A core assumption of cosmopolitan globalism is that the ideal society is the completely open society. That is, there are no barriers between people and all transactions are completely transparent. Organizations are based entirely on neutral rules, so that anyone meeting an objective set of criteria may join. Goods and services flow freely, without regards to national borders or local interests. The open society is therefore transactional, where the friction of custom, national interest and tradition is eliminated.

To see how central the concept of the open society is to the globalist project, you just have to look at the chief global advocate for globalism, George Soros. He is a citizen of nowhere, but he meddles everywhere. Through his organization, The Open Society Foundations, he funds subversive organizations all over the West. The goal is to destroy borders, customs and traditions, in order to turn the West into an open, transactional commerce area for the world. Openness is central to post-nationalism.

If a society is fully open, therefore, it means all people have access to all things, all places and so forth. It follows, according to the logic of the adherents, that any organization lacking the diversity of its surrounding environment, must not be fully open. A fire house without vibrancy, for example, is somehow discriminating against the vibrant. There does not have to be proof of this. The lack of vibrancy is proof enough. After all, if the hiring process of the firehouse was open and transparent, it would be fully vibrant.

At first blush, this sounds sort of reasonable, but it is when you examine it in detail that this zeal for openness is found to be every bit as extreme and inhuman as the radical ideologies of the past. This post from Robin Hanson offers a good illustration. His first thought experiment, regarding discrimination against the left-handed, comes to the conclusion that busting up exclusionary group preferences is good for the world. The reason is, such discrimination offends the gods of efficiency.

This sounds fine in the abstract, until you think about it in practice. Hanson assumes insiders create rules for arbitrary reasons. They just like one another and foolishly create rules that favor themselves. If only they could see the beauty of openness, they would drop those rules, so let’s just bust up those rules for them. Attacks on free association and private discrimination are not just about liberating the excluded. They are about liberating the included, so they can enjoy openness and vibrancy.

He then gets into “gender” differences, by which he means sex differences. This confusion we see on the Left between biological reality and their fantasy constructs is an essential element of their world view. It’s a form of fallacy where they compare reality to some model of reality, then critique the model, rather than use the model to gain a better understanding of reality. Therefore they talk about gender roles and ignore biology, because the model of gender is easier to critique.

This passage from his post is where we see the extreme radicalism.

Some may postulate gender as an innate atomic feature of the universe of human concerns, so that when we desire that an associate have a certain gender that has nothing to do with their many other associated features. But that seems crazy to me. Much more plausibly, what we like about a gender is strongly tied to the set of associated features that tend to go along with that gender. That is, we like the package of features that “are” a gender.

He is taking the theoretical model of gender that is not based in biologic reality then imposing it on reality. The whole post is a great example of sophistry, but it is also an insight into the thinking of the people who currently rule over us. They really have accepted the blank slate arguments about observable reality being a social construct. When you start talking about society “assigning roles” based on packages of features associated with genders, you have slipped the chains of reality.

The monstrous nature of the open society lies in the fact it assumes choice, based in anything but objective criteria, is invalid. The male who marries a female because of biology is acting from bias. The male who marries a man, because of economic benefit is acting rationally, because his decision is based on objective criteria. This view of people strips them of their humanity and turns them into economic units, cursed with a sense of moral duty and a belief in free will. They must be broken of those beliefs.

This is what lies behind the sudden promotion of race mixing on television. Every ad must feature a mixed race couple. It’s not so much a denial of biology, it is a denial of choice driven by anything other than objective criteria. Preferring your own race or ethnicity is invalid, because it places a barrier between you and others. Breaking up these antiquated notions of choice is not about racism. It’s about destroying any barriers between people, as those are by definition invalid in an open society.

This is why they are so berserk about what is coming from the human sciences with regards to the nature of man. If people are wired to favor their kin over strangers, for example, the open society cannot exist. More important, biology is a more authentic authority than whatever is bubbling up from the soft sciences. Destroying science will become a crusade, as it is the only way to preserve the open society. The un-personing of James Watson is not a sacrifice. It is atonement.

There’s also an anarcho-nihilism quality to the open society. If all human relations are reduced to self-interest based in objective criteria, there’s no reason for anyone to sacrifice. Trust is not objective and it cannot be measured. Without trust, human cooperation is impossible, as no one has an interest in sacrificing today for the good of a whole he may not be around to enjoy. The result of the open society is a Hobbesian world where everyone is a stranger and everyone is a predator.

