Those who remember the Soviet system understand the danger of letting the practice of collective denunciation run amok. But you don’t have to imagine an American Stalin in the White House to see where first the toleration, then the normalization, and now the legitimization and rewarding of this ugly practice is taking us.

Americans have discovered the way in which fear of collective disapproval breeds self-censorship and silence, which impoverish public life and creative work. The double life one ends up leading—one where there is a growing gap between one’s public and private selves—eventually begins to feel oppressive. For a significant portion of Soviet intelligentsia (artists, doctors, scientists), the burden of leading this double life played an important role in their deciding to emigrate.

Those who join in the hounding face their own hazards. The more loyalty you pledge to a group that expects you to participate in rituals of collective demonization, the more it will ask of you and the more you, too, will feel controlled. How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?

From my vantage point, this cultural moment in these United States feels incredibly precarious. The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society. Whether that society looks like Soviet Russia, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Castro’s Cuba, or today’s China, or something uniquely 21st-century American, the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.

Go here to read the rest.  Fight the Red Fascists with everything you have.  We have seen this movie before.  Those who sit by mute and shocked as their nations dissolve under Leftist riots have a dreadful fate.  There are plenty of power hungry and hateful politicians in our country just itching to recreate Soviet Union II in this country and willing to kill how many tens of millions to accomplish it.  Alarmist?  Perhaps.  But the Bolsheviks in 1913 had prospects so poor that Lenin feared the Romanov dynasty, celebrating three centuries on the throne of Russia, could have another three centuries.  Our current unrest has little to do with race and quite a bit with an ongoing attempted Leftist coup.