The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh

predators into his home. Granted, there is a human impulse toward suicide. (Does any other animal willingly kill itself?) People kill themselves over losses in finance, over love, in frustration or despair, after defeat in battle. But to deliberately set out upon a program that can only result in mass self-destruction—this is something relatively new. I do not refer to the mass suicide of the Jews at Masada in 74 A.D ., as the Romans were about to breach the walls of their fortress; or the desperate members of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry who, when surrounded and well aware of the unutterable fate they would face at the hands, clubs, and knives of the Indians, shot themselves rather than fall victim to the enraged warriorsof the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations. These deaths were both understandable and noble—they were a last gesture of defiance in the face of an implacable and merciless enemy. Better to die by your own hand than like a dog at the hand of your mortal foe.
    But when reason sleeps, monsters follow, even when reason doesn’t know it has dozed off. In our darkest moments, the bats alight upon our shoulders, and the raven taps on the window while we muse over our lost loves. Poe, instinctively, had it right, introducing his narrator pondering, like Faust, “weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” Compare his situation with Faust’s, complaining of his ignorance, despite all his scholarship:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Und bin so klug als wie zuvor . . .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  (Now here I stand, poor Fool I!
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Just as smart as before . . .)
    Weary Faust, searching for answers that only Heaven can provide, easily falls prey to Hell. Mephistopheles offers to free him from the jail cell of his private study and show him a world he never dreamed existed—the real Tree of Knowledge. That world promised love, sexual pleasure, and forbidden fruit, yet ended with the deaths of Gretchen, her brother, her mother, and her baby by Faust. In the same way, the modern world proposed by Critical Theory promised heaven but brought only hell to the millions of people who fell victim to both strains of totalitarian socialism—Nazism and Communism—and who continue to suffer under some form of it to this day.
    Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a large Russian community has found a home in the United States, and almost to a man, and woman, they want no part of the socialists’ vision for America, having just fled it. They have seen this movie already and know the outcome in a way that most Americans cannot grasp. They were mugged both by the beautiful theory and the brutal gang of facts, and they would rather deal with facts, thank you very much. Americans, hitherto a fact-based, empirical people, have in recent decades been exposed to the siren song of European theory, with its “scientific” calibrations, parsed nuances, and confident projections. That almost none of what these theoreticians say ever comes trueis, for a time, beside the point. The elites of academia and government, accompanied by their trusty stenographers in the press, have spoken.
    But an unrelenting record of failure eventually begins to tell. What at first seemed impressive—charts! graphs!—turns risible, then mockable. Finally, the people realize they are being had. They see that the entire revolving-door system of academe, government, and the media—bound together through myriad incestuous ties, along with their offshoots, such as the left-leaning think tanks and nonprofits that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to “global warming” and other questionable causes—is one giant, taxpayer-funded racket designed to enrich the “clerisy” and impoverish the proletariat. The truth will out: The people are being governed by a criminal