Straight from A Clockwork Orange, the prescient Anthony Burgess novel (and equally visionary movie by Stanley Kubrick), a caravan of hundreds recently spent two days looting dozens of stores in Philadelphia. A social media influencer even livestreamed it to thousands.

Clockwork Orange questions whether an authoritarian government should reprogram humans to make evil impossible. This is in response to a revolt by part of society (the "Droogs"), devoted to "a bit a' the ol' ultraviolence" by adopting nihilism, a deliberate absence of morals and values. 

Fifty-one years after Burgess's novel, the Droogs seem starkly familiar: menacingly dressed sociopaths, speaking near-incomprehensible dialect, who burn, loot, and murder their way across the urban landscape. 

But Burgess got the conundrum only half right: the question today is not whether authoritarianism can engineer morality but instead whether governmental leftists can destroy rational incentives for mutually beneficial behavior with the goal of engineering nihilism. 

Why would any government do that? Because nihilism promotes civil disorder which, in turn, justifies more governmental intervention to "solve" the problem it created. As Saul Alinksy, strategist for the Left, put it: "The first step in community organization is community disorganization." To create the socialist utopia they envision, leftists must first degrade existing society.

ANP Emergency Fundraiser: The globalists war on ANP is all part of the globalists 'Big Tech' effort to silence conservative and independent voices, allowing them to maintain a monopoly on the flow of information. As George Orwell made clear to us decades ago, "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more they will hate those who speak it." But, with your amazing help, we at ANP promise to keep 'speaking truth to power' because, as Orwell also reminded us, "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."