That is what makes the zeal for openness immoral. It violates the natural order. It’s why a people under siege will sacrifice rather than open their gates. They know without that barrier between them and the besiegers, they don’t exist. It’s why the first demand of the conqueror is for the conquered to tear down their walls. The people preaching the open society are similarly acting from the position of the conqueror. If the West tears down its walls, removes its borders, becomes fully open, it ceases to exist.

Way back when the West was pressuring the apartheid government to commit suicide on behalf of its people, they did a remarkable thing. They sequestered their nuclear program, making sure the information and material would not fall into the hands of whatever came after apartheid. It was remarkable, because no other state has voluntarily abandoned its program for the good of the world. Governments just don’t do that, but the South Africans did and a huge potential problem down the line was averted.

The reason this is worth thinking about is there are other unstable states, with lots of military technology. Pakistan is an obvious example. There is a better than even chance they have sold nuclear technology to other Muslim governments. They have most certainly been working with North Korea. Israel has nuclear weapons and they have advanced delivery systems. These are two countries that could fall into chaos or have their government overthrown. It’s not likely at the moment, but it is possible.

A bigger concern is America. There’s no getting around the fact that America is in bad shape in many important ways. The wizards in the Federal Reserve have been able to use creative ways to maintain the debt bubble, but everything comes to an end eventually. The demographic changes going on in the country are creating very serious fissures regionally, ethnically and economically. Just look at how aggressive and radical the political talk is these days. America looks very brittle right now.

If you are doing long term planning for the EU or a European government, you have to be looking at America and thinking about the Crisis of the Third Century. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it is a pretty good one. Like the Roman Empire, the American Empire is militaristic, the dominant military power and politically fragile. Like the Romans, America appears to be critically short of intellectual firepower in its ruling elite. Who knows, maybe Washington has a lead pipe problem, but it does have an IQ problem.

You have to think China, Japan, Europe, even the Russians are looking at America and wondering how it keeps teetering on without some serious reform effort. Further, you have to think the failure of the Trump administration to get anything done is another data point suggesting the American political class is malfunctioning. A healthy political elite would have made sure to co-opt Trump, given him some easy victories and made sure he turns his talents and political support toward defending the system.

Instead, the result of the Trump years is likely to be further confirmation that the system is hopelessly broken. Maybe the Democrats have some great reformer in their ranks who will rise in the primaries this year. It seems unlikely, but the funny thing about greatness is no one ever sees it before it becomes obvious. Still, what the political class has favored, guys like Bush, Clinton and Obama, suggests they have managed to create a system that selects against, at an early stage, anyone with the any amount of talent.

Now, America is probably not going to fall into a period of military anarchy as happened to the Romans in the third century. America is a sea-based empire, while the Romans were a land-based empire. Chaos, if it comes, will first be in the possessions. Perhaps that’s why the Trump administration is so eager to get out of Afghanistan and Syria. It could be that the defense establishment has finally realized they are being bled dry by these commitments. In order to preserve the empire, they must shrink it.

On the other hand, in an age when controlling the financial system is worth more than controlling territory, the chaos will show up first in the economy. We’re two months away from “hard Brexit” with no signs of a soft resolution. The EU had to compromise with the populist Italian government on their budget. The Yellow Vest riots, which everyone is told to ignore, are becoming a serious issue in France. All of these problems in Europe are being driven by the impossible realities of their economics system.

Whatever your favorite collapse scenario, all of them assume that the American political class will not be able to keep the plates spinning. At some point, the divisions in American society, be they cultural, racial or economic, become so large that the core of the empire becomes ungovernable. If you are on the outside looking in right now, America certainly looks like a continent wide version of 1970’s New York City. The difference being, New York City was not armed with nuclear weapons and a massive military.

How the rest of the world could “manage” the entropy of empire is hard to know. China could simply work to reduce its exposure to the empire and wait for it to withdraw from the Pacific Rim. South American governments seem to be using the current chaos to export their troublesome populations. They are using the techniques of Progressive urban gentrification to clean up their underclass. A weakening and chaotic America could very well be a good thing for them, at least from a demographic perspective.

