I replied to a comment on a Facebook post yesterday with something that the more I think about it, the more I understand its relevance.

I stated that there is a difference between old-line liberals and these contemporary progressives. I’m a classical liberal (aka a conservative) and I have some very good liberal friends. We don’t agree on how to solve problems, but we do agree what the problems are.

I also have some progressive acquaintances who simply think I am the problem. My very existence is the issue for them.

And it’s that last group that are the most dangerous because they have done a masterful job of two things – they have 1) successfully created an enemy that is perceived to be worse than they are and 2) they fight – loud and in close quarters.

One thing you need if you want to raise an army is an enemy. The opposing force doesn’t need to be real, neither does the conflict.

The violence inherent in the various “people’s revolutions” of history has always been part of the American collectivist movement, it just ebbs and flows over time, waiting for the right enemy. In the 60’s it was “The Man” (who was holding everybody down), the 70’s it was the “uptight religious culture and 80’s and 90’s when the Internet started to get traction and people were figuring out how to commercialize it, the violent tendencies subsided. Then came the Millenium – evil corporations and their Satan spawned CEO’s, hell bent on destroying the environment, were the targets of the progressive left (the bourgeois is always a reliable target) – but none of that really gained ground.

Why?

It wasn’t personal enough. People worked, needed products and services these corporations supplied and the average Joe was invested in mutual funds and IRAs that bought stocks in these corporations. Nobody wanted to kill the goose laying the golden eggs.

So the left began calling everybody not them a racist. The revived the KKK and white nationalism, more or less creating the Alt Right – a movement supposedly led by a gay guy, Milo Yiannopoulos – as their enemy. Suddenly everything became racist. Math, clean air and water, enforcing immigration laws, being on time for appointments, dark matter and black holes, science in general, professional sports (which are dominated by black athletes) – all racist.

It even got to the point that college professors decided that white people were just subconsciously and inherently racist because they were white (and that’s not racist AT ALL, is it?).

It didn’t matter that the right really didn’t support or even really pay attention to these outlying folks or that they made up an extreme minority of the population (the SPLC says there has been a “rise in the number of white hate groups” but still numbers the biggest, the KKK at less than 8,000 members total out of nearly 329 million people in the US), all the progressive left needed to do was to convince people to fear the disfavored group(s) and then come join the braindead progressive legion where there is safety.

They even convinced enough people in elected office to join – such as mayors of major cities who will not enforce laws against members of the progressive movement. We have seen this several times in Portland, in Seattle, and in other West Coast cities. Mayors created sanctuary cities to protect illegal aliens from arrest and prosecution and not to be outdone, state governors have declared some states “sanctuaries” with both city and state refusing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

As to the loud and in close quarters aspect, the revolution is being televised – and lights up the internet. Not a night goes by that one of the Alphabet broadcast Networks or cable affiliates like CNN or MSNBC doesn’t run program length commercials for the progressive left (erasing or ignoring information harmful to the movement, of course) . Some – like MSNBC – have made that the basis of their 24/7 programming.

Now the digital carpetbaggers are openly censoring one side of the discussion so that the only news and commentary that matters comes from Big Brother (Google) and the Ministry of Truth (Facebook/Twitter/YouTube) in Mountain View and Menlo Park, respectively.

In his 1964 book, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, Marshall McLuhan proffered that “the medium is the message” – that statement could not be more true today, some 55 years hence. McLuhan understood that how the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself (who did what to whom) and more about creating a desired societal reaction to the crime.

Nowhere is this process more evident than when a murder victim or victims presents the opportunity to advance a policy desired by the anti-Second Amendment progressives (a school shooting) but another murder of equal or greater evil does not (statistics from a weekend in Chicago).

Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

If you don’t have the right enemy, you make them.