The Cultural Marxists are dressed as vampires this Halloween, baring their fangs and sucking the fun out of everything again. In their inimitably dictatorial and humor-free manner, they are sternly lecturing us as to which sort of costumes are “appropriate,” “acceptable,” and “cool,” and which ones are not.

Fear not—so long as you don’t don anything that could conceivably offend a nonwhite, a non-male, or a non-hetero, all is permitted. There’s nothing offensive if you dress as a war victim with half your face blown off, a leering pedophile pope in diapers, or a mutilated corpse with fake bloody intestines hanging out of your belly—but you will be reprimanded, harassed, and eternally ostracized from polite society if you dare to wear a poncho and sombrero if you aren’t Mexican.

A black college student in Ohio—who fancies herself constantly oppressed, demeaned, and suffocated from all sides by “white privilege” rather than, say, very privileged not to be living in Africa—has infected the cyberworld with yet another Guilt Virus by spearheading a poster campaign where pouting nonwhites hold pictures of “racist” Halloween costumes underneath the slogan, “WE’RE A CULTURE, NOT A COSTUME…THIS IS NOT WHO I AM, AND THIS IS NOT OKAY.” Funded by Ohio University and distributed by an organization called STARS—“Students Teaching Against Racism in Society”—the series of five posters depicts a mopey Asian girl holding a picture of a geisha costume, a disconsolate Muslim (or maybe Arab) with a photo of a dynamite-strapped camel jockey, a morose black female presenting an image of someone in blackface dressed as a “gangsta,” a weepy Mestizo clutching a printout of a person riding a stuffed-animal burro, and what I’m assuming is supposed to be a grievously offended “Native American” disapprovingly clasping hard-copy evidence of two palefaces dressed in warpaint and Injun headdress.

In every instance, I’d rather hang out with the tasteless douches in the “racist” getups than the sourpussed killjoys who are play-acting as if they’ve been stabbed in the heart.

On her blog, 24-year-old STARS president Sarah Williams approvingly quotes someone who paints “White people” with as broad a brush as Tom Sawyer was given to paint that fence:

White privilege isn’t like a knapsack…it is like a toy box. And White people will scream and cry and throw a tantrum if you so much as threaten to take away one of their toys. Racist and otherwise offensive Halloween costumes are one of the many toys that White people are used to playing with.

Williams, a political-science major who describes herself as an “Obama intern,” is following in the bold, noble, inane tradition of predecessors such as a watchdog organization that monitors “racist” costumes and a Washington City Paper scribe who in 2009 offered a helpful guide about “How to Inform a Friend Their Halloween Costume Is Racist.”

Such scowling crusaders are the spiritual brethren and sistren of Brooklyn City Councilman Charles Barron, who this year successfully screeched, clawed, and hollered to have a hanging dreadlocked effigy removed from public sight because it was “racist…reprehensible…horrific” and “not funny.” Similar faux outrages about Halloween noose imagery occurred this year in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Last year an Illinois man faced chest-beating censorious caterwauling after featuring a “hanging man” display on his lawn with a mask that was “grey with brown and red tones.” Without incident, he had displayed the same lynched mannequin for “several years,” only with a lighter-hued mask that he replaced after it melted in summer storage.