European elites are suffering from the same disease as their American counterparts, so it is unlikely they are thinking too far ahead. On the other hand, the demographic situation in Europe is salvageable, so they have more time. France is not condemned to becoming a majority-minority society. No European country is assured that fate. America is guaranteed, short of something completely unexpected, to become a multi-racial, multi-ethnic country, with a large white minority. That’s a mathematical guarantee.

If it turns out that the model of the American empire cannot function with a majority-minority core and the core becomes ungovernable, then the world is going to have a very serious problem. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe fell into the dark ages for roughly a millennium. On order to avoid that fate, the world, particularly Europe, will need to start planning and preparing for life after America. That means figuring out a way to manage the inevitable decline of the American empire.

Elizabeth Warren is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, so she is out making the rounds, boasting of what she would do as president. She’s planning to run as the weepy champion of the middle-class, so you can expect her to say the “middle class is getting hammered” six million times over the next year. She can’t be a culture warrior, now that her fake Indian cover is blown, so she is going for the bourgeois populism that used to be a thing on the Left, before they discovered anti-whiteness.

Warren’s first salvo is a wealth tax, which will be some sort of levy on those with assets over $50 million. This will be in addition to the regular income tax and she says it will raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years. That’s like saying the plan will allow Big Foot to finally get the unicorn he always wanted. Politicians love making ten year projections, despite the fact no one believes them. It’s just a way for the actors, our rich people hire to run for office, to sound like they are something other than actors. It’s part of the role.

Portly polemicist Kevin Williams was ready to lead the charge against this new communist assault on the rich people who pay him to sing their praises. That post is a madhouse of nonsense, but it is also like reading National Review from 1985. That old crowd is still lighting candles, hoping the Left will get back to talking like socialists, so they can get back to pretending to be conservatives. Comparing what Warren is proposing to the Soviet collectivization programs is dumb even by the standards of Kevin Williamson.

It’s also completely backwards. Historically, the radical position on taxes is all about restructuring society and making it more egalitarian. The Right took the position that the state was primarily in service to the rich, so the rich should pay for it. Sure, the rich tax the poor, that’s why they are rich, but they pay for the state, because it serves their ends. The Warren plan is hardly radical. Every state in America has property taxes. Some have inventory taxes on business and asset taxes on individuals. Asset taxes are common.

Of course, Warren’s game here is to pitch herself as the champion of middle-class white women. Kamala Harris will get the black vote. The question is whether she is black enough to get enough of it. Warren is betting she can scoop up the Sanders vote and the box wine auntie vote, in order to counter the black vote. That’s why she is pitching this idea, which she knows will never happen. It’s a form of virtue signaling in order to shape the narrative of the 2019 election season, heading into the primaries next January.

Still, it is an idea that should be discussed. America has many problems and is probably headed for a very bad end, but if reform is possible, it starts with reigning in the out of control plutocrats. Everyone talks about the racial and ethnic hostility, but one big problem is the degree of inequality. You can make all the libertarian arguments you like to explain why this is not a bad thing, but history says otherwise. Throw in the outright hostility of the rich toward their duties to the nation and it is a dangerous brew.

A debate about an asset tax also does something else that is needed. It raises the issue of why taxing income is acceptable, but taxing other things is taboo. Why do we treat investment earnings as sacred, while the working man’s paycheck is fair game? Take this further, why are we using an industrial age tax philosophy in the technological age? The world is a very different place economically, compared to a century ago when income taxes were invented. It’s time to think about modernizing taxes.

Another thing worth debating is how tax policy changes the behavior of office holders in a neoliberal democracy. Every shabby economics expert in Conservative Inc. can lecture on tax policy and market incentives, but no one thinks about how tax policy changes the behavior of public officials. Income taxes encourage government to attract earners, not builders. Countries become flop houses for stateless economic pirates. That’s what countries are in the global age. They are a pirate’s cove for global capital.

Asset taxes could motivate politicians to attract investment that creates wealth in the nation. After all, if the money available to the politicians is pegged to the asset value of the nation, nationalism makes a lot of sense. That’s why the flunkies and coat holders for the globalist class will be howling in agony at any attempt to debate this idea. Income taxes serve the interest of the post-nation future. Global capital is just a renter, always looking for the cheapest rate, with no stake in the port where they find shelter.

