As the orchestrated refugee crisis involving émigrés from Central America trekking across Mexico in the hopes of gaining entry into the U.S. plays out, there is a similar – but very real – refugee crisis playing out in South America. In recent weeks, thousands of Venezuelans have been pouring into Colombia at the border city of Cucuta, giving rise to scenes and circumstances right out of refugee scenarios that follow natural disasters.

The state of these people and the conditions they are facing are beyond appalling and far surpass the ginned-up squalor that’s been reported concerning the Central American caravan. Among the Venezuelans, there are both women and men selling their bodies for food, women selling their breast milk and hair, malnourished mothers carrying equally malnourished infants, all hoping against hope for better conditions in Colombia, of all places.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a Venezuela in steep economic decline; it is now clear that the glorious socialist revolution of Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro has essentially destroyed that nation. Their health-care system has collapsed, and Third World diseases that had been eradicated have become rampant once again. Hospitals in neighboring nations – particularly Colombia – have been inundated with Venezuelans seeking medication and vaccines because there simply aren’t any left. The suicide, maternal and infant mortality rates have exploded, and over 50 percent of the educated professionals who have been able to leave the country have done so.

Puzzlement over the nearly deafening silence concerning the reason for Venezuela’s woes is compounded by the fact that Venezuela is not the only nation in the region suffering in this manner. In Brazil, incoming President Jair Bolsonaro has said that he intends to establish an international coalition of anti-socialists to thwart the efforts of highly organized leftists at home and abroad who have influenced policy in that nation, very much to its social and economic detriment.

Considering the scope of the problem in Latin America, one would think that it would be garnering more press coverage than it is, but as I recently pointed out regarding the nationwide “green riots” in France, it’s likely that this is because the dedicatedly leftist Western press is reluctant to feature crises in which leftism itself is the cause thereof. In fact, one of the most comprehensive articles on the Venezuelan crisis didn’t even use the word “socialism.”

The plight of Venezuela (and to a lesser degree Brazil, where things aren’t nearly as dire) is significant because Venezuela was once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, rather than an undeveloped nation with limited resources. The human and natural resource potential in Venezuela is vast, yet it has been stultified into dormancy by socialist policies.

What this means is that there is no reason to presume that this could not happen here, the delusion to which far too many Americans currently subscribe. Just enough socialism, and no resources of any type or measure are sufficient to keep the ship afloat.

Yet in America, despite the election of Donald Trump as president – a mandate against Obama-era socialist policies, whether voters realize it or not – grinning young fools, activists and liberal politicians are celebrating “democratic socialism” as the salvation of our nation. This brings to mind the axiom which asserts that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is essentially the definition of insanity.

Taking Brazil’s example – or that of their president-elect: The key first step is in identifying the nature of the malady. Bolsonaro has done this in charging domestic activists as well as the governments of Cuba and Venezuela with having conspired to influence policy in Brazil for many years.

In America, while some on the right have had a pretty clear picture of the designs of the hard left for a long time, many conservatives, libertarians and unaffiliated voters have been duped by an illusory “left-right” paradigm that is no longer accurate. This goes beyond the presumption that any politician with an “R” after his name is trustworthy; it encompasses the sobering fact that many who once positioned themselves as conservatives are in fact Deep State apparatchiks, every bit as dedicated to the oligarchical collective as George Soros or the most rabid Democrat operatives.

Two weeks ago, the billionaire Koch brothers – long considered to be conservative activists – publicly came out against the Trump administration’s intent to implement a policy that would protect American taxpayers from funding the mass importation of welfare-dependent foreign nationals, claiming that ending this type of immigration would do “serious harm” to the nation.

If this contention seems to fly in the face of common sense, it’s because it most definitely does. Leaving aside the question of why the U.S. would allow for the admittance of even one welfare-dependent foreign national, obviously this reveals that the “conservative” Koch brothers are, like so many wealthy socialists, simply looking to protect their stake in the supply of cheap labor.

Then last week, it was revealed that a fabricated dossier which has been central to the left’s witch hunt against President Trump was in fact passed on to the press by a surrogate of the late Sen. John McCain, another notorious “conservative” poser.

The politically uninitiated individual might look at such examples and think “See? Even conservatives hate Trump!” That’s the spin the establishment press might put on it for obvious reasons, but this, like the faux conservatives cited above, serves the same function: to re-define conservatism as being the benign realm of the posers, and marginalize actual conservatives and Trump supporters as extremists.

These wolves in sheep’s clothing remained difficult to detect for many years, but many were revealed during Barack Obama’s presidency for their abject refusal to hold him accountable for his high crimes. The universal “tell” that’s given many more away lately has been their zeal to chime in with Beltway socialists in condemning all things Trump.

Article posted with permission from Erik Rush