The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Consequences of Demonic Influence

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | Comments Off on The Consequences of Demonic Influence

The Huffington Post unloaded an 8,000-word feature about a transgender person calling herself/“himself” Renton Sinclair. Perhaps your first reaction to this is to ask, “The Huffington Post still exists?” Yeah, I was surprised, too. In 2011, Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL for $315 million. In 2015, Verizon paid $4.4 billion for AOL. then in 2021, Verizon sold HuffPo to BuzzFeed in a stock swap whose value could most likely be described as “pennies on the dollar” of what Huffington sold it for 10 years earlier. BuzzFeed immediately started cutting HuffPo staff.

So much for the story of the dwindling footprint of HuffPo. As for this exhaustingly long feature about Renton Sinclair, why? What was the journalistic objective of HuffPo senior reporter Christopher Mathias in spending so much time telling Renton’s story? The idea seems to be to present this person as the sympathetic “poster boy” victimized by a “right-wing culture war,” as Mathias describes the backlash against the Transgender Cult. Sinclair is the daughter of Tania Joy Gibson, who has become an outspoken opponent of transgenderism, and Mathias portrays Gibson as a “Crazy Church Lady” type, associated with “a coalition of Christian dominionists determined to reshape America according to a far-right, fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.”

A major “hook” for this story — the selling point of the narrative — is that Gibson is a former beauty pageant winner, who competed as Miss Illinois in the 1996 Miss America contest. And one could imagine how, perhaps, being the daughter of a former beauty queen might present difficulties, pressure to follow in mommy’s footsteps, to live up to a certain ideal or whatever. So this information may be relevant as an explanatory factor in Renton Sinclair’s gender identity issues. However, the more obvious and mundane explanations are impossible to overlook:

Renton was 8 when his parents divorced, and he struggled with depression thereafter. His mom sent him to therapy and put him on meds, but nothing seemed to help ease a profound despair and anxiety that had grown inside him, feelings he could never quite identify the origins of and which intensified with puberty. “A lot of it was just internally like feeling terrible about myself and just not really knowing why,” he recalls.
He didn’t have much of a frame of reference for being queer — save for a couple of gay men he saw serving on pageant boards with his mom — but he suspected he probably was. “What’s worse is my whole sexuality issue,” he wrote in his journal once. “I can’t decide if I’m homo or bi.”
Then, when he was about 12, one of Renton’s favorite YouTubers, an anime cosplayer named twinfools, posted a video announcing that he was transgender. . . .
Renton found refuge in an online network of queer youth on sites like Tumblr and DeviantArt. He started going by the name Axel with this online coterie — a name adapted from a male character in the video game “Kingdom Hearts” — and eventually set up a secret Facebook account where he could try on this new identity.
He and his new friends confided in each other and talked about being queer. At one point, Renton felt comfortable enough offline to come out to some friends at a Bible camp in Wisconsin. “I told two friends about my LGBT stuff,” he wrote in his journal.
But the depression only deepened. On Dec. 22, 2011, Renton tried to kill himself by overdosing on Tylenol.

This tale — family problems, mental health issues, social-media influence — is so familiar as to be stereotypical of transgender teens in the 21st century. A depressed girl with divorced parents and sexuality issues, addicted to YouTube and Tumblr, creating a fake male online persona named for a character in a video game and pretending to be a boy on Facebook? It’s a cliché. Remember all those crazy SJW Tumblrina feminists I used to make fun of? Practically all of them were “queer” in one way or another, and universally they listed their mental illnesses — bipolar, PTSD, whatever — in their Tumblr profiles.

Adolescence is always an emotionally turbulent time, and everybody has to find some way of coping with the stresses involved. Smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin were among the most popular coping mechanisms when I was a teenager. Nowadays, getting lost in online media — video games, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. — seems to have replaced nodding off to “Kashmir” in a haze of marijuana fumes as the popular teenage habit, and I’m far from certain it’s an improvement.

But what about the influence of . . . Satan?

