Assimilated by the Collective, Part 2: Resistance is NOT Futile
Like Star Trek's Borg collective, cultural Marxism is a parasitic force that endlessly assimilates genuine causes, only to use them to assimilate more for its own agenda. But resistance is not futile.
Note: This is the second part of the series. Click here for Part 1.
The Collective’s conquest and expansion through Assimilation
Assimilation, the most famous and most prominent aspect of the Borg collective, is also arguably most useful as an analogy in describing cultural Marxism’s modus operandi. At the end of part one of this series I used the Borg’s assimilation tubules as an analogy for cultural Marxists’ use of language as a means to implant their ideology in the public consciousness. What is more insidious about cultural Marxism’s assimilation of the West, however, is that the people whose minds are being assimilated by that worldview might not even realize what is happening to them. They might not know they are slowly being transformed into cultural Marxism’s latest drones because the language used to infect their minds sounds so good to them. The vocabulary employed by neo-Marxists seems to agree with their preconceived virtues at face value, so much so that they fail to realize that it has been infused with Marxist concepts. They do not realize that words such as “justice”, “tolerance”, and “equality” have been previously assimilated by the cultural Marxist lexicon and now do not actually mean what they think they mean. This is how good, well-intentioned people are unwittingly assimilated into the Collective’s ideological machinery.
Cultural Marxism as a social movement assimilates more than just words. It also assimilates existing social issues, causes, and movements. It then reshapes them in its own image and even subverts their original goal if need be in order to redirect them to achieve neo-Marxist ends. Cultural Marxism takes genuine grievances in society and reframes them to suit its ideological narrative so that it can be used as yet another weapon in its arsenal, another tool that it can use to support its project to fundamentally transform society. Note that when cultural Marxism assimilates an existing social cause, it is more than just an assimilation into a political party or a political platform’s agenda; this is an assimilation into an entirely different worldview, a worldview that might not be compatible with - or maybe even contrary to - the worldview of the original proponents of the cause before it was assimilated by cultural Marxism.
The neo-Marxist subversion of the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement are perhaps the clearest examples. The neo-Marxist so-called “antiracism” movement - spearheaded by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi - today claims the mantle of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, jr. even though the views of the two men on race relations could not be more different. Dr. King famously dreamt of a society where no one is judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. His vision, essentially, is that of a colorblind society. This is something that the worldview of cultural Marxists like Kendi cannot truly abide by because the Marxist framework is obsessed with viewing society through an adversarial lens where there are always “the oppressors” and “the oppressed”.
Dr. King stressed the importance of individuals working together through education and economic empowerment in order to achieve a society where everyone is equal, but cultural Marxists like Kendi conceive the problem as being in society, and therefore meaningful change, in their views, can only be made by changing society or replacing the foundations of society if necessary. Dr. King’s vision of society is a positive-sum game where everybody can win, but it is an indispensable nature of Marxism, and therefore cultural Marxism, to conceive the world as a zero-sum game where there must always be winners and losers. The original civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, jr. - which took no small influence from Christian theology - was clearly nothing like, if not the opposite of, today’s decidedly Marxist “anti-racism” movement of Ibram X. Kendi. The former was a genuine cause for racial equality; the latter is a neo-Marxist subversion of it.
Similarly, neo-Marxist assimilation has also been responsible for the subversion of the courageous struggle of First-wave and Second-wave feminists for equality in voting, property, workplace, and reproductive rights into Marxist-influenced Third- and Fourth-wave feminisms. The collective’s assimilation of the women’s rights movement has turned women’s genuine (and historically unique) struggle for equal rights into yet another cog of grievance in the cultural Marxist societal transformation machine. The recent conflict between traditional feminists and transgender-inclusive feminists brings to light the parasitic Borg-like nature of the collective’s assimilation of the women’s rights movement.
