Let me start by laying out clearly my heuristic for understanding our enemies in politics, in culture, and even within the Church. Fittingly, it is biblical:

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (John 8:44)

Those simple words of Jesus guide me whenever leftists, libertines, or “Progressives” start moving their lips. I suggest you let them guide you the same way. It will save you endless wasted time and heartache you might otherwise inflict on yourself by insisting, “But these people are sincere!”

They’re Not Stupid, They’re Lying

What if they aren’t? What if they’re simply lying, to us and to themselves? Wouldn’t that explain things better than, for instance, the dubious theory that they’re mentally impaired enough to believe things like these:

• A speciesless mass of undifferentiated lifeless tissue acquires both humanity and life the moment it exits the Magical Birth Canal. (Women’s bodies are even cooler than I realized as a teenager!)
• There were always 47 different genders, but science didn’t discover them until reality TV star Bruce Jenner decided he was “really” a Lesbian trapped in the body of a male Olympian, and Vanity Fair did a cover story on him.
• Science dictated during COVID that infected patients really ought to be moved from hospitals to nursing homes, to infect thousands of the most vulnerable Americans, while children with vigorous immune systems had to miss a year of school. Abortion clinics, casinos, liquor stores and big box stores were “essential” businesses, but churches and small businesses weren’t. George Floyd protests were safe, but GOP rallies were “superspreader events.” Abortion rights were covered by constitutional privacy rights, but vaccine decisions weren’t. And all this we knew if we “listened to the Science.”
• When members of one political party question election results and claim that the president is abusing his power, they are acting as righteous citizens. When those in the other party do the same, they expose themselves as anti-democratic insurrectionists who must be silenced and crushed at all costs.
• Sending illegal immigrants to a poor part of the country for local communities to deal with is humane and generous. Sending them to a wealthy enclave that has proclaimed itself a “sanctuary” for them is dehumanizing and cruel.

We could conclude people who believe these things were all dropped on their heads as children. But the charitable, Christian position is that they are intelligent, responsible, and free human beings. They’re not incompetent. They’re simply lying, to themselves and to us. It isn’t about bad cognitions, but bad intentions.

Forked Tongues and Phony Words

Jesus spoke stark words to the religious hypocrites who were plotting His death. They were willing to kill Him to preserve their political power and curry favor with Caesar. Jesus loved all persons, but He hated ingrained dishonesty, forked tongues and phony words which feign devotion of hearts that are fatally clogged with pride.

Jesus’ enemies drew on the gifts God gave them — native intelligence, advanced education, the trust of the public — to fight against the very Law He’d written on their hearts. Lifestyle hypocrites do the same today. On some level, they know better, or ought to. They willfully and proudly refuse such truths in favor of the worldly rewards they get from their glittering, flattering lies.

He Who Smelt It, Dealt It

They have many tools for their deception, but the most useful one is the one psychologists call Projection. It entails casting one’s own guilt onto some innocent person or group. Children engage in this all the time. Remember the old expression, “He who smelt it, dealt it”? The five-year-old who leaps up and accuses someone else of passing noxious gas … is probably the culprit.

It’s usually neither so innocent nor fragrant. The Serpent whispered to Eve in the Garden that God was worried humans might displace Him, as if He was afraid of us and the gifts He Himself had given us. That wasn’t God’s fear, it was the Enemy’s. He was projecting his own twisted intentions onto God.

The Protocols of the Nazis of Munich

The Nazis did the same. They grabbed hold of a wildly implausible conspiracy theory laid out in a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It claimed that a tiny cabal of plotters intended to tyrannize humanity, destroy traditional values and manipulate and deceive the masses. It was all part of a plan to acquire global power. The Nazis were right, in a twisted sort of way: There was such a conspiracy abroad in the world at the time. But it wasn’t Jews who schemed to do all those things. It was the Nazis themselves.

Likewise, when Stalinists threw the word “fascist” around to describe everyone from Catholic monarchists to Marxist Social Democrats, they had a grain of truth to rely on. There was a political party whose brutality and intolerance made it morally indistinguishable from the fascists. But it was the Communist Party.

The Democrat Nazi Resistance

In our own place and time, the Democrats claimed that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was a “threat to democracy” that required a “Resistance.” They said he was corruptly colluding with a hostile foreign power. He would abuse the government’s power to persecute his opponents.

And they were right in the same twisted way we’ve been talking about here. Those very evils were in the offing. Except that it was the Democrats themselves who were ready and willing to impose them. Their candidate, Joe Biden, was corruptly connected  to a hostile foreign government. The left broke every rule, norm and law to nullify the results of an honest election, directing its supporters inside the Deep State to defy the will of the people. They used the bloated powers George W. Bush had given our intelligence agencies to persecute political dissenters. And they were willing to throw American dissidents in jail as political prisoners.

If you want to know the evils the left intends impose upon us next, there’s no mystery to it. Just listen to the warnings they’re issuing about what conservatives and Christians might do. That’s what’s in their minds, and they can’t help blurting it out. But they purge themselves of any guilt they might feel by projecting it onto us.

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.”