How far along are we into America's Maoist Cultural Revolution?  Well, Tumblr encourages users to choose from 112 different genders and another 73 distinct sexual attractions that can be mixed and matched in order to "create the orientation that best describes you."  Hmmm.  Math is racist.  White Democrats think black Americans can't figure out how to get a voter ID.  And Tumblr believes there are at least 8,176 gender identities — for right now, mind you.  A year from now, Tumblr's corporate board members will be bending over backwards during public struggle sessions trying to convince the woke mob that they failed to previously appreciate that there really are 17,429 gender identities or 835,709 different sexual attractions because the white patriarchy infected their brains with encephalitic hate.  Nothing lasts very long in Mao's America.

For the political left, what is true is always changing.  Just as our Constitution has been rendered meaningless by making it a "living, breathing" pile of gobbledygook subjectiveness, this year's truth will inevitably go out of fashion by this time next year, and the same Democrats who claim to believe fervently in the woke dogma of the moment will in the future deride and mock anyone who could so ignorantly believe in what they themselves believed only yesterday.

It took fifteen years to go from Ellen coming out of the closet on national television to Obama "evolving" on redefining marriage.  It's taken less than a decade since then for Joe Biden to declare the trans movement the "civil rights issue of our time" and only a year for Big Tech to outright censor Americans for being so brazen as to believe there are two — and only two — biological sexes, a fact widely known by most Democrats just a short time ago.  Now, in record time, Democrats have thrown cautious "evolution" out the window and decided that straight men must be shamed for not wanting to date men posing as women.  Forget bodily autonomy, religious belief, or morality.  You will bake that cake — I mean, date that guy with the pink lipstick, stubbly chin, and Manolo Blahnik knockoffs — or prove that you're irredeemably filled with hate.  Yikes!  We've gone from "tolerant people should accept Ellen for who she is" to "only bigots unworthy of our respect think there's a problem with men dressed as women twerking in front of children at story hour."  That may not be "change we can believe in," but it's the kind of earth-shattering stuff that ends up torching entire societies.  That's the thing with "cultural revolutions," though — a little kindling catches fire, and then the whole forest is ablaze before anyone knows what's happening.

First, viewpoints are attacked as illegitimate.  Then books supporting those viewpoints are burned.  Then the people who write those books (or read those books) join the bonfires themselves.  So when Amazon banned scholar Ryan Anderson's book on transgenderism earlier this year, it wasn't just engaging in censorship.  It was throwing a huge log onto the flames.

Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola's "bonfire of the vanities" in Florence in the late fifteenth century should have provided ample warning to future generations that burning books always leads to burning bodies, but humanity never learns the lesson.  Young indoctrinated students not too different from those today rushed to the Bebelplatz in Berlin in May of '33 to burn tens of thousands of books for the Nazi cause, and twelve years later, Berlin lay in ruins.  When Mao's Cultural Revolution really took hold in '66, idealistic brainwashed students, again not so different from those today, became Red Guard marauders, going from house to house, burning books and anything else that reeked of one of the "four olds" — old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits.  Sound familiar?  Gotta rid America of all that nasty "white supremacy," "systemic racism," "patriarchy," and "hate" — and "build back better"!  Nobody wants to remember that Mao's version of "hope and change" killed off 65 million Chinese, condemned another 50 million to the gulag, and turned a generation of teenagers into a raging army of psychopaths who tortured their parents, neighbors, and teachers in the name of "progress" and killed over a million of their elders before the dust settled.  Woohoo, now that's a "Great Leap Forward"!  Or was it a "Great Lean Forward"?  Eh, same difference.

It's just a little censorship, Google, Facebook, and Twitter say.  So we put you in virtual time-out or purge your voice from the internet for "spreading hate" — what's the harm?  It's just a little citizen designation, Attorney General Garland says.  What could possibly go wrong with legally defining half of the American populace as "domestic violent extremists" because they voted for Donald Trump or as "white supremacists" because they have the wrong color skin?  Conservatives are just too "touchy" these days.  Nothing bad ever happens when a certain class of people are designated as enemies of the State for supporting the "wrong" ideas — nope, nothing to see here.

Except, it never, ever ends with just censorship or labeling.  What starts with burning words — whether on paper or in digital space — always ends with burning people.  Those most eager to start the fires learn quickly that in order to truly eradicate ideas, they must go after their "root causes" — the people who have those ideas and write them down in the first place.  Pretending there are thousands of genders out there seems a little too crazy to take seriously.  But "politics is downstream from culture," and when the "madness of crowds" takes over, blood is never too far behind.

Image via Pexels.

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