Swimmer Riley Gaines was not the first woman to speak up against the injustice of having biological men compete in women’s competitions. She is perhaps one of the most directly affected by the issue, but not the first one to speak up about it. Fellow athlete and tennis legend Martina Navratilova has also spoken out against the same issue long before Gaines was sidelined by swimming officials in favor of Lia Thomas. Nor is it limited to the world of sports or to those who have skin in the game. The clash between women’s rights activist and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and critics who label her “transphobic” is an even older example of this dispute between traditional feminists and transgender activists. The involvement of Navratilova, Rowling, and many others also shows that the issue is not just about conservatives versus progressives, or Left versus Right. Rowling is clearly not a conservative and Navratilova is an openly gay LGBTQ+ activist who has sharply criticized fellow tennis legend and pastor Margaret Court as being “homophobic”. Gaines, Navratilova, and Rowling are joined by many other women of various backgrounds and ideological persuasions.
Given the long history of the Marxist Left championing women against “the patriarchy”, even up to the very recent #MeToo and the related #BelieveAllWomen movement, it does not seem to make sense that they would suddenly abandon the plight of biological women in favor of biological men who “identify” as women. Some have even remarked that this seems like just another win for the patriarchy through a backdoor: the winners of so many women’s competitions and awards are biological men. Yet, as uncharacteristic as it may seem for feminists, even most Fourth-wave feminists ally themselves with the transgender movement.
Among the best example of this seeming double standard are the stances taken by soccer player Megan Rapinoe on the issues of pay and transgender participation in women’s soccer. In 2020, Rapinoe was among those that made headlines by filing a gender discrimination lawsuit against US Soccer for not paying female soccer players as much as their male counterparts. She and her teammates also made shows of public protest on the field. Fast forward to 2023, at the height of the controversy regarding transgender participation in sports, Rapinoe now chastises women like Riley Gaines who protest against allowing biological men to participate in women’s sports. This might seem like a logical contradiction, but this only seems like a contradiction until one realizes that Rapinoe has never operated from a classical feminist paradigm but from one that has been thoroughly framed by a Marxist worldview. In this worldview, women are victimized and discriminated against, but not as much as transgender people are. This is the logic that has caused the sidelining of biological women, making them comparable to an old toy discarded by a child who has just received a new toy.
This seemingly bizarre turn of things would only make sense if one understands it to be an inevitable part of the cultural Marxist assimilation package. It has been part of Marxism’s essential paradigm to always see society in terms of conflicting groups. Because of this, it is logically inevitable that even the feminist movement would eventually be sidelined when the collective finds another “marginalized” group whose grievances are seen to occupy a higher position in the ideology’s totem pole of victimhood. It was only a matter of time before neo-Marxists consider the plight of white “cisgender” women to be secondary to that of another group perceived to be more oppressed, in this case - at least according to cultural Marxism’s current narrative - that means transgender people.
What can definitely be said is that cultural Marxism’s intersectional juggernaut has swallowed up and rendered nearly invisible the “purer” struggles for equal rights by earlier feminists and civil rights activists by insisting that their causes should now serve the neo-Marxist vision of “the greater good”, even if it means it now has to play second fiddle to the collective’s latest golden child. Yet in the eyes of the general public whose main source of information is the mainstream media, cultural Marxist-driven movements like Kendi’s “anti-racism” and Fourth-wave feminism look - at least superficially - very similar to their pre-Marxist precursors. This has allowed them to garner widespread public support. Being unaware of their cultural Marxist influence, most people who are sympathetic to the original would fall for supporting the neo-Marxist version. They would then become instrumental in promoting it further. To continue with the Borg analogy, it would be as if drones assimilated by the Collective would go “home” to their former planet and infiltrate their former society to make it much easier to assimilate behind the disguise of a friendly face.
One of the most tragic consequences that come with being assimilated into the cultural Marxist ideological machine is that as long as they are yoked to the neo-Marxist intersectional agenda, these causes will never be able to achieve their original goals. If anything, being tied to the “progressive” machine may well end any hope of achieving those goals because cultural Marxism is like a drug dealer who benefits from its clients never finding satisfaction and depends on them being addicted to its “services”. This is why it seems like any social issue that has been taken over by the collective’s ideological machine never seems to find a resolution. This is not just only because of Marxism’s dependence on the appearance of societal conflict to exist; it is also because once a cause has found resolution, it ceases to be useful for the collective’s goals. For this reason, the collective will always keep that resolution beyond arm’s reach from the drones they have assimilated.
