[No, this is not about America’s Gen Z, named after the Xers and Y Millennials. It is about Russia’s, named after the tactical insignia of Russian troops occupying Ukraine, which they support with a Nazi-genocidal fervor]

Alina is 19. She loves fashion, and watching pirated Hollywood movies with her mechanic boyfriend Sergei.

But since February 24, 2022, when President Vladimir Putin sent an invasion force into Ukraine, Alina's online life has become scarily violent. She is one of the Z Generation.

She shares and re-posts propaganda about Ukrainian neo-Nazis and child-killers, backed up with warnings of the threat to Russia from shadowy NATO organizations. The people of Ukraine, she believes, can be saved only by wiping out their culture, their government and their language.

Her homepage is plastered with apocalyptic images of a burning White House in 'Fasciston DC'. The Ukrainian flag is renamed 'the Devil's Swastika' and Putin is 'Russia's savior'.

How did Alina, and hundreds of thousands of young Russians like her, become so consumed with online violence and hate?

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bi-coastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual left-wing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

Democrats are adopting arguments and rationales once used against the left to silence or jail them. Pundits and politicians are becoming the very thing that they have long condemned in this age of rage. It is realization of Nietzsche’s monster theory.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Those words from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche capture the fear that the struggle against the ideas and people we oppose will twist us into the very thing we hate.

For Democrats, that moment has come in an age of rage against former President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general. It’s an age when reason and restraint are strangers.

In various areas, Democrats have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents. What is most striking is that legal arguments now used by the left were once used against the left.

The headline at the Daily Mail was eye-catching: “Squatters take over Wyoming city: Vagrants leave millions of dollars worth of damage to motel and 500lbs of human feces in downtown area - as Casper fights off a homeless invasion.”

It was an image at odds with how we think of Wyoming; that is, a clean, naturally beautifully conservative state. But the homeless plague is everywhere, and the situation in Casper reminds us that most of today’s homeless are not just ordinary people down on their luck; they are dysfunctional drug addicts who are the inevitable result of 60 years of leftist drug policies.

The Daily Mail has the details behind the headline:

Squatters have taken over a Wyoming city after some left millions of dollars worth of damage to a motel and others left 500lbs of feces in the downtown area.

Casper, the second-largest city in the state, is home to 60,000 residents but now also has about 200 homeless people.

Some have seized various properties that are empty or abandoned, including an abandoned Econo Lodge motel that hasn’t operated since November.

Casper Mayor Bruce Knell described the extent of destruction as akin to ‘third-world-country stuff’.

This can't be the mugshot his many enemies hoped for. Instead of looking cowed, concerned, deflated and defeated, Donald Trump looks strong, defiant, unbowed.

Not for the first time, attempts to denigrate Trump have backfired badly. It has already almost erased from memory the fact that the night before the mugshot was taken, the first televised debate in the Republican primary race for the 2024 presidential election was broadcast from Milwaukee in the swing state of Wisconsin.

During the debate, Trump was 'the elephant not in the room', as Fox News put it, because his presence was never far from the proceedings. Few dared to criticize him for fear of aggravating the Republican base, which still adores him - even more so after that mugshot.

One, Vivek Ramaswamy, said that if he became President he would pardon Trump for any convictions 'on day one'.  He is the glib, arrogant millennial of the Republican field, whose gobby overconfidence blinds him to the fact that often, especially on foreign policy, he has no idea what he's talking about.