In 1872 Frederick Engels wrote a letter to Theodore Cuno saying, “The thing to do is to conduct propaganda, abuse the state, organize, and when all the workers are won over, i.e., the majority, depose the authorities, abolish the state and replace it by the organization of the International. This great act, with which the millennium begins, is called social liquidation.” That same year, Fyodor Dostoevsky published a novel about revolution and rebellion titled, The Possessed; other translations have seen it titled, Demons. It is a book about revolution and rebellion “in the name of unlimited freedom” and how the ideas for such acts are connotations of demons. Richard Pevear’s forward to his translation explains it this way, “…implicit at least in his (Dostoevsky) analysis is the possibility of an evil or alien idea coming to inhabit a person, misleading him, perverting him ontologically, driving him to crime or insanity.” In one memorable scene the revolutionary theorist Shigalyov who by today’s standards is considered the modern-day liberal declares, “My conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start from. Starting with unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.” Pevear adds, “Here we have the voice of the demonic idea in its pure state.”
Anytime a moment in history defines a reality, there are always prior moments you can go back to in depicting a historical backdrop; so let us go back to the beginning; the Garden, and specifically the fundamental attitude shift in creation when the serpent brought forth the idea to Eve that she could “be like God” if she ate of the fruit. Adam and Eve lived peacefully in the Garden of Eden, perfectly harmonious with God and creation. They had complete freedom to do as they pleased; there was only one rule; they “must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” When the only rule in the Garden was violated, liberalism became ubiquitous with creation because humans got the idea they could “become like God, knowing good and evil” by acting as autonomous individuals who determine what is right and wrong and rejecting established traditions, authorities, and religion.
Rush Limbaugh once said the most prophetic things about liberalism: “I think we wouldn’t be here today if there had been a proper education and understanding of liberalism by a majority of the American people,” and “that so many people on our side do not recognize and have not recognized the threat posed by standard, ordinary, everyday liberalism.” Today, conversations about liberalism are more and more copious. As Rush Limbaugh astutely pointed out, a quick search online reveals the scope of the discussion on the subject—liberalism is the problem, liberalism is the solution, we need to expand liberalism, we need to limit liberalism, we need to improve liberalism, we need to get back to basic liberalism. This essay puts forth the argument that the ideology of liberalism is closely linked with Satan’s manipulation of our passions, with the aim of influencing and directing us. As Christopher Dawson wrote in The Judgment of the Nations, “Here in this world we are staying in an inn where the Devil is the Master and the world is landlady and all kinds of evil passions are servants and these are the enemies and opponents of the Gospel.”
In 1888, Pope Leo XIII wrote that at its source liberalism is demonic, “But many there are who follow in the footsteps of Lucifer and adopt as their own his rebellious cry, “I will not serve…who, usurping the name of liberty, style themselves liberals.” The ideology of liberalism aims to dismantle traditional structures and beliefs, and often portrays the past as being dominated by superstitious practices and institutions meant to restrict personal freedom. It does this through politics. In his article, “The Consequences of Catholicism for Political Theory,” Benjamin Studebaker, an honest Marxist holding a PhD, says that our society can be considered “post-Catholic” because Catholics had to subordinate morality to politics embracing pluralism: “This is why liberalism is fundamentally a post-Catholic ideology–it cannot work in a context of full atheism, in which good/truth/God have been rejected. In a context where these things have been wholly rejected, we return to the principle of might makes right. By trying to flesh liberalism out and make it feel more substantive, the liberal theorists have moved more and more people away from good/truth/God toward an emphasis on desire satisfaction and autonomy.”
The realm of politics can be seen as the intersection of liberal ideas and demonic influences, potentially leading to distorted perceptions of reality. Liberals are overactive in the institutions that produce the ideas informing people about so called “new truths,” about who are the real reactionaries, and how to remake the world. For the liberal, politics is everything, and everything is political. Who you are politically means the most to liberals because it is Satan’s way of categorizing his detractors. Bishop Fulton Sheen once commented that politics would be the method for enslaving mankind, saying, “…but he (Lucifer) was suggesting to the Lord theology is politics…the mastery of the world in the future will depend entirely upon politics.” Lucifer has become a symbol of rebellion since the Garden uprising, reflecting the revolutionary political movements of past centuries, which sought liberation from moral restrictions and promised a new Eden.