Make no mistake, Elizabeth Warren is as dumb as a goldfish. She’s proposing this because the script writers hired for her told her it will get applause from the demographic she is courting. On this side of the great divide, it offers a chance to talk about bigger issues in practical terms that disgruntled whites can follow. It also offers another chance to be the thoughtful, intellectually serious alternative to the sad clown show that in conservatism. The politics of the future, will need a tax policy to match it.

Usually, when you seek to take over something, you try not destroy it in the process of acquiring it. For example, if you’re trying to rise up the ranks of an organization, you don’t want to discredit the organization in the process. What’s the point of rising up the ranks, if the post you finally attain has been made worthless? This “conservative” instinct becomes stronger once you have gained control of whatever it was you were after. Now it is yours and you do what you must to protect and increase its value.

For example, when the Left took over the institutions of the American ruling elite, they were careful to not destroy them in the process. They destroyed the people in their way, for sure, but they were careful to avoid damaging the institutions too much. In fact, they worked to increase the power of the government, the schools and the colleges once they gained power over them. Today, logic says the Left should be extremely conservative, not wanting to alter anything, for fear of diminishing the power of what they have.

That’s the curious thing about what we are seeing from the Left. They have a firm grip on all of the institutions of the empire. They control the mass media. They control the administrative state and the education system. Global corporations are now run by people deeply invested in virtue signaling. The days of the Left having to pressure big business to do their bidding are long over. Big business is the vanguard of the Left now. Despite this, the Left is running around trying to scramble all of the rules.

When you’re in charge, the rules are your friend. After all, you get to write the rules, pick the people who enforce the rules and pick the people who interpret the rules. That is one of the best perks of being in control of the institutions. The people in charge of the empire should be the great defenders of law and order, as the rules work in their favor. Instead, everywhere you look, the Left is trying to destroy the authority and legitimacy of the things they control. It’s as if they are trying to burn down their own house to spite us.

A good example is the two big fake news stories this past week. The first one was an obvious put up job by some hack political operators. There was no way it could hold up under scrutiny. Left-wing media should have attacked it in order to maintain what little credibility they have on these issues. Similarly, they fell for the story about the teenagers and the Indian protester. Official media should have been all over debunking that story, as that would have made them look responsible and humane.

Instead, they helped egg on the feeding frenzy. Even if the facts were as originally presented, normal people will always take the side of a kid over an adult in a situation like this. It’s not as if the kids were a gang of blacks attacking an old man in the subway. They just stood their ground and peacefully protested on behalf of their issue. More people were red pilled by that story than by all the alt-right internet memes combined. The media frenzy was suicidal, self-destructive and avoidable.

Now, it could simply be the case where their fanatics on social media make it impossible to put the brakes on these feeding frenzies. A left-wing idiot posts fake news on Twitter and within hours it is retweeted a million times by other left-wing idiots. The speed of the process makes it impossible for the more sober minded media operations to react in a timely fashion. Before they can react, the fake news has rocketed around the internet and the debunking of it is well under way.

That’s not the case in other areas where you see the Left damaging their own cause. For example, they are undermining the law in an effort to swat at flies. Two years after Charlottesville, left-wing lesbian lawyer Roberta Kaplan is asking the court to manipulate Federal law so she can harass alt-right activists. Her scheme relies on reinterpreting old laws aimed at the KKK to terrorize people who attended the rally. Kaplan is a billionaire and she is suing people who don’t have two nickels to rub together.

This is not strictly an American issue. In Canada, two left-wing professors are suing a student, because the student shared a Jordan Peterson video. This video was so upsetting and triggering to the professors, they went on a crazy rant about Peterson on social media. They now fear he may sue them, so they are suing the student in an effort to shift the blame onto her. That sounds insane, but given the state of the courts in Canada, it is not out of the question that the student loses the case.

The only possible outcome of this sort of lawfare is to convince people that the law is a fraud. The only way a legal system can function is if the people think the law is both rational and predictable. Even if people don’t like the laws, they will obey them as long as the law is predictable. If left-wing lawyers manage to subvert the law by getting left-wing judges to sign off on what amounts to state terrorism, the law becomes the enemy of the people. The value of controlling the law and the courts declines.

Even if you want to put this sort of stuff aside as the actions of rogue individuals and mindless idiots on-line, think about some of the policies the Left is championing. One big item on their list is the normalization of open borders by debasing the value of things like driver’s licenses. States with left-wing government are in a rush to issue driver’s licenses to illegals. This will result in so much fraud that the picture ID will lose its value. All levels of government count on those ID’s being mostly accurate.

