Leftists ruin everything, from knitting to chicken.  Leftism is not merely a religion.  It is a cult.  Because leftists are cultists, everything they touch or target must either submit to their beliefs or be destroyed.

But what if, from schools to entertainment to news media, individuals now have the power to walk away from the institutions the leftist cult controls?  The fight against leftism's destructive reach has never been a mere political battle.  As Mark Bauerlein chronicled in American Greatness, once leftist personnel take over institutions, those institutions become Marxist tools.  What is noteworthy today is the degree to which Americans, both young and old, are increasingly rejecting those established institutions and turning toward alternatives.

Hollywood

Today, global media conglomerates take instructions from Planned Parenthood, GLAAD, and communist China.  Hollywood celebrities parrot the party line.

Yet at the same time, those same celebrities mean less and less to the next generation.  At just the cultural moment when a Maoist government controls much of Hollywood scripts, the influence of traditional entertainment sources is waning among the young.  In fact, YouTuber/vlogger is the number one "dream job" of teens and tweens in the United States today.  Most Zoomers can barely identify a movie or television star, but they can readily name their favorite YouTubers.  Hollywood actors droning on about leftist politics no longer matter.  The independent prankster or online gamer is the new "movie star," and he is less likely to care what China thinks.  (However, Big Tech's control over the online infrastructure remains a threat, as American Thinker has previously chronicled.)

Academia

For three generations, any young high-achieving person from a stable, two-parent family in the U.S. has been told he "has to" go to college (and often rack up huge loan burdens) if he wants a future.  This "you must get a college degree or your life is ruined" mentality has enabled an entrenched leftist academic and bureaucratic class to both indebt and indoctrinate generations.

But finally, there are emerging cracks in this left-wing racket.  More parents are waking up and no longer pressuring their vulnerable kids onto this path.  You can increasingly hear it in online moms' groups and social media discussions when parents talk about teens.  The phrase "if he wants to" now proceeds from the mention of the word "college."  The college path is no longer presumed.

In particular, the humanities majors on college campuses are dying in droves.  Take English as an example: "Two-thirds (66.3%) of English departments responding to a 2018 survey done by the Association of Departments of English reported drops (large or small) in the number of majors, while only 8.7% reported small increases.  Nobody reported large increases."

English departments, like many other corrupted left-wing departments, deserve to die.  Acknowledging this does not mean that people do not believe in the value of education or the humanities in particular.  Quite the opposite: It is because leftists have destroyed the noble arts and letters at American universities that the eventual death of humanities departments at secular, left-wing institutions is necessary.  Out of the ashes, others can rebuild.

There are schools and programs that still encourage academic freedom and inquiry, such as the University of Chicago and Princeton's James Madison Program.  There are also the smaller colleges, many religious in nature, still upholding the classics and tradition.

Once parents and their children begin to question academia as a required credential, the left-wing hold on future generations will be more tenuous.  Left-wingers who fill-up bureaucratic "diversity" posts and other administrative rot on campuses may have to get real jobs.

School Systems

It is in the area of modern schooling that some of the greatest hope lies.  Not in the American public school system itself — that is a lost cause.  But recognition of that "lost cause" is exactly where the hope lies.  Countless modern families are finally acknowledging that it is time to give up on government schools and go their own way instead.  Home-based education, from traditional homeschooling to micro-schools, hybrid models, co-ops, and online education, are blooming.

Conservatives spent generations trying to fight the school systems only to watch the Overton window pushed farther and farther left until government schools morphed into indoctrination camps.  Large and cold factory-style schools feel like modern prisons for children.

In previous generations, those who could afford it found private school options.  But now with modern technology and growing awareness, even working-class individuals and single parents can opt out of the public school nightmare and forge ahead with the home-based path.  The more that awareness of this option's viability grows in the United States, the more the left will lose control of future generations.  The left knows this.  That is why Democrats are working overtime at the state level to restrict parental rights in education and why countries like Germany and Sweden essentially ban this particular freedom.

Journalism

Nearly twenty years ago, William McGowan detailed the nepotism that goes into the hiring of journalists and anchors of establishment news sources.  Others wrote about the "revolving door" of democratic activists and politicians who became supposedly "neutral journalists."  Establishment journalism has long been a leftist racket.  One could argue that it has been a racket since the 1930s, when the New York Times' Walter Duranty provided cover for Stalin.  But in the past decade, it has become crystal-clear that the journalistic con's days are finally over.

The 21st century began with Andrew Breitbart setting out to explode the old media order.  Now literally hundreds of conservative new sites, shoe-leather journalists, and investigative reporters call out the establishment and cultural commissars on a regular basis.  It is a beautiful thing.  The examples of conservative media exposing left-wing lies are legion.

In the past few years, shoe-leather conservatives exposed stories like Planned Parenthood's baby parts business, Virginia governor Ralph Northam's blackface, a crazy family court case of transgender madness in Texas, Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez's fake photo-op at a supposed "detention center," and Ilhan Omar's immigration fraud, to name just a few.  The list goes on and on.

The establishment media used to publish commentary by only the most milquetoast conservative commentators and only conservatives who "looked" a certain way.  Conservative women and minorities could not get their voices published in mainstream media.  That no longer matters, because mainstream media no longer matter the way they once did.  Now conservative men, women, and minorities have countless outlets with audiences in the millions where their voices can be heard.  We ushered in 2020 with the mainstream media no longer controlling the narrative.  This reality terrifies them.

(Again, this makes the control wielded by Big Tech corporations so disturbing.  Technological advancements have enabled conservative media to reach audiences they could previously never reach and allowed the rise of conservative voices that would never have been heard in the previous decade's establishment market.  But Silicon Valley also silences those same voices and wields the power to ban voices from ever being heard again.  Unless and until Republicans respond to that threat, leftists wield a dangerous amount of control.)

In the final analysis, conservatives are finding ways to escape the suffocating claws of everything from government schools to political, academic, and media establishments.  How we ultimately also break free of woke corporate dominance will be a critical question of the next decade.

For now, I count my blessings that I live in a culture and a country where I can educate my children as I please; write and publish without my female conservative voice being silenced; and tell my children that their future choices can involve, but need not require, a higher education path.  Meanwhile, conservatives and religious believers will have to roll our eyes at regular onslaughts from the media and corporate world as cultural Marxists continue to insult our values and attempt to corrupt our children.