Are Liberals the Spawn of Satan?

Many on the Right think so

Greetings from Paris, where I am having petit dejeuner at the Hotel Grand Amour while contemplating the American abyss.

I don’t how you are feeling, but I feel like my choice right now is to duck and cover — exit, escape, run from the country — or stay in the US and try to help America somehow. The first option seems cowardly but the second option seems immensely challenging and perhaps self-destructive. I can’t imagine living in New York City and trying to tune out, garden, write avant-garde poetry — or whatever — while our society descends toward the dark place where Fascism inexorably leads.

When I consider staying, I stumble up against the reality that there are many millions of Americans who have entered into a reality tunnel where anyone Left of Trump is Satanically possessed and literally “unhuman." Just this morning, for the first time I took a look at Matt Walsh’s content. I knew Walsh, formerly of The Daily Wire, made the blockbuster documentary “What Is a Woman?” I didn’t realize he literally describes himself, on Twitter, as a “theocratic fascist,” and has 3.6 million followers. A devout Catholic, he openly says that he wants the government to force everyone to follow his religion.

In The Unholy Trinity: Blocking the Left’s Assault on Life, Marriage, and Gender (2017), Walsh equates Liberalism and progressivism with Satanism:

Like its author, Satan, progressive doctrine often comes coiffed, hip, pleasant, wearing trendy hats, and saying dumb, popular things like “Tolerance for all” and “Love wins” and “Heteronormativity causes the otherization of non-cisgendered communities” and so on. Yet at its core lies a deep animosity toward life itself.

I would wear a trendy hat if I could find one I liked. I still believe “love wins.” I am all for tolerance.

Walsh, with his black beard, looks like a normal dude one might find drinking Red Stripe in a South Williamsburg bar wearing a lumberjack shirt. His documentary — which made $20 million — is a slick, professional production, with hipster-ish touches.

But Walsh is no hipster when it comes to gender issues and, above all, abortion. He sees abortion as the essence of the unholy, literally Satanic, doctrine of liberalism. He calls abortion, “a cancer in the bloodstream of American society; a depraved, nefarious, shameful practice; a travesty of historic proportions… Abortion unravels the fabric of society, subverts the sacred institution of the family, and turns parents into something like alligators eating their young.” The liberal’s Satanic impulse is, for Walsh, rooted in secular individualism. Abortion is, for him, the final expression of individualism in a world without meaning or values.

Walsh knows this is the case because he believes in “objective truth”: He and other Christ-loving absolutists have direct, unmediated access to it. This objective truth includes the truth of there being only two, forever spiritually as well as legally unequal genders. He writes:

Objective truth is not the truth imagined or concocted by any individual person, or group of people, for their own advantage or convenience. It is not the truth arbitrarily decreed by some government edict or presidential directive. … The truth we accept and protect and give voice to is timeless. It is eternal. It comes from the God who created the universe and everything in it.

When people have total certainty that they possess objective truth coming directly from God, they obviously cannot be reasoned with. This kind of fanaticism can justify any course of action, no matter how extreme. Similarly, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley mastermind behind JD Vance’s political career and Trump’s resurgence, argues that “liberal humanism” or “progressivism” — any use of tax money to fund social services — is the literal Antichrist.

There was a time, not so long ago, when “the Left” (broadly speaking) was known as the locus of countercultural rebellious energy: art, style and graphics, rock and roll, standup comedy, and so on, all had a Left-ward slant. This changed over the last decade. Right-leaning art, culture, and comedy now has the ambience of being edgy, rebellious, cool. Liberal progressive culture has stagnated.

As one example, Tony Hinchcliffe is the comedian who made racist jokes (hardy har har) at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, insulting Puerto Ricans and so on. He hosts Kill Tony, a live comedy show at Joe Rogan’s comedy club in Austin, which is the hub of Right-skewing stand up. Where comics once pilloried corporations and mocked the wealthy, they now find fun in racial slurs and owning the libs. These days, Rogan’s podcast is a platform for the techno-feudalist overlords sabotaging our government. Even psychedelic hippie podcaster Duncan Trussell — another Austin mainstay — has joined Team Trump.