It is no coincidence that the cultural Marxists constantly harp on “systemic racism” in a Western society that has never been less racist than ever, even if it means that they have to redefine the meaning of racism and create ways to manufacture conflict such as introducing the concept of “microaggression”. If the drones cease to consider themselves as members of an oppressed class, if they stop being angry about how society and “the Man” are treating them, and if they finally find peace because they have finally achieved their goals - then the collective would no longer have any power over the drones. They would be free of the collective’s control.
The sad irony is that while claiming to be championing the causes of the “marginalized”, cultural Marxism destroys the hope that they will achieve their goals in favor of their Marxist subversive clones. This is why “progressive” policies driven by neo-Marxist fervor have resulted in developments that until only recently would have been universally considered regressive. Half a century has passed since the civil rights movement successfully ended segregation in the United States. Yet today the postmodern Marxists who claim to be carrying the torch for Dr. King have grossly and deliberately betrayed his dream of racial equality by their addiction to addiction to the notion of perpetual power struggles. And because their ideological vision cannot justifiably exist without intergroup conflict, their zero-sum obsession results in the very thing that the original civil rights movement fought bravely to end at a great sacrifice. Some of America’s schools and colleges are now back to segregation, not in the name of anti-black discrimination but out of a perverted sense of “social justice” and “equity”. (Examples here, here, here, and here.) This a clear example of how the collective has assimilated a noble cause and corrupted it to such an extent that it has turned against its own original purpose.
Yet even this is not the most destructive aspect of the way cultural Marxism assimilates all that is good in our society. Somehow, as hard as it may be to believe, the neo-Marxist collective actually manages to exceed the Borg in one area in terms of the way they achieve their agenda. And this is all the worse for our society because, unlike the Borg (and despite the gaslighting from some on the Left), cultural Marxism is real.
How cultural Marxism is more insidious than the Borg
Until very recently, the main kink in my analogy between the Borg and cultural Marxism is that the latter operates openly while the former operates in a largely covert manner. The Borg announces its intentions to its prey without duplicity. Cultural Marxism mostly subverts Western society through covert methods such as semantic disguises and neologisms. Indeed, in this regard, the Borg means for proliferation is closer to that of classical Marxism, at least according to the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves in the fourth chapter of The Communist Manifesto:
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
This is so, at least, until “Võx”, the penultimate episode of the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard (which was coincidentally released at the time I am writing this article!).
This episode reveals that the main villain of the season has been Picard’s old nemesis the Borg Queen after all, who has emerged from the past with a vengeance and assimilated the Federation once and for all. And by the end of the episode, she was well on their way to finally succeeding in achieving those ends.
As season three of Picard plays out, we learn that another enemy of the Federation, the shapeshifting Changelings, has been infiltrating all of Starfleet. In this episode, we finally find out why. Working with the Borg, they have been installing Borg DNA - drawn from Picard’s own post-assimilation body, no less - in transporters device on all Starfleet ships. When every single one of those ships was assembled in Earth orbit for “Frontier Day” celebrations, the Borg Queen used this Borg DNA to remotely assimilate all Starfleet officers below the age of twenty-five. (There is a biological technobabble explanation for this but it’s too long to repeat here. It is, of course, also convenient for the show’s narrative, of course, that all the returning The Next Generation main cast are all advancing in age.) What ensued is chaos: assimilated younger Starfleet officers murder their unassimilated seniors as they are used by the Borg to assimilate Starfleet itself.
