A zombie is shambling down the street, one leg dragging, arm waving at the sky before collapsing on a discarded cardboard refrigerator box. A thin trail of blood can be seen on the back of his dirty shirt.
It’s not Halloween yet. It’s just Thursday.
But in the America of Drag Queen Story Hour, of homeless encampments, random arsons, gangs smashing their way into stores, street takeovers with blowtorches and meth addicts screaming into the night, all the monsters are real and every day of the year is Halloween.
Zombies and monsters are real. Some are dead end vagrants from skid row. Others operate at the highest levels of government.
In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, Frankenstein’s monster reborn, shambles, looms and issues strange noises that faintly resemble human speech as he strives for the Senate. Joe Biden attends conferences and offers impromptu word salads while dressed as the naked emperor. Neither are functional human beings, but our standards are low enough that we accept any level of dysfunction as normal. Anything else would be “ableist” and we fear words more than monsters.
But it’s the ‘Halloweenization” of ordinary life that gets far too little attention.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the streets of major cities were filled with men and women wearing black masks over their faces. The long Halloween of the lockdown, perhaps the longest on record, was just one of those costume changes in which all of society got a makeover.
But masks can be taken on and off. Social dysfunction is a lot harder to fix. The drug addicts lying in gutters are not just wearing a costume, they’ve become the costume. Just as if we had worn the masks long enough, we might have become the masks.
Costumes are everywhere.
One day, Dr. Rick Levine chose to put on a dress and a long flowing blond wig and he became Rachel Levine. The Biden administration decided to make Rick into a four-star-admiral and now he’s Admiral Rachel Levine allowing him to wear an exciting new costume. In a society where a man can become a woman by thinking it, he can also become a four-star admiral.
When every day is Halloween, reality is just another hate crime and anyone can pretend to be anything they want to as long as they’re willing to pay the price.
TikTok trends drive massive transgender identification among teenage girls. Some begin taking hormones or even undergoing surgical mutilation that they will forever regret.
But then there’s no taking off the mask.
The endless Halloween of medical costume shops ensures that the temporary desire to change bodies, to escape the unwelcome physical reality, will become an inescapable nightmare. Unlike Walmart or K-Mart, there’s no returning these costumes. And there’s no escape from the playacting of a surgical center.
That is what an unserious society has trouble understanding.
“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow,” Philip K. Dick wrote in the afterward to his novel A Scanner Darkly. “Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style.”
The days when drug abuse was the worst effect of the counterculture are now a fond memory. The zombies, the ones already here and those yet to come, are everywhere. The old drug epidemics have given way to the terrors of fentanyl. Three New York City professionals, a Wall Street executive, a Columbia Law School grad and a therapist, died of cocaine overdoses laced with fentanyl provided by a phone delivery service.
They were just playing in the street, but playing in the street is a life-style.
We’ve become a society of people playing in front of moving cars while pretending that moving cars are a society construct created by whiteness, the patriarchy and outmoded ways of viewing the world. What was once a risk has become a virtue and a social cause. The zombies lying in cardboard boxes and shivering in tents in the Valley noonday heat are just casualties of the cause.
The cause is destroying reality and replacing it with fantasy: an endless night in which we can become anyone we want to be and replace society with a series of egotistical fantasies.
Reality is as real as ever. The only ones we’re destroying are ourselves.
In the endless counterculture Halloween in which drag queens cavort in front of schoolchildren, teenagers go under the knife in the hopes of being reborn into another sex and the people of a united nation join separate warring tribes, there are newer exciting forms of madness on display.
Wearing costumes was a transgressive act in many cultures. A night or a day of brief fun, people testing what it was like to be someone else and to turn the social order upside down. Nobody wanted to live in a world in which there’s no way to know what is real and what isn’t.
But that’s the world we live in now.
Costumes have become the norm and normalcy is the aberration. Men dress up as women. An NAACP president turned out to be a white woman who identifies as black. New York State Senator Julia Salazar is an antisemite who identifies as Jewish. And it’s revealed that prominent Indian activist figures, Marlon Brando’s Oscar night princess, a prominent academic, a poet, were just white people even though they took to dressing up as Indians all year round.
Identity politics values what people identify as more than who they are. Magical thinking leads people to believe that life is just a costume that you can change when you want to. In a world that is becoming increasingly unreal, it’s easy to think of reality as endlessly malleable.
Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford, dressed up in Steve Jobs drag and convinced investors to hand her hundreds of millions of dollars. No one actually checked to see if she could do what she promised because she wore the right costume. Lesser dot com con artists have taken to doing the same thing. And buy themselves private jets from the proceeds.
