Yes, it’s April Fool’s Day. No, I’m not writing a satire here at The Stream. As Al Perrotta points out in his Brew column, satire is almost obsolete. The Babylon Bee is so hard to distinguish from the New York Times that Facebook fact-checks the former. (And not the latter, which is a shame since somebody ought to fact-check those stories, and the Times no longer does.)

But I digress. I will take the occasion of my second favorite holiday (after Halloween) to encourage satire. And ribaldry. And raucous parody, scorn, even contempt for the phony pieties our elites are trying to stuff through all of our orifices. Mock without mercy or the slightest hint of pity the priests of Baal and their followers.

Leftists: From Blasphemers to Ayatollahs

It’s finally our turn to be the blasphemers. When the reigning religion in America was still a residual Christianity, the left was the party of sacrilege, caustic laughter, and unbridled free speech. Remember the old Saturday Night Live, Mad magazine, and National Lampoon?

Now that leftists have merged with corporate oligarchs to seize every position of power in our culture, they’ve thrown away their jester’s hat to don a crown. Or maybe an Ayatollah’s turban, since the regime enforced by Google, Facebook, the Deep State, academia and corporate “diversity” despots acts like a witch-burning theocracy. They use every point of pressure, every lever of influence, to bully, brainwash, silence, or else (if those fail) destroy anyone who pushes back against their self-righteous, irrational cult.

So push back, as hard as you can get away with. Remember that your grandparents had to fight actual Nazis with guns.

It’s Their Punchbowl

Back at Yale it used to grieve me to see a once-great (once-Christian) educational institution turned against the civilization that made it. To watch gay activists hold kiss-ins on the steps of exquisite Gothic buildings inspired by cathedrals. I felt as if these people were ruining my wonderful Western culture. Then one day I realized: It’s not my culture, it’s theirs. It’s their punchbowl. I’m free to be the piece of poop that floats in it. It was a liberating epiphany.

I’ve laid out here before how the left’s ethical platform in no way flows from what progressives claim to believe about life. There’s no way to get from “No lives matter/This I know,/Because Charles Darwin told me so” to the progressive fetish for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. That’s not how natural selection works, cupcake.

By the way, that’s exactly how I suggest you explain things to leftists, with a broad, defiant grin. Make sure you say, “cupcake” at the end, so your interlocutor realizes how much you respect him/her/hir. Real, sincere Darwinism leads to Margaret Sanger and Hitler, not participation trophies and crying rooms for college students.

A Cargo Cult

The left’s pretended concern with racial equality, and poor people, and foreign people, is a kind of cargo cult. They’re cherry-picking the ruins of an integral Christian concern for the human person as image of God, the way South Sea islanders would rummage through what U.S. Navy fliers left behind, to make little airports out of palm fronds — in the hope that they’d attract more Navy pilots with trinkets and Spam. That’s all that the left took from Christianity: the shiny objects and potted meat.

And the only fitting response is to laugh at these pompous clowns, and get everyone else who still has a funny bone and a spine to laugh at them too. Don’t fall for their sob stories, don’t fool yourself into thinking there’s “common ground” between you and people who want to have drag queens groom 7-year-olds. Or to lock up little old ladies for years for taking selfies at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

There isn’t. These people have made themselves your enemies, and God’s. You should love them anyway, insofar as you hope that they’ll be saved.

It’s Easier to Float Downstream Like the Dead

But you do need to remember that you’re a salmon swimming upstream, against a thundering torrent of lies, nonsense, filth, and literally demonic deception. There’s a very small chance you might be tempted to wield too much contempt for the pious phonies and self-deluded censors. It’s much more likely, given human nature, that instead you’ll be tempted to cave. To fall for white guilt, or straight guilt, or First World guilt. To imagine that calls for “inclusion” are an olive branch from the left, instead of poisonous weeds that grow like kudzu, until they take full control of your organization or church.

And that’s why I’d like to mark the upcoming Transgender Visibility Day by urging you to keep your compassion under control. Employ it, but do so carefully. Dorothy Sayers once observed that if Satan cannot capture us through our crude vices, he will try to do so via our virtues — by exaggerating and distorting such normally wholesome impulses as pity, sympathy, and attraction to the underdog.

Yes, each given person who really suffers from gender dysphoria (and isn’t just trying to cheat at sports) carries a heavy cross. If you know such a person, he needs to be foremost in your prayers. His therapists and counselors are almost certainly giving him destructive advice, based not on science but ideological quackery. Don’t be too impressed by white coats and Ph.D.s. Remember that lobotomy was once the treatment of choice for mental illness.

Hello, My Name Is Legion

But insofar as someone is parroting or enforcing the Transgender ideology, or serving as its poster “boy,” he’s literally channeling voices from the very pit of Hell. Transgenderism is based not on science, but Gnostic hatred for humanity as God created it — which is to say “male and female.” The ideology is funded by a few white male billionaires with strange sexual obsessions, and promises to make trillions for pharmaceutical companies. Transgender advocates are obsessed with targeting children, with preying on young, confused minds, often of children victimized by sexual abuse or exposed to pornography.

There’s a deeper reason why the default pronoun favored by Transgenderists is “they/them/their.” You can learn it in the Gospel:

And when he had come out of the boat, there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who lived among the tombs; and no one could bind him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been bound with fetters and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the fetters he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out, and bruising himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped him; and crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” (Mark 5:2-9)

That’s why I refer to the whole movement for enforcing sexual “liberation” and liquidating Christian morality and human biology as “LGBTQMYNAMEISLEGION.” Because it’s from the Father of Lies who was a murderer from the beginning. I urge you to do the same. For instance, at Thanksgiving dinner.

But keep a twinkle in your eye. Remember that the West is now the Enemy’s punchbowl. You and I are just floating in it.

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.”