Facing the Beast, page 18
But we don’t leave babies to starve—at least we didn’t kill living babies before 2020—for a reason; our courts at least ostensibly—at least until recently—don’t allow cheating or theft in our society for a reason; we don’t abandon the elderly to the modern equivalent of wild animals—for a reason; and the reasons derive straight from the Ten Commandments; and from both the Old and New Testaments.
Though secular, in the West, until 2020, our institutions had retained a Biblical, not a pagan, shape.
Congresses, parliaments, and nonprofits were organized along what were basically Judeo-Christian ethical frameworks. Respect for human rights, the equal value of all, the cherishing of life, the seeking of a peaceful society—while our institutions were far from perfect, these were our institutional values, in the West, at least overtly, until 2020.
All of that changed seemingly overnight.
Pastor Cahn notes that Jesus identified Satan alongside the daimones. Pastor Cahn refers to these ancient gods and powers, as well as the more modern Satan, together, as the “anti-God” forces.
I do feel that this is what we are terrifyingly grappling with. Since 2020, the world, I feel, has been bathed, infused, bombarded even, with intensely powerful energies that are totally unfamilar to us in this generation but that may derive from a pre-Christian, pre-solidly Jewish time, a time when early Judaism was struggling with the seductive and oppressive entities that always sought to lure the Children of Israel away from the monotheistic truth, the One God.
The ancient shedim are the only “principalities and powers” I can imagine that can manifest a national, and now a global, network of policy advocates, social workers, graphic designers, and members of parliament who are all on board with an escalating euthanasia death cult.17 The ancient daimones are the only entities I can imagine powerful enough in just two years and a bit, to destroy families, to ruin sexuality and fertility, to make a mockery of human rights, to celebrate the end of critical thinking, to march us all in lockstep to worship of technocrats and technocracy; medical cultism and an orgiastic cult of self- and other-annihilation.
All of Western Europe was once consecrated to Jesus, Mary, and saints—or to the church; almost every chapel, town, village, crossroad; Santander, Mont Saint Michel, Greyfriars. Much of America, too: Santa Barbara, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Catalina. Did that consecration do more than establish place-names?
Did it help keep us safe?
Are we now seeing the costly and intentional process of global elites reconsecrating our America, our West, to negative entities that are—despite the dominant narrative since the twentieth century began—in fact, real?
As the poet Charles Baudelaire pointed out, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
The only thing that feels intuitive to me is that these pagan forces may indeed once again have gained a foothold on our planet.
What feels intuitive to me is that God is at the limit of His patience with us.
And He has said,
Okay, you want to do it yourself?
Do it yourself.
And He let us go.
And that this—the absence of the protection of our God—the ascendancy of a realm on earth of us doing it all ourselves; regarding ourselves; worshipping ourselves; whoring after only human works; releasing ourselves from all lawful constraints; embracing all lusts and obedience to nondivine authorities; rejecting mercy; celebrating all narcissisms; treating children like animals whom we own; treating the family like a battlefield; treating the churches and synagogues as marketing platforms.
This is, indeed, what the realms of pagan darkness—or of “principalities and powers”—look like.
This may, indeed,
be what Hell itself looks like.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A Fall
One Thursday afternoon, in mid-January 2023, in the quiet neighborhood near Salem, Massachusetts, where my husband has a little place where we hang out when we spend time with my wonderful stepson, I foolishly decided to go for a run with our new puppy.
After we had mourned Mushroom for six months, we realized we could not manage without another little dog, and we found a new creature to bring furry mischief into our home, in the guise of little Loki.
Loki is now ten months old. He is a “Shi-Poo”—a shih tzu–poodle mix, an adorable combination.
Loki is very different from the much-mourned Mushroom. Where the late Mushroom was, certainly in his elder years, a judgmental, eccentric Oscar Wilde character, Loki is all a young Jimmy Stewart; wide-eyed innocence, good intentions, purity of heart.
Brian keeps up a narration of the excited, tolerant inner monologue of Loki, just as he did with an equally funny, finicky, and censorious inner monologue for Mushroom. Where Mushroom would gaze at us with relentless hostility until we broke down psychologically and yielded any delicious human food in our possession, Loki’s voice is something like: “I see you guys are having steak tips! I’m having puppy chow! But that’s cool! I love you!!”
Loki has long hind legs like a rabbit, and he runs like a rabbit—with joy in motion. I began to run with him—as who could fail to want to share in that delight? And I made the mistake of using a long extensible leash, as he loved to cavort about with all that length. Had I done more research, I would have known that that was a recipe for an accident.
I was racing with him on the uneven sidewalks of the town, a few blocks from Brian’s little flat. The next moment, I realized that I was on my back on the icy sidewalk, in an agony unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life, and probably screaming.
