Ever since Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Communist China in 1972, Americans have been repeatedly told by members of both parties and several administrations that contact with the West would “democratize” them. Yet what if it’s the other way around? What if China is succeeding in turning the United States into a Marxist/socialist state? How many Americans have been persuaded that our nation, not China, needs to be “fundamentally transformed”?

We begin with academia — or what passes for such. Last week, former Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at an annual conference hosted by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, was subjected to a heckler’s veto and forced off the stage. The incident took place at Georgetown Law, where one might assume people are earning credentials to defend the Constitution, not trample it.

Such totalitarian-like behavior is the tip of the iceberg. In universities throughout the nation, the Left’s radical agenda has become so thoroughly entrenched that anyone who challenges it can now be run off stage, sometimes in fear for their lives. Moreover, anything that doesn’t comport with progressive ideology is “hate speech,” and course studies revolving around topics like “white privilege,” “toxic masculinity,” and the idea that America is a hopelessly racist, sexist, bigoted nation have become routine.

It’s even worse in the nation’s public schools. A toxic combination of dumbing-down and rank indoctrination, papered over by rampant grade inflation, is turning out legions of weak thinkers, virtually clueless about civics and the Constitution, but imbued with quasi-religious, inalterable convictions about environmentalism, social justice, and anti-capitalist economics — and the need for increasingly expansive and coercive government to “solve” the nation’s problems.

Hollywood is no better. The same celebrities and executives who never miss an opportunity to lecture this nation about its shortcomings are the people who tailor their pictures to suit a Chinese government that demands obedience in order to gain distribution. Such obedience, which is all about relinquishing creative control to Chinese censors, has also become routine.

Big business? In the past week alone, the NBA, ESPN, Apple, Google, and even Tiffany & Co surrendered to ChiCom demands with regard to the protesters in Hong Kong. All of these entities have made it clear that Liberty takes a back seat to lucre.

And not just in China. In Philadelphia and Washington, DC, the NBA actually ejected fans for holding signs in support of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs, the Muslim-minority group that has been systematically persecuted and forced into internment camps. They also had their signs confiscated. NBA sports agents are warning their players, many of whom express their social-justice take on America whenever it suits them, to remain silent.

What’s more important than freedom? Sneaker contracts. “You see NBA players constantly over the summer in their off-season running to China to do the bidding of their shoe companies and to sell their shoes in the China market and so the NBA is really being exposed as not nearly as much of American business as it is a global business with China perhaps having more influence over it than even America,” explains sports journalist Jason Whitlock.

Other companies recently caving to Chinese sensibilities include jeweler Swarovski, clothing-makers Versace, Coach, and Calvin Klein, automaker Audi, Marriott hotels, Qantas, Air France, Air Canada, and British Airways. Blizzard Entertainment, a California-based game company, banned e-sport player “Blitzchung” for a year, and fined him the total amount of the prize money he won at a regular-season tournament, because he voiced support for the Hong Kong protesters.

The pattern is apparent and the message is clear: Patriotism, Liberty, and concern for basic human rights take a back seat to multinationalism, and ideas like “last best hope for mankind,” “beacon of freedom,” and “American exceptionalism” no longer resonate among elitists who don’t care about anyone or anything but themselves and their bottom line.

The media? Their unrelenting attempt to force feed the American public the “progressive” narrative has reached metastatic levels. Three years of lies, leaks, and propagandizing — from the Russian hoax to the New York Times’ race-baiting, historically revisionist 1619 Project, and everything in between — has made it clear their two main agendas are to divide this nation, and undo the 2016 election — by any means necessary. They are aided and abetted by felony leaking, courtesy of an unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy that can come at any American, including the president, “six ways from Sunday.” As a result, public trust has reached an all-time low, even as as “fake news” is still disseminated on a daily basis — and a de facto coup remains ongoing.

Media is joined at the hip by the tech giants who’ve made it clear they intend to completely eliminate privacy. It’s a contemptible stew of surveillance-capable and data-mining devices and “algorithms” designed to “filter” dissent and tailor public opinion beginning in American classrooms — and possibly ending in the manipulation of millions of votes — makes George Orwell’s 1984 look benign by comparison. And whether Americans realize it or not, the avalanche of currently obtainable data allows for the seamless transition into the very same Social Credit System the Communist Chinese government will forcibly impose on its people beginning next year. The one where a person’s “trustworthiness” will be evaluated, and those found wanting will be blacklisted, economically and socially.

Politics? One and a half of our two main political parties are willing to not only jeopardize our nation’s economy, but it’s national security as well. If there is anything resembling bipartisanship in our nation’s capital, it amounts to bipartisan contempt for the nation-state, borders, a genuine justice system that treats everyone the same — and ordinary Americans, whose influence on the body politic must ultimately be rendered irrelevant by massive levels of legal and illegal immigration.

Our devolution is further epitomized by the Democrat Party’s effort to undo the 2016 election, even if it takes what amounts to a star chamber approach to impeachment. One whereby the whistleblower form is changed to to accommodate second-hand allegations, testimony and transcripts are kept secret, and the abandonment of precedent is perpetrated by a cabal of House zealots, who refuse to let their colleagues hold a formal vote on the issue — and refuse to grant the Republicans the power to call their own witnesses or issue subpoenas, even as they issue subpoenas of their own. “The subpoenas are part of a two-pronged strategy by Democrats,” explains columnist Chad Pergram. “Get the information to help tailor the articles of impeachment, or convert a refusal to comply into an impeachment article itself.”

Every bit of this charade will be fully coordinated with the Trump-hating media, controlled by America-contemptuous multinational corporations, run by elitists indoctrinated by a corrupt education system, who also can count on useful idiot Hollywood cheerleaders to give them an aura of celebrity-endorsed legitimacy.

So, when it comes to America and China, who’s changing whom?

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” —George Orwell