Spend five minutes on social media and you’ll discover America suffers from an epidemic of terrible leaders.

Politicians are corrupt, CEOs are exploitative, pastors are compromised, police chiefs are incompetent, university presidents are ideologues.

Apparently we’ve managed to elect, hire, appoint, or promote the worst human beings in recorded history.

What remarkable luck! Maybe… or maybe we’re thinking about it myopically. I’ve become convinced that America doesn’t primarily have a leadership crisis, but a followership crisis, too.

Leadership has become the political equivalent of a piñata. Everybody enjoys taking a swing at it. Followers, meanwhile, somehow escape all responsibility, as if institutions simply malfunction on their own. They don’t.

Institutions reflect the incentives created by the people inside them.

Politicians keep making outrageous promises because voters reward outrageous promises.

Cable news keeps manufacturing panic because panic keeps ratings high.

Social media influencers keep posting intellectual junk food because millions of us consume it like it’s Thanksgiving dinner.

Markets generally produce what people repeatedly buy.

Politics is no different.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) marked the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth by attempting to resurrect one of the bloodiest dictators of the twentieth century as a champion of humanity.

In an official statement, the DSA praised Castro as an “organizer, a fighter” and a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle.”

It accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio of committing “genocide” against the Cuban people, demanded his prosecution for “crimes against humanity”, and blamed the United States for the devastation created by nearly seven decades of communist dictatorship.

This was not an impetuous social media post from an errant intern. It was a considered declaration of allegiance to the totalitarian regime Castro built and his successors still operate.

Stone’s Rule applies here: when the left invokes genocide, examine whose firing squads actually operated at dawn.

We’ve gone through six or seven iterations of we’re at war, we’re negotiating, we’re at war, we’re negotiating, we’re at war.

So, about 75% of the so-called war that began on Feb. 28 of this year has been negotiations.

About 25% has actually been kinetic action. And I think that’s obscured a little bit what we’re doing in Iran. We’re not passive when we’re negotiating.

What [President Donald] Trump is doing right now, the Trump administration, is very similar to what the North did as it started the Civil War. They were not sure how to deal with the South because they’d have to invade it, and it was the size of Europe.

So, Winfield Scott came up with the idea of an Anaconda Plan, named after the snake, a python-like snake of Latin America, that would squeeze the South.

In other words, they would occupy the Mississippi River and cut off their western approaches to trade and commerce.

The battlefront in the North would cut them off from the industrial cities of the North, and then they would blockade Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, and they would not be able to export cotton nor import manufactured goods, especially weaponry.

Now, it was very slow because, in those days, there was not an international banking system that you could freeze accounts or you could isolate a whole area or region economically, or, I should say, financially.

But it did work.

Hasan Piker, a close ally of Abdul El-Sayed, is calling for "Marxist-Leninist" punishment for those who criticize Michigan’s Democrat Senatorial candidate.

As radicals and antisemites like Piker flood the Democrat Party, establishment figures are struggling to justify their alliance with extremist candidates.

Ironically, Democrats are now fulfilling the false narrative that they used against President Donald Trump after the Charlottesville protests.

They are maintaining that there are "many fine people" in the Democratic Socialists of America party, despite its leaders seeking to destroy our constitutional system, open our borders, defund the police, and embrace virtual anarchy.

Now, some of these fine people are calling for moderates to be purged as radicals take over the Democrat Party.

After meeting Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, and Francesca Hong, AOC doesn’t seem so scary, does she?

Why, she’s almost quaint, traditional, and (slightly) old-fashioned by comparison.

Tread carefully, Republicans: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is still America’s most dangerous Democrat — and still the odds-on favorite to win her party’s 2028 presidential nomination.

And if she captures the nomination, there’s (roughly) a 50%-50% shot she’ll win the White House. Don’t underestimate her: She’s media-savvy, camera-friendly, photogenic, and her PR instincts are as sharp as Sardinian swords.

Consider how deftly she just rebooted the “woke” narrative.