This revelation of what the Borg has been doing in the episode “Võx” is precisely how cultural Marxism operates. Unlike the older Borg strategy of direct confrontation, complete with their unmistakable declaration of intent, the episode portrays the Borg operating with subterfuge. This parallels the distinction between classical Marxism’s overtness, perhaps best exemplified by Communist regimes such as the Soviet Union, and the subtle and clandestine manner in which cultural Marxism seeks to subvert the mind of every individual in Western society. And herein, in using genuine, and often historical, tragedies, lies cultural Marxism’s most devious and most atrocious strategy. It is easy to counter the moves of an enemy that declares itself to your enemy with hostile intentions. It is harder to counter an enemy that pretends to be an innocent victim, especially when victory is partly determined by a jury of public opinion.
Instead of forcibly subduing and assimilating societies by brute force the way its classical predecessor once did, cultural Marxism has infiltrated Western civilization by using that aspect of society that it knows best how to use: culture. Marxist icon Mao Zedong famously said that power comes from the barrel of a gun. But every Communist totalitarian would know that while this kind of power can break their enemies’ bodies and strike fear into their hearts, it lacks the power to touch their beliefs and convictions. This is where the subtle infiltration of Marxism’s postmodern manifestation has succeeded where Mao’s Marxism has failed. Just as the Borg infiltrates Starfleet in the most “backdoor” manner possible - through rewriting the very DNA of its officers - cultural Marxism has also managed to “rewrite” the cultural and intellectual DNA of much of Western society without anyone realizing it in the past few decades.
In the Star Trek universe, the transporter technology is ubiquitous and its use is taken for granted as a means of transportation. Billions of individuals have their atoms disassembled at one place and reassembled at another every single day in that fictional universe. This mundane ubiquity of the technology makes it the perfect means for the Borg to implant their DNA in Starfleet officers. The real-life parallel for us would be media and social media. It is through these platforms that cultural Marxist values have been implanted in the cultural zeitgeist of the postmodern West. We might have been on guard against what we recognize as ideological propaganda from our enemies, including through education as seen in the increasing popularity of homeschooling. But until recently, we have been putting up a lot less defense against means used by those that hate traditional Western values to inculcate their ideology that we find entertaining, or even addictive.
Social media companies have been able to grow to the extent that they are able to control the prevailing narratives in our society in favor of reshaping them to the cultural Marxist worldview. What this tells us - belatedly - is that we have failed in the past, before it was too late, to recognize how effective media and social media can be as instruments of cultural assimilation. When Twitter turned our public discourse superficial and immature by forcing us to write less and read less, we played along. When TikTok fed our young especially “fun” short video after short video, we did not realize that the effect was to prevent them from thinking critically about what they watch, making it an effective means for inculcating cultural Marxist ideas. Before you know it, concepts and values that were traditionally considered to be antithetical to the worldview of Western society are now generally accepted, especially among the educated urban population in the West, to the point that speaking out against them would invite censure from a public that, a long time ago, took them for granted. The subtlety in Cultural Marxism’s means of assimilating the culture has helped it in becoming very effective.
As an aside, it is interesting that in Star Trek: Picard, the Borg’s scheme to assimilate Starfleet only works on the younger members of Starfleet, namely those twenty-five years old and younger. Something about the young still genetically developing whereas their seniors are genetically set, as the technobabble goes. Presumably, behind the scenes, this is to allow Picard’s aging The Next Generation-era characters to become the heroes that save the day in spite of their age. But regardless of the reasoning in-universe or otherwise, this part of the story definitely parallels the fact that our young have been arguably a lot more susceptible to cultural Marxism’s process of cultural assimilation. Perhaps this is because they are still developing in terms of their worldview and personal values, or perhaps because they are more susceptible to peer pressure, or perhaps because they use social media more, or something else. I don’t know. The empirical fact remains that the younger generations are more vulnerable to cultural Marxism’s subtle influence.