Money, like so much else, is becoming unreal. Facts give way to narratives. And skilful propagandists have discovered how to make not only morality, but reality appear relative. Everyone becomes a conspiracy theorist, digging so deep that nothing seems true anymore.
That is the endless Halloween in which the game, the funhouse mirrors and costumes, give way to the sudden panicked realization that there is no more reality, only a perpetual game of let’s pretend.
And there’s nothing playful about the game anymore.
The monsters are real. And sometimes they’re obvious. Other times they’re authority figures discussing how to sexually mutilate children. Nobody is a monster in their own story. And even those dressing up as monsters, don’t believe that they are. But monsters are defined not by what they believe they are or what someone else believes what they are. The only test that truly matters is the one of consequences. Everything except reality is just a series of word games.
Millions of people would like the costume party to end. They’re done with the masks, the drag acts and the lies. They’d like everyone to take off the costumes and bring reality back.
The good news is that reality didn’t go anywhere, the bad news is that we have. And it’ll take more than the midnight of one day to bring reality back.
Mr. Greenfield have done it again. With his keen eye he has defined a society of lefties who have gone cuckoo.
Carnival showman Ward Hall once said that, “ who’s going to pay to see the freaks in the sideshow when they could get it all for free outside the gate “
Paying To see movies like Blade Runner, Village of the Damned, clockwork Orange, etc..
Little did I know I know I could see that for free.
Thank you Mr. Greenfield for your accurate observations “of night of the living dead” Happy Halloween ,to bad it was an all just fiction and we could wake up from this nightmare..
If Rip Vanwinkle Woke up after 20 years he want to go right back to sleep.. .
Thank you.
Yes, the dystopian freakshows of the past are the evening news of today. Arguably some of that was prep for normalizing what was to come.
Reality and fantasy. The bad guys promote a false narrative and take power, pushing the good guys and functional guys out. In reality, the country is ruined, but the bad guys keep pushing the false narrative.
Oct 30 1938 Orson Wells and his Broadcast of War of the Worlds convinced many listeners(They had Radios back Then)that we were being invaded by Mars with Death Rays and Poison Gas
Yeah, one of the best examples.
Then we created the BBC in the UK and Orson would be disturbed that his science fiction became reality as they continue to instil fear into those who watch.
Intentionally or not, Wells’s broadcast was a proof of concept, to determine how easy it would be to terrorize the sheeple in heretofore impossible numbers. And the sheeple, once terrorized, clamored for someone — government usually — to lead them to safety.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken
This is the triumph of post-modernism. Post-modernism rejects the existence of objective truth, fact, logic, and reason. Instead, everything is a subjective narrative – my truth, your truth, his truth, her truth. The truly odious Foucault must be so proud sitting in his front row seat in Hell watching this disaster.
His life was a product of it.
Post-modernism is meant to culturally nuke civilization so that a new order can be built on the rubble. But the leftist destroyers may find that they have destroyed too much to put the genie back in the box.
They keep clamoring for a unified set of facts after imposing subjectivity and relativism. And of course they can’t have both.
The thing I always think is, how hard it would be to build back better after everything was destroyed. And how excellent were the engineers who built it in the first place, and how hard they worked, and who is to replace them?
They have no one that can actually build.
We had a master builder president who built city skylines. If not thwarted, he could rebuild….if we have the chance to do it with him.
And this is a pessimist speaking
It took millennia to build Western civilization, It is so fragile, it can be destroyed in a nightmare of wild nihilistic madness and can never be rebuilt. Nobody even knows how to draw so much as a straight line anymore,
When fantasy becomes reality, that is when and how the inmates run the asy;lum
We’re living in the Star Wars Bar🤓
No, that was more fun — grim as it was.
“Masculine Republics give way to feminine democracies which give way to Tyranny ” Can anyone prove Aristotle wrong?
About a lot of things yes(physical knowledge was much more limited 2300 years ago), about that, no.
You should mention the most important costume wearer of the day .. Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The man who leads his valiant nation in war dressed only in a T-shirt .. so that the fabric that would have been wasted on his business suit can be used for one more uniform for a common soldier!!
The man who has transcended the stodgy suit and tie of non-entities such as FDR or Winston Churchill. A man who is just as much at home in a Vogue Pictorial as he is in the front lines leading the charge of his troops in the Kherson salient. How can a suit and tie wearing stiff like Putin possibly compare to that
I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy. Now internalized .
