In Part 1, I asked how seemingly intelligent people can watch their ideas proven false and their policies proven catastrophic, and still refuse to change their minds. How, in fact, our elites can use their own Chernobyl-level meltdowns as pretexts for doubling down on failure and grabbing still more power over us — on issue after issue, from government schools to immigration, from sexual “liberation” to public health dictatorship.

How do they get away with it? Why do so many voters — especially the most educated — continue to pour their support down such ratholes?

To understand this baffling, infuriating fact of life, we need to unpack the nature of ideology.

A Blaring Trumpet to Drown Out the Still, Small Voice

Unjust and unrepresentative regimes that flout key precepts of the Natural Law which God wrote on the human heart don’t always need full-fledged false political philosophies to justify their tyranny. Often such governments start with just a powerful criminal gang that somehow grabs control of a city, a region, or nation.

But man is a curious creature: At some point he usually craves some rationalization for his actions, even when they are evil ones which his conscience (if he were honest) would condemn — especially when his deeds are evil. Then he really needs some blaring trumpet inside the mind to drown out the “still small voice” that whispers the truth.

So over the blood-soaked centuries of our fallen human history, the greatest tyrannical empires have, in fact, had rationales. Often they were false religions, such as the pagan creed of the Assyrians — which assured that empire’s soldiers that massacres, mass enslavements, and the torching of ancient cities were done in service of the supreme god Ashur. Or the Muslim call to jihad, to “holy war” against every person on earth who “rebels” against Allah by refusing the call to submit. (The word “islam” in Arabic actually translates as “submission.”)

A Half-Baked Worldview with a Fully Loaded Gun

In modern times outside the Muslim world, the pretext of false religions has been replaced by ideology, best defined as a “half-baked worldview with a fully loaded gun.” It’s a picture of reality that men develop in order to justify their own fallen impulses, gather allies for the purpose of grabbing or holding power, and silence the call of conscience.

Historians now seem to agree that white racism aimed at black people wasn’t the cause of slavery — which existed all through history, and wasn’t usually race-based. No, the simple fact was that from the 16^th century on, Western white nations had imported millions of African slaves for purely economic reasons. But in order to justify keeping black people enslaved instead of freeing them and letting them vote, the slave-owning classes had to invent racial theories of black “inferiority” to fend off abolitionists inspired by the Christian doctrine of human equality. Theories of evolution, culminating in Darwin’s work, fit the purpose wonderfully. Darwin mused that nonwhite races amounted to links in the chain between lower primates and “civilized” (white) people. Thus the “science” of eugenics was invented to excuse the oppression of the weak and Jim Crow laws disenfranchising black citizens.

The Two Forms of Murderous Socialism That Threatened Our Grandparents

In the 20^th century, the two most powerful and poisonous ideologies with the highest body counts were varieties of socialism — a collectivist view of man which denies the dignity and sanctity of every person.

International socialism, or Communism, claimed to explain all of human history and infallibly predict the future based on economics — as understood by the resentful atheist Utopian Karl Marx. National socialism pretended to make sense of human life and properly organize it based on Darwinian biology, as weaponized by embittered ex-Christian and racial crank Adolf Hitler. Each of these ideologies offered rationalizations to explain away religion, make nonsense of traditional moral qualms about mass violence and oppression, and offer life new meaning: as part of either the militant working class overthrowing oppression, or the elite Aryan race claiming its rightful place as the global elite.

Each of these ideologies tried to replace the Church as the focus of human community and the trustworthy interpreter of reality. Each one produced its own “scriptures,” in the form of Karl Marx’s turgid treatises and Hitler’s embittered manifesto, Mein Kampf. Each ideology developed rituals to replace Christian liturgies, claimed martyrs whom it venerated as saints, and demanded total devotion as the price of achieving some worldly “heaven” as the end state of human history.

Ersatz Religions

The great political philosopher and refugee from the Nazis, Eric Voegelin, analyzed the nature of both these ideologies in the 1930s while he was in exile from persecution. I studied him in grad school, especially his pivotal work, The New Science of Politics. In it, Voegelin dissects the mind of the ideologue, of the person who has accepted one of these new “ersatz religions” (as he calls them) and now lives mentally in a “secondary reality” that replaces the real world we all inhabit.

And here is where we move from the history that affected our parents and grandparents (my dad served under General Patton in World War II) to the threats that you and I face today, which may poison our children’s futures.

Because the people now controlling our government — who censored our media and locked us in our homes, who stole the 2020 election and fully plan to steal this one, who want to gut the First and Second Amendments and send Trump supporters to reeducation camps — are acting like classic ideologues from the Soviet or Nazi regimes.

How Normies Manage to Keep on Believing the Liars

Voegelin explained how the ideological mind clings to its dogmas: When confronted with unwelcome facts — for instance, the total failure of Soviet economic policies or the uselessness of the COVID lockdowns — the ideologue senses on some level the threat to his worldview, which claims to be scientific and infallible.

Unwelcome facts or dangerously persuasive intellectual objections get treated like deadly bacteria. The ideologue’s intellectual immune system identifies and attacks them (or rather, attacks the person who dared to raise them). The ideologue forbids the question, silences the questioner, and tries to scapegoat him in the eyes of his neighbors.

Remember how the World Health Organization responded to epidemiologists who questioned the lockdowns and the vaccine? It got YouTube to censor them and pressured local medical associations to revoke their professional credentials. How about critics of election fraud? Tina Peters, who preserved evidence of computer vote fraud, was just sentenced to nine years in prison by a judge who said that her greatest crime was not the minor offenses named in the case, but the “doubt” she cast about election results. In Britain, ordinary citizens who question the mass influx of Muslims are now going to prison — and the regime there is freeing violent criminals to make room for them.

Morally Equivalent to Terrorists

When you or I raise radical questions about leftist or globalist policies — such as “Why do we dump kids in godless government schools?” or “Why are we bringing in millions of unskilled Third World peasants?” — we don’t get treated like rational adults exercising our sacred freedom of speech. Instead, those in power treat us as morally equivalent to terrorists or super-spreaders of some deadly virus. That’s why the FBI has been infiltrating groups of conservative Catholics and PTA moms who oppose “groomer” porn aimed at kids.

The goal is to scapegoat dissenters who raise awkward questions and make examples of them, so that the general mass of people see that questioning the System comes at a very high price indeed. The message, blared through all our official media, is clear:

Do you want to be marginalized like Sidney Powell, prosecuted like Steve Bannon, bankrupted like Rudolph Giuliani, or shot at like Donald Trump? Ostracized as a “racist,” made unemployable in your field, audited by the IRS, and put on terrorist “no-fly” lists?

Then stop asking questions, and stay with the rest of the herd. Don’t listen to those who warn you we’re leading you all over a cliff to drown in the sea. You see what happens to people like that. Do you want to be next?

We didn’t think so.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.