A Short Letter to the MAGA Youth

(Guest contribution by James Lindsay)

A short letter to MAGA youth and young conservatives:

Maybe you deny it, but the facts are growing clear. "Woke Right" is real, whether you like that name for it or not, and it is exposed. It is heading for a crash, and it will be terrible.

Maybe you've been participating to be or feel "based," or to vent frustrations about living with Woke BS, or to be funny, or to drive the Boomers crazy, or to get likes and retweets or views or whatever. There are a lot of reasons for young people to buck the system that they're under and to transgress its boundaries, and that's normal and fine. You're not a bad person for having dipped into transgressive things, especially in your youth. Almost everyone does.

The fact is, you have lots of reasons to be frustrated and to want to rebel. Tons of them. Covid was BS and tyrannical, and stole key formative moments for you for stupid, bad, and evil reasons, and we know it. Accountability is still missing. Our institutions are often full of crap because of Woke capture. Lots of your teachers and even pastors filled your heads with Woke garbage, which amounts to lies and manipulations, some of them knowingly. You've been forced to self-censor, told you can't have fun, robbed, and abused.

The impacts of lots of bad policies, some Woke and some otherwise, including "globalist," have made certain parts of your lives harder (while others aren't). Dating is a mess, largely because of online factors and their consequences. Buying a home or starting a business is more difficult than ever, or at least in a long time. Things are expensive. The economy and the future are completely uncertain. Even your hobbies and outlets like sports and games have been corrupted and poisoned by this madness, and again, you're not given many options.

That's a lot of reason to want to transgress, to be edgy, to post the poasts, whatever it is, and to follow the influencers who feed that side of things and tell you no one else but they understands your situation or shares your values. And they're leading the way and getting big numbers, so it's okay, right? Not a big deal, right? Just blowing off steam and having fun, right?

Well, maybe. Sometimes. And to a degree but not open-endedly. Consequences have a way of creeping in. The truth always eventually comes out on top. And some mistakes are hard to unmake, hard to atone for, and hard to come back from.

Most of you are young and feeling free and not bad people. You're having fun, and it's mostly no big deal. You can and will be fine when it all goes down so long as you didn't get in too deep or go too wild. You know there are limits, of course. You know that being edgy and transgressive can be either fun or wicked, and most of you know the difference because it's written on your hearts and was instilled in you by your parents and faith leaders up to this point. Most of you can come back no matter how bad the crash is, no matter how cringe everyone associated with all this madness looks in the rearview mirrors of tomorrow. You can just own it and move on with a laugh.

You want to do this sooner rather than later, though. You don't want to be caught in that crash in a bad way, and it's coming. These influencers who egg you on tell you no one else shares your concerns or values, but the truth is that they don't share your concerns or values. They don't care about you. They care about clicks, attention, going viral, and the almighty dollar, wherever they can get it from. And they won't care about you a bit when it all goes bad. It will, of course, be all about them in that ugly moment.

This has happened before. In 1966, Mao Zedong sought to get revenge on his political enemies who had taken full control of the CCP away from him, and he launched the Cultural Revolution. The young revolutionaries he unleashed were all your age: angry young people stuck in a bad economy created by his own massive failures that he blamed on the rest of the Communist Party.

The Great Leap Forward had been a catastrophe across the board, and Mao mobilized young revolutionaries, his infamous Red Guard, through huge propaganda and then mobilization campaigns to find and destroy all the bad elements ("capitalist roaders," people taking the "capitalist road" instead of the "socialist road") hiding in the Party and to do it by "smashing" every "old" aspect of society, which hindered them from a bright new world, which would be a kind of socialist Golden Era. "Smash the Four Olds!" was the slogan. They had to get rid of what you guys call "neoconservatism" and "Boomer mentality."

This is what those influencers are doing for you, either for clicks or for cash, some of it coming from bad places like Qatar, Russia, or China. They're artificially amplified even when they're honest in their radical views by bots from those countries and others, including Pakistan. Some are probably Deep State actors trying to lure MAGA patriots into a kind of "Hundred Flowers Campaign" where they say too much or go too far and destroy themselves in the process.

They'll treat you like Mao treated his Red Guard too. Mao lavished praise and opportunity on his Red Guard from June of 1966 with "Sweep Away the Monsters and Demons" through "Red August" 1966 when they were led into mass violence and property destruction in Beijing and Shanghai until Liu Shaoqi, the premier of the People's Republic and Mao's newest big political enemy, was struggled, shamed, destroyed, and shipped off to die in primitive conditions in a countryside labor camp. That was just a little over a year later, peaking against him in August 1967. He died in terrible conditions in 1969, completely disgraced. The Red Guard disposed of Mao's enemies, just like these influencers praise and promote you so you'll swarm theirs.

In early 1968, Mao had enough power back. Not even two full years after he released the Red Guard, he returned to the fullness of his totalitarian power. Once there, he didn't thank the Red Guard. He punished them. The "Cultural Revolution Committee" was denounced and destroyed. The Red Guard youth were declared "too radical" and rounded up by the hundreds of thousands to be sent to the same labor camps in primitive conditions in the countryside as Liu Shaoqi was. Mao moved on to other matters and never looked back.

Mao used them and didn't care about them at all. He radicalized them and taught them to go too far, and then when he got what he wanted out of it, he got rid of them, permanently, declaring them enemies of the state.

Do you know what phrase he used to whip them up and set them loose? It's the same one these influencers are telling you. It's actually very famous.

"To rebel is justified."

Mao knew their frustration and had their loyalty, and he weaponized it for his gain and then threw it away when he was done with it. He knew they were frustrated by how badly things had gone after the disastrous Great Leap Forward (Great Reset...), and he laid the blame on the corruption of the Party. Then he told all these angry, frustrated young people the thing they needed to hear: "to rebel is justified."

And they did. And they destroyed things, desecrated things, transgressed every boundary the CCP hadn't let them transgress before, and in the process they destroyed themselves. Their families were ravaged. Their communities were ravaged. Society hated them. They had no future in the Party, as they were promised, except in some cases, and in most cases had no future at all because they were disposed of. I hope you hear this and think about it. You're frustrated and having fun now, but one of the most important skills to learn is when to leave a party before it goes sideways. This one is going sideways. Don't let its excesses and its eventual crash define you.

---

James Lindsay is an author, lecturer, and podcaster. He is well known for being based on the internet. This article is a republishing of a post he made on X (ConceptualJames) that he has generously allowed us to republish. You can find the majority of his works at www.newdiscourses.com. He will be publishing a podcast further explaining the ideas in this post soon.