Part of the news coming out of the GOP drubbing they suffered on Tuesday dealt with the upheaval in the Virginia House of Delegates. A broad Republican majority was kicked to the minority office in a single day. One of those stories which is now receiving more attention is that of Democratic candidate Lee Carter. He’s a Marine and he wound up defeating Jackson Miller, the GOP Majority Whip who had been considered a safe bet even in a purge election.

So well done to Mr. Carter and our thanks for your service to the nation. This can’t be so bad, right? Except for one thing… the guy ran openly as a socialist. (Associated Press)

While working as an electrician Lee Carter received a literal shock, through one hand and across the chest, that jolted him into politics and turned him on to what was a dirty word in America for nearly a century: socialism.

His struggle to obtain compensation for the workplace injury inspired him to run for office, and this week Carter ousted a top Republican incumbent to nab a spot in Virginia’s House of Delegates, becoming one of over a dozen unabashed socialists newly elected to US state and municipal seats one year after Donald Trump took the White House.

The 31-year-old former Marine is part of a growing cadre of Americans, particularly millennials, pledging their allegiance to the Democratic Socialists of America, the nation’s fastest growing leftist group that was originally founded in 1982 as a foothold for Marxists.

Simply incredible. Only two years ago the DSA had barely 6,000 registered members. Today they boast more than 30K. Yes, that’s still a relative drop in the bucket when you consider the size of our nation, but how many people have written off one small mole on their skin as nothing to worry about only to find themselves fighting for their lives against advanced stage carcinoma only a year later?

Perhaps even more alarming is the statistic cited by the AP showing that the median age of DSA members has abruptly plunged from 60 to 35. Once a refuge for elderly hippies, socialism is now “cool” among millennials, largely spurred by the near-success of Bernie Sanders last year. While they may not have achieved success at the national level… yet… they’re winning local races. And local races are where the real action is in terms of building an authentic grassroots movement.

We might write this off as yet another case of people forgetting history and being doomed to repeat it, but the world is delivering plenty of reminders. Yes, it’s been roughly 170 years since Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, and even longer since the more recognizable carnage of modern socialism during the French Revolution. But there have been so many more examples since then. And even for millennials, we’re not talking about the days of their parents or grandparents. It’s happening in Venezuela right this moment.

People suffering under the socialist yoke under Nicolas Maduro are starving the streets, being brutally beaten down by federal militias and resorting to eating zoo animals just to survive. And this isn’t some glitch in the program or a one-off event. This is how socialism always ends, sooner or later. And now we have a generation of Americans who are either unaware of these historical events or are willfully blind to them, choosing to play around with the concept here in the home of modern democracy. It’s like watching a child drag a stick of dynamite out of the back shed.

Complain all you like about millennials when it comes to their fashion sense, tendency to live with their parents and all the rest. Every generation has their own quirks, fits and starts. But this is some dangerous, dark magic they’re experimenting with now.