Great synopsis of our current world. I won’t end well with so many people detached from reality.
getting people detached from reality is useful if you want to burn down society
It might not end well for the rest of us either. We’ll see,
Excellent article. Thank you. In my 70 years, I never would have imagined how insane things/people would become. The Bible said all these things would happen, but I never thought in my lifetime. Our world has degraded so far down and they are now blatantly doing things and “dragging” our children into their muck. If this country does not turn to God our civilization will not make it another 5 years.
Thank you Shirley.
Excellent article Daniel, the problems are so well articulated, the writing superb!
But sadly missing at least a reference to God’s hand and plan in it all. But I guess that’s part of the scheme to deceive at work among us. In the end it’s all about a new, glorious kingdom to come
JB Hixson’s latest book “Spirit of the Antichrist” is a great read to fill in the what-why-who questions behind the veil of deception that has been operational since the beginning and growing stronger each day.
I pray you give it a read.
Wayyyy back in the 80s, there was an Atlanta industrial dance nightclub called Club Rio. Every night was Halloween there, though it was well done(quality leather, laces, and silver inlays). I coined that phrase then, but it was a nightclub, not the real world.
I knew the gal Rob Lowe got in trouble with(she was a regular there), and figured she was underaged like me the first time I talked to her(who didn’t have a good fake id back then?). I was into older women anyway, like those Delta stewardesses, that were a whole 5-15 years older than me. What a wild time, I never dreamed it would go this far though. I guess I should’ve, I’d read enough history by then.
Greenfield, you’ve done it again — another great piece of writing. You are clearly one of America’s best journalists.
Daniel once again straddles commentary and poetry.
I became a Born Again Christian and completely turned to the Lord in order to escape that nightmarish lifestyle. The Lord rescued me from all of it. I didn’t even have to be gay (which I’m not) to be deceived into their mode of thought that was all encompassing.
What was fun and funny became sad and depressing after a certain amount of time. Upon reflection, it took a while to realize the destructive evil of some associates within my inner circle. I became acquainted with many very likable, talented, and skilled people who were not trying to destroy society or attack the church—like the looney leftist ones are now. Rush Limbaugh used to play a truthful and humorous song about those fascist evildoers.
I suffered tremendously from the after effects of being involved with that group. The Lord was with me through it all.. I’m ever so grateful to Him for saving me from such a path. He loves everyone and can rescue anyone from that pit of darkness.
That lifestyle is a cult-like fantasy world that does become unbearably nightmarish. My mom wouldn’t give up on me, and faithfully prayed nonstop. The Lord brought me back to normalcy. It is a spiritual battle that can be won if we persevere. Diligent prayer is essential.
—Romans 5:8; 1 COR 6:11; Luke 15; John 11
Since the holiday of Halloween has been brought up , it should then be remembered that five years ago there that the deadly incdent created a jihadist in Halloween. in New York City,
For that violent jihadist /Muslim, Sayfullo Saipov, whose first name means “The Sword of Allah” who murdered eight people and injured twelve other people in New York City was following the instruction of the “holy book” of Islam, the Quran. For example, the Quran instructs in 9:123 . “Do you who believe ! Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you and let them find harshness in you…” Maiming and murdering people who are non-Muslim in a jihad truck attack as the jihadist did is a very effective way show non-Muslims “Harshness.” Strange teachings for what some call a “peaceful religion.” Likewise, the Quran teaches in 47:4 “When you encounter the disbeliever’s strike off their heads until you make a great slaughter among them…”A truck jihad attack can, for sure, make a greater “slaughter among them than a sword can.” As the Quran also instructs in 2:191. “Kill the disbeliever wherever we find them.”
All the while that jihadist was committing mass murder he was yelling out “Allah Akbar’ meaning “Allah is great” Islam is a false dangerous and deadly religion.
About Halloween. It’s the specific day of the year when some people might think of the non-entity of folklore which is the vampire. This fiction of myth is about a demonically raised blood drinking animated corpse. This monster is dangerous and deadly. Of course, such a creature doesn’t exist.
By contrast what or to be more accurate who really does exit is a totally different kind of monster who is the violent jihad-minded Muslim who in not a creature of folklore but a real person who might be demonically inspired person who because of his or her firm but blind and unquestioning faith in the false religion of Islam with its false doctrine the Koranic based violent jihad of violence and killing for the advancement of Islam .As the Qu ‘ran instructs in, for example in Sura 2:191. 5:33. 9:5, 111,123. 47:4. A person such as this is a real live “monster” who is definitely dangerous and deadly.
So, we need not fear monsters of folklore as vampires. Nevertheless, we should not fear but be on guard and have vigilance regarding the fiendish and scheming jihadists with their insidious and heinous violent and murderous militant jihadists in their deluded and irrational Islamic quest against Christianity, Judaism and Western civilization.