So far, they have been stunningly successful, and their twenty-first century acolytes remain on message. It is not an old-Left strategy.

Old Leftists have disappeared into the dustbin of history. The updated strategy has left Marx behind.

The newbie Left, globalist, green, relentlessly progressive and woke, don’t so much as give a toss about the means of production, distribution and exchange.

LOATHE

They loathe the working class. Most oddly of all, it turns out they rather like capitalism. They don’t mind having a ruling class, so long as they are it. A bit like the Chinese Communist Party.

How have they done it? We know that they have been able, ridiculously easily, to gain control of the commanding heights of the economy and, way more importantly (as it happens), the culture.

What are the tactics they have used to achieve this? Well, these have evolved over time. But, as we survey the damage in 2022, we can identify ten key pillars that have evolved into a game plan.

These might be regarded as the core elements of the ground-game of the new ruling class. Alinsky updated, if you will.

First, silence any and all opposition. Use social media platforms to ban people. Rig internet search engines. Cancel, cancel, cancel.

Simply ignore views that challenge the ruling narrative. What the punters don’t know, won’t hurt you. Where silence fails, use ridicule, bullying. Gaslight whole classes of people. Stop the truth leaking out. Think vaccine harm.

Next, control the language. Do this and you control what is thought and believed, you control actions, and you control the world, as the American Christian apologist Peter Kreeft and others have noted.

Wikipedia notes that “newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual’s ability to think and articulate ‘subversive’ concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will”.

In other words, narrow the Overton Window. Well, it has worked. Look at the way contested terms have become part of an uncontested narrative. Homophobic. Bigot. Climate emergency. Love is love. We are all in this together.

When describing contrary views, call them “divisive”. “Controversial”. Use benign words to describe your own views. “Progressive”. It works a treat.

Then, create, capture and control HR. Whatever their initial intent, human resources departments in corporations and government agencies have become the indispensable tools for oppressing employees and enforcing acceptable speech and thought.

They cannot (yet) control dinner table conversations at home, but they sure as hell can control what people say and do in the workplace where they spend (or used to) most of their waking hours.

Infiltrate all political Parties. Don’t just create your own. Tweedledum and tweedledee was a (political) term invented in the 1970s to show how close the major parties were in practice.

Now, they almost totally overlap in what they believe as well. Those who challenge the ruling ideas of the age have no one to vote for, at least no one that can command a majority in the parliaments of the nation.

This tactic has working brilliantly. Just look at Malcolm Turnbull. Matt Kean. Matty Guy. The Liberal teals. The Nats, for God’s sake.

EXTREME

The latter are at the forefront of social liberalism for whom adherence to traditional values stops at the end of a rural grant.

Make mainstream extreme. Look at Israel Folau and Andrew Thorburn. Make Christianity weird. I am not that sort of Catholic, says the exemplar theologian, Daniel Andrews. You mean, not like the religion of Saint Thomas Aquinas?

Turn dissidence on climate, say, into “denialism” (there is that use of language again).

Make science dogma and make real scientists into the lunatic fringe.

Jay Bhattacharya in Melbourne last week reported that he is routinely described, not as an eminent epidemiologist but as “fringe”.

Make people forget what was mainstream before, or label it “backward”. Ignore the fact that until eight minutes ago, just about everyone accepted what were, until then, utterly “mainstream” and uncontroversial.

Tell someone in 1970 that come the 2020s, they would be shafted from their job for believing that marriage is between a man and a woman.

The old joke about “should a married couple be frank and earnest of should one be a woman?” could be told without queasiness.

Before Roe v Wade in 1973, most people would have assumed there was no “right” to terminate your unborn baby.

Create hate groups. This returns us to Orwell and to 1984. The Party organised a two-minute session every week where the identified enemy of the people was “hated”.

There was also a hate week once a year. Now the vilification is ongoing, if often “casual”. Like casual racism.

The newly hated wear MAGA hats in America and are called “deplorable” for their (until eight minutes ago) mainstream views. Here, they are One Nation voters. And bigoted Christians.

Use people’s lethargy and their failure to turn up for the fight, game-face on. In the context of COVID, former Judge Stuart Lindsay grimly noted that all most Australians cared about was their Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate. (The latter might be gone for them, alas, come net-zero).

Create Jobkeeper and work-from-home. Having a low-information electorate helps the ruling class immeasurably.

Know your Goebbels. Where the whole of life, at least public and corporate life, is about narrative creation and maintenance, in other words, marketing, propaganda is your default weapon in the service of power.

Just look at the big three issues of our time, as dictated by the elites – climate, enforced progressive social life and safety from “pandemics” – and you see the MO endlessly repeated. Look at Ukraine.

Tell big, apparently plausible lies. Climate emergency. Pandemic. Abortion is reproductive health. Rinse. Repeat.

Network like there is no tomorrow. The World Economic Forum is the global networker’s network.

Scratch the surface and you will find Gates’ money, liberally scattered in service of his global agendas. Hence the “two clicks to Gates funding” rule that seldom fails.

Fund the media, in particular, and it becomes your megaphone. Niall Ferguson’s clever book The Square and the Tower is revelatory about the power of networks in getting your way.