Jeer at Satan, and all his works, and all his workers in the vineyard. Don’t be too “compassionate” (or cowardly) to mock those gulled by his lies. The spleen you vent on them might be the cup of cold water Jesus remembers, which spares you, on judgment day. Taunt the priests of Baal, mock the Woke inquisitors, and keep your spirit refreshed in our present darkness with the healing balm of Scorn.

Remember that bullies and joiners view your silence as consent. Every time you “go along to get along” you’re going that much closer to the cliff. At some point you’ll cross its threshold and find yourself sliding helplessly down the slippery Gadarene slope, where you’ll drown with the swine in the sea. If you can’t lead, and know that it’s evil to follow, refuse to get out of the way. Be a Heckler for the Kingdom of God.

We’re All C.S. Lewis Characters Now

I’ve read two profound books on C.S. Lewis this year, first Planet Narnia, and now Deeper Heaven. You’ll find vast riches and depths in each of these books. They make magnificent sense out of the “weird” or “distracting” aspects of Lewis’ fictional universe. Wondering why he seems obsessed with the planet Jupiter? Confused why he keeps launching fauns, centaurs, and dwarfs into the stories? Baffled by Merlin popping up in the suburbs? These two works of popular scholarship will show you why Lewis was right to use all those devices. We were just too poorly educated to “get” them. (Planet Narnia focuses on the Narnia novels, Deeper Heaven on the Space Trilogy.)

I mention those scholarly books because we’re just now living through the novel which many considered Lewis’s worst, That Hideous Strength. (I’ll confess I used to think that.) And for understandable reasons. It’s not in any recognizable genre known to literature. The closest things to it are old and difficult poems like Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and Milton’s “Comus.” But those aren’t written in prose, with realistic present-day details, and psychological analyses of the various characters’ motives. Instead, Lewis labeled as science fiction a fantasy Inferno peopled by medieval wizards, beta males, bitter feminists, interplanetary demons, and academic politics. The novel leaves you feeling as if you’d been dumped into a Hieronymus Bosch painting (see main image), with a death metal soundtrack, where everyone speaks either Klingon or the Black Speech of Mordor. It’s a horrifying mish-mash.
 

Are We Living in a Gunshow Apocalyptic Novel?

You know, like our lives today. How should we sum up the genre of a book that soberly warned us what would happen between 2019 and the present? “Gunshow Apocalyptic Novel,” as I once suggested? Most such works lack the black comedy (Jonathan Swift’s, not Tyler Perry’s) we find in Hunter Biden’s laptop and Pope Francis’ writings. The atrocities in those novels usually get taken seriously, unlike all the needless lockdown deaths during COVID, the dead babies behind our vaccines, or the locked-in murdered nursing home patients in states like New York and Michigan. With most of us yawning those off, it would make for a strange apocalypse, which ended with a whimper (perhaps Ashley Babbitt’s). How about a new genre, the “Tragicomic-Phantasmagorical-Snuff-Farce”? I think that might hit the mark, as it does for That Hideous Strength.

Consider the very idea that “conservatives” want to rally behind a gelded, attention-addicted weirdo like “Caitlyn” (Cough: “BRUCE!”) Jenner. In past decades it might have been genuinely cruel to laugh at this lumbering giant in pricey hair extensions and giant fake breasts. (A quiet “Bless his heart!” would have sufficed.) Now I think it’s sinful to do anything else. To take Bruce’s sexual pantomime at face value is worse than laughing complicitly at racist minstrel blackface. Because now we all know that racism is evil — even the federal government, which is wrong about virtually everything else.

Good Is Always Getting Better, and Bad Is Always Getting Worse

But Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom have all aligned to tell us that Transgenderism is good. So mocking it takes courage, and assenting to it takes more cowardice than I can muster. (My donkey-Irish stubborn refusal to do the Smart Thing is what got me kicked off Twitter — no career bump for a writer, I can tell you.)

In a key passage from Lewis’ novel, he says something wise and ominous: “Good is always getting better, and bad is always getting worse: The possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.”

I’d like to see more tangible evidence that the Good is getting better. Maybe I need to think more about the Coptic martyrs of ISIS, the heroes who staff our crisis pregnancy centers, and our missionaries in China. But I can say with moral certainty that the Bad is getting worse.

Transgenderism: Worse Than Communism

For instance, I really do think that Transgenderism is worse than abortion. Worse than Communism. Worse, yes (I’m tap-dancing into the minefield here) even than Nazism. Why?

Because as wicked, foul, and callous as abortion is, it isn’t new. People have been killing the innocent since Cain murdered Abel. It seems to have wormed its way into our fallen DNA.

Likewise, we have always coveted our neighbors’ goods. Communism is just the pyramid scheme that figured out how best to monetize that.

And the Nazi attempt to murder God’s people and turn men into gods? That might have been implicit when our first parents bit the apple and blew up Paradise, so that they could “be as gods.”

Those monstrosities are known to us. They were probably baked in the cake, the moment man fell. But I really don’t know what to make of a worldview that says that unhealthy sexual fantasies and delusions on the part of much less than one percent of the population must rule what we say, think, and do. That we must deny the biological nature of man as a mammal, in order to placate the mentally ill. Or go to prison for defying their orders on how to speak to our own children.

An Ideology from Hell

This evil is so extreme, so bizarre, so seemingly unmotivated, that it doesn’t seem to emerge from fallen man. Since it’s certainly not from God, that leaves just one other sponsor. The Enemy who hates both the Creation and the Creator. Who wishes to mutilate it, as surgeons even now are mutilating confused adolescent girls. He would cut off Creation’s breasts and poison her womb, then make her sprout beastly hair on her weak, girlish chin. He would force us to lie every time we spoke to people, calling male “female,” as he’d have us call evil “good.”

And giving in to that, letting our very words and thoughts be tainted with Satan’s mankind-hating lies? That seems a lot like the first temptation which masses of Christians were forced to face: to call Caesar “God.” In fact, it seems far worse.

Am I ready to die in the Colosseum rather than do that? Probably not, which is why I invested in an AR-15. I’m resolved, if not to martyrdom, at least to not being taken peacefully.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”