This is not a drill. This is the real deal, and we acquiesce at our great peril.

I remember considerable emphasis in my formal education on how important it is to resist these sorts of totalitarian movements. I remember watching The Wave, the Stanford Prison Experiment documentary, the Milgram Experiments, etc. I remember reading about how the Nazis were enabled by people who remained quiet. I remember learning the dangers of group think and scapegoating. We learned how important it was to think critically and question authority.

But throughout it all, the threats were coded mostly as right-wing, at least in my Seattle schooling. I don't remember being introduced to, say, Solzhenitsyn. Through the simple trick of putting a leftist mask on totalitarianism and coding resistance as "right wing," "far right," "racist," "white supremacist," etc., almost all of my educated leftist friends and family eagerly abandoned the principles we were raised with and jumped right on the authoritarian bandwagon. It is so crude and obvious a trick, but the intelligentsia are either oblivious or willfully blind to the evil they are perpetuating.

Particularly with the advent of bank account freezing, not to mention the social and career costs of resisting, this adage has a lot of explanatory power these days:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked