The phantasmagorical meltdown of the political left today is hard to convey in words. But let me try:

Five hundred spider monkeys released in a fancy restaurant, throwing the knives and water glasses across the room, then trying to mate with the faces of all the patrons.

Nope, that doesn’t work. Because that would be funny. I’d actually pay to watch that. I’d book a reservation at any posh French four-star bistro which could reliably promise such a show.

How about this:

A once persuasive demagogue who used to fool the masses, now doddering and incompetent, clinging to his position by obeying the whispered orders of plutocrats and spooks to impose draconian, irrational policies that speed the destruction of his homeland.

That’s just squalid and sad. And what we’re seeing now is far worse than that. The national tantrum that started on election night 2016 and continues to this day is something that transcends shallow, two-bit hacks like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Columbine, on a National Scale

No, the nearest I can come to an adequate dramatization of what our Oligarchy is imposing on our country is this:

It’s like Columbine or Uvalde. It’s a school shooting, an attack on our hope for the future, organized by a small cabal of the hateful, which provokes and then exploits the confusion and panic of the helpless, and the cowardice of their guardians.

That’s why I can finally take no glee in skewering the self-contradictory and irrational positions of our enemies, however objectively ludicrous their deepest held beliefs turn out to be. There are just too many victims, and even once we defeat these people, we will never undo all the damage in this life:

• The thousands of veterans and grandmas murdered via COVID by blue state governors in nursing homes, all to inflate the death statistics, thus justifying massive power grabs, forced vaccination and insecure mail-in balloting.
• The tens of thousands of young people sterilized and mutilated by medical malpractice, in pursuit of fictitious “genders,” encouraged by perverted male billionaires with huge investments in Big Pharma, and delusional Gnostic ideologues.
• The millions of babies aborted, to fuel a billion-dollar industry and grease our hook-up culture.
• The thousands now struggling with health problems from a rushed, untested vaccine made using organs stolen from unborn babies, and forced down our throats almost at gunpoint.

Only Christ can wipe away such tears.

“We’re Not Democrats — Honest!”

We could develop a politics based simply on stopping the madness. One might well win elections just by promising “We’re not Democrats — honest!” On that promise, if nothing else, most Republicans could deliver. We could model ourselves on Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) in the classic Horse Feathers, who memorably sang “(Whatever It Is) I’m Against It!”

But such a purely negative program wouldn’t endure, and couldn’t accomplish much. When you’ve slid more than halfway down a slippery slope with the Gadarene swine toward the sea, it won’t do simply to say, “Thus far, no further!” We can’t stay perched in such a precarious place, and the pigs keep nosing us downward.

A Defiant “No!” to Caesar

It’s incredibly important to know what we’re against. To prayerfully muster the courage to face down massive cultural pressure and government terror tactics. To sacrificially stand with the victims of this regime of madness, lies, and hypocrisy. To trust in God enough to say a defiant “No!” to Caesar.

That was enough for the martyrs. When they refused to worship Commodus or Diocletian as gods, they likely didn’t have well-developed alternative political programs. They couldn’t glimpse the beauties and achievements that lay ahead in a fully Christianized civilization, shining forth in various forms from England to Spain to Russia, and soon in the Americas. They probably couldn’t articulate a theory of the proper limits of the state, and the rights of man.

Saying “No” Was Enough Once. No More

They just knew the First Commandment, and knew it applied to them. And they knew that some dictator in Rome had no authority to override it. And that we are wiser to anger some petty earthly ruler who only has power over our bodies, than the Author of the universe who disposes of our souls.

Saying “No” was enough for them. They were part of a small and helpless, still exotic minority whose beliefs were misreported and mostly misunderstood. Buoyed by grace, they could go to prison or to their deaths, perhaps in the awareness that their steadfast courage astonished their lukewarm, pagan neighbors.

We must be ready to emulate such saints and heroes, whose example was so inspiring that countless people have since been christened with their names: Peter, Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Thaddeus; Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia and Anastasia.

Far Worse Than Pagans

But our task is different from theirs. We are not facing an empire full of innocent, ignorant pagans who don’t know any better. Instead we confront an ex-Christian culture, full of militant post-Christians and anti-Christians, who damn our ancestors for baptizing Europe, while weaponizing grotesque, mutated notions of the justice they learned from the biblical view of man.

Such people are jaded by a theology they don’t even understand, cynical about truths they think they’ve seen through, but in fact have never explored. Their ignorance is willful, stubborn, and prone to violence. They’re far worse than Aztecs or Iroquois whom missionaries once faced. They’re vaccinated against reality, apparently ruined for truth.

It’s our task to face down the threats of our foes, of course, and strip them of power to harm us. But to do that we must dismantle their cobbled-together caricatures of what Christians believe and debunk their jaundiced, one-sided accounts of our culture’s past.

We must know what we believe, and why. How we came to believe it, and how our ancestors defended it. And we must make excruciatingly clear the price that the world will pay in chaos and tyranny if these crucial truths get finally forgotten.

 

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.”