Around the end of the eighteenth century, revolutionaries “demonized themselves, so to speak, in order to demonstrate their complete rejection of the Christian establishment.” Satan would become a “positive political role model, a symbol of political goodness.” We know that the people we associate with can influence and change our behavior in various ways, from simple things like the sports team we cheer for to the foods we eat. However, it can also influence our opinion about tradition, values, reality, and power. The Russian Mikhail Bakunin was a revolutionary socialist who encouraged anarchism through his writings. In one, titled, God and State, he writes, “But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience: he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.” To Bakunin, Satan symbolizes revolt and reason, and that belief in God was “one of the most threatening obstacles in way of humanity’s liberation.” Satan was seen by many socialists as a symbol not only of intellectual enlightenment, but also of actions that were deemed sinful by certain individuals. In 1907, the socialist magazine Brand published a short story called “In Hell.” The story depicts a proletarian, who is imprisoned, having a dream about Hell. In the dream, Lucifer explains, “Jehovah is conservative, but Lucifer is a democrat,” and Hell is not a place of torment at all: “…Christianity preaches asceticism and self-denial; we preach happiness and pleasure. Hence, all the things considered sinful on earth are practiced here: eroticism, dance, theatre, and cheerful melodies.” Another short-lived socialist publication, Loki: Pamphlet for Youth, asserts that Lucifer is the spirit of liberation, “the human lust for rebellion, the battle between oppressor and oppressed.” West German anarchist-terrorist, Michael Baumann, claims satanist tendencies were widespread in his political circles. “Hail Satan” was actually the internal greeting.
Some people view tolerance as a liberal value. However, others believe it is used as a technique to help establish a totalitarian state by eroding the principles necessary for maintaining freedom. Tolerance advocates manipulating the human will: “Tolerance thus becomes a device to elevate certain liberal ideas and constituencies above public criticism rather than trusting that they will eventually emerge victorious on their merits in open public debate.” Lenin knew that tolerating something against your values would eventually become intolerance towards you. Paul Gabel in his book, And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs. Religion in Russia, 1917-1929, put it this way: “Nothing in thought or aspiration seemed to Lenin more incomprehensible than tolerance. For him it was indistinguishable from lack of principle. It was the beginning of contemptible surrender.” It is common for liberals to believe that they are tolerant simply because they identify as liberal and not as “intolerant Christians.” However, recent studies have shown that Gen Z is less tolerant of opposing views despite considering themselves more tolerant than previous generations. It is clear that Gen Z is very disconnected from reality and history. For instance, they are waging war on statues, distorting historical facts, and disregarding the importance of biology. This behavior could lead to a dangerous shift towards proto-fascism and the imposition of immoral beliefs. You are rendered invalid, if you do not capitulate to such pathologies. Gen Z is, as Blake said of Milton, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
A recent study from 2020 found that “political ideology may also be relevant to mental health, as people who are more liberal, especially those identifying as ‘extremely liberal,’ are more likely to have mental health problems. It is suggested that may be because conservatism is associated with greater religiosity.” It is possible that the perpetual cycle of mental illness could be from the prevalence of mental health professionals being liberal. One study found that only six percent of professionals in psychology described themselves as conservative and feared the negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. The study found they were correct: “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.” There is also research that demonstrates that liberals are less happy than conservatives: “conservatives are more likely to embrace family-first values and virtues that steer them towards wedlock and fulfilling family values” liberals, on the other hand, embrace the “false narrative that the path to happiness runs counter to marriage and family life.” Four studies from several countries concluded that “childlessness leads to liberalism, support for homosexuality, abortion, and promiscuity, while parenthood creates conservatism and traditional values.” In an article from Current Affairs titled, “Why We Should Abolish the Family,” lets you know right in the beginning: “The family is a conservative project that limits human flourishing. The family must be abolished.” Another article from Slate shares the sentiment but calls out the fearful liberals to take credit, “Yes, Culture Helped Kill the Two-Parent Family. And Liberals Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Admit It.”
The insight of Dostoevsky’s Demons of liberal parents producing revolutionary children was again made prophetic with Midge Decter, a century later, with her book, Liberal Parents, Radical Children: “we allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling.”
