If you thought the Left could keep their claws off Halloween, think again.
Consider the phrase:
“My culture is not your costume.”
I remember the first Halloween I began seeing that hectoring, censorious warning. It was my freshman year of college. Various woke campus clubs plastered mediocre graphics throughout dorm hallways. The messaging was also scattered across agitprop—I mean, emails—from the student government and administrative offices.
“Trick or Treat Others With Respect”
“Cultural Appropriation and How to Avoid It”
“What Not to Wear: Be Culturally Aware”
But of course, Leftists never see the irony of their own virtue signaling. Each poster with “This is not a costume” in font size 100 also featured an extremely stereotypical caricature: a sombrero-clad mustached man or a woman with paint on her face and feathers in her hair.
Quick! Look at this insensitive cartoon! But you’d better not dress as it!
The goal of mass-distributing this message across universities around Halloween is to supplement the racial hyper-divide students receive in the classroom. Marxist academia wants what makes students different from one another constantly top-of-mind. Colleges are the intellectual arm of the deep-state agenda, and the push for cultural partitions successfully creates a distracted next generation of eggshell-steppers in the workforce, media, and voting booth.
As critical race theory seeps from the university into society at large, the same trends pop up in professional sports. The Cleveland Indians are now the Guardians. Redskins, Commanders. (Have they ever improved a team’s nickname? Even once?)
During summer 2020’s peak period of racial sensitivity, brands like Aunt Jemima, Cream of Wheat, and Land O’ Lakes cancelled what someone on the Internet deemed “offensive” illustrations from their package design.
Goodbye Uncle Ben. Hello, “Ben.”
There’s an argument to be made that the erasure of specific subgroups is completely unnecessary, that these food brands dehumanized their product, thereby yielding once again to the Marxist agenda, where there is no culture—simply conformity. But we’ll leave that argument for another time.
If indeed these illustrations are stereotypical and offensive, the Left is creating for themselves a new issue that will eventually have to be addressed with the customary hysteria and shouting. I predict the eventual demise of at least some low-melanin mascots:
Notre Dame Fightin’ Irish. The Boston Celtics. The New England Patriots.
Lucky Charms, Chef Boyardee, Quaker Oats.
Some have already bitten the dust. The Elon Fighting Christians, for instance. The Holy Cross Crusaders have seen better days. Can the Wake Forest Demon Deacons be far behind?
Outside academia, most of the allegedly offensive cisgender breeder deplorable concepts linger on.
Brawny Paper Towels. The board game Monopoly. Mr. Clean. We could go all day with cartoon Caucasian males on logos. Because they aren’t going anywhere, no matter how “stereotypical” or “offensive” they might be. That’s where the Left screwed up.
But if liberals remove every minority from ESPN and the grocery aisle—and assuming there isn’t something we don’t know about the aforementioned leprechauns—isn’t the white, straight, cisgender patriarchy being reinforced?
And the same goes for Halloween.
Look, I understand the notion that some costumes leave a room rubbed the wrong way. There are plenty of chuckle-inducing options that don’t require dyeing your face or adding unnatural extremities. Now, please, tell it to those former Democrat politicians in Virginia, or Justin Trudeau for that matter.
But once again, even as some cultures are “not a costume,” others are assumed acceptable to mimic, appropriate, and fetishize.
Gaining significant buzz after Hollywood’s “Halloweekend” are rapper Machine Gun Kelly and his fiancé actress Megan Fox. Now, I shouldn’t be too surprised by this, considering the couple has shared their literal blood-drinking rituals with the public.
The duo decided it would be excellent for Machine Gun Kelly to pose in clerical garb. Fox—bound by a leash and wearing leather lingerie—kneels beside him, ready to ingest an unleavened host.
Fox captioned a post on Instagram, “On Sundays we take communion.” So clever, Meg!
Imagine the outrage if Megan Fox donned just a hijab or Machine Gun Kelly somehow sexualized Hasidic Judaism.
But mocking 21% of the United States population? Totally cool.
Maybe Mr. Gun Kelly or Miss Fox never received the indoctrination—er, education—my college bestowed upon me. But something tells me this choice was not out of ignorance.
Because according to the Left, faith is a farce. Christianity is a clown show. It’s a-okay to make a mockery of a tradition spanning two millennia.
Forget the rules—they don’t apply here. To them, Catholic culture is nothing more than a costume.