After Oct 7, some purple-haired
genderqueer activists on TikTok have taken to reading the Koran and are
pondering converting to Islam. That may seem like a leap, but once
you’re a teenage girl who decides to be a boy for internet clout,
changing to Islam is less difficult.
Hijabs, like dyed hair and
androgynous clothes, have long become just another accessory of restless
social change. Commercials that claim to relate to the youth invariably
include a woman in a hijab as a progressive marker alongside a purple
haired they/them, an ascetic activist type in a t-shirt and random
minorities laughing together while having lattes on a college campus.
Every
generation in the last 60 years has grown up with less of a sense of
who it is than the previous one. The intangible sense of being an
American that once came from boundless frontiers, a work ethic, a sense
of fair play and meritocracy was replaced by cultural programming
distributed by daily newspapers, big publishing houses and movie
theaters, then television networks and colleges, and finally a massive
chaotic stream of social media sewage.
American identity used to
be so strong because it was internal and acquired through hard work and
the character shaping experiences of life in a country with many
possibilities, but it became performative for those members of newer
generations with diminishing frontiers who acquired theirs from
following a script written for them by the entertainment industry and
radical academics. Rather than learning who they were, they copied who
they thought they should be.
Social media combined with academic theories that reduced all identities to a construct unleashed a generation of mutants who mimeographed behaviors on social media.
Identity became a game. And identity could be gamed for
maximum advantage. Socially astute and emotionally unstable teens
spread social media diseases like transgenderism or facial tics
Politics
became just another cultural identity that could be cosplayed at will.
Some social media influencers played far-leftists and then fascists,
putting on and taking off costumes, swapping t-shirts with different
slogans, Antifa shirts giving way to farm dresses and then hijabs.
On
Sunday, they’re wearing pink hats, on Monday, they’re attending
alt-right art shows, on Tuesday, they have their fists in the air for
BLM, and on Wednesday they’re waving ‘Palestinian’ flags. “Hands Up,
Don’t Shoot” segueways to “From the River to the Sea.” They rarely
understand any of the causes they embrace, but politics to them is just a
fashion show.
It’s hard to blame the mutants. They grew up on
social media where the old high school cliques are about international
politics, massive lifestyle changes or castrations and mastectomies. The
outfits and the posturing are about getting attention, finding a group,
and a lucrative side hustle.
Social media and academia turned
millions of people into living viruses whose emotional needs drive them
to find weaknesses in our existing systems and ways of living. Teenage
girls who might have gone goth and flirted, but not too seriously, with
suicide in a previous generation announce that they’re boys and
encourage impressionable younger girls to join them.
People die
and have their lives ruined, but teenage fads always did that. They
rarely disrupted society on this scale, and the teenagers usually moved
on and grew up. But that was when there was something to grow up to and a
sane world waiting out there for them. In the age of corporate affinity
groups and workplace DEI, the intellectual chaos of teenage and college
years extends into their adult jobs. And social media continues to
incentivize the same behaviors.
The adult world with its fixed
truths and serious responsibilities is less present than ever. Rather
than imposing the reality that so many had expected, dismissing campus
antics with, “just wait till they grow up and get jobs”, that world is a
reflection of the same cultural chaos and instability. What is truth,
morality, love, family, right and wrong, or even a woman, are up for
grabs. And social media has become the battlefield for the endless
debates about every element of reality.
The essence of
‘mutantness’ is that change has become its own identity. Radicalism
exists for the sake of radicalism. The culture war was always about
making leftist politics into the source of identity, but much as in
Weimar Germany, this didn’t lead to dominance, just instability. What
does perpetual rebellion turn into when there is nothing to rebel
against? A broken society eventually slides into communism or fascism
just so someone will finally end the chaos.
The ideal recruits
for totalitarians are believers who can latch onto any mass movement at
the drop of a dime because they desperately need something to believe in
to fill the hole within. The leftist culture war has left behind
generations of cultural orphans, robbed of faith, family and country,
who veer between causes and identities, changing politics, religions and
genders with total ease because they want to believe, yet they were
born without anything to believe in.
Academic theories have
taught them to see everything from the outside, not the inside. Gender,
race and sexuality are mere constructs. So they become genderfluid and
invent minority roots. Politics is all-consuming, but also meaningless,
so they scream for the ‘current thing’. They’ve been robbed of the
ability to feel so they go to extremes to try and briefly feel
something.
They act out political and gender roles from the
outside: they imitate because they have been made incapable of
experiencing. With no identity of their own, they’re all ‘Obamas’,
trained to see the culture from the outside, fitting in by sending
cultural signals, gaining social clout by manipulating people on social
media, and yet remaining cold and unfeeling inside.
You might say that a generation raised on social media is a generation of Obamas.
Leftist
culture warfare and extremism has created a culture that no one can fit
into except by mimicry and running along to keep pace with its latest
shifts. The pop culture of last year is this year’s hate crime.
Yesterday’s virtue is today’s vice. The best way to adapt is to just
shout along. And that is how you end up with mobs chanting in support of
Hamas. You could just as easily get them to rally in support of burning
witches or killing all the children because most of the participants
don’t understand the cause and have learned to internalize a barrage of
memes and first-person emoting without feeling the reality of the cause
or grasping the consequences.
Nothing is real to them except their own internal unreality and the emotional pain they feel.
Mutants
are too busy running away to want to think about what they’re running
to. Today’s cause will get tiring soon. It will require too much
commitment and then grow stale. They will have to look at themselves in
the mirror and see that they are the same people they were yesterday.
And then they will find a new cause to champion and a new disguise to
wear.
Today they’re transgender, tomorrow they’re Muslims. And
the day after tomorrow? Maybe they’ll be Nazis. There are so many
possibilities, so many shades of eyeshadow they can put on while
listening to lo-fi beats derived from 1920s music: a new reinvention is
just waiting for them.
This one, the next current thing, will surely work and make them feel like they matter.
The
first casualty of a culture war is the culture. People who derive their
identity from the culture, become mutants, changing all the time,
zombies, shambling soullessly along, or grab a piece of the culture to
recruit their own mutant and zombie armies to gain power.
Or they unplug from a culture gone mad and reach for the truths of their own character.
Know
thyself, an old dead white man once said. That is still the only
bulwark against mass cultural programming and a society gone mad. We are
entering a world of knowers and mutants, those who know what they
believe and those who will believe anything. Those who do and those will
do anything so they never have to look themselves in the eye.
The
business of a healthy society is expecting each man and woman to know
themselves. Those who believe in nothing, can become anything, but those
who know themselves, can become who they are and fulfill their
potential. Mutants can’t change the world, only destroy it. To change
the world, a man or woman has to first deal with their greatest enemy:
themselves.
The mutants are willing to do anything to avoid being
themselves. They will disfigure themselves, tear down our society, or
kill millions so they never have to know themselves.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
Tags: culture war, Left, recent
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