My teacher had enough and turned off the VCR. The room was dead silent.
For the previous three minutes, our 11th grade class had watched a scene from Helter Skelter, a film based on former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s (now largely discredited) account of the Manson Family murders.1
Actor Steve Railsback, portraying Charles Manson, testified in court. This was part of my group assignment’s book report presentation. We wanted to show the class that in order to truly understand the twisted pathos of evil minds, they needed to see it personified.
Railsback captured the essence of Charles Manson perfectly, even hauntingly, and it was too much for my teacher; she couldn’t handle it and had to turn it off.
It’s disturbing, because that’s what evil is.
Anyone with a lifelong interest in criminal justice or has spent an inordinate amount of time researching very bad people and what they’ve done to each other throughout history will conclude: The propensity of human beings to do evil to one another is unimaginable.
It just is.
When we filter the world through that lens, we tend to listen up when others scoff at outlandish, kooky conspiratorial claims about acts of evil happening in the dark underbelly of our world.
So many of us have read enough, researched enough, and listened to first-hand accounts enough to know this stuff happens. It happens every day.
News feeds postulating the “absurdity” of the Pizzagate allegations were dismissed by media fact-checkers, assuring everyone it was too crazy to be true.
Could there possibly be a vast network of pedophiles and Satanists practicing their dastardly craft while hidden in plain sight? Could there be a worldwide cabal of traffickers preying on children and transporting them across borders? Could there be a strange subset of individuals with a penchant for cannibalism?
History, scripture, federal and state documents, and whistle-blower accounts all testify that every one of those things from child sacrifice to cannibalism have happened, still happen, and aren’t all that uncommon.
I once had a weekly Bible study with a man whose adopted daughter was rescued from Satanists. She was conceived with the expressed purpose of ritual sacrifice.
There are stone structures and historical sites where such things occurred all over the world. Author Mary Roach has an entire chapter in her book Stiff detailing modern cannibalism; it’s a great book, but I recommend skipping that chapter. You’ll thank me later.
Prominent people are on record telling their stories of abuse, and many others have either been cancelled or found dead after leveling allegations or investigating widespread human trafficking, especially child trafficking.
Is it that hard to believe that worldwide ritualistic pedophilia and murder are rampant?
We don’t bat an eye when we see the Coast Guard take down a mini-submarine loaded with millions of dollars worth of drugs, so why do we find the notion of those monsters transporting children too fantastic? Children are worth a lot more by the pound. There’s a lucrative market even just for their organs.
We know drug traffickers are ruthless murderers, so it stands to reason the sex traffickers are even more so, even if you subtract the ritualistic murder element. Do we minimize the scope of sex traffickers’ reach just because we don’t want that reality to hit too close to home?
And if satanic (or even conventional) pedophilia is happening, why exactly wouldn’t celebrities and world leaders—the ones with all of the money and their lavish, perverted, secret lifestyles—be involved in this stuff?
That some find it so hard to believe the most powerful people on Earth are complicit (if not guilty) of such awful crimes is frustrating for those of us who’ve seen the images, heard the tapes, and know the history.
Evil people look just like you and me, and are all the more brazen when cloaked with the air of respectability. But so often we simply won’t consider the evidence in connection with the figures we’ve chosen to elevate, so we discredit anyone who dares to suggest it.
After a few weeks, we accept it when investigations get sidelined, or never bother to check up on whether they even began in the first place.
We can clearly see someone using a bed sheet to climb out of the window at Buckingham Palace, captured on a tourist’s video. But the idea that someone in there could be a pedophile is too much, so we jump to accept the explanation that comes out much later, saying it was part of a publicity stunt for a television show. And then we trust the fact checkers and commenters who parrot the most head-scratching cover explanations available.
Those excuses line up with our worldview, eye witness evidence or not, so we go with it because it’s easier to stomach than a network of elitist pedophiles raping and killing children.
And zero investigators ponder why the Queen signed off on such a ridiculous cover story that desecrates a historic landmark, even as British Royalty continues to be embroiled in related scandals. And then the raw footage largely disappears.
These things matter.
Ask any cop, social worker, pastor, or historian, and they’ll confirm: People do awful things to each other—things we don’t want to talk about, things we don’t want to know about, things we want to get away from, like a foul odor upsetting our Sunday stroll through the meadow.
But the odor is a warning, similar to the low battery chirps from a smoke alarm, and we all know how annoying those are. How often have you just pulled out the battery to deal with it later on?
The satanic grip over the nations, and the institutions tasked with combating evil, need to be dealt with. Yes, that includes law enforcement, certainly, but it also includes you and I discerning evil in our own neighborhoods, and even within our own churches.
We need to recognize patterns of abuse, grooming, supernatural influences, and demonic manifestations, and ask the Holy Spirit what we can do about them.
We need to deal with the chirping battery in the smoke alarm.
It’s much easier to write off stories that haunt us, lest we face the reality of living in a world steeped in them. Our default mode is to shake our heads in disbelief and move on with our lives rather than really examine what others are saying — in some cases, for years.
And there are a lot of people out there saying what we don’t want to hear.
Perhaps the next time you hear about a celebrity or your favorite international figure involved in Satanic rituals, or a powerful individual preying on young people, or a conglomerate of media heavyweights fact-checking the allegations out of the public sphere, you might want to check out a few documentaries, sift through a few boxes of legal discovery, or examine the case files of convicted monsters.
You might just get a taste of the evil history the record keepers haven’t yet scrubbed from existence, and learn a few current details about the horrors all around us.
It’s no coincidence that the news about these matters lines up perfectly with what the Bible describes time and time again, or that it corroborates a multi-generational pattern evidenced by historical documents, modern and ancient. Some things never change, including the worship of demons. It’s out there, right where you and I live, and as followers of Jesus we’re going to have to come to terms with that reality if we stand any chance of combating it.
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Footnotes
1 We’ve since learned that Bugliosi’s entire case and the basis for the prosecution’s “Helter Skelter” theory were pure fiction, as law enforcement and two of Manson’s parole officers knew at the time. A fantastic book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill documents this revelation exposed through his twenty-year investigation into the Manson saga.
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