The dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened thinking of the woke, the social justice warrior, the anarchist and communist

From The Crisis of the Mind by Paul Valery (1919).  

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

Brings to mind Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and the burning of books.  From his coda to the 1979 edition of Fahrenheit 451.  

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

For all their historical faults on the path to prosperous modernity, the Age of Enlightenment nations and creed are a beautiful architecture and engine of well-being.  The dreadful tiny minority of authoritarian wannabes and has-beens who seek power through utopia are always the barbarians at the gate of the City on the Hill.  

In a false sense of empathy and magnanimity, we ignore that under their flags of crisis - Anthropogenic Global Warming, Income Inequality, Trans Rights, Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory, Blood Guilt, etc. - that they are, at heart, simply power-hungry barbarians who must be redeemed or destroyed.  Until then, they are running about with lit matches, trying to destroy all the progress which has been achieved.