Historical Note: One fine Sunday, I stood with the folks from Manhattan’s traditional Latin Mass in a pro-life “Life Chain” along Fifth Avenue, right by St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Marching down the Avenue was a pro-abortion contingent. In my early 30s at the time, I was wearing a pair of funky eyeglass frames, and a then-chic black turtleneck. I looked a bit like Dieter on Saturday Night Live’s “Sprockets.” At one point a cute 20-something girl marching for “reproductive rights” locked eyes with me. She smiled and said, “You have cute glasses. You should be on our side!” At that moment I realized two things: How pro-choicers choose sides, and the existence of … The Hive.  

Please Don’t Tell Anyone I Wrote This

First of all, I need to ask my readers’ discretion. By a series of providential events, I have gained access to secret machinations of dangerous elites in the U.S. and around the world. And I’m willing to share them with you. However, should my identity as the leaker be exposed, I could be put in danger.

My invitations to Yale reunions would surely be cancelled immediately. Likewise, my subscription to the school’s alumni journal. That magazine provides me with heart-rending updates about vulnerable, oppressed transgender billionaires in need of our help. (And lucrative investment opportunities in China’s Uyghur-staffed cotton farms.)

My own church’s bishops, on Pope Francis’ direct orders, would revoke my status as “professional Catholic.” Should they demote me to “amateur” status, I’d be stripped of eligibility for a low-energy, decently paid, unfireable job at a federally funded non-profit like Catholic Charities. I’d also lose dozens of dollars of vital speaking fees each year, and valuable drink discounts at gay bars across America.

So I count on all of you being tight-lipped about this. Mum’s the word, okay? Don’t admit that you heard all this from me. Attribute it instead to simply “an Ivy League media whistleblower from New York City” and leave it at that. Though that’s a bit long-winded, so just call me “Zmir-Anon.” That should be safe.

A Conspiracy of Termites

There is indeed something like a global conspiracy, whose central hub resides right here in the country still called (for the sake of nostalgia) the United States of America. Let’s dub this worldwide power nexus and social caste The Hive.

I use this term advisedly, because the participants in this cabal do not operate in the way most conspiracy theorists imagine. Hive members are not like the Bolsheviks who schemed with Kaiser Wilhelm’s general staff to pull off a coup in Russia. Nor like the post-Christian, libertine, pedo-shuffling bishops who plotted to take over the papacy. Those previous conspirators self-consciously knew they were working in secret to subvert the established order, to seize power for themselves.

Hive members, by contrast, do not communicate their plans in secret. In fact, they don’t always need to contact each other directly at all. Once you have slid into membership, you develop the knack for just … knowing what steps you must take next. Which opinions you must promote. Whose old friends’ careers you need to savage. You pick up your instructions in thousands of subtle ways. From news stories on CNN, human interest items on NPR, skits on SNL, even sermons you hear in church.

Just Follow the Breadcrumb Trail

Your mind is not wholly your own anymore, but you never quite realize it. You can go through life following the cultural equivalent of the pheromone trails that ants, bees, and termites obey, while feeling mostly “free.” (That’s another old-timey word we keep around out of deference to our ancestors.)

How else would people like Joe Biden go from knowing in 1980 that there are two human sexes, and a tiny percentage of people who suffer from mental delusions on the subject to … realizing that there are at least 47? That transgender rights are primordial and basic, inscribed between the lines of the U.S. Constitution?

The Hive didn’t send him or anyone else a series of rational arguments, much less scientific evidence. Instead, it left little breadcrumb trails that its millions of members mindlessly followed. (Be warned! If you don’t follow each turn in the maze, you won’t get any breadcrumbs, or be allowed on social media.) Now at the maze’s end, munching the cheese, Biden fully believes that people who believe today what he believed when Reagan was president are dangerous haters, as bad as the Nazis. And for all Hermann Goering’s cross-dressing, the National Socialist attitude on transgender identity was far from fully accepting.

We Do the Thinking for You

Likewise, The Hive instructs its members which kinds of election fraud, political violence, “hate speech,” conspiracy theory, extremist politics, books, movies, and opinions are “dangerous” and “seditious” and which are “mostly peaceful” and benign. When it’s time for a moral panic, The Hive incites one —as it did after the Reichstag Riot on January 6. When The Hive requires a time of national healing and laxness, it decrees one — as it did after Barack Obama was safely in office.

Hive members belong to both political parties, every race and tribe, and claim membership in a wide array of religions. It’s ludicrous and sad to see people try to locate them all in one ethnic group or faith. Read Rabbi Dov Fischer’s hilarious case in The American Spectator that The Hive seems less like a Jewish than a bad Catholic conspiracy. (The Spectator is a conservative magazine run by non-Hive members, while National Review is positively sticky as a honeycomb.)

A Hive Mind without a Queen

What unites the members of The Hive? Well, the leading members attend a small set of elite prep schools and colleges. They listen to the same podcasts, read the same intellectual journals and fashion magazines, and watch the same Netflix series. They embark on the same kind of sexual adventures, then settle down into virtually interchangeable families.

Hive members believe that they perform all these ritual dances of their own free will. But in fact, the changes The Hive makes to their DNA when they are assimilated program each member to spontaneously “find” the media that will give them their subliminal, day-to-day orders. The left loves to talk about right-wing “dog whistles.” If these even exist, they are primitive media compared to The Hive’s seamless, marvelously sophisticated system.

But I’m just speaking here about externals. Is there a central worldview that operates in the Hive, that brings together seemingly disparate personages such as Mitch McConnell and Stacey Abrams, Mitt Romney and Ilhan Omar, Neal Gorsuch and Lawrence Tribe?

The Trigger that Flips the Switch

Indeed there is, and it stems from a common origin point. I believe that I’ve identified the means by which The Hive recruits its members, and scares off people like me whose cognitive talents might otherwise qualify them. There’s a Great Book that most of us have to read in school, which in those suited for Hive membership flips a mental switch, and sends them scurrying down the breadcrumb paths forever after.

Most of us were assigned to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in middle school. In case you forgot, this novel depicts an Earth ruled not by kings, dictators, or presidents, but by Controllers. This elite seeks economic efficiency, social stability, and nothing more. Its members achieve this by maximizing each of their subject’s moment to moment pleasure — from sexual gratification to emotional satisfaction.

The means they use include orgies, rigid mandatory contraception, mood-altering drugs, and monopolized, sanitized media. Old-fashioned prejudices and moral norms are turned on their head. Promiscuity, drug-based escapism, and mindless consumerism now appear as sacred norms. Family life, monogamy, religion, and parenthood become obscenities — unmentionable (as the word “abortion” once was) in polite society.

In the novel, all who dissent from the “brave new worldview” are exiled to live in remote, barren deserts. There the “wild men” live, and carry on the ancient human mode of life—monogamous, religious, occasionally violent. Those in “civilized” realms view the “savages” with a mix of fear and amused contempt. Of course, the last thing they’d permit would be the savages taking over, or even voting. Instead they must stay on their reservation, as the “red man” had to do, and we in Red States will soon have to do, far from the levers of power.

How to Join the Hive

The way The Hive recruits members is simple. A certain percentage of students who read Brave New World in middle school think: “This is terrific! What a great plan for the future! Where do I sign up?” Each such student is thereby enrolling himself in The Hive. He need not do anything further. His instructions will be coming, and keep coming all through his life, till his painless, godless euthanasia in some suburban pastel room.

Those of us who read the book as a dystopian nightmare satire? We’re deplorables, long past redemption, like Brave New World’s tragic hero John Savage.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”