What better way to demonstrate one’s tolerance and open-mindedness than daubing a placard with a twee proclamation, then dousing a “fascist” with a milkshake for sharing a different opinion?

To attack verbally and physically, those who dare to deviate from the herd is to be a progressive. Even better: to mark one as an “anti-fascist.”

British progressives this week outdid themselves with President Trump’s state visit serving as an agora of the aggrieved. London swarmed with crumpled faces, every placard intended to display the owner’s self-righteous wit.

Because this is not about them. They’re here to stanch the “rise of fascism.” Or something.

They don’t like President Trump. Why, they cannot articulate with coherence. He is a fascist, a racist, a misogynist, and a sexual predator. Apparently.

When asked to elucidate such frightful charges, the rhetoric runs dry. They just know Orange Man Bad. The leftist corporate media and the BBC told them so.

Which may be why his approval rating here is so low. Trump says what most Americans and Brits tend to think, but would not dare say—lest they be shamed publicly, and banished from polite society.

They may not like the man or his weapons-grade loucheness, but majorities in Britain and across Europe nod secretly in favor of his politics and policies.

But this year’s carnival of the cry-bullies wouldn’t know that. They were busy inflating a balloon to prove how serious and mature they were.

There’s something unedifying about young and middle-aged adults bawling abuse in defense of the status quo responsible for their grievances.

If anything, progressives should at least tacitly endure a man so reviled by the ruling class. After all, they love Bernie Sanders. On the issues, those two are kindred.

Instead, the Woke eschews all rational thought, preferring the psychiatric safety of what the ruling class silently demands.

One case in point is the risible mayor of London—relevant, it seems, for one day in every 365. Sadiq Khan whets like a Pavlovian dog when Trump comes to town. It’s his day of relevance.

“A stone-cold loser,” the pugnacious president dubbed the sapless Sadiq.

Mayor Khan was elected solely because he fits the identity-politics bill: A first-ballot Hall-of-Fame mediocrity. Which, if you haven’t noticed, is the aim of the identity-politics Left.

Gone is the reverence of greatness, or even competence. The mediocre rule and rile all.

Which is why, since the tumult of 2016, such protests have infected paper and pixel. The progressives, those in the cosmopolitan cities, and coasts, were assured their worldview was to be sanctified for all of time.

Rather than quake at the prospect of Brexit, or the absurdity of a Trump victory, progressives saw both as mere formalities en route to the total victory of the right-on.

Progressives soon learned that their worldview was not of the world, but of those to whom they talk .

Hence the anti-democratic machinations. The calls to overturn Brexit in the U.K. and for impeachment in the United States. Or the demented insistence that Donald Trump in fact was and remains a Russian agent.

This has been brewing coldly for some time. Most of a certain age were inculcated with misplaced grandeur. They’re learning that they’re not that special.

Now, a sizeable rump is terrorized by the malfunctions of reality.

This is the mediocracy at work. They revile greatness to mask their own inadequacies.

Hence, contrived hate crimes, fat shaming, participation medals, identity politics, demand for rights already accrued, for lopsided equality, for affirmative action, resentment politics, no-platforming, and other corrosions of democratic health.

In a brain-shaking lecture, “The Psychology of Mediocrity and Cultivating an Ideal,” the Academy of Ideas illuminates our current woe:

As a result of a functional deficiency in critical thinking and other intellectual skills, the intellectually mediocre individual parrots the prevailing social and political paradigms, and uncritically accepts the dogma of the day and standards of political correctness.

Bolstered by the thoughts of Nietzsche and Carl Jung, the lecture touches upon the stark implications for political—and thus, all—life.

The mediocre will band together and attack all those who attempt to surpass their own station,those daring to question dogma, or vivisect political correctness. Anyone who questions the often-obvious falsehoods of the ruling class is deemed a dangerous individual.

For the ruling class, this psychological weapon serves great purpose. The protestors, long convinced of their superiority, motor violently upon their envy, hostility, and resentment, not once stopping to question whose dirty work they slavishly perform.

Meanwhile, the progressive high priests enrich themselves and bleed their nations dry, engorging the anger of those all too willing to wage war on Trump, or Brexit—any threat to the ruling class whose politics entrenches their misery.

It is astoundingly effective politics. Unlike the Trump Baby.

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