As we enter the home stretch in the 2024 presidential election, awash in a deluge of campaign promises, lies and half-truths aimed at influencing minds and votes, some are asking: Is a drama-free outcome too big of an ask?

The answer to this question largely depends on whether we associate the toxic environment in recent years with Donald Trump, the mainstream media machine that attacked him on his way into politics and who will no doubt continue to attack all things Conservative and Republican long after Trump is gone — or an agenda of a much more pernicious sort.

For an answer, it may help to look at how the so-called mainstream media has mastered the art of narrative.

Often we become so numb to the spin that we do not even notice anymore. Take the fact that left-leaning political parties have enjoyed long, unbroken runs of dominance across much of the Western world through the latter half of the 20th Century and beyond. All the while, the Political-Media Industrial Complex has managed to position themselves as a besieged minority amidst a sea of far-Right extremists who, in turn, serve as antagonists.

The purveyors of left-leaning perception also benefit from baked-in rhetorical advantages. “Liberal’ has a nice ring to it. By contrast, Conservative sounds rather regressive. Likewise, “progressive” sounds forward looking, far better than a Luddite! (And who wouldn’t want to be the party of Labour, if the alternative is sloth?)

Public sentiments generally reflect and reinforce this framing. Indeed, no one in the U.S. or European politics seems to lose sleep over leftist radicalism — and one would be hard-pressed to find a news story on any given day flagging the problem of “left-wing extremism”. The same cannot be said on the right. Adolf Hitler is frequently evoked by American media gatekeepers. But for those old enough to recall Cold War era “red scares”, once could be forgiven for failing to appreciate that the bulk of 20th Century genocides were carried out by Communists. Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong, in fact, have been collectively blamed for the deaths of 150M people!

Fascism is arguably the only authoritarian form of government the civilized world has largely rejected, but it is arguably the only form of tyranny the public has been conditioned to fear despite the historical proximity of the Cold War. All the while, repressive regimes operate with virtually no blowback in Venezuela, Cuba, China and elsewhere even as “socialism” enjoys a comparatively benign reputation.

Wikipedia exposes another way the Left masters language and therefore “reality”.

There is academic debate over whether [Communist] killings should be attributed to the political system, or primarily to the individual leaders of the Communist states; similarly, there is debate over whether all the famines which occurred during the rule of communist states can be considered mass killings.

Imagine how many jaws would have to be picked up off Ivy League floors if there was any sizable or serious modern scholarly “debate” over whether fascism, apart from the fact that Hitler and Mussolini were genocidal disasters, coulda, woulda, shoulda been a smashing success?

One really has to hand it to the Left for owning the “reproductive healthcare” discussion, too. It is never a high point in life when a pregnancy ends in miscarriage or an unwanted child. So why does “pro choice” sound like the kind of choice you get between two job offers, two romantic suitors or two flavors of ice cream?

No wants to make so-called birthing persons’ feel bad about tearing beating hearts out of viable “preborns”, so we call that pound (or ounce) of flesh a “fetus” or an “it” rather than a he, she, they/them — or a baby. Meanwhile, not even pro-lifers are so vulgar as to challenge the pro-choice euphemism as “pro death”.

Another semantic ploy involves the Left’s incongruence over “censorship”. The same individuals who openly call for censorship both online and off for the sake of protecting adults from hate speech and misinformation refuse to breathe any air into a discussion about age-appropriate educational materials for schoolchildren. Instead, they throw out the LGBTQ+ community as human shields, fueling fears that the adults in these communities would like nothing more than to sexualize children.

Tragically, Americans have taken the narrative bait: Members of the LGBTQ+ communities are perplexed about why they have been accused of “grooming” children. And heteronormative cisgender adults apparently have nothing better to do than worry about how other adults live — as opposed to how their own children are educated behind closed doors. This, in turn, has given rise to yet another, deadlier spinoff surrounding “transgender genocide” and the formerly unheard of phenomena of transgender mass shootings.