Like the Borg’s novel method of assimilation shown, cultural Marxism’s postmodern modus operandi makes it more insidious and dangerous than the ways that old Marxist regimes used to use to expand their influence. Star Trek: Picard’s penultimate episode shows how covert assimilation allows the Borg to accomplish something that it has never been able to do since its debut: to assimilate Starfleet, the very institution that has served as the Federation’s only defense against the Collective. Likewise, even until the Fall of Communism in 1989, proponents of old Marxism, even the powerful Soviet Union, were never able to subvert the fundamental values of Western nations. Yet its postmodern progeny, cultural Marxism, has not only been able to do exactly that but has also - by all appearances - es military, once America’s main defense against Communism.
But the covert nature of cultural Marxism’s means of operating can also become its biggest weakness depending on how we respond to it. If understood properly, it can even tell us how to defeat it: reveal its nature, reveal how it is doing what it is doing, and reveal its agenda. Unmask cultural Marxism as the force underneath all the masquerades of “woke” issues currently plaguing Western society. Hopefully, when the mask falls off and its true face is revealed, thy ugly reality of its nature will be enough to make enough in our society reject its deceptive siren call.
Not futile: Resisting the collective
The first step to defeat an enemy is to know him. One cannot defeat an enemy one does not understand. Like the Borg in the majority of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season, the cultural Marxist collective hides behind the mask of various social causes and movements that it has assimilated over the years and has used to achieve its agenda. As anyone familiar with the shapeshifting Changelings from Deep Space Nine would be able to tell, this makes fighting against the collective very difficult. But it is possible to discern whether it is the voice of the neo-Marxism hive mind speaking purported speaking for “the marginalized”. A voice is likely to be that of cultural Marxism when:
It disingenuously denies alternative solutions that do not conform to the neo-Marxist paradigm, allowing only the answers informed by a Marxist worldview. The collective has a particular disdain for those with answers for their pet issues that do not advance their ideological agenda. It does not matter whether those answers are rational or empirically proven. Because cultural Marxism assimilates social grievances in order for its own purposes, its highest priority is not the advancement of the resolution of those actual grievances but the accomplishment of its agenda. Anything that would serve to end those grievances but take society away from the neo-Marxist vision would be rejected, censored, and/or defamed. It would be labeled things such as “racist” or even painted as the complete opposite of its actual intentions. A voice that truly wants to resolve a social problem would be open to possible resolutions from all perspectives even if it does not ultimately agree with them.
It denies the individuality of a person and obsesses over classifying everyone as part of an identity group. This is the result of Marxism’s preoccupation with conflicts between oppressed and oppressor groups. Consequently, it ignores the individuality of each person in favor of that person’s membership in a perceived aggrieved group. And to many cultural Marxists, one’s group identity determines one’s own supposed worth, allegiance, and even how one should think. In addition to the last point, this also explains why cultural Marxists are especially hostile to supposed members of “victim” groups that refuse to toe their expected ideological line. There is a special place in hell in the collective’s theology for people like Dave Rubin, Clarence Thomas, and Tulsi Gabbard, members of minority groups that defy the neo-Marxist expectations on how minorities are supposed to think and vote.
It discards the grievances and causes of a particular supposed ‘oppressed group’ when it no longer suits its purposes or when another ‘oppressed group’ would suit its agenda better. For instance, the defense of women’s rights was all the rage up to only recently with the incessant (and virtually brainless) pushing of #MeToo and “believe all women”, until transgenderism became the more beneficial cause du jour for the neo-Marxist agenda of radical societal transformation.
This is connected to the concept of intersectionality and to the 'totem pole of victimhood’, often also sarcastically called the victimhood Olympics.
Underlying all this is the zero-sum-game mentality of the Marxist worldview, where a group is always either an oppressor group or an oppressed group.
Before I conclude, let me make one thing clear. On most occasions in this series, I have referred to "cultural Marxism” rather than “cultural Marxists”, which I have done only when appropriate to the context. I have done this because I want to emphasize that the bigger danger to our civilization is not so much neo-Marxists but the ideology of cultural Marxism itself. Let me - again - use a Borg analogy to explain.