It’s not just for the benefit of foreigners. New York State is now offering a third option for biological sex. A big part of how the state keeps tabs on the citizenry is having their personal information, usually through the driver’s license process. How long before the body dysmorphics start demanding they can describe themselves as they feel they should be described, rather than their actual description? Cops will be looking for people claiming to be dinosaurs, having licenses with pictures of a T-Rex on them.

When you start to tabulate the radical agenda and the ad hoc activity of the Left, the most obvious conclusion is there is little coordination. The people at the top have lost control of the monster they created. They dream of creating a coalition of non-whiles, over which they will preside, so they can control the empire. The trouble is their coalition is always reminding the other side that such an arrangement will be a catastrophe. Again, the Left is mostly just radicalizing white people now.

The other conclusion is the radicalism of the Left has no limiting principle, so it has to spiral out of control. Like the Khmer Rouge, the logical end of this new radicalism is an orgy of self-destructive violence. That means it will not burn out on its own as happened in the 1970’s with student radicalism. This round of radicalism is for keeps and the Left will not stop until they are stopped. That’s going to put an end to civic nationalism and any thoughts of restoration. Whatever comes next comes after the final conflict.

Way back in the mists of time, alt-right pranksters on social media came up with the term “cuckservative”, which is a combination of cuckold and conservative. They started calling the National Review type of conservatives this on Twitter and Facebook. It was one of those amusing episodes that revealed the gap between the fantasy world in which conservative writers live and the real world outside. None of them initially got the joke or they assumed it did not apply to them, so it made for a week of good gags.

The reason the term was so effective is that is crystallized a reality of the modern conservative intellectual. They are toadies of the Left. Just as a cuckold is a man, who is so completely dominated by his woman that he allows her to carry on with other men, the conservative intellectual is thoroughly dominated by the Left. So much so he willingly submits himself to humiliation on cable chat shows. Worse yet, like the cuckold, the modern conservative endorses and defends the relationship.

What made the gag even more effective is that once these conservative opinion makers were informed of what it meant, we got the old familiar sneer from them. This is where they crinkle up their noses like they caught wind of a bad odor and pretend they are offended by the mere presence of the people mocking them. David French was the most hilarious, as he was one of the last to figure it out. When he did, he went full-on Daffy Duck. The poster child for cuckservatism managed to agree and amplify the insult.

The worthlessness of conservatism, the professional variety at least, is one of the first steps people make along the way toward the dissident right. Today, someone who listens to Ben Shapiro is someone you know is trapped in a forgotten age. They may as well be wearing denim leisure suits and listening to disco. As far as a political movement, it was always a sham, but as a cultural force it at least served as a rallying point. Today, to be a conservative is to be, at best, the house slave who relishes his servitude.

The thing about the cuck label is it implies there is a possibility for the cuck to wake up from his degraded condition and reclaim himself. He literally stops being a cuckservative, as soon as he lifts his eyes and stops bowing and scraping to the Left. There are, after all, a lot of former cucks in the alt-right. There are lots of former conservatives in the dissident right. These are people who saw where they were headed, gathered themselves, and made the trip to this side of the great divide.

The thing is though, there are some people who cannot be saved. They can never reclaim themselves, because they have become so degraded there is nothing left to reclaim or they never had the will to stand alone. There is safety in being a supplicant, so they habituate themselves to that life until they can no longer imagine any other. For them, it is the only way they can live. That’s what you see with the sad spectacle of so-called conservative opinion makers attacking the Covington High School kids.

To normal men, what those boys did is inspiring. It shows that there is still some life left in our people. That old degenerate with the tom-tom thought he could just show up and force the white kids to submit. Instead, they stared the old crook down, refusing to play the role of conquered men. The smirks and MAGA hats are a great touch, but the mere act of rebellion among young people is the inspiring part. It says all the anti-white rhetoric and the endless assault on white men is having the opposite of the intended effect.

To the conquered men, the house negroes of Conservative Inc., this is frightening, so their first instinct is to run to their masters and condemn the insouciance of these boys. The only thing missing from the Frankovich piece was a few lines about how this is “not who we are”, as in “master, this is not who I am.” It is a revolting display of cowardly groveling, but so common with these worms that it has become a meme. Social media is full of “the conservative case for [fill in liberal cause]” one liners.

