Socialist societies strangle and eventually kill the institutions of civil society, by co-opting them all to the same political goal of “building socialism together.” So in socialist countries, not just the press but the print shop, the priesthood, and even the local fence painters are dragooned into projects that do not interest them, or are hateful to them. Or all these institutions are simply corrupted from the political pressure put on them.

This is usually an advanced symptom of socialist societies, and yet we see it happening today in America and many other countries of the free West. Children’s books that fail the purity tests of the Left are now pulped and destroyed before publication. Movie studios now quake in fear, not from a government censor, but from the unofficial censors that operate across media and academia; an emerging government in fact, if not yet in law. The whole culture of political debate and dispute is subjected to a conformist spirit. If you don’t say the magic words, suddenly an online mob will command major corporations to boycott you, to deplatform you, to make it as if you no longer existed.

We see how this perverted instinct cares little about dismantling the power of Google and Facebook, and not at all about redistributing their wealth, because socialism never was about equality, but about power and subjection.