Defining degeneracy down. Or, looked at another way, raising the bar to truly nauseating heights.

Would you be inclined to buy makeup because a 10-year-old boy is showing you how to create a look on Instagram? If we’re talking about Jack Bennett of @makeuupbyjack, then the answer could well be a resounding yes.

Oh, I assure you it most certainly could NOT. It does raise a whole lot of other questions (such as whether this poor confused young man’s overindulgent parents ought to be locked up, for one), but the only real answer it provides is whether this kid has serious mental-health issues or not, and whether he’ll be tormented by them his whole life long. But I suspect there was never much doubt about those answers anyway.

Since convincing his mother to start his account in May, young Mr. Bennett, who lives in Berkshire, England, has amassed 331,000 followers and attracted the attention of brands like MAC and NYX, which have offered products to create looks. Refinery29 has celebrated him as the next big thing in makeup.

He is the latest evidence of a seismic power shift in the beauty industry, which has thrust social media influencers to the top of the pecking order. Refreshingly, they come in all shapes, sizes, ages and, more recently, genders. Hailed by Marie Claire as the “beauty boys of Instagram,” the early male pioneers, like Patrick Simondac (@PatrickStarrr), Jeffree Star(@jeffreestar) and Manny Gutierrez, (@MannyMua733), have transcended niche to become juggernauts with millions of followers. And their aesthetic is decidedly new: neither old-school-rocker makeup nor drag queen.

“When I first started on Instagram six years ago, the only stuff that existed was guy-liner,” Mr. Starrr said. “It was Fall Out Boy, and it was not glamorous. There wasn’t anything close to applying false lashes. I wanted to feel pretty and beautiful without being a drag queen.”

Well, sorry, kid, but despite the cheerleading from the cultural boll-weevils at the NYT—who wish only to undercut the whole idea of masculinity by promoting gender confusion and dysfunction, and are merely using your natural early-stage groping for identity to promote a sinister agenda—you’ve failed at that.

What makes the Lefty propagandists indulging and manipulating the trials of youth to advance their larger goal of manipulating the greater society as well as humanity itself so despicable in this instance is the damage they’re doing to the boys. Instead of providing them with proper guidance and role models that could ease their passage to a healthy, realistic, and more productive place in society, the kids in this article are going to suffer their whole lives from this Lefty ploy in one way or another. The villains wreaking this havoc—starting with the writer of this article, and the NYT itself—should hope most fervently that karma ain’t a real thing. Or, y’know, Hell.

Mike Walsh lays his finger on another issue:

At the same time the MSM tosses around the word “pedophila” without the slightest idea what its definition actually is, the Newspaper of Record goes and runs a celebratory story like this: just have a look at the picture at the link of a ten-year-old boy. This is not only the sexualizing of children, it’s the homosexualizing of them, which is of course the point, given the Times‘s passionate and enthusiastic advocacy of all things gay.

The gay marriage battle, as many said at the time, was just the first step down a path that would lead into many cultural blind alleys. That now-quaint notion was airily dismissed at the time as absurd exaggerations from extremist bigots overcome by hysteria and hate. Those “extremists” wished not to oppress anyone or do them harm, but to preserve institutions and traditions that have served humanity quite well for a VERY long time, and sparked the most rapid advancement, the most true progress, in all of human history.

A small irony: the remarkable rapidity of that progress, juxtaposed with the breakneck speed of the changes in attitudes being wrought even now by the Left’s machinations seeking to pervert or undo it. Imagine gay marriage as anything but a completely mainstream and non-controversial proposition now; imagine lighting up a cigarette in a bar freely and without approbation or arrest; imagine repealing Obamacare…and not replacing it with any government-run system.

You probably can’t. I’d bet anything your teen or twenty-something kid can’t.

As with feminism and the status of American blacks among many other issues, the NYT’s and Leftymedia’s pro-gay advocacy has dragged us way beyond righting some wrongs, addressing some legitimate grievances, and liberating a marginal minority who, yes, had been treated unfairly in the past, sometimes horribly so. This is now something else entirely: it’s an attempt at the overthrow of an entire culture, replacing it not with some marvelous Utopia but with chaos and confusion.

But you don’t have to take my word for it; the loathsome hippies gave the game away long ago:

Everyone knows that Charles Manson inspired those murders. None of that is being forgotten in reports of his death.

But what also shouldn’t be forgotten was how the murders inspired Bernardine Dohrn, the ’60s militant Marxist who spearheaded the Weather Underground.