Exercising their narrative superpowers yet again, behold the dawn of a new era in children’s rights. Children may be unable to vote, legally and lawfully buy alcohol, cigarettes, marry or enlist in the armed services — but they have the right to explore the world of sex toys. Should you disagree, this too is a negative reflection on LGBTQ+ people!

In recent years — seemingly overnight — children have been empowered to transition genders, a practice innocuously referred to as gender affirming care. By definition, there is nothing whatsoever to affirm about “born this way” biology. But how can anyone argue with something that sounds so beneficient on its face?

A child may be ill-equipped to envision a life of reproductive dysfunction and/or medical dependency. They may very well suffer from undiagnosed neurological or psychiatric disorders. (Studies show, for example, that a disproportionate percentage of self-identified transgender youth are also autistic.) They may be too young to appreciate the longstanding eugenicist preoccupation with sterilizing “undesirables” — or that eugenics was driven throughout the 20th Century not just by the usual suspects of class, gender and race but by concerns about human overpopulation — in turn echoed in the climate crisis concerns of today. Should the public question whether the medical system ought to make make tens of millions of dollars transitioning children, all we need know is that asking gender dysphoric children to make life-altering decisions later on in life is to condemn such children to suicide.

As it is so often, shame is the cudgel by which to impose “replacement norms”.

Establishing the right of children to make decisions without parental knowledge or consent isn’t radical; in fact, it is the new civil rights frontier. Not that the Left frames it quite that bluntly for public consumption, however. Parents have, since time immemorial, had the responsibility to shield their offspring from harm. But once again, the creators of Truth aren’t having your definition of what that harm may be.

Adults who wish to shield children from content so graphic that it violates Federal Communications Commission decency standards to read excerpts into a microphone during a televised public comment period at a school board meeting are not merely Christian conservatives or even, exclusively, Americans. And yet thanks to their power over narrative, the Left has shifted the protection of children and parental rights into a discussion about censorship and domestic terrorism. The only “extremism” in this X-rated picture is on insisting that there is an age-appropriate conversation to be had in the first place!

The Left also owns the narrative on “illegal aliens”. Better we refer to these tired and huddled masses as undocumented, than noncitizen. Better yet, call them refugees and asylum seekers rather than undocumented, noncitizens or migrants. It is fully expected to give appropriate consideration to verbiage — but not to concerns that those who claim to have fled violence in their homeland may never be confirmed as such for the same reason it may never be confirmed if noncitizens are fleeing efforts by law enforcement elsewhere in the world to arrest them for serious crimes.

The Left has an even bigger monopoly on what constitutes misinformation. When public concerns go viral on social media, fact checkers rush in to prove them wrong even if the gist of a story is more accurate than not. Replacement migration is one of the so-called conspiracies for which acknowledging demographic reality has been made taboo on the grounds that such concerns reflect little more than hate.

Everywhere the Left has spent any amount of time in power, the more privileges formerly reserved for citizens are awarded to noncitizens — but we are not supposed to notice this trend, either. If we question how noncitizens are caught up in automatic voter registration — with little more than a checkbox on the federal voter registration form separating someone with the right to vote from an ineligible individual — we are told these “glitches” are exceedingly rare even though the experts journalists turn to for data have their own agendas.

When we question why Europe and the United States are in the throws of a forever migrant crisis despite years of mostly-liberal rule and billions of dollars in cumulative aid to facilitate economic development and address the root causes of mass migration, we are told that the only real problem — besides climate crisis — is that we have failed to open our minds, hearts and wallets wide enough.

If we express concern for undocumented crime, fact checkers trot out apples-to-oranges comparisons to an era not so long ago when family units were the undocumented norm, Customs and Border Protection resources were not nearly so overwhelmed and individuals were vetted after a stay in a detention center. Few of those conditions remain in play in recent years.

Taken together, the rhetorical obstacles the Left has thrown up in objection to citizen-led democracy suggests we the people are little more than impediments to progress in the minds of those who refuse to discuss their post-Capitalism ideas in an open and transparent way. Even diversity, equity and inclusion — for all the warm fuzzies these concepts evoke — are misleading in that it has come to reflect little more than superficial racial and gender identity traits, for which education, character and merit are inappropriate considerations.

