Those of us of a certain age remember those grainy, black-and-white films we were shown in school of a spreading ink stain or the tentacles of a giant octopus that represented Communism spreading over Europe and heading our way.

Today the advancing fascist, totalitarian state that is coming for us might well be represented as a gigantic Pac-Man figure scurrying around within eating any idea or thought or expression that deviates from or opposes leftism: It's Frost's fog not on tiny cat feet but on steroids, and when it is done it will envelop us all.

This Pac-Man figure is:

Cancel culture ...the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.

It is led by truly ignorant people who, literally, don't know what they are talking about.  The prime example of which is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a cum laude graduate of Boston University majoring in international relations and economics:

Rarely does an AOC remark on economic issues go by...[that does not prompt] doubts about how much she learned [in school]....[Like her] Green New Deal [that] would “spend the U.S. into oblivion”....her opposition to Amazon’s attempt to establish offices in Long Island City....[and her claim] that unemployment in America “is low because everyone has two jobs” and “people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week.”  

AOC is but one of the geniuses urging a boycott of Goya Foods because its CEO, Robert Unanue, dared to praise President Trump.  Mr. Unanue, of course, is not alone.  The list is long, from the coaches who use the wrong words, to the proposed rescinding of admission of the student who also praised Mr. Trump (the rescinding has been, for now, aborted),  and even to the canceling of a virtual speech by the President's daughter.

That is but a small sample, and readers undoubtedly know of many more that, especially, do not involve the President such as a Superbowl-winning quarterback being forced to grovel for criticizing the practice of kneeling during the anthem.  And, ridiculously, they've canceled The Duke, John Wayne!

This is all done, of course, not in the name of fascist totalitarianism but to correct the evils of capitalism or to improve race relations or in the name of some other liberal cause, but I ain't fooled, I think AT readers are not fooled, and surely the great novelist, Sinclair Lewis, wasn't fooled eighty-five years ago when he wrote:

“But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”  

None of this is new.  In George Orwell's seventy-year-old novel, 1984, the job of Winston Smith, its protagonist, was to rewrite the past.  In Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union his enemies were routinely erased from history.

From the time of Horace we know “that even fools are right sometimes,” so I am pained to use the words of a true fool when I say that our rulers cannot be criticized, but they are free to criticize and silence whom they wish. When all opposition is silenced, certainly totalitarianism will prevail.

Every day The Mainstream Media (MSM) and the tech giants (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google, et al.) abet or conceal what “cancel culture” does.  In fact, they are the perpetrators of many of  the cancel culture's manifestations.  They, MSM and the tech giants, are our rulers now, but they are only placeholders for the rulers they hope will come: A Grand Socialist State Paradise.  This GSSP would, of course, be led by Democrats.

It is laughingly ironic that the MSM and the tech giants don't realize that the crocodile will eat them, too, for there is no free press under totalitarianism!

Please don't get me wrong.  Cancel culture alone will not topple America and bring on the GSSP.  It is but one of fascism's current handmaidens.  There's Antifa, the Black Lives Matter's parent organization, mail-in voting and other voting fraud, the Russia/Mueller Hoax/investigation, the Impeachment debacle, the persecutions of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, George Soros' prosecutor/Secretaries of State campaigns, the Defund the Police movement, and on and on and on.

Can the advent of this GSSP be forestalled?  I dunno.  Right now I'm less than sanguine about our prospects for doing so.  The clock ticks. The Moving Finger has writ and has moved on.

Many have foretold of the coming of fascism.  Others on the tenuous grip that we have on the results of one election.  Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”  I fear he was too optimistic.

A colleague wrote about the one thing all of who wish to forestall that advent can do this year:

If there was ever an election in which every vote counts, this one is that election. Whether you’re in a red, blue, or swing state, if you stay home this November you, personally — YOU — could be responsible for putting Biden in the White House and handing him a compliant Democrat Congress. And as you’ve seen with the riots in the past few months, that doesn’t mean that America just leans left. It means America is gone.

One by one, our defenders are being shunted, silenced, and replaced by the believers of the wondrous GSSP.

They're coming for us, and as that former U-Boat captain wrote, in effect, we'll be alone when they do.

The author is retired, his profile may be found on LinkedIn, and he usually responds to emails sent to ringchadburn@hotmail.com