Nicholas Frankovich is a horrible person, but he is a useful example for explaining why there are acts of retribution after every revolution. In every race of people, there are people like him, who would rather crawl on their bellies to the service of a conqueror, than risk a hair on his head in defense of his people. These are the people found swinging from light posts after the conquerors are overthrown. For a victorious and proud people, there can never be any quarter given to the conquered man.

Back in the 1980’s, something often remarked upon by conservative writers was the diversity of opinion on the Right versus the Left. By that point the Cold War version of the American Left was on fumes. Their policy ideas had a threadbare feel to them. Most of their leading figures struck people as anachronism. They would talk about labor issues, as if men still worked in factories and women were secretaries. The Right, in contrast, seemed to have a great wealth of ideas and idea makers in tune with the age.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Buckley Right has declined into a dull recitation of lines from a catechism that is no longer relevant to the age. The only thing interesting about the legacy Right is watching the neocons figure out how they will rejoin and subvert the Left side of the political class. There’s also the death watch for their legacy publications like National Review. Those are interesting for amusement purposes. Otherwise, there has not been an interesting idea from that crew since the Contract with America.

For its part, the Left has evolved into a weird spirit cult chasing after bogeymen like racism and white supremacy. From an anthropological perspective, that is an interesting thing to observe, but it is entirely without intellectual footing. It’s also infuriating to see bellowing primitives point and sputter at a heretic so the rage heads of their cult can attack the person. The sad spectacle of the House voting to condemn Steve King as a blasphemer speaks the madness that has gripped our ruling class.

What’s remarkable about the emptiness of the intellectual class is that the West is faced with problems that are unique to this age. Automation, for example, promises to reduce the need for labor to a point where the majority of adults will be idle. The demographics of the West, where populations begin to decline and age is an entirely new problem. The only country working this problem is Japan. These are complex and novel challenges, but the intellectual class is mostly silent on these and other pressing issues.

If you are looking for intellectual diversity and depth, the action is all on this side of the great divide. As the James Watson story reveals, the only place you can find honest discussion of the human sciences is on this side. Whether it is evolution, human cognitive ability or population genetics, the dissident right is the only place where people are discussing the amazing breakthroughs in the human sciences. The most interesting writing and commentary is now on outlaw blogs and podcasts.

Of course, it is politics and current events where you find most people on either side of the great divide, but again, the interesting stuff is all on this side. That’s where you see the great diversity on the dissident right. Jared Taylor, for example, is working the same material as Steve Sailer, but arriving at entirely different places politically. In fact, the two of them have debated in the past. When was the last time anyone debated anything on the other side? The closest we got is Tucker Carlson slapping down Ben Shapiro.

There’s also an aesthetic diversity to this side. The tone and material of Counter Currents is completely different from what you get at The Right Stuff. Greg Johnson is more in tune with the trans-occidental intellectual movement, so his material and commentary is more meta-political. The TRS guys are casual, appealing to an earthier audience. Their primary focus is on domestic issues and identity politics. There is plenty of crossover, but they are clearly appealing to different temperaments and a different aesthetic.

That’s the other thing you see on this side that is missing from the other side. There is an irreverence and a joie de vivre on this side. Say what you want about the TRS guys, but they are having fun being bad. RamZPaul is having a blast interviewing curious people on his YouTube channel. The people on the other side always look like they caught whiff of a bad odor. What passes for humor is a host saying wooden gag lines about Bluermpf. “Orange man bad!” Applause sign lights. Audience cheers. Rinse. Repeat.

When people talk about the political divide in the West, they often focus on practical matters like nationalism versus globalism. In reality, the divide is between the search for factual truth versus the search for moral truth. Not only are the goals different, but the methods are different. Both sides look at the human condition and wonder why things are as they are, but one side seeks to explain the great diversity of man, while the other side seeks to exterminate these differences, in order to reach a moral end.

That’s why there is so much more diversity of thought and opinion on this side. There can be only one moral framework, one set of moral truths. If two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong, thus the ever narrowing of our intellectual class. As the free thinkers and the curious are cast out, they find their way to this side, having to first cross the river of the damned, accepting biological reality. Living outside the favor of the popular gods is not always a lot of fun, but it vastly more interesting than the other side.

