Unsurprisingly, what I wrote about last Sunday played out similarly this past week when protestors stormed a church in Minneapolis, demanding that the Christians within embrace their obnoxious crusade against ICE. And when they didn’t, they were shouted down and shamed. Like rainbow armbands in sports—an ideological symbol being imposed in this or that form, all with the threat of punishment if refused—the demands placed on the Christians in that church followed the exact same pattern.

I hope New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is watching this stuff. These two scenarios—the athletes refusing to comply and the Christians in Minneapolis doing the same—while different on the surface, reveal the same underlying dynamic. The shunning common to both betrays collectivism’s innermost spirit. Mamdani did say he intended to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Well, we’re watching historic Marxist collectivism being paraded in real time.

Essentially, forcing anyone under threat of punishment to submit to ideologies and their symbols is a distinctly Marxist, and therefore a readily socialist, impulse. Mamdani is an avowed socialist. He believes that the “warmth of collectivism” is the subordination of the individual conscience to the demands of the collective, and it must be enforced not by persuasion but by institutional pressure. Marxist warmth, in practice, always comes with enforcement, because collectivism only works when dissent is treated as a problem to be punished.

Taking this a step further, what I’m really thinking about right now is the symbols themselves. What’s the harm in wearing a rainbow patch on your jersey? What’s the trouble with a church’s pastor raising a fist alongside protestors to stem trouble? What’s the trouble with driving a company car with a BLM or an ICE-out sticker on its bumper?

Well, for starters, the first thing I’ll say is that every movement in history revealed its true ambitions not first through laws, but through symbols. In that sense, symbols are rarely neutral. You know as well as I do that they train the eye and discipline the conscience. Symbols have a way of testing allegiance long before force is ever required. That’s why armbands, flags, and gestures matter, even before they are compulsory. They are never just a thing.

Since I’ve already sort of wandered near to what I was concerned about last Sunday, you’ll remember that rainbow armbands, jerseys, and other such things have been forced into soccer, basketball, volleyball, football, and so many other sports. When I say forced, I mean it. They’re always framed as harmless signs of “tolerance.” And yet, the countless stories of athlete after athlete being shunned or punished for refusing to wear one expose the deeper truth. Tolerance, by definition, allows dissent. But what we’ve witnessed is enforcement against dissent. Participation is no longer optional. If a person refuses, he or she becomes an example of moral failure and must be shamed accordingly. The only way forward for such a reprobate is total annihilation in the form of cancellation.

History teaches us to pay attention when ideological movements do this—especially when they migrate from persuasion to enforced uniformity. The comparison to past regimes is uncomfortable, but symbols worn on the arm (or, thinking back to COVID, maybe on one’s face) have long functioned as tools of social sorting. Everyone is identifiable. The ones wearing the symbols of compliance are safe. The ones without it are suspect. Again, the purpose is not merely expression but visibility.

But I think it gets even worse still.

I’ve long thought that the LGBTQ, Inc. movement’s use of a flag was bad news. The same goes for the BLM flag. This is true because flags never really originated as tools of personal expression. They were militaristic. They began as tribal identifiers—markers of people, allegiance, and territorial claim. They were carried by nations and armies not just to establish sovereignty, but often to impose that sovereignty’s will on others. Historically, when a flag was raised where another flag once flew, it signaled conquest—one culture replacing another, one authority displacing a rival. When I saw that Minnesota had changed its state flag, making it eerily similar to Somalia’s flag a few years ago, I wondered about displacement. When I started to hear about the billions in fraud orchestrated by the Somali community, to which the Minnesota government largely turned a blind eye, the flag’s redesign made a little more sense. It was a quiet announcement of who’s now in charge in the state.

Of course, in the modern age, flags have been repurposed for everything from corporations to clubs, but that does not erase their original meaning. A flag still signals a collective identity that believes its vision and mission, good or bad, must be announced and then carried into the world, and maybe in ways that will assure it finds a footing as the governing one. Even General Motors would love to see its flag being flown at a Ford building.

But what if it suddenly became a cultural expectation that Ford must fly GM’s flag? That would be extremely telling.

When a group’s flag moves from voluntary display to institutional expectation—on school walls, corporate labels, in movie and TV scripts, on government buildings and athletic uniforms, or wherever and whatever—it stops functioning as a gesture of tolerance and becomes an advancing army’s sovereign demand for submission instead. I spoke in terms of war in last week’s note. Indeed, when what I described starts happening, you know a very real conflict is underway. It’s no longer a debate, but instead, warfare is underway, and territories are being taken. The occupying nation now marks its seized lands. In these territories, dissent can only be treated as resistance.

I think this is a crucial distinction often obscured in public debate. And so, again, I think one of the best forms of resistance is to refuse to display the LGBTQ Inc. flag, which more and more people are choosing to do, especially among the youth—most assuredly among young men. In one sense, I think that’s happening because common sense is making somewhat of a comeback. On the other hand, “Not the Bee,” the Babylon Bee’s source for non-satirical news, reported a study suggesting Americans are pretty much sick of the LGBTQ, Inc. agenda. America has grown tired of the stuff being shoved down our throats day in and day out. The study noted that most Americans seem to have realized it was never about “live and let live.” It was always about something more. One line in the article stood out. It said, “[Young people] have been told they are ‘bigots’ if they believe [unnatural sexual relations are not okay] … but even if they tried not to be ‘bigots,’ they were told they were bigots anyway…” Maybe another way to think of this is to say, as I already did, that common sense is making a comeback. Common sense knows that a person can affirm human dignity while also rejecting ideological compulsion. The former is humane. The latter is totalitarian and dehumanizing.

From another perspective, I should return to that “live and let live” thought. It sure seems most ideologies seeking dominance began by insisting they merely wanted to be left alone, when that’s not at all what they really wanted. The eventual enforcement of their imposed symbols made it clear.

And so, I suppose the question before us is no longer about tolerance and treating people with respect. The question is whether any movement, however well-intentioned it claims to be, has the right to force individuals and institutions to accept its ideology publicly. The Minneapolis church and the shunned athletes sure seem to suggest that this question is no longer theoretical but is already being answered in practice. The moment you are required to display allegiance before you’re allowed to belong, you are no longer living in a free society. You are living under occupation.