Worse still, I could see that Loki was about 100 feet further away from me on the sidewalk, with the leash, fallen out of my hapless grasp, trailing near him. He was looking back at me in confused concern.
But I was unable to get up, and I realized with horror that I could not move my left arm or hand at all. Loki could easily wander away and be lost or hit by a car.
I started shouting, “Help me! Please help me!” I put all my will into those screams, and I prayed someone would respond before I passed out, or before I went into shock, which would mean that my puppy would be in terrible danger.
Amazingly, I soon felt someone kneel by me. A woman had come out of her nearby home, having heard my screams. She sought to calm me, as someone else called 911.
“Please get my puppy,” I begged. Miraculously, another woman appeared, from another house—I believe from across the street. I heard two voices then gently luring Loki back toward where I lay, and then my heart was in my throat until one woman was able to seize his leash handle securely.
“Please tell my husband what happened,” I managed to say between groans, and I gave that woman our address. Her wife also, I believe, called 911 on my behalf.
Amazingly, this neighbor took Loki three blocks away, accurately located our address, knocked on our door, gave Loki safely to Brian, and let him know that I had fallen. Amazingly, too, another neighbor, an older man, appeared out of nowhere, while all of this was happening, a look of concern on his face, bearing a pillow and blanket.
The neighbors deliberated about not using the pillow, as they decided that they should not move me. Meanwhile I felt myself start to sink into shock—I felt my heart rate slowing, and I grew colder and began to tremble. I felt that sense of, “My body and mind can’t take this pain any longer; I am about to lose consciousness.”
Then the four neighbors, working together, put the blanket gently over me. The sidewalk was frozen, and my body temperature kept dropping; keeping me warm, I am sure, prevented me from going into shock or hypothermia, and their decision not to move my head also helped me avoid further injury.
The first woman who had come out to help me, knelt beside me and asked about my dog’s breed. She kept chatting with me. This could not have been pleasant for her, as I was still inarticulate—howling and groaning.
I realized, even in my increasing confusion and agony, that she was making small talk with me in order to keep me from passing out.
My husband arrived, and the ambulance arrived as well, and the EMTs wonderfully took over, loaded me excruciatingly onto a stretcher, and whisked me into the most painful ride of my life. They cut off my winter coat, so that there were feathers everywhere in the ambulance interior.
By now I was screaming unreservedly.
“We are in Massachusetts, so there are going to be potholes,” one of the EMTs explained, and indeed I shrieked aloud with every jolt—he was not kidding. But they got me quickly and efficiently to the ER, where, after I underwent agonizing X-rays and MRIs, Brian and I were told by a cheery ER doc that I had broken my shoulder.
But I was so lucky. I had not lost consciousness. I had not gone into shock. I had not been left on the wintry sidewalk, my vital signs steadily dropping till someone finally reacted, perhaps too late.
What I mean to say is that four strangers came out at once into the freezing street at the sound of a human voice in distress. Four strangers stayed at the uncomfortable, no doubt upsetting scene, prioritizing a stranger’s and a little pup’s visible risks over whatever else they had been doing at that moment, and over their own cozy comfort; strangers patiently lured, then secured, and thus saved the life of my little dog. A stranger patiently brought him home, and let my husband know I was hurt. A stranger had held my good hand and talked to me of random subjects, in freezing temperatures, for quite a long time, so that I would not pass out. A stranger had brought me a pillow and a blanket of his own and put the blanket down for me on the icy, gritty sidewalk.
The decency of these people—who themselves may not have even known one another—created an instinctive choreography of goodness, which was lifesaving.
Then, once my dog and I were safe, these strangers melted away, back into their lives, asking nothing of the moment—not even my thanks. I don’t even know their names.
These four strangers may indeed have saved my life, or at least kept me from a much more serious injury. And they certainly saved the life of my little dog.
Five days later I walked—very carefully, and without Loki—and now wearing a sling supporting my shattered left shoulder—around the corner, to see where it all had taken place. There was the ridge in the uneven sidewalk that I had not noticed as I had been running. There was the place I’d fallen.
I looked around—these kind people must live nearby, but I literally don’t know where to find them to thank them.
Our little community showed that it was emotionally and morally healthy. In a healthy community, humans save each other.
These people had in each one of them a moral compass and a sense of selfless compassion that led them to act together with such a beautiful, positive outcome.
That is the society, the community, that sense of unity, we all used to have—at least as an ideal.
Human communities’ ability to save one another, to save the community itself, out of values of internalized decency and compassion, is a resilient, effective, powerful, unstoppable thing.
That is why when others wish to take power from us, they create policies to keep us apart, unknown to, and in fear of, one another.
