You might have thought Ali Alexander would go away after the January 6 calamity. Nope — he’s back with a new, even more radical proposal:

Ali Alexander says the free press should be abolished. He plans to build a MAGA Mega city for 10 million people. He’ll hold rallies again in march and “alot of people will end up rioting.” pic.twitter.com/xWykavJnGd

— Jared Pushner ??? (@JaredPushner) February 11, 2021

There’s a subzero chance that I would want to live in the same city as the mob that invaded the Capitol. Anyway, Ali’s MAGA utopia will go nowhere, and the riots he says he will spark will do nothing but bring us all closer to the total surveillance state. If the Left wanted to create an undercover provocateur who would bring about its fantasy of smashing the Right, they could hardly do better than this reckless dude.

But I surprise myself with the amount of sympathy for his dream. Right after I saw that tweet with Alexander in it, I read this piece on The Federalist about how Snapchat propagandizes youth with its “news feed.” Excerpts:

What you probably haven’t heard much about is Snapchat. Why? Adults aren’t really on the app. A 2020 study found Snapchat is the most popular social media among U.S. teens (TikTok is a close second).

It is dominated by social media’s youngest users, and with its short-lived, disappearing content, parents have no way of keeping tabs on what their kids are looking at. For years, Snapchat has flown under the radar, yet they are arguably the most influential and dangerous app because of its solid grip on the next generation of Americans.

Parents tend to think Snapchat is just about sending photos and videos to your friends. Snapchat used to just offer one- to ten-second person-to-person photo and video sharing and “stories” of 24 hours of chronological content that all your Snapchat “friends” can view.

However, in 2015, Snapchat got into the brainwashing business when it introduced “Discover,” a feature for publishers like CNN, Complex, The New York Times, Mashable, People, Vice, and Vox to showcase short, ad-supported content. Snapchat also offers smaller brands and content creators a platform on Discover, like the famous left-wing podcast “Pod Save America” and “Hooked on the Look,” a documentary series focusing on people who go to extreme lengths to look a certain way.

Snapchat’s editorial team has complete control over Discover content. They carefully hand-select propaganda to be placed right before your child’s eyes. Here’s what I found after scrolling through my Snapchat Discover feed.

Here are some screen shots of Snapchat programming and news that the piece’s author, Evita Duffy, shared from her feed:

You get the idea. One of this blog’s Polish readers told me recently, reflecting on the cultural-left radicalization of the younger generations in his country, that there is no institution in Poland with more power over the minds of the young than global social media.

With each passing day, I grow more alienated from what is now the American mainstream, or at least the American mainstream as mediated to us. I don’t want to live in the same society at people who refuse to call a mother a mother, because they stand to offend a man who calls himself a woman. I want to live in a society where people use the right words for things. I want to secede from this sick and decadent society. That’s what the Benedict Option is, more or less — not calling for a separatist utopia, but calling on traditional Christians to form thick communities of practice capable of resisting the cultural tide, even as we live in the world.

Why not a separatist utopia? Because utopias don’t work. If Ali Alexander were to form his MAGA-tropolis, it would take about five minutes before human nature asserted itself, and it would reproduce some version of many of the problems on the outside, plus new ones particular to that community. I’m reading a really good mystery now, Coyote Fork, by James Wilson. It’s a metaphysical story about a failed northern California hippie commune that, in some way (I haven’t gotten to the end) has to do with the creation of an Internet dystopia. The kinds of things that Wilson’s protagonist, an English journalist named Robert Lovelace, discovers on his quest for answers about the disappearance of a woman are the kinds of problems that every utopian community has encountered. This novel is a good way to think through what it is about human nature that makes utopias impossible.

But if utopia is impossible, it does not follow that there is nothing at all we can do. I have a friend who lives in a small city out West, and who recently interviewed for a plum position in a major coastal city. He returned home certain that he didn’t want the job if offered. For one thing, it would involve having to work in a culture of intense wokeness. For another, the general culture of that city would have been a disaster, he judged, for his children. They will remain in the small city out West, where the cultural insanity hasn’t yet reached them. That’s something. It’s not an infallible escape, because the young people in that small city are still participating in Internet culture. But at least one is not considered a freak if one is conservative and Christian.

The world that the people who hate us are creating is one in which it will be impossible to escape, thanks to the Internet. Ali Alexander’s MAGAtropolis had better be able to live off the grid, because the day is coming when the social credit system will be inescapable. A more reasonable solution, it seems to me, would be for like-minded people to form physical communities — neighborhoods — where they live close to each other, and form thick attachments within which to raise their kids. There has to be a shared commitment among all the families to keep their kids off social media until a certain age. That has to be non-negotiable. Social media and the Internet are the pipelines that pump this contagion into homes and families and the minds of the young. If parents are going to have a shot at raising children who are willing to accept lower-paying, lower-status jobs within the system, as the price of living in truth, they are going to need all the help they can get from the community.

