The opportunity provided by CoVid to place not just the country but the entire world into a gigantic re-education camp was simply too good for the Left to pass up. Keep us confined, expose us to an unrelenting diet of controlled information flow, ruthlessly suppress contrary opinion - these are hallmarks of a prisoner of war camp in some communist hellhole rather than a free society. It has been carefully contrived and its maintenance is now being desperately pursued by authoritarians for whom freedom is an obstacle, not an objective.
Some of it was, I think, deliberate, much of it simply opportunism; it hardly matters, really. I get the sense that the political class is slowly coming to realize it has an existential threat on its hands for overreaching and are panicking a bit. That's likely to lead to such abuses as the 6 January protestors in solitary for six months, unthinkable as little as a year ago. What is clearly not simple opportunism is the systematic corruption of the legal system that has culminated in the outrages of asymmetrical law that now empower a revolutionary class to violent action against the others with impunity. That is very deliberate indeed, and the only "transformation" that is likely to achieve is anarchic violence and vigilantism. In theory that will lead to the abused middle class calling for an authoritarian leadership and order - both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis came to power that way, and neither journey ended well for anyone concerned.
Still, there's no fool like a new fool, and one more generation appears to be popularly succumbing to old promises that were never even once fulfilled. Many of us who are trying to call out an alarm are feeling like we're sitting in crosshairs. We are.
I think the leftist politicians really hate the USA and the citizens that keep it running. The citizens are realizing this and the politicians are becoming aware that it is a two-way street.