Home culture war Every Day is Halloween Now
Home culture war Every Day is Halloween Now

Every Day is Halloween Now

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.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.


(Frame from Kensington Avenue - Kim Gary video)

Comments

  1. Anonymous1/11/22

    I lived through the 1960's...in San Francisco. I remember the cultural revolution we had. There was the Black Civil Rights movement, which I deemed necessary and still support today. After all, even in my lifetime, Black people could not vote! Insanity. I recall the Women's Rights movement. I was a child, but I clearly recall noticing that when women got into the working world, it became necessary for two-income earners to earn the same thing as one earner could've done in the 1950's and '60's. One of my older brothers got married in 1967. He was 19 with a baby on the way and he bought a house in a San Francisco suburb off of a gas station attendant salary. I remember the drug culture. I remember the day teenagers in my neighborhood went to go see Timothy Leary give his LSD/drug speech in Golden Gate Park. I saw drugs ruin my neighbors' lives--one kid on my street became a vegetable. I remember couples having sex on the streets and in other public places, including Santa Cruz's Boardwalk--meant for families with young children. I remember sexually explicit posters and posters advocating drug use in the malls.

    It was a CRAZY time of revolutionary change.

    It was NOTHING compared to today. Nothing. At least we knew what a woman was. Even one of our Supreme Court judges claims to not know.

    These are very dangerous times. We must be careful not to play into the clown show. The inmates are truly running the asylum. It is up to us to change that. One simple way is to not use their euphemisms (like "gender affirming care" to name one in a long list of many) nor their premises. Call them out. Speak the truth. If you calmly speak the truth, others will follow. You can make a change. I have done it myself many times. I stopped a CAIR speaker from talking at my work, stopped critical race theory workshops and classes, and refused to cooperate in the brainwashing of students that they can change their sex. (Try calmly saying, "How is taking drugs to change your hormones and certain physical features "gender affirming"? Isn't it exactly the opposite? Every single cell in your body is coded male or female. Sex is binary. If gender is not binary, then show me one human being in all of human history that has the reproductive ability of both sexes. Show me one person that can get itself pregnant. Color is a spectrum. If you mix red with yellow in different proportions, you get different shades of orange. Where are the different shades of orange in human sexuality?") I have paid the price for standing up to the truth, but it is worth it. We have to win so that sanity can prevail.

    King Western Man

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1/11/22

    Long ago, Walt Disney was considered wholesome.
    Peter Pan, Wish Upon a Star, Santa, the Tooth
    Fairy were all "benign lies" for kids. Did
    wishing really make it so? When were young
    people supposed to start facing reality?

    According to those in power, our pajama boys
    and girls can reside in Never-Never Land forever.
    They may not resemble Peter Pan and Wendy, but
    the grizzled, stinking bum (or corpse) in one
    of our No Go Zones, er, Sanctuaries.

    Survival-based evolution provided us brains as
    tools for life. Choosing not to use that organ
    will not end well. 'Nuff said.

    Thomas

    ReplyDelete
  3. AislaPS2/11/22

    A truly original take on this malevolent and godless celebration of demonic forces.
    Here in Europe, it has never taken off. But like women's football and Ru Paul, it gets stuffed down our throats gratis by the media and the celebrants of chaos and misrule, evil even.
    When everyday is Hallowe'en, we are being hogtied for sacrifices yet to come." Man can't bear too much reality" as TS Eliot said. And yet if words and thoughts don't align to experienced, observable reality, then we know real trouble has to result.
    Just make sure it's not you or yours that suffer. Let them dangle with both feet firmly in the clouds. The " Luftmensch" you've spoken of will not be improved, so you'll have to find ways or removing them. The Chinese and Islam won't be so courteous to them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous3/11/22

    Mr. Greenfield, this is a fantastic commentary.

    ReplyDelete

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