Subsequent to the Next Generation episode “Q Who” that introduced the Collective, individual Borg drones were generally portrayed for some time as mindless cybernetic zombies. This changed with the fifth season episode “I Borg” when we are introduced to a young drone who has been inadvertently separated from the hive mind, eventually called Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco). As a result of this separation, Hugh develops his own individual personality. This paves the way for other liberated drones in the franchise, the most famous being “Locutus”, none other than Picard himself, who was liberated in “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2”. Another well-known liberated drone, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) is even part of Star Trek: Voyager’s regular cast from the fourth season onwards. She further joined her fellow liberated drone as a regular character in Star Trek: Picard.
Similarly, there is a parallel with cultural Marxism: though often difficult, it is possible to liberate the cultural Marxist from the collective’s ideological programming. Most cultural Marxists are not the rabid screaming kind one finds in abundance on TikTok, on Twitter, and at protest rallies. Most progressives - most of whose values are informed to some extent by the neo-Marxist worldview - are well-meaning individuals. They just believe that the answers to society’s ills lie in the promises of Third-Wave feminism, Critical Race Theory, and other spawns of cultural Marxism. They want to see a change in what they see as real problems in the world and are convinced that neo-Marxist answers for those problems are the only ones.
Cultural Marxism, however, is akin to the character Grima Wormtongue in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a silver-tongued “advisor” who gives sweet-sounding deceitful advice to keep his audience easier to control for his own malicious purposes. In a way, those who live by cultural Marxism visions are just as much its victims as each Borg drone is a victim of the collective’s drive to assimilate every species it encounters. Our true enemy is not necessarily those that have been educated and indoctrinated into the collective but the infernal philosophy of cultural Marxism itself. In fact, liberating minds from the collective’s ideological hive mind - through “speaking the truth in love” as the apostle Paul says - may be among the most important way to fight against that ideology. It weakens the hold that the collective has on our society like nothing else.
And this is a battle we have no choice but to fight.
One crucial scene in Star Trek: First Contact finds Captain Picard and his no-nonsense companion, Lily Sloane, trapped in Enterprise’s holodeck as two Borg drones enter the simulated environment. The drones’ personal shields are, by now, immune to regular phaser fire. In a moment of quick thinking, Picard instructed the ship computer to load his Dixon Hill detective noir program, with himself as the titular detective, complete with a Thompson submachine gun. Picard opens fire at the drones with the gun after turning off the holodeck’s safety protocol, making every single holographic .45 caliber round as deadly as a real one upon impact with a living solid object, ending the cybernetic threat.
The lesson that we can take from Picard’s maneuver against the advancing Borg drones is that the cultural Marxist agenda is something that has to be addressed in a realistic manner. Those familiar with The Next Generation would know that Picard is not one to jump into a fight head first guns blazing; as a leader, he usually prefers diplomacy and temperance. But when it comes to such an existential threat that is immune to the usual weaponry, he, as we do in the face of a worldview that does not care about our society’s values, must get dirty in the trenches and get real. This does not necessarily mean taking up arms in the literal sense but not shy away from the battlefields of ideas. This means not cloistering ourselves among only like-minded people for fear of personal attacks and mockery that is sure to come from speaking the truth.
We will also have to turn off our own “safety protocol”. We will be exposed to being “canceled”, being “de-platformed”, being called names, losing friends and family members, and maybe to even being physically threatened. Many who speak the truth about the reality of cultural Marxism have learned of the cost of doing what they do. Resisting the collective is not easy but it is the right thing to do. Because, after all the time that we have allowed ourselves to be deceived by cultural Marxism’s masquerade behind genuine causes, and after all the time we have been cowered to crush us through public opinion, there comes a time when, as Picard declares in First Contact in the face of the seemingly unstoppable advance of the Borg juggernaut:
“We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats.
They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back.
Not again! The line must be drawn here!
This far, no further!”
Note: For non-Trekkies interested in knowing more about the Borg in order to understand my analogy between the Borg and cultural Marxism better, click here for a useful list of all appearances of the Collective prior to the very recent Star Trek: Picard revival series.