Living in Twilight Zone America

By Wayne Allensworth

I was watching Jeopardy the other night. It’s a habit I can’t quite give up, despite of the predictable direction the show has taken in recent years. When host Ken Jennings was introducing the contestants, one of them, a woman — the signs were there … no makeup, a vaguely androgynous appearance — said she was a writer. And what does she write? She described herself as an author of books for middle-school-age kids, especially girls. Such as … A heartwarming, I’m sure, story about a girl with an eating disorder … A story about a girl whose mother is an alcoholic undergoing rehab… And, I knew this was coming … a story about a girl who has a crush on another girl. Really. These are stories described as fitting for middle-school-aged girls. The host didn’t flinch, but I guess he is used to it by now, as “trans people” have already appeared on the show, with no one daring to notice the square jawlines of estrogen-dosed men in dresses. It’s all in a day’s work in the madhouse that is Twilight Zone America. It’s hard to acknowledge, but our lady writer’s stories really do reflect certain aspects of the country we live in.

For anyone reading this who is not of a certain age, The Twilight Zone was a popular 1960s TV series hosted by Rod Serling, a WWII veteran who co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes, a man with a taste for the bizarre, the macabre, the fantastic. Each episode introduced by the grim Serling himself, and the show featured characters who found themselves in weird, inexplicable situations: A combat soldier who can predict the deaths of his comrades or a man who has passed to the great beyond — an episode written by the Schuyler, Virginia country boy Earl Hamner, who came up with the cozy, all-American show The Waltons — and is tempted by a smiley-faced Devil to enter his domain of darkness. Then there was that episode in which airline passenger William Shatner  kept seeing a gremlin on the plane’s wing. I often feel like Shatner’s character, a shaken Cassandra who cannot convince his fellow passengers that they are in a dire situation. The aircraft is coming apart. The gremlins are dismantling it.

You see what I mean. Living in Twilight Zone America is itself a bizarre trip into a nether world where the freakish is the norm, in which evil is called good, and good evil, darkness is taken for light and light for darkness. Dear readers, we are not faced with a coming Apocalypse, we are living in it. Crazed mobs burn down cities during “mostly peaceful demonstrations,” and if the other side protests, the hapless MAGA crowd is thrown under the jail. We are told that “democracy dies in darkness” as political dissenters are “de-platformed” on the Internet, once called “the information highway,” lose their jobs, are refused service by banks and credit card companies, and are generally marginalized. The federal government refuses to enforce laws it doesn’t want to enforce, and manufactures crimes to persecute the people it hates, like Donald Trump. Children are being mutilated, having their “gender” altered by doctors whose model isn’t Albert Schweitzer, but Josef Mengele. The U.S. government overthrows foreign regimes it doesn’t like and is constantly instigating instability and generally creating chaos around the globe, including war, all for the sake of “democracy” and the moral and social desert they call “peace.” “National security” is invoked to justify spreading the revolution far and wide even as our own borders are erased, and drug and “human traffickers” enjoy practically free reign to overrun us. Big Business, once touted by alleged conservatives as embodying the ideals of Randian “objectivist” heroes, will forego profit and insult their own customers, to promulgate “woke”/globalist ideology (Budweiser, are you listening?), for those ideologies constitute the real religion of this system, one whose tenets permeate everything it touches.

Noticing things, as blogger Steve Sailer has, well, noticed is a dangerous habit. I’ve noticed, for instance, all of the above and more, such as the simple fact that the numerous catastrophes listed above are not a bug, but a feature, nay, the goals of the managerial system I’ve dubbed “The Blob.” If one notices, say, that the goal of unchecked mass immigration is to replace core Americans, you will be vilified as a “racist” and “conspiracy theorist,” even as our opponents gloat over and celebrate that replacement. I’ve tried to explain this in a number of pieces on this website (Thanksgiving Day, A Matter of Life and Death, and The Global City and Our Future, among others) but there are some things that need to be stated clearly.

The powers-that-be are not failing, as noted above. They have been wildly successful. They are not incompetent, if by that one means someone who cannot do his job. They are doing the job on us.

The managerial elites and woke ideologues control the institutions that credential potential future managers for positions in government, the bureaucracy, corporate business, the mainstream media, and the educational establishment. To gain admittance and to thrive in the Blob’s institutional world, one must pronounce the correct Shibboleths. Your career and social status depend on that. Our side — what we have called the American Remnant — has no comparable channels to train and promote our people within this system. The Blob hates the fact that we exist at all. The Swamp is under the complete control of the Blob, manned by its minions who have jumped through the right hoops to get there.

We have already practically reached the point where questioning the wisdom of “gay marriage,” much less the wisdom of celebrating homosexual behavior, is beyond the pale of discussion. The “trans” aspect of LGBTQ ideology is rapidly approaching the exalted state of being beyond question. And the sexual revolution, which is at the critical core of what I’ve called Pandemonium’s Rebellion, is not going to stop there.

Despite some victories, such as the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the trend is ever toward the globalist/woke vector. As an article in The Wall Street Journal recently noted, Americans are rapidly giving up on the values that were once commonplace in our lives. Family, children, patriotism, the Christian religion … It’s all going fast. Identity, a sense of purpose and meaning (see “deaths of despair”), of being members of an historic community are all being lost. Tradition, the glue that can maintain a real, not a virtual, community, is, as Chesterton noted, “the democracy of the dead.” It means “giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” It means refusing to submit “to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Tradition is not the dead arm of socially constructed oppressive patriarchy, it is the accumulated wisdom of mankind built on the surest base of all, experience. We jabber a lot about the failure to assimilate masses of immigrants, but we have failed to assimilate our own children.

I have written that conventional “horse race” politics, particularly at the national level, are a dead end, partly because of the stranglehold the Blob has on the country’s institutions. And it is not only because we are being replaced demographically. We are fighting essentially a religious battle over issues that cannot be settled through conventional politics. The “end of politics” has been noted in this space more than once:

“Politics” are no longer merely about policy — which can be bargained over within a procedural framework that once included shared cultural assumptions — but about the most fundamental moral and social issues, including the legitimacy of the American polity as such, the value of human life, even the definitions of “sex,” “gender,” and “marriage.” These are not issues like tax policy or health care that can conceivably be worked out in committee.

There is, however, a nascent Middle American resistance out there, as yet un-coordinated and leaderless. Mobilizing that resistance should be a priority for us. Yet our real work will be at the grassroots level, in our daily lives. That means taking risks. It means risking your livelihood, it means refusing to acquiesce to their lies, and it means risking ostracism, losing friends and the regard of family members. The threat of those losses is the Sword of Damocles hanging over all of us. Recall these words from the Gospel of Matthew: And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. And from Mark: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.