Are America and Europe’s ruling elites really acting as the Devil’s Advocate at home and abroad?

On 30 September, during a ceremony marking the illegal annexation of four Eastern regions of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin gave a speech portraying his war as an actual holy crusade against the West, whose nations were now “moving toward open Satanism”, as symbolized by the relentless promotion of transgenderist “sexual deviation” to their helpless children. Watched over by Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, the dictator explained how Russia was fighting to protect its own infants from this quasi-supernatural “experiment to change their souls”.  

This narrative is now embedded deep within Russian propaganda, vindicating Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a just war of self-defense against Western perversion. Roman Silantyev is a leading official in Russia’s Ministry of Justice, who claims to have discovered a wholly imaginary new hellish sect, named ‘Columbine Satanism’ after the infamous 1999 high-school massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, carried out by a pair of disaffected, gun-toting teenagers. Silantyev views this movement as the secret joint-invention of the CIA, Ukrainian spies and Anton LaVey, founder of the genuine Church of Satan cult in California back in 1966. When a disturbed individual shot dead 17 students and teachers in the Russian city of Izhevsk days prior to Putin’s speech, Silantyev portrayed this as just yet another alien US import, like Coca-Cola or capitalism, whose perpetrator had been brainwashed by the Wicked Witches of the West.  

Silantyev now heads his own ‘Laboratory of Destructology’ at Moscow State Linguistic University, to destroy such occidental occultists’ plans. Silantyev has promoted his fantasy to Putin’s FSB security service, who opportunistically raided the homes of opposition figures claiming they too were members of another invented Ukrainian sect, the ‘Maniacs’ Murder Club’, painted as killing “15-20 people and hundreds of cats and pigeons annually” in honor of His Satanic Majesty. 

It is easy to mock these outlandish stories, but as always, the true devil lies in the detail. For Orthodox Archpriest Alexander Novopashin, “Satanism” is really a synonym for entropy, or “the Evil that dissolves societies like a hydra with its many tentacles”. The “real evil” being imported eastwards is not Beelzebub or Baal, but “radical liberalism”, which is far more dangerous to a nation’s soul. According to leading pro-Putin ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, “Everyone who sympathizes with liberals, [the dissident all-female punk band] Pussy Riot and the West belongs to Satan. This is the Army of Hell.” 

The Left-Hand Path 

Putin has accused today’s post-Christian Western ruling class of formulating “a religion on the contrary”, which does show some genuine understanding of what the term ‘Satanism’ actually now means. Russian criticism of the hyper-liberal pseudo-religion of today’s US and EU elites as an inverted parody of traditional Christian mores reflects perfectly the habitual Latin motto of occultists that ‘Demon est Deus inversus’, or ‘The Devil is God Upside Down’.  

God rules above, up in Heaven, Satan reigns below, down in Hell; God represents Goodness and Truth, the Devil Evil and Lies. Likewise, today’s leftists try to turn our entire cultural heritage upside-down. Progressives seek obsessively to transform women into men and men into women, paint victims as criminals and criminals as victims and re-write history as its complete opposite. Satan, Father of Lies, would feel right at home in today’s Orwellian regimes. 

When ordinary voters resist such false, Black Mass chants as ‘Diversity is our strength’ or ‘Trans women are women’ and dare cast ballots for Brexit or Donald Trump, then the West’s rulers too demonize their opponents, just like the FSB arresting dissidents for being alleged Satanic cat-killers. For Vladislav Surkov, another of Putin’s one-time chief Mephistos in the Kremlin, the permanent technocracies of the US and ‘Gay Europa’ (so dubbed by the Russian media) become “surprised and enraged by the paranormal preferences of the electorate”, ominously announcing “the invasion of populism” at the hands of diabolic ‘Deplorables’. Unable to comprehend the majority of voters’ distaste for State-imposed abnormality, their Faustian masters arbitrarily re-label their healthy and normal desires as being “paranormal” instead, thereby turning reality on its head – Demon est Deus Inversus. 

Red Devils 

Recently, various websites such as The National Pulse tried to out Dr Demetre Daskalakis, Joe Biden’s choice for National Monkeypox Response Deputy Coordinator, as being an actual, verbatim Satanist. You can see why the confusion arose. Daskalakis’ social media was filled with lurid images promoting a New York cycling gym he co-owns called Monster Cycle, which adopts a deliberately transgressive aesthetic to attract the custom of Goths, whose dollars are as good as anyone else’s. To celebrate Hallowe’en, such literal fitness freaks could even get six rides for only $66.66 (the true Number of the Beast, $6.66 not being quite so commercially viable).  

