Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (1872) tells us a story of reckless intellectuals, ungrounded in faith or reason, who turn their peaceful society into an apocalyptic nightmare. That Russian novelist wasn’t just depicting such an outcome.

He was predicting it. Himself a recovering revolutionary, he saw that hunger for needed reforms had long ago curdled into pure, destructive fury — a gnostic hatred for the world as it existed, and hence the God who’d made it. The promised Utopias of various radical theories weren’t really the goal. They were just the fig leaf, the highfalutin’ excuse for lying, stealing, grabbing power and killing … which weren’t bugs but features. The Purge was the point.

The Spiritual Roots of Terrorism and Tyranny

That Russian novelist had seen up close the absolutely irresponsible, irrational attitudes of Russia’s “enlightened” classes. Historian Michael Burleigh, in his profound study of terrorism Blood and Rage, confirms that the “intelligentsia” in Russia had abandoned sane, prudent schemes for modernizing Russia.

Instead, they promiscuously threw themselves at bloodthirsty, murderous revolutionaries. Burleigh notes that the Tsar’s government couldn’t get convictions for sociopathic anarchists who’d slaughtered helpless civilians. Juries composed of “intellectuals” would simply vote to acquit them, whatever the evidence, however high the body count.

From the Bolsheviks to the Nazis

Dostoevsky would not have been shocked by the Russian Civil War, the mass slaughter of Christians, the mass theft of property, the artificial famines, the purge trials or the Gulag. He’d tasted the depths of the post-Christian Russian spirit, and detected those dregs in advance. Likewise, a few intellectuals such as Wilhelm Röpke and Herman Rauschning foresaw the barbaric extremes to which Nazi ideology would drive people. These wise Christian thinkers could smell on their fellow citizens’ breath the brimstone of literal demons.

That same stench arises today, right here in our prosperous cities, behind the veneer of “Science” and the gibberish of “inclusion.” Whatever means the enemies of God are using to gaslight us, their real intentions are clear. There is no rational case to be made that (for instance) a woman’s constitutional “privacy rights” compel doctors to murder a baby who somehow survived an abortion attempt.

There are reasons why all but one of the Democrats in Congress want such babies dead. But they have nothing at all to do with women’s rights, or indeed any rational motive. Instead we see the sheer hatred of innocence that bubbles up from Hell.

The Trans Demons

Likewise there’s no psychiatric case for castrating teenage boys and cutting off girls’ budding breasts. The shabby, invalid studies that propaganda media and politically captured medical groups wave around don’t convince anyone, not even the authors. They’re slapdash Halloween costumes worn by real life, malignant spirits who hate men and women as such, just because God created them.

We see this bleak spiritual truth loom before our eyes, like darkness visible, wherever we look today — from Disney commissioning a TV series to infect children with gender dysphoria, to the neighborhood pub where I used to go, which hosted an “all ages” drag queen event, and invited armed thugs from Antifa to terrorize Christian picketers. (Don’t go to Buzzbrews, people. The place is now possessed.)

The preternatural evil that dwells beneath the surface has broken out into daylight — like the oil that gushed from the yard of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Sen. Megan Hunt, Exorcism Candidate

One of the darkest, greasiest stains to emerge is Nebraska Democrat Megan Hunt. Gateway Pundit reports on her latest attack on sanity:

State Senator Megan Hunt was so triggered over a Republican-backed bill that would bar young children from attending grotesque drag queen shows and penalize the adults taking them that she filed a blatantly unconstitutional amendment last Friday to go after individuals taking their kids to church events like vacation Bible study.

The Blaze gave the details:

Hunt’s amendment calls for blocking youth from “religious indoctrination camp,” which the proposal defines as ‘a camp, vacation Bible study, retreat, lock-in, or convention held by a church, youth group, or religious organization for the purpose of indoctrinating children with a specific set of religious beliefs.’

‘The Legislature finds that there is a well-documented history of indoctrination and sexual abuse perpetrated by religious leaders and clergy people upon children. Abusers within churches and other religious institutions often use events like church or youth-group-sponsored camps and retreats to earn children’s trust and gain unsupervised access to such children in order to commit such abuse,’ a portion of Hunt’s amendment reads.

Gloating Over a War Hero’s Suicide

This isn’t the first time Hunt has indulged her twisted fantasies in public. Remember when U.S. Marine combat hero Jake Gardner tried to defend his elderly father and his Omaha small business (a pub) from a violent felon who was looting the place during the George Floyd riots? As the felon tried to choke Gardner out, Gardner finally had to shoot him in self-defense. Since the facts were all visible on video, the local prosecutor declined to charge him — until BLM and Antifa thugs picketed the prosecutor’s home for over three weeks.

Then he turned the case over to a Soros-linked special prosecutor, who charged Gardner with first-degree murder and a hate crime. GoFundMe shut down his defense fund, his landlord evicted him, and a desperate, persecuted Gardner took his own life. He could fight the terrorists of ISIS, but not the Woke mob of vindictive American monsters.

And Megan Hunt went on Twitter to gloat about Gardner’s death:

The indictment of Jake Gardner would never have happened without the community, the people, who stood up for justice and demanded action from city officials. Jake Gardner is gone, but the white supremacist attitudes that emboldened him are still with us today. https://t.co/IFw5ZXepAz

— Senator Megan Hunt (@NebraskaMegan) September 21, 2020

The Ruined Children of Privilege

Hunt isn’t an outlier. She represents a real constituency of unhinged, cruel ideologues who seem capable of … anything. We get a hint just how dark they really are from P.J. Media’s report on the Antifa thugs recently arrested for terrorizing Atlanta. These aren’t the victims of rogue police violence, shattered homes, or urban poverty. They’re spoiled, ruined, and I would argue possessed children of privilege.

Let’s take Francis Carol, who set a cop car on fire:

Carroll hails from Kennebunkport, Maine — yep, the same Kennebunkport that is home to the Bush family compound. … He’s the scion of a multimillion-dollar family that owns a yacht, and he lived in his parents’ mansion before coming to Atlanta to wreak havoc.

Next let’s consider Serena Hertal:

The Idaho native is a graduate of $82,000-a-year Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. How has she made use of that high-dollar education? By facing charges of domestic terrorism, aggravated assault, and criminal trespass in Atlanta.

And Ivan James Ferguson:

The 23-year-old Nevada native is a clarinetist who performed with orchestras up and down the West Coast before throwing it all away to interfere with the safety of a city two thousand miles away. Ferguson studied at the swanky San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which should serve him well in jail.

And Madeleine Feola (22):

She grew up in a wealthy suburb of Portland, Ore., before her family moved to Spokane. Feola went to tony — and far-left — Oberlin College in Ohio, where she “studied archaeological studies with a focus on decolonization.” She’s now a “trans nonbinary activist.”

Sociological studies won’t explain how such cossetted Americans ended up acting like brown-shirted Nazi thugs. Nor even the bad ideas they learned in school. No, there are primal spirits of darkness moving in daylight today, and we must be ready to answer their violence and expose their inhuman (non-human) motives.

The Russians who scoffed at Dostoevsky would have been lucky to get hold of one of his novels to read in the Gulag. Let’s pray we don’t choke on that kind of ironic outcome ourselves.

 

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.”