, and morals, and the right to privacy of every actual female to cater to a group that deserves toleration but not celebration.  Is that progress?  Progressives have taken us from welfare, to workfare, and now are supporting the payment of guaranteed incomes to discourage work and bankrupt already struggling governments.  Rather than progress, this is a wrecking ball, designed to collapse our society, in favor of what?  And that’s the point.   It’s increasingly  apparent that Progressives are not simply misguided, but are purposely attempting to bring about the destruction of the United States.  Our enemies, principally China, are behind this.  George Soros’ One World scheme doesn’t seek to bring the rest of the world up to our standards, but to pull the United States down to the level of the rabble.  Once we’re overrun with illegal aliens, bankrupt, stoned, destitute, and as hopeless as everyone else on Earth, we’ll be much easier to defeat, and the Progressive invocations of the word “democracy” will be merely a sick joke.  Progressives don’t bring about progress, only destruction, and it’s not a mistake, it’s been well planned.