Children of liberal parents are more prone to accept revolutionary ideas because liberal parents are more concerned with “injustice” in the world and how they failed to change it. One mother confesses that her son “learned progressive values from my husband and me. When he was in elementary school, we took him door-to-door to canvass for John Kerry and Barack Obama. When he was in middle school, we took him to rallies to protest Scott Walker’s union-busting Act 10. In high school, he learned to make sophisticated arguments for his liberal positions on civil rights and economic fairness.” Then she becomes shocked for creating a monster. Often, the seed of liberal indoctrination parent’s plant gets germinated by the liberal professors, and flowers into revolutionary activity.
Another example on how liberals are revolutionaries bent on destroying the foundation for a free civilization is from Michael Walzer, written in the 1996 issue of the liberal intellectual magazine, Dissent that sought to find the middle ground between communism and liberalism, and gave a list of liberal political successes since the 1980s: affirmative action, feminism, the emergence of gay rights, the acceptance of cultural pluralism, the transformation of family life, changing sexual mores and new household arrangements, the process of secularization and the fading of religion in general, Christianity in particularly from the public sphere—classroom, textbook, legal codes, holidays and so on—legalization of abortion, gun control, environmentalism, and constraining police powers. What one would assume are natural evolutions of human reason and rationality, Walzer admits that these victories were not won in the central arenas of democratic politics but by the revolutionary activities of “liberals and the liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalist, television and screen writers—not the population at large.”
Walzer admits that the sense of cultural collapse we feel is the result of these liberal “victories”: “…and that the victories of the left have caused the collapse.” Completely unconcerned about what type of society we will be left with, when the institutions that make a society dissolves, Walzer ask: “How would it be held together? Would it be stable? What would everyday life be like within it?” Then he confesses, “The focus of the left and liberal politics these last thirty years has been overwhelmingly on “liberation” from various restrictive institutions and practices-not on the creation of new institutions and practices.” When in positions of influence where decisions are made on how culture is shaped, liberals will seek to make their liberal ideas normative. A Disney executive in charge of content was caught on video confessing to having a gay agenda and adding queerness to children’s programming. What helps make sense of this is that she is also a mother to a transgender and a pansexual child.
In my film, It’s Easy Being Green When You Have No Choice: Sustainable Development and the End of History, I explore the concept of elevating creation above the creator, as warned in Romans 1:25. Satan, known as the revolutionary liberator of creation from the confines of Christianity, goes beyond man and women directly to the Earth itself. Interestingly, six months after the official end of the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation, he became an environmentalist and attended the first Earth Summit to usher in the phenomenon of sustainable development. Recently, Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks claimed that sustainable development is part of “Satan’s plan” because it is not only about global rationing and control of natural resources but has also become an instrument to impose liberal values.
Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians warned them that our battles are not physical but spiritual, not flesh and blood but against “Principalities and Powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness on high.” People are beginning to express that the most viable explanation for what is happening in the world today is supernatural. Jonathan Pageau just comes out with it: “People are afraid to talk about these things… I’ll say it straight out, there’s a demon that is a watcher, watching over a pattern of reality, and that is what is maintaining it together and making its boots work in the world and these people are possessed and are unwilling agents of a demon and they’re bringing about this system.”
As we recognize that politics alone cannot resolve our problems, religion serves as a foundation for values, ethics, and morals. However, with the rise of liberalism, the significance of Christian ethics has declined. While liberals may believe that a world without religious influence will be more ethical and freer, it could lead to tyranny, as we rely solely on our own reasoning to determine what’ is right and wrong. Then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger put it this way:
But when we look at the presuppositions and the consequences of this seemingly marvelous expedient that lifts the burden of man’s inconstancy, we realize that this unburdening—“liberation”—is based on the renunciation of morality, that is, on the renunciation of responsibility and freedom, on the renunciation of conscience. That is why this sort of “kingdom” is an optical illusion with which the Antichrist dupes us—such a liberated society presupposes perfect tyranny. I think we must make it clear to ourselves again today, in all earnestness, that neither reason nor faith ever promises that there will be a perfect world someday. It does not exist.
