JEFF GOLDSTEIN: The revolution will be accessorized.

Whether it’s a country music drag act, a trans-identified light beer, or a march for willing subjugation and a surrender of natural rights to the State, the memetics of cultural Marxism are performative — phony Maoist struggle sessions delivered in swarms to project strength and to dispirit opponents by displaying the inevitability of the mob and its power. It’s a cultural troll. It’s their way of telling you that they are in charge, and that you are helpless. You will conform. You must. What else is there?

It was in response to this attempted coup against western liberal culture — that is, against the Enlightenment and all it represents historically and foundationally to our country — that I’ve written what I believe to be a clarion call for the individualist; but it, too, was something of a performative: it proclaimed, but it didn’t explain. So I’ll try to flesh it out briefly.

We must reject the premises of the cultural Marxist because cultural Marxism itself cannot live peaceably with federal republicanism or individual autonomy. In fact, it demands the opposite: all things are constrained by the State and its desires. The rule must be universal. Governing individuals is like herding cats; whereas ruling over a collective molded by both State pressures (law, force) and social forces (shame, shunning) is a far more gratifying task, because the molding, if done correctly and well, creates a populace that reflects back the will of the State to itself. The State is now God, and its citizens, made in the State’s image, are its supplicants.

The Old Totalitarianism was established with guns and death camps. The New Totalitarianism is more subtle but no less controlling and pernicious.

And do read the whole thing.