From Mao To Minneapolis

Who knew it was Struggle Session Season?

It slipped up on me so fast this year that I have nothing to wear.

So many decisions…do I show my independence from the collective by designing my own sign and using my own colors or just show my solidarity and get a free one from the Soros or Singham funded activist store?

It would be easy to laugh off the latest spasms of performative outrage as another odd blip of American cultural life — yoga students in Minneapolis berating staff to force them into a political declaration denouncing ICE; journalists marching on their former employer with placards, demanding ideological and employment justice as the Washington Post continues to bleed $100 million a year; calls for a national strike and campus walkouts. These are not isolated pranks. Taken together, they signal a deeper transformation in how Americans wield social pressure: a struggle season in which public denunciation and coercive conformity are the new currency of cultural conflict.

Consider the spectacle at the Washington Post. After the storied newspaper laid off roughly one-third of its newsroom, the reaction from its own community was less measured lament than quasi-ritualistic rebuke. Former employees and union supporters rallied outside the Post’s headquarters, critiquing management and demanding answers about the cuts. The scenes of journalists turned protestors were striking not only for their emotional intensity but for their implicit expectation: that the owners should continue to subsidize a newsroom serving mostly an ideologically sympathetic audience despite decades of financial losses and shrinking readership. It was a public grievance session in which the laid-off demanded vindication from those who had the power to reinstate them.

Then consider the video of yoga students inside a CorePower Yoga studio in Minneapolis confronting instructors and demanding they condemn ICE. The footage shows customers pressing visibly uncomfortable staffers to take a stance on a hot-button political issue, accusing them of complicity by neutrality, and only relenting once the studio announced its own symbolic disavowal of federal immigration enforcement. Spandex-clad participants policing the boundaries of acceptable speech and forcing compliance through sustained confrontation — a textbook example of a cancel-or-coerce ritual: a public performance of ideological enforcement intended to leave no space for ambiguity or neutrality.

Across the country, protests triggered by the federal crackdown on immigration have spilled into broader forms of public action. Student groups at the University of Minnesota called for a “National Shutdown” to protest immigration enforcement, urging walkouts and economic disruption. These events are part of a sustained, multi-city series of demonstrations responding to deaths occurring in the context of ICE operations. It’s tragicomedy to watch young high school “revolutionaries” marching through the local Target store chanting “ICE OUT!” as store employees stand by with a “What the hell is this?” look on their faces.

The message to the bewildered studio employees? You will be made to care.

What binds these disparate episodes — newsroom walkouts, yoga studio pressure campaigns, campus shut-ins — is not merely shared political sympathy but a method of social conflict rooted in public coercion and reputational enforcement. In Maoist China, a struggle session was a ritualistic public attack aimed at forcing ideological confession, shaming, and submission. In today’s America, we substitute social media clips for bamboo poles and chant slogans at yoga studios instead of parade grounds, but the functional equivalent remains: identify deviation from an ideological script, call it out publicly, mobilize peers to bear witness, and insist on a corrective action or apology lest the target be socially or professionally isolated.

I’m not ready to equate the political content of these movements with totalitarian government policy because the historical and moral contexts are radically different and the left in America tends to be performatively pathetic. This is not Maoism, this is Mao Lite as described in the pages of the New Yorker, Vogue, or The Atlantic.

But the mechanism — social pressure wielded as a tool of conformity, amplified by virality and the fear of reputational blowback — echoes earlier forms of coercive public rebuke. Critics from across the political spectrum have noted that such dynamics do not encourage dialogue but enforce doctrinal purity, shrinking the space for nuance and dissent. Whether it is journalists insisting their former employer must foot the bill for their craft regardless of consumer interest, fitness customers demanding corporate political declarations, or students disrupting campuses until administrators bow to their demands, the pattern is consistent: public confrontation as a means of ideological enforcement.

In an age where media ecosystems are fragmented and public attention is constantly monetized, these struggle-like performances are not marginal theatrics — they are becoming routine features of our civic life. Social media doesn’t just reflect public opinion, it shapes incentives: the shriller the denunciation, the greater the visibility; the louder the protest, the more likely corporate or institutional capitulation; the faster a clip goes viral, the greater the reputational risk for any individual or business that fails to conform.

We may not have young adults with Mao’s Little Red Book in hand or Red Guards on every corner, but we do have something equally potent in its own arena: a culture where public shaming and socially enforced compliance are the default tools of conflict resolution.

Until bullshit is called, we will reckon with that reality — the incentives that drive it, the harm it engenders, and the costs it exacts in terms of civility and discourse — and this struggle season will continue to unfold, all the way down.