With the rise of the radical left in America, one of the many terms that is super cool to toss around is “stolen land.” Will Cain recently chimed in on this topic succinctly by saying, “There is no such thing as stolen land. There is only conquest.”

Before the outrage mob lights their tiki torches, let me explain that Cain was not endorsing the idea of conquest as an admirable or morally justified endeavor. He was simply stating an obvious fact of human history, i.e., that nearly every populated square foot of land on earth was conquered by its current inhabitants.

Tribes conquered tribes. Kingdoms swallowed neighboring kingdoms. Empires expanded until stronger empires destroyed them. This is not a defense of conquest. It’s simply a historical reality, a reality that makes it clear that America is not unique when it comes to conquest. Long before Europeans arrived in America, indigenous tribes fought one another over territory, resources, and hunting grounds. Some tribes displaced other tribes, some absorbed other tribes, and some enslaved other tribes.

Likewise, the Romans conquered much of Europe, the Normans conquered England, Arab armies conquered large parts of the Middle East and North Africa, the Ottoman Empire ruled vast territories inhabited by many different peoples, and the Aztecs and Incas conquered neighboring populations before they themselves were conquered. Conquest is not a pretty undertaking, but the truth is that human beings have been fighting over land and power since they first discovered that their neighbor possessed something they wanted.

Clearly, then, if residing on conquered land makes a nation “illegitimate,” virtually every nation on earth should be dissolved. But dissolved in favor of whom? If one group conquered another group that had previously conquered a third group, which group is today’s rightful owner? How many centuries should we go back? Five? Ten? Fifty?

Should Europe be returned to the descendants of tribes who lived there before the Roman Empire? Should England be returned to whoever occupied it before the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans arrived? Once you begin playing the stolen-land game, there is no justifiable place to stop. Property rights cannot survive if ownership can be overturned by tracing history back far enough to locate an earlier claimant of someone’s choice.

Today, of course, conquest of one country over another is rare. Starting with the French Revolution, the threat of conquest for countries throughout the world has been primarily from within. Notable internal conquests include Robespierre’s French Revolution in 1789, Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, Castro’s overthrow of the Batista government in Cuba in 1959, the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela that led to his ascent to dictatorial power in 1999.

What these internal conquests have in common is that they all led to leftwing dictatorships that produced poverty, censorship, imprisonment, and a loss of freedom for the “masses,” the very people the leaders of the revolutions claimed to be representing. (A partial exception to this is China. Deng Xiaoping, who rose to power after Mao’s death, was the one leader smart enough to remake China into a state-controlled capitalist country, which is why it has been so successful economically over the past fifty years. Freedom, however, is still a scarce commodity with the CCP in control of everything.)

Today, the survival of the United States is being threatened by an internal leftwing revolution whose goal, much like the Jacobins in the French Revolution, is to tear down the system that made the country the envy of the world. While they are not likely to gain control of the levers of power anytime soon, it once again reminds us of Ronald Reagan’s warning about freedom never being more than one generation away from extinction.

Angry leftists always start by calling themselves “socialists,” but as Karl Marx explained, socialism is just “the transitional stage between capitalism and a fully communist society.” Today’s malcontents may call themselves the Democratic Socialists of America, but, make no mistake about it, they are communists, because their stated goal is to control the means of production and abolish private property.

It may take 50 years or more to achieve their goal, but rest assured the commies are coming.  And if they succeed, they won’t be returning any stolen land to Native Americans. Commie leaders always keep the goodies for themselves while abolishing private property for the masses. It’s just one of the realities of conquest, especially internal conquest.

Ben & Jerry are not going to be happy about having to move out of their mansions if the commie revolution succeeds. After all, they railed on about “stolen land” for decades, but never quite got around to transferring their real estate holdings back to the Abenaki tribes that occupied most of Vermont long before they were born. Communism and hypocrisy are a marriage made in heaven.