It’s telling that a lot of progressives want to ban Halloween because (they say) it’s all about people trying on identities that are not “authentic,” as if anyone knows what an authentic identity is. As if any of those mooks have a clue about anything.

What they really want is to arrogate power to themselves, to control how people live and what they think, who they can strive to be.

In their view, which is very Zuckerbergian, we are always supposed to present some ever-present authentic identity. Just as we should only write about people exactly like us in every way, we should only showing our real face, our real self, to the world at all times. This, to them, is the only way to avoid being offensive. Personality and selfhood, however, doesn’t and never has worked that way — but let’s ignore all that for a moment as it’s too deep to explore in a blog post tossed off in three minutes.

Really, the progressives want to take away Halloween because it’s fun, and most of them are not just sexual prudes, but are in fact all-encompassing prudes who deeply desire to be dull bores. Identity bullshit is their excuse, their entrepôt into making us all as dirt-boring as them by using contemporary stylistics to force a bit more prudishness into our lives.