It’s easy to get discouraged, or as they say online “blackpilled,” by the news. That’s the last thing I want to encourage, since I think Christians and patriots should (literally) fight to (literally) their dying breath for the Common Good and religious freedom, as our ancestors did at Bunker Hill and Omaha Beach. That’s why I wrote a learned book about the biblical roots of the Second Amendment, which I’ve mentioned many times on The Stream and elsewhere.

But we need a coherent understanding of the battle we’re fighting and the nature of the Enemy. With a capital “e,” since we no longer strive primarily against sleazy people and dumb ideas but against principalities and powers. The mask has almost fallen off the Left — and the anti-populist Republicans, who now endorse Kamala Harris because she agrees with them just on two issues: stopping Donald Trump, and starting wars.

Think I’m overstating how dark our opponents are? Read this:

A new survey finds that more than 1-in-4 Democrats, 28%, think America would be better off if Trump was assassinated. 24% are unsure.

48%, fewer than half, believe America would NOT be better off.

Hard to imagine a more revolting conclusion than to realize over half the…

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 18, 2024

There’s nothing “liberal,” “progressive,” or “compassionate” about wishing your political opponents dead — especially when they’re not even dictators, not even in power, but merely on the verge of being lawfully chosen by the people. That’s not a human reaction, but a demonic one.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when we see such evil made everyday and normalized. Still worse, each time catastrophic policies and irrational claims are discredited by events, their hold isn’t weakened. In fact, it grows even stronger. What’s going on?

To make sense of this infuriating intractability of evil, we need to dig deeper, indeed, into the spiritual realm. That’s what we’ll do in Parts II and III of this short series.

The “Happy” Mask Slips Off

As when Frodo slipped on the One Ring, we now can perceive the spirit world and the dark forces that move there, but we see it with our waking eyes via news cameras, on podiums surrounded by Secret Service agents.

We see behind the shadowy façade of venal mediocrities like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz their master, the Accuser, who barely bothers now to hide the fact that he’s driving our fellow citizens like swine to drown in the sea.

This is not an American problem. It’s global. The bare minimum of freedom throughout the West is deeply in danger — not so much from Russian soldiers, Chinese spies, or Muslim jihadis, but from our own elites, who fear and hate the people they govern.

 Need evidence?

• In Ireland, a Christian teacher who refused to use fake transgender pronouns is back in prison for his beliefs while the government ramps up plans to accept thousands more “refugees” from mostly Muslim countries.
• In Canada, pastors get prosecuted for “hate crimes” for reading aloud passages from Leviticus that offend the LGBTQ movement. A new law would subject people merely accused of hate speech to house arrest, and to life sentences if convicted.
• In Germany, the nation’s largest political party is on the verge of being outlawed — with postwar anti-Nazi statutes perverted to ban a strongly pro-Israel, patriotic movement whose views are identical to those of the Christian Democratic Party circa 1982.
• Here in the U.S., the Biden-Harris administration waved some 10 million illegal immigrants transported by cartels across our border, and now Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) is calling for all those migrants to be granted citizenship and the vote. California, which heavily taxes citizens and bans voter ID, is offering only to illegal aliens $150,000 down payments for homes. Are you a citizen or a veteran? No soup for you.
• President Joe Biden, deemed by his own party to be incompetent to win re-election, is still in office. He’s clearly not running the country, and neither is Vice President Kamala Harris (who has no legal right to do so while Biden lives and remains in office).

So who is running our country right now? Do you even know? Whoever is in control of the nuclear codes and our military, you and I didn’t vote for them, and we have no way of finding out who they are. It’s like the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. And it fits the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of “conspiracy”: “the activity of secretly planning with other people to do something bad or illegal.” It is patently illegal for unelected, anonymous appointees to be secretly running our country and controlling our nuclear weapons. And I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s also bad.

What Doesn’t Kill Me …

Patriotic views that even Rep. Maxine Waters claimed to hold back in 2008 are now smeared as “populism” that “threatens democracy.” Displaying American flags gets students suspended from school. Blue state after blue state (the latest being Michigan) is dismantling every means of preventing voter fraud. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has started calling free speech a “privilege” and claiming that Elon Musk has “lost his.” She refuses to speak to journalists, as if she feels certain that the presidency will be delivered to her — presumably by whoever is secretly running things, and has been running them for years throughout Biden’s mental decline.

I could go on, but you get the point.

How can evil elites cling to power in systems designed to be democratic, with official legal protections for freedom of expression? Clearly that topic deserves an entire book, but here’s a central mechanism, which isn’t so much political as theological: The Enemy crafts political systems that don’t suffer from their failures, but actually profit from them.

One of the best books of the past 15 years is Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In it, he explains that the opposite of “fragile” isn’t “resilient.” Something fragile will likely break under pressure, while something resilient will be unharmed. But there’s a third option: Some things actually get stronger thanks to adversity. In the natural realm, our immune systems work like that, and so do our muscles — each benefits in the long run from short-term challenges. That’s what it means to be antifragile. For antifragile systems, what doesn’t kill them really does make them stronger.

The same principle applies in the spiritual realm. The death of Jesus really was His victory, the blood of the martyrs often proved to be the seed of the Church, and thorns that prick the heads of saints really do form stars in their crowns. God turns our tears into wine of the finest vintage.

However, Satan can do this, too. Perhaps it was the greatest lesson he learned from his great defeat at Calvary: that he must master the “trick” of turning failure into success. He must corrupt not just people but institutions, and design them to feed on the fruit of their failures — to grow stronger with each setback, cynically using the obvious bad outcomes they produce as pretexts for grabbing still more power.

When Institutions Turn Evil

Normally, catastrophic failures should discredit the System that produced them — as the meltdown at Chernobyl helped to push a surprisingly fragile Soviet Communism over the brink. But the dark antifragility of our corrupted institutions in the West turns every such crisis into an opportunity for deeper, more intractable evil.

An obvious example is the incompetence in the Bush administration that made the 9/11 attack possible. That should have led heads to roll throughout the CIA, NSA, and FBI, and sparked angry hearings in Congress, then systemic reform of our national security agencies. Instead, what did we get?

The Patriot Act, which left in place all the bureaucrats who missed the obvious signals of an oncoming attack, and vastly increased their power to spy on and politically persecute Americans. The System didn’t just evade accountability — it turned the crisis into an opportunity, its failure into bonanza of new funding and less democratic oversight. We got FISA warrants and feds infiltrating houses of worship to lure people into committing acts of terrorism. It started with Muslims under Bush, but the Obama administration quickly changed the target to Christians and conservatives. The same FBI offices that had recruited apolitical Muslims to bomb federal buildings went on to create the fake kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and plant violent nutcases among the overwhelmingly peaceful protestors on January 6, 2021.

How do elites get away with scams like these? 

In Part II of this series, I’ll unpack more examples of bad ideas failing their way to the top in our institutions, and explain why this paradoxical strategy so often succeeds. Then in Part III I’ll lay out how we can resist it, by worldly and otherworldly means. 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.