In The Benedict Option, I said that I’m not calling on people to head for the hills. This is in part because the Internet, and social media, make the idea of an impregnable geographical redoubt impossible. But over the last four years, since the book’s publication, I have come to believe that heading for the hills is not a bad idea at all, in a qualified sense. There are no utopias, true, but there are places where you can strengthen your hand, and your family’s hand. Places where words still mean what they say. It does you no good to go to, say, Bozeman, Montana, but let your kids have full access to Internet culture, and to let the vile Disney Channel raise them. But if you get out of New York City and move to Bozeman, and live a more disciplined life, especially regarding what you let into your home and into the heads of your children, and homeschool or put them in a private school where the garbage has not invaded the curriculum or the culture — then you have a much better shot.

There is no way I would ever move to Ali Alexander’s MAGAtropolis, and they wouldn’t want me anyway. But the fact that he’s thinking this way, and the fact that there’s a part of me that sympathizes with him, is a sign of how this country is coming apart. I think that secession is impossible in the 21st century, but that said, I’m finding it difficult to muster up any enthusiasm for keeping America together. A friend texted me this morning:

I’m struck by the general sense of helplessness many of us feel in the Specter of Wokeism.

I’m struck that this is a kind of historical pattern. We are being led by the psychopathic. I’m listening to a fascinating essay by Thomas Sowell about Germans and Jews before the Nazis. Clearly the Nazis were a genuine minority, yet they were able to capture a whole nation.

Along those lines, this tweet today:

The brutal fact is this: The average person living in a Western country increasingly has nothing to live for. He has little family, few friends, no neighborhood, no community, & certainly no Christ. He exists mostly as a ritual of economic activity, a number on a balance sheet.

— Ciarán ☘ (@DefenceOrthodox) February 10, 2021

Overstated, probably — Ciaran lives in Ireland, which is undergoing a more abrupt collapse of Christianity than the US — but that cuts awfully close. Me, I cannot understand why so few Americans are willing to stand up against Wokeness. Do people not care that the institutions in this society are trying to normalize children wishing to cut their breasts or their penises off? Do people really not care that we are all being forced to call males females, and females males? Does the neoracism of the Left, which identifies white people are uniquely evil, not trouble the masses? Do they somehow think that this is not going to affect them?

The election of Trump is said to have been a reaction against wokeness. Maybe so. But what good did it do? Is wokeness any weaker today for four years of Trump? No, not at all. His administration was at best a holding action, and at worse incentivized it. As I see it, the main problem with Trump was that he had no plan for fighting this garbage. To be fair, politics as a defense are limited, but even within those limits, Trump was not nearly as effective as someone more disciplined could have been. It amazes me that so few Republican politicians ever speak out against wokeness, or propose legislation to fight it (e.g., passing laws forbidding medical interventions — hormones and surgery — for minors). They are passive. And, if the only serious rebellion against the lunacy comes from the extremes — people who only know how to emote, not fight intelligently, and with discipline — it will never get anywhere.

I was just Skyping with a friend in France, who was telling me that they face the same kind of insanity there. He explained that the French left is taking up American woke themes, and condemning French institutions on the grounds that they are complicit in American crimes (“crimes”). He said, for example, that there was a group campaigning for the French president to abandon the Elysée Palace on grounds that it was built with slave labor. This is historically false, of course, but facts do not matter to the woke. It is insane, but so far, there is little effective resistance. He told me that in the French media, as in the US, there is only one side of the story presented. Parents who bring their transgender children onto national television are uniformly praised as “brave.” There is no criticism of any of this. The media are manufacturing consent for the destruction of the lives of children, and their bodies.

What we need in this country, and in every country of the West where wokeness is in power, is an intelligent, comprehensive, and effective counterattack. I still cannot believe that most Americans support this stuff. My French friend said that it’s not supported in France either, but most people remain passive because they are afraid of being cancelled.

So what do we do? Ali Alexander’s idea of a MAGAtropolis will go nowhere. If he really does succeed in sparking rioting around the country, that will only help the national security state, and further empower Woke Capitalism. I see people on the Right who are still in thrall to Trump as being the best friends the Left has.  Where are our sensible, non-crazy leaders who are able and willing to lead a sustained campaign against wokeness, on every front? What is the alternative? Passively accepting this left-radicalism as it destroys the country? Or proposing to replace it with groundless, incompetent right-wing emotivism which amounts to a Maginot Line easily evaded by institutionalized wokeness?

Resistance led by ideological mountebanks like Ali Alexander will accomplish nothing but destruction. Siding with the mob that attacked the Capitol conserves nothing, and builds nothing. People like him thrive in the absence of meaningful leadership from the more established Right. But who in the Republican Party is willing to step out and lead? Let’s hope that somebody has the guts to step forward. But whatever you do, do not place your hope in politics. Instead, use this time, and the freedoms we still have, to prepare for the long struggle ahead. It is a false choice to say that we can either fight through politics, or we can build private cells of resistance. We have to do both. But if your only resistance is political — if you vote conservative, but otherwise participate, and let your children participate, in the corrupted media-dominated culture — you are lying to yourself about what you are accomplishing.