If you are liberated from the right moral formation on how to act, what is going to be the result? Irrational behavior. And when enough people start to act irrationally, you are going to get a reaction (and it is not Donald Trump)—it is banks closing your account or refusing to do business with you because of what you think. It is the FBI placing parents on a terrorist watch list for acting like parents, or being banished from participating in the economy or community for not agreeing with the evolving liberal morality, and technology being used for the wrong reason and in unethical matters. In the Garden, Adam and Eve were free. As Pope John Paul II explains, their freedom had limits, “The man is certainly free, in as much as he can understand and accept God’s commands. And he possesses an extremely far-reaching freedom since he can eat of every tree of the garden. But his freedom is not unlimited: it must halt before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The problem with liberalism is that it has no limits, and sometimes you need limits. Tyranny shows up when liberalism runs its course and passions are incapable of being contained, and a new order is needed to keep the emerging disordered society functioning. The problem with most liberals is that they do not understand the consequences of their actions. This essay argues that demons are guiding those unknowingly liberal actions. Lucifer comes to you as a representative of liberalism and says he will liberate you—but what it really means is liberation from the moral order; and once liberated from the moral order, you are put under another form of control, not of your choosing.
Liberal elites spend billions of dollars socially engineering the manipulation of passions on how the reality of race, sex, science and religion is perceived. The culture is being deformed and molded into a ceaseless confrontation between every man, woman, and child. In principle, what is going on is the marketing of the idea of liberalism—it is being sold like a product, and it has no competition at the level that it is currently being consumed. The solution is not our side acting like play-by-play announcers on the sidelines, constantly commenting on the malaise or the occasional anti-woke slices of entertainment. Our target is not preaching to the choir but engaging directly with liberals and appealing to their concept of what they are for and against. Many individuals want freedom and oppose tyranny. However, some have been misled into thinking that liberalism is the only path to achieve freedom and happiness. They may even reject alternative worldviews based on the Bible, often dismissing them from historical context because they view the Bible as restricting their personal freedom and view it as oppressive, to enforce a moral code that goes beyond their individual autonomy. It is essential to understand that embracing liberalism can lead to a loss of freedom and the rise of oppressive political systems.
Instead, it is crucial to value Christian morality, traditional families, and customs as they serve as a true safeguard for freedom and liberty. This can be achieved by rejecting liberal ideologies and promoting the alternative idea that liberation without end will lead to a totalitarian state.
Anyone promoting liberal ideas needs to be prevented from reinfecting society and people need to be persuaded to stop voting for liberals.
We need to associate every social, cultural and political malady with liberalism—write books about it, publish articles and op-eds, and produce entertainment demonstrating the ineptitude of liberalism and liberal ideas in stories.
If you need an example why liberals need to be rejected the way, as Christians and conservatives are, read about the teacher who is “proud as f–k to be a liberal” and is in love with Communism; and if you want to see what happens when liberals are have power, watch this.
If the word “Mother” and “Father” can be eliminated and redefined, then so can liberalism. If Robin DiAngelo can publicly say and have CNN promote the idea that if “you’re a white person in America you’re a racist, pure and simple, and without a lifetime of conscious effort you always will be,” then we can promote the idea that if you are a liberal, you are undermining society in diabolical ways, and with a little conscious effort you can reverse the slid to tyranny.
Conclusion
Prioritizing individual autonomy and choice above all else will result in tyranny. Many people believe that any limitation on equality and freedom as a result of non-liberal values is oppressive. The liberal believes that the main goal of government is to protect its citizens from this type of oppression. As a result, it strives to eliminate these values from an ever-growing range of daily activities. James Kalb in his article, “The Tyranny of Liberalism,” explains how liberalism become tyrannical this way, “[liberalism] demands submission to arbitrary principles and conclusions. It insists on controlling everything that affects public life, including the human soul. It responds to criticism by silencing the critic. It destroys concrete freedom by centralizing power, by undermining standards that make free social life possible, and by destroying our connections to others and so making us dependent on universal systems utterly beyond our control. And in the name of giving us what we want it denies us everything worth having.”
Frank Pinski is a filmmaker and writer on politics and culture who also works as a researcher in the legal field. His debut film, It’s Easy Being Green When You Have No Choice: Sustainable Development and the End of History, explores the impact of sustainable development on freedom.
Featured: Demons Pulling People into the Jaws of Hell, by Heinrich Kley; painted ca. 1910-1915.