That surreal, cruel moment came at the appropriately titled “War Council” held in Flint, Michigan on December 27, 1969, two days after Christmas. It was attended by some 400 student radicals from the SDS-Weathermen cabal, who promoted this political-ideological-sexual gathering as a collective “Wargasm.” For the lovely ’60s hippies, it would be (as usual) a night of radical politics, unrestrained sex, and violence.

Among the ringleaders was the late John Jacobs, who had coined a fitting slogan for the evening and for the entire movement: “We’re against everything that’s good and decent.” That became obvious when the indecent Bernardine Dohrn grabbed the microphone. “We’re about being crazy motherf—ers,” Dohrn shouted, “and scaring the sh-t out of honky America!”

Mark Rudd, the SDS leader who shut down Columbia University a year earlier, in the spring of 1968, translated this message for the wider world: “The message was that we sh-t on all your conventional values, you murderers of black revolutionaries and Vietnamese babies. There were no limits to our politics of transgression.”

A line had been crossed that night in Flint — the first steps into a dark world. From the high altar of Rev. Dohrn’s four-finger salute flowed domestic terror cells, gunpowder, bomb-making units. A “new decade now dawned,” recalled Rudd, as “the New Red Army marched out from Flint, exhilarated and terrified.” Its members would spend the next decade literally plotting the violent overthrow of the United States of America, which (quoting their hero, Che Guevara) they declared “the Great Enemy of Mankind.”

They planned attacks, planted bombs, and engaged in murder, all along fleeing the federal authorities as fugitives on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. Ayers would change his name from town to town, chillingly visiting dead cemeteries where he borrowed the names of deceased babies from tombstones as his macabre aliases.

Lest you kid yourself that this is all some quaint old ancient history with no relevance for us in the modern era, better think again:

Dohrn and Ayers, of course, were back in the news again in 2008, when their friendship with an aspiring Illinois politician named Barack Obama was raised. A chilling symbolic moment in Obama’s rise was the political blessing he received in the living room of Bill and Bernardine in their Hyde Park home in 1995.

In fact, Obama and Bill Ayers actually did a number of things together in Chicago. They jointly served as board members at the Woods Fund in Chicago; they worked on “school reform” through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge; they served on a juvenile-justice panel (organized by Michelle Obama); they appeared together as speakers or panel participants at Chicago events; they had many mutual associations, including with disturbing figures like Rashid Khalidi; they acknowledged one another in books and reviews and even endorsement of their books; they had a relationship as neighbors (three blocks apart); plus numerous other reported associations. (I detail these and many additional connections, with copious endnotes, in my book 2010 book, Dupes.) In 2001, the same period when Ayers openly lamented that he had not done enough damage to the Pentagon, Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s reelection campaign for the Illinois Senate, which Obama happily accepted and was never called upon to repudiate. The relationship was professional and personal. Some have speculated that Barack met his wife Michelle at the Sidley & Austin law firm where Bernardine Dohrn worked.

But, hey, who’s counting — eh?

Who indeed. Which is probably the most dismaying part of all.

This does work well as a reminder that nobody should be telling themselves Leftists are going to be easy pickings when the liberty-minded finally do rise up to throw off the yoke of their oppression, or that their professed abhorrence of violence extends far enough to cover anyone who disagrees with them or dares to try to resist them. Some of that might apply in varying degrees to some or perhaps even most of them. But there has always been a hard core of the Left that is thuggish, vicious, cannot be reasoned with, and is quite enthusiastic about doing violence to their opposition. And they are probably far greater in number than many of us imagine.

Oh, and don’t be kidding yourself with the comforting assumption that our side has all the guns, either. We have most of them, true, and probably will for a good while yet. But empty talk of who has what never yet stopped even one piece of contra-Constitutional act of legislative tyranny, nor any Obama pen-and-phone power grabs, either. And the Left is beginning to arm up.

On the other hand, the hard Left will also be bringing effeminate, passive neurotics like the children in the article up top gradually into their ranks too. They’ll be dull-witted, sheep-like, and incapable of functioning or taking initiative outside of a strictly-regimented environment thanks to their government schooling. They’ll be awkward with tools, unable to cope when something malfunctions or breaks down, and prone to breaking down themselves into helplessly paralyzed fits of weeping at the slightest misadventure or unexpected complication. All of which will serve to weaken the Left just as much as it will (or has) America itself.

Another instance of stinging irony, and of their grandiose plans blowing up in their faces because of having actually been brought to a fuller fruition than they at first imagined—but which WE easily foresaw, and warned against all along. Hey, who says there ain’t any justice in the world, anyway? Why, sometimes, it’s so rich and moving as to be almost eerily poetic.