“SATAN IS WAITIN’”, reads one advert, “We’ll steal your soul,” reads another, whilst Daskalakis openly poses topless with pentagram tattoos and Ouija Boards. Yet in his White House day-job he wears a suit and tie, not cape and horns, and denies being a Satanist: “I wish I were that interesting.” In truth, he is a boring, left-wing bureaucrat, not Aleister Crowley, the notorious twentieth-century English occultist known as ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’. 

Or is he? Crowley’s own great magical motto was ‘Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’, a characteristically liberal sentiment. Daskalakis might agree. Not merely a practicing homosexual, but openly and aggressively queer (there is a difference), Daskalakis is also an HIV/AIDS specialist who “learned my bedside manner from East Village drag queens.” Like AIDS, monkeypox is primarily spread between promiscuous homosexual males having casual sex, but the “progressive, radical, gay” doctor does not seek to judge such activities, instead giving them tacit encouragement by performing HIV screenings in S&M-clubs or handing out vaccine-shots in drag. His outrageous online presence was one specific reason Biden chose him for the role. 

Daskalakis may not be an actual Devil-worshipper, but those like Putin who view Satan more as a principle than a literal big red demon may recognize him as being one nonetheless. Online, Daskalakis followed The Satanic Temple TV, which aims to “give voice to our diverse communities as Satanists, atheists and social justice activists in a global society.” Whoever realized Satan was woke? 

Freedom Is Slavery 

There is a long history of left-wing identification with the Devil. Nineteenth-century socialist journals bore titles like Lucifer the Light-Bearer and lauded Satan’s progressive credentials as an agent of positive social change, as when he freed Adam and Eve from their ignorant imprisonment within the Garden of Eden by urging them to taste the previously forbidden Fruit of Knowledge in the felix culpa. Satan became acclaimed as a symbol of free love, female emancipation and anti-capitalist rebellion – a symbol of antinomianism, or freedom from having to obey the usual social rules that everyone else does, as with today’s curiously legally immune BLM and Antifa protestors. 

The excessively ostentatious, almost Crowleyite, homosexuality of Dr Daskalakis fits into this same broad category. A recent online hoax tried to claim the gay initialism LGBTQIA had recently gained a new alphabet-soup addition, making it into LGBTQIAS – the ‘S’ standing for ‘Satanism’. Hoax maybe, but you really can now buy T-shirts bearing the legend ‘666: SATAN RESPECTS PRONOUNS’, complete with image of the Goat of Baphomet bearing horns colored to match the transgender flag. So, queer cultists themselves now openly associate themselves with Satan on the grounds that ‘Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’. Leftists chanting “Hail, Satan!” during pro-abortion marches reflect similar sentiments.  

Russians, knowing their Dostoyevsky, and the tragic fate of the similarly antinomian Raskolnikov, the axe-murdering anti-hero of Crime and Punishment, seem more wary than some less wise contemporary Westerners. A 2019 profile of The Satanic Temple – that same organization followed by Dr Daskalakis online – in left-wing UK newspaper The Guardian, entitled ‘Devil’s Advocate: Are Satanists Now the Good Guys in the Fight Against the Evangelical Right?’ sycophantically portrayed the cult as rationalist freedom fighters battling the true forces of darkness in America – Christians. The Temple’s apple-eating founder, Lucien Greaves, is clear Satan is just a “metaphor” for him, the sect’s principles being “broadly liberal humanism”, opposing the oppressive, irrational norms of Judeo-Christian culture – norms which have protected it from total civilizational collapse for the last 2,000 years, at least until lawless Raskolnikovs like Greaves began blindly gnawing at its foundations.  

To adapt Baudelaire, the greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing men like Lucien Greaves he doesn’t exist. The distinctly sulfurous Vladimir Putin might beg to differ; the existence of genuine Western attempts to impose gay-parades upon lands like Ukraine whose populations overwhelmingly do not want them rather proves it. Whilst his precious war is manifestly not a just one, neither are certain aspects of US and EU foreign policy towards the region. Why are Western tax-payers funding diplomats to write Putin’s own propaganda for him?