If these are the six phases on the road to communism where are we?

1. Laying the groundwork
2. Propaganda
3. Agitating the masses
4. Consolidating control over society’s
   institutions
5. Coercing conformity
6. Final solutions.
   ‐-----------

1. Laying the Groundwork

This is usually a generational or decades-long process, in which minds can be closed to reason and more influenced by emotion and propaganda. This happens in many ways: through the mass bureaucratization of life that allows for policies that promote polarization, dependency, and human isolation; through disabling independent thinking by educational fads that actually cultivate ignorance and shun content knowledge; through the attack on the humanities in both K-12 and higher education; and through the lack of general knowledge about how mass psychology works.

All the while, as new communications technologies develop and proliferate, they are embedded into the groundwork that promotes tyranny over liberty. Through the effects of these trends, people become less open to logic, and more persuaded by the proliferation of images and emotional appeals, cemented by groupthink.

2. Manufacturing Propaganda

Propaganda has always been with us, and always will be. But as people become less able to discern fact from fiction, propaganda feeds on itself more intensely. As emotions trump facts, propaganda tends to become more forceful and more focused on driving people to agitate for collectivist agendas. It takes a multitude of forms, but the Orwellian manipulation of language is always the key to thought reform.

Then, journalists increasingly become propagandists, and promote illusions of alternative realities. This includes the revision of history, as well as trends such as gender ideology, which pushes to de-sex everybody in the eyes of the law. As propaganda takes the form of political correctness, it threatens people with social rejection if they don’t conform to the politically correct agendas. In this way, it induces self-censorship and preference falsification to create the illusion of public opinion support for its agendas. Political correctness is the sort of agitprop that can grow a cult mindset in the population.

3. Agitating the Masses

Once the groundwork has been laid and propaganda absorbed by enough people, agitation can proliferate. As Lenin made clear, agitation and propaganda go together and are absolutely essential to communist revolutions. As that sort of agitation becomes more prevalent in public life, there’s more speed on the road to totalitarianism.

Agitation can involve protests, parades, marches, demonstrations and riots. It also involves organized shout-downs of legislators and a hundred other means of trying to affect public policy by influencing public opinion. During this phase, imitative behaviors proliferate (such as we’ve seen among NFL players during the national anthem and Olympic athletes). It seems that hatred and frustration are more palpable everywhere in the society.

Indeed, the propaganda media-cartel, Hollywood, and academia, the ACLU & the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL, the DOJ, the FBI and the 'squad' would have us focus on nothing else. We see iconoclasm in this phase, as in the defacing of public statues and national monuments. The education establishment becomes involved in politically agitating children, creating confusion and frustration, and cultivating hostility towards their parents if they aren’t with the program (especially CRT)..

4. Consolidating the Takeover of Society’s Institutions

About 100 years ago, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci introduced his theory of “cultural hegemony,” which cast cultural institutions as the enemy, claiming they were used to maintain power. So the key to achieving communism in the West was through destroying its culture, not through promoting socialist economic policies that had little appeal in the West. This would require a “long march through the institutions” of society, destroying them from within so communism could fill the vacuum.

Radicals of the 1960s like Herbert Marcuse (Regressive Tolerance) and Saul Alinsky picked up on this theme, noting that “the system” (i.e., American freedom) could only be destroyed from within once radical operatives had control over society’s institutions. The deep state and globalist elites is one example that’s been building through decades of bureaucratic bloat, with operatives embedded throughout the government, including in the military and intelligence agencies. And, of course, the cultural politicization and takeover of media, academia/education, healthcare, entertainment and science.

But, most importantly, the mediating institutions have been relentlessly attacked. Those are the institutions that protect the individual from encroachment by the state, particularly the family, the church, and all voluntary and civic associations. We can see and feel especially how the family has been eroded today. All of these institutions have been deeply affected by statist forces, rendering them more vulnerable than ever to total absorption by the mass state, a prerequisite for communism.

5. Forcing Conformity

This is perhaps the most unsettling phase, when otherwise discerning people who have been duped by the rhetoric of social justice finally awaken to the deceit within the agitprop. This is the stage in which you are told to conform and convert—or else. We see small shop owners threatened with financial ruin if they don’t disavow their faith. We see Catholic nuns, like Little Sisters of the Poor, threatened for not disavowing their faith. We see echoes of Maoist-style “struggle sessions”—otherwise known as sessions of criticism and self-criticism—as college students are forced to admit to white privilege simply because they had happy childhoods and people attacked by groups of trans-activists like antifa if they question pro-nouns or 100+ genders, affirm male/female biology or don't want males in female restrooms, etc.

Cancel culture attacks and false confessions proliferate, along with apologies and recantations for showing even the slightest hint of a politically incorrect viewpoint even if the incident occurred years prior in an online social media post. A surveillance state can grow with new technologies being used for data mining. At the same time, human resources departments start telling employees to report for discipline any politically incorrect private conversation that they might overhear.The practice of ritual defamation—smears such as “bigot,” “racist,” “KKK”—become commonplace. And, perhaps most chilling, psychiatry is being used as a political weapon. This

6. The ‘Final Solutions' (normalization)

Perhaps you’ll agree that we should always be aware of the lessons of history if we don’t want to repeat its more unsavory chapters. In the last phase, which is fast and furious, totalitarian elites let loose their inclination to brutally eliminate their perceived enemies.

It happens in what Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov identified as the “normalization” stage, after subversion of a nation is complete. It’s as though they can’t do anything but eliminate their perceived enemies because they just don’t know how to do anything else. The body count in the Soviet gulag state, including reigns of terrors and purges intended to rid the country of counter-revolutionaries, was in the tens of millions.

In this phase, violence is considered simply a necessary means to achieving the goal of centralized power. There is not even a pretense of due process or respect for free speech. Yet there are pretexts given for eliminating perceived enemies, excuses that have the perpetrators projecting their own intentions upon their victims. That’s an old and tragic story.

America is still a free nation with laws on the books that protect individuals from abuses by the state. But we should be very disturbed by the emergence of trends that, if left unchecked, would lead to the consolidation of centralized power by elites who would abolish the Bill of Rights. Communism, as well as fascism and all such forms of totalitarianism, is the natural product of such unchecked trends.

So when people disrespect the American flag “because oppression,” they tend to be clueless that their freedom to do so is extremely fragile. Freedom must be fought for, tooth and nail. Then it must be appreciated and nurtured, never taken for granted.

We are still in the fight to preserve freedom. But when we review the preponderance of trends that point us in that direction, we ought to pay attention to the symptoms and work to reverse those trends. We ought to be looking hard for a cure, or at least a path to sanity and balance.

This means filling the vacuum of ignorance with knowledge and teaching students how to dispassionately assess information and process it on their own rather than rely on emotion and groupthink—and finding a way to do so quickly. It means cultivating respect for reality over pseudo-reality. It means reaching out in goodwill to others, no matter their political persuasion, to de-fang the polarization causing so much alienation and unhappiness in our society.

[thefederalist.com]