Every once in a while, particularly during the Obama years, someone would compare the ideological enforcers to the Red Guards of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Inevitably, the response from many so-called conservatives, would be that it was an exaggeration or just a bad comparison. After all, today’s ideological enforcers just shriek and make life unpleasant for the bad-thinker. No one is being forced to publicly confess to imaginary crimes or being sent off to a reeducation camp.

The whole point of comparing something in the current time, or even the near future, to something bad from the past, is exaggeration. The point is to make the present thing appear worse, in order to warn of something bad on the horizon. The shrieking social justice warriors may not be physically attacking college professors today, but if they are not stopped now, they could be doing this in the near future. That’s the whole point of the exaggerated comparison. It is to warn of something bad on the horizon.

The question never considered is what happens when the warnings prove to be correct, but no one is taking notice. That is, what if the shrieking social justice warriors start forcing college professors to wear dunce caps and the people in charge open up reeducation camps for bad thinkers? That would be pretty bad, but it would be worse if people just shrugged and said, “Sure, you were right about this turning into the Cultural Revolution, but what are we going to do?” What exaggeration do we use then?

We are now about to find out. This story from the New York Times was bouncing around among dissidents over the holidays. It tells of a black women who got her feelings hurt on Twitter a couple of years ago. The people in charge used her sadness to force one of the people making her sad to confess to imaginary crimes and agree to spend 200 hours in a reeducation camp. Additionally, the black girl will monitor his behavior and determine if he is sufficiently submissive to her, before he is released from custody.

That sounds like an exaggeration, for sure, but it is not. A year ago, American University celebrated the acquisition of a new totem to their goodness, but then that totem was mocked on Twitter by people who read the Daily Stormer website. One of them, Evan James McCarty of Eugene, Ore., was hunted down and brought to trial. According to the New York Times story, he was forced “to apologize, renounce white supremacy, undergo counseling and help civil rights groups fight hate and bigotry.”

The point they are making, as is the point of any sort of mob justice or vigilantism, is to send a warning to others. When the Maoists were parading around bad thinkers in dunce caps, it was not about the victim. It was a message to everyone else. You either fall in line or you face something similar. That’s the point of this case and the harassment campaign run by propaganda organs like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast. Kelly Weill and Chris Mathias are hired ideological enforcers, not journalists or reporters.

No doubt people will argue that this characterization of this event is out of line or an exaggeration. They will point out that the victim agreed to perform the confession and agreed to enter a reeducation camp. That’s true, strictly speaking. It’s also true that workers around the country “volunteer” to undergo morality training and submit themselves to examination, in order to ensure they are not blaspheming the gods of the state. In an ideological state, people “volunteer” for a lot of things.

It is tempting to dust off the great quote from Theodore Dalrymple about how in communist societies, the purpose of propaganda was to humiliate. There’s certainly truth to that in this particular case. The new class wanted to humiliate the Twitter troll in order to make a point. They probably wanted him to wear a dunce cap and sandwich board detailing his crimes, but maybe next time. The assumption is that no one will want to submit themselves to the same humiliating punishments so everyone will fall in line.

There is another side to the coin here. This was an act of vengeance. The story and the facts make clear that the new class is angry that anyone would dare disrespect the gods of the state. They are insulted by these silly acts of rebellion. That’s why the ink was not dry on the settlement and the lawyers for the black girl were on the phone to the New York Times with the details. They wanted to make sure that everyone in this kid’s community knows he is a blasphemer and a heretic. It was a high tech doxxing.

Therein lies the big difference between what the Maoists or Soviets were doing to their heretics. The Chinese college professor wearing the dunce cap, while being jeered by his revolutionary students had the hope that one day the people doing the jeering would rehabilitate him. The Russian forced to confess to harboring bad thoughts or listening to decadent music could hope to get a reprieve, if he grovelled sufficiently. In other words, the condemned still had some chance at redemption.

There will be no rehabilitation for Evan James McCarty. This is now on his permanent record. Anytime a prospective employer or rival in the work place puts his name into a search engine, his crimes will be announced. That’s the point of having this posted in the New York Times. That’s the real punishment. They are not allowed to brand him or force him to wear an armband, so they make sure his crimes were announced by the main organ of the ideological state. He’ll be a heretic forever.