That, of course, was the damage that lockdowns sought to do—to dissolve the communities that allow us to save one another.
I don’t mean to politicize a great blessing I received at the hands of my neighbors, but I can’t help considering that if, God forbid, this had happened to us during lockdown—or during some time of global messaging about our fellow humans being untouchable, or somehow dangerous to others—I might have lost consciousness, or frozen to death, and Loki too surely would have been lost.
And that risk is true for anyone in times and places that treat some humans as “others”; a person of color injured or fainting in the wrong neighborhood in the Jim Crow era; someone suspected of being HIV-positive, if injured or losing consciousness, during the bad old days when we were asked to shun those with AIDS.
The poet William Butler Yeats’s beautiful lines from “Easter, 1916” reveal the risk to us of losing compassion:
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part. Our part
To murmur name upon name.1
My neighbors did their human part; they seamlessly together manifested the ancient human miracle of compassion; they saved one of their own, saved indeed two sentient beings, purely out of kindness.
If we are to survive all of this, we must defy any pronouncements that seek to make “a stone of the heart.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dear Conservatives, I Apologize
I realized I needed to write a formal letter of apology. From me. To conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.
It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug—to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgment, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.
But that erasure of personal and public history would be wrong.
I owe them a full-throated apology.
I believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity—and the credulity of people similarly situated to me—many conservatives’ reputations have been tarnished, on false bases.
The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, in March 2023, of excerpts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on January 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.1
While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day,2 the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to—the United States Capitol Police.3
This would be the same Congress that convened the January 6 Committee subsequently, and that used millions of dollars in taxpayer money to turn that horrible day, and that tragic event, into a message point that would be used to tar a former President as a would-be terrorist, and to smear all Republicans, by association, as “insurrectionists,” or as insurrectionists’ sympathizers and fellow-travelers.
There is no way to unsee Officer Brian Sicknick, claimed by some Democrats in leadership and by most of the legacy media to have been killed by rioters at the Capitol that day, alive in at least one section of the newly released video. The USCP medical examiner states that this Officer died of “natural causes,” but also that he died “in the line of duty.”4 Whatever the truth of this confusing conclusion, and with all respect for and condolences to Officer Sicknick’s family, the circumstances of his death do matter to the public, as without his death having been caused by the events of January 6, the breach of the capitol, serious though it was, cannot be described as a “deadly insurrection.” Sadly, though the contrary was what was reported, Officer Sicknick died two days after January 6, from suffering two strokes.5
There is no way for anyone thoughtful, even if he or she is a lifelong Democrat, not to notice that Senator Chuck Schumer did not say to the world that the footage that Mr. Carlson aired was not real. Rather, he warned that it was “shameful” for Fox to allow us to see it. The Guardian characterized Mr. Carlson’s and Fox News’s sin, weirdly, as “over use” of January 6 footage.6 Isn’t the press supposed to want full transparency for all public-interest events? How can you “over use” real footage of events of national relevance?
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell did not say the video on Fox News was fake or doctored. He said, rather, that it was “a mistake” to depart from the views of the events held by the chief of the Capitol Police.7 This is a statement from McConnell about orthodoxy—not a statement about a specific truth or untruth.
I don’t agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos as depicting “mostly peaceful chaos.”8 I do think it is a mistake to downplay how serious it is when a legislative institution suffers a security breach of any kind, however that came to be.
But you don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos to believe, as I do, that airing the footage is valuable journalism.
Remember: by law all Capitol footage belongs to us—it is a public record, and all public records literally belong to the American people. “In a democracy, records belong to the people,” explains the National Archives.9
You don’t have to agree with Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to notice the hypocrisy by the Left. My acquaintance and personal hero Daniel Ellsberg was rightly lionized by the Left for having illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers.10 The New York Times was rightly applauded for having run this leaked material in 1971. I do not see how Mr. Carlson’s airing of video material of national significance that the current government would prefer to keep hidden, or Fox News’s support for its disclosure to the public, is any different from that famous case of disclosure of inside information of public importance.
You don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos to conclude that the Democrats in leadership, for their own part, have cherry-picked, hyped, spun, and in some ways appear to have lied about, aspects of January 6, turning what was a tragedy for the nation into a politicized talking point aimed at discrediting half of our electorate.
From the start, there have been things about the dominant, Democrats’ and legacy media’s, narrative of January 6, that seemed off, or contradictory, to me. (That does not mean I agree with the interpretation of these events in general on the right. Bear with me.)
There is no way to un-hear the interview that Mr. Carlson did with former Capitol police office Tarik Johnson, who said that he received no guidance when he called his superiors, terrified, as the Capitol was breached, to ask for direction.11