By circumscribing any number of public conversations in this way, stakeholders in government, finance and media need not make good on intellectual and ideological “inclusion” for the nonaligned. And yet again, the Left wins another battle for the public mind: Exclusionary practices and the demonization of dissent doubles as “protecting Democracy“. All the while, core freedoms — speech, privacy, religious and freedom of conscience — are hanging on by a thread!

The world is changing rapidly but not because a majority have spontaneously rejected values as they existed as little as five to 10 years ago. The ratcheting up of rhetoric and narrative is highly suggestive, rather, of a relentless effort to push the envelope on our behalf.

Some will undoubtedly be convinced faster than others that these ideas are inherently their own because repetition, by whatever mechanism it occurs, breeds familiarity if not self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we become untethered from the old, the more we are convinced it is because we saw superior virtue in the new. And yet for all the attempts on the part of the Left to brand this evolution as “inclusive”, we would do well to ask how much is voluntary if, in fact, the result is a more divided world?

It is hardly a conspiracy to admit that the ideas espoused by self-described radicals of the 1960s have not gone anywhere. What they have done is to soften their revolutionary image for public consumption. The use of euphemistic language that few can disagree with could be expected to rather successfully rebrand Marxist revolutionary praxis into the palatable anti-fascist and social justice movements of today.

Unfortunately, a deeper dive into the academia that informs popular narrative — the pursuit of “critical theory” and “intersectionality” — reveals the same weaknesses that gave way to the horrors of 20th Century Communism: Capitalist oppressors cannot be reformed or reasoned with. Their institutions and identities must instead be abolished — destroyed! — to make way for a heretofore unrealized Utopia.

To bring this full circle, the fear of post-election chaos was virtually unheard of in the United States until relatively recently — but we are no longer tethered to Right/Left party politics as we once knew them. When the Wikipedia entry quoted earlier in this essay alludes to a debate about whether or not Communism was the cause of 20th Century genocides and famines as opposed to blame resting on “bad apples” such as Stalin, anyone not already wedded to the infallibility of Leftist ideology can readily appreciate that the challenge inherent in clearing the slate of the world’s oldest ideas about borders and sovereignty, religion and family, politics and economics are so monumental as to lend themselves to the “adjacent” notion that the only way to replace the status quo (oppressive structures) is to also eradicate individuals who refuse to surrender old ideas — hence the fact that there is so little daylight between communism and violence!

Collectively, the New Left is not to be underestimated as an academic, political or activist minority. One need look only to the success with which language and media have been leveraged to shape the cultural wars to appreciate that narrative dominance does not come about without the aid of propaganda. These “stealth narratives” — in the sense that modern Marxists, communists and anti-fascists do not openly own such efforts — nevertheless serve to move the needle on behalf of the apolitical, unschooled and traditionally-minded masses.

If we do not want the “soft revolution” to became a violent one, something has to give.

Reclaiming normal — a less radical and polarized public life — does not require anyone to agree. But it does require that we reassert our “thought space”. Our values are not others’ to coerce. Our speech is not others’ to control. Our children are not others‘ to raise.

It is not others’ democratic Republic to lose. It is ours.

The sooner we learn to spot the myriad of ways in which language has been ideologically captured to exploit class, race, gender, income and public safety divides for the sake of discrediting our Capitalistic, nuclear family underpinnings, the sooner this silent revolution — marked by desecration, destruction and lawlessness — ends.

The drama only stops short of becoming a full-fledged revolution if we live and vote with the knowledge that we are being played against the middle.

Fortunately for us, we still have a choice.

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Sources

Marxism: What It Is and Comparison to Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism | Investopedia

Democratic Socialism and Socialism Are Increasingly Salient Among Democrats | Data For Progress

The Surprising Roots of Fascism | Hoover Institution

H.G. Wells ‘Liberal Fascism‘ | JSTOR

Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism’? | Climate Depot

The Dangers of the New Democratic Socialism | The Daily Economy

Christianity or Critical Theory? | Ligonier Ministry

The Successful Long March Through the Institutions | The American Vision