“It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers” said my best friend many, many years ago. Referring to the leftism sweeping hearts and minds, it was an apt metaphor. For those unacquainted with the reference, it concerns a film, made in 1956 and then remade in ’78, about an invasion of Earth by extraterrestrial plant spores.
There are no lasers or even guns and bombs in this story, as the aliens don’t just kill bodies but co-opt them. The other-world plants would grow large pods, and when one of them was in close proximity to a sleeping human, it would begin replicating the person. Upon the process’s completion, the “original’s” body would degrade and the duplicate would take his place, having precisely the same appearance, voice, and memories.
There was one major difference, though: The duplicate was part of a collective, devoid of true emotion and united with his alien fellows in the goal of seizing every human mind and heart on Earth.
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Again bringing this to mind is a Wednesday Federalist article entitled “Leftists Are Colonizing Red Towns Like Mine, and Local Republicans Are Clueless.” In issuing the warning, writer Mark Pulliam isn’t merely referring to the effects of migrating Northeasterners or Third World immigrants on conservative areas. Rather, he writes that while small-town residents associate “wokeness” with big-city dominated “blue” states, mind snatching leftist spores are working feverishly in their midst, changing them from within while they “sleep.”
Pulliam learned this firsthand after relocating to Blount County, Tennessee, from Austin, Texas. Beginning with the example of his small town’s Presbyterian-affiliated liberal arts college, he writes that
my wife and I imagined the school was comparable to Hillsdale College, except nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. My wife and I quickly learned the reality is otherwise when a supposedly faith-based lecture we attended on campus was devoted to the teachings of Karl Marx rather than Jesus Christ. The lecturer, who teaches “religious studies” at Skidmore College, is the daughter of the host school’s equally-leftist campus minister.
We were also chagrined to learn that the local public library — in a county that voted for President Trump in 2020 by a margin of 71-27 percent — maintains a curated “antiracism” reading list that includes controversial fare such as Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me.”
… Even though the area is overwhelmingly Republican, the local paper (owned by a national chain headquartered out of state) is unfailingly and obnoxiously left. The editor admits that one of his “life’s greatest disappointments” was being interviewed by The Washington Post and getting turned down for the job. The local paper is a WaPo wannabe, albeit relying heavily on Associated Press reportage. It consistently boosts leftist ideas, locally and nationally.
Also, while pointing out how education is controlled by leftists, Pulliam writes that in “my local school district, for example, the unelected school superintendent (or ‘director,’ as the position is called here) appointed a ‘diversity task force’ that included an activist college student who told a group of protesters organized by the local NAACP chapter in the wake of the George Floyd incident that ‘We need radical change, and we need it now’; the district’s paid ‘diversity trainer,’ who instructs on the topics of ‘systemic racism,’ ‘racial equity,’ ‘inclusive leadership,’ and ‘unconscious biases,’ among other dubious topics; and an officer of a community organization that describes its mission as ‘working for racial justice.’”
“The stated goals of the 12-person diversity task force include acknowledging that ‘racism … exist[s] in our schools and community,’” the author continues.
After providing other examples as well, Pulliam writes that leftists get away with this manipulation because people are uninformed, not many read their local paper, and they’re busy working and tending to their families. (I’ll add that too many are also distracted by frivolity, our “bread and circuses.”)
People also naturally project their own mindset onto others. If you’re “conservative” but not highly political, for instance, you may assume that “sure, people have different opinions, but everyone loves the country and basically wants the same things.” If only.
Then there’s the matter of “conservatism” itself, all of which “is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are,” as philosopher G.K. Chesterton put it. “But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”
As for the change agents, realize that while there are exceptions, people who enter education, politics, media, and certain other fields are generally different from those who pursue most other endeavors. You might even say they’re alien.
While the reason why is somewhat complex, suffice it to say that there’s a difference between people who pick a job as a means to a practical end — e.g., supporting their families — and passionate change-oriented individuals to whom career is calling (and there are the power-driven, too).
Yet it’s not just that these pod people start out different. It’s also that whether your school or university is in the big city or big valley, virtually all its “educators” will have come from the same teachers’ colleges or leftist universities.
So it is much as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (IBS), in which pods were seen loaded onto trucks in a “captured” town so that they could be transported throughout the country and spread the aliens’ “utopia.” Pod people spread out from our indoctrination centers — a.k.a. institutions of higher learning — and spread their mind-snatching ideology everywhere.
Unlike average “non-political” people, these liberals are jihadists, a left-wing variety, wholly devoted to advancing their dark faith. Or to use yet another movie metaphor, it’s a bit like what character Kyle Reese said about the unfeeling assassin robot in The Terminator (1984): “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with.… And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
So it is with our leftists; only, they won’t stop until the Republic is dead. Meanwhile, too many Americans are asleep as the “woke” snatch their children, one by one, and build the collective.
By the way, don’t be surprised that IBS fittingly epitomizes our plight, as it was meant to be an allegory for communism. The only question is whether our story will conclude as in the ’56 film with its happy ending or as in the ’78 remake with its tragic one.
So far in our case, the aliens are winning.