In the HuffPo article, Mathias makes a point of treating Tania Joy Gibson’s religious beliefs and practices as self-evidently absurd, e.g., when she puts her daughter into psychiatric treatment:

Renton says his mom and stepdad had discovered he’d been cutting himself. Moreover, his stepdad had gone on Renton’s computer and found the “Axel” Facebook account. He and Tania read through his messages about being queer.
“They freaked the fuck out,” Renton recalls. . . .
One day they told Renton they needed to stop by the hospital so Tania could get a blood test. But while waiting in the lobby, it became clear to Renton that it was a ruse: “I saw a sign saying ‘adolescent inpatient psychiatric’ or some shit, and I was just like, ‘God damn it, here we fucking go.’”
Renton says they kept him there for a week. Sometimes Tania visited with a pastor, the pair loudly praying over Renton in the visitor’s room and speaking in tongues — the practice, popular in certain charismatic evangelical churches, of harnessing a supernatural ability to speak in an unknown, divine language. (To nonbelievers, however, it can sound like gibberish.)
Tania would also bring Christian counselors for therapy sessions, Renton says, during which they’d sit in a room reading Bible verses and telling Renton that being queer was wrong. It was only years later that he realized this was conversion therapy.
“I don’t think the goal was necessarily to make people straight or whatever as much as it was just to, like, repress you to the point where you either just die or you just stop arguing with it,” Renton remembers.
Renton eventually was allowed to spend nights at home, but he claims he spent daytime hours when he should have been at school at the psychiatric facility. He was still forbidden from seeing friends, even the kids next door. Renton remembers his grandmother, Tania’s mom, telling him over and over that there was a war over his soul between angels and demons.

Consider this possibility: GRANDMA WAS RIGHT!

The phenomenon of “cutting” (self-harm) immediately calls to mind the Gadarene demoniac who spent his time “in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.” When Jesus confronted the “unclean spirit” that had possessed the man and asked the demon’s name, the reply was: “My name is Legion: for we are many.” And then Jesus sent the demonic spirit (or spirits) into a herd of pigs, “and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea” (Mark 5:1-20).

Maybe you don’t believe that, but for those of us who do, there are several lessons that can be learned from studying this Bible passage, including the fact that Satan’s influence is destructive, which is why the victim of demonic possession engages in self-destructive behavior.

That Renton’s grandma would see her behavior as evidence of spiritual warfare is only controversial to non-believers. Most Christians aren’t into that charismatic speaking-in-tongues kind of thing, but anyone who views the Bible as the Word of God must acknowledge that demonic possession is a real thing. You can see evidence of it lots of places, if you know what you’re looking for (e.g., “‘Feminist Witchcraft,’ Mental Illness and the Demonic Dangers of the Occult,” Feb. 21, 2017). Some years ago, I read An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels by Father Gabriele Amorth, who was often called the Vatican’s chief exorcist, and offers this explanation (pp. 72-73):

Diabolical obsessions are disturbances or extremely strong hallucinations that the demon imposes, often invincibly, on the mind of the victim. In these cases, the person is no longer a master of his own thoughts. . . . The objects of these hallucinations can be manifested as visions, as voices . . . as monstrous figures, horrifying animals, or devils. In other cases it can be an impulse to commit suicide or to do evil to others and, particularly in the young, it can lead to confusion about one’s gender.

See, it’s not just me pointing out this connection. However, in an age of spiritual ignorance, most people are not cognizant of the dangers of demonic influences, and tend to ridicule anyone who takes such dangers seriously when discussing, for example, Ellen “Elliot” Page.

“Symptomatic evidence of demonic possession,” I called it, and I suppose most readers took this as merely more of my habitual sarcasm, but was I really just joking? When people engage in self-destructive behavior and claim to be hearing voices, whose voice are they hearing?

So HuffPo spent 8,000 words celebrating Renton Sinclair as a victim of “right-wing” Christianity, when I think it far more likely that she/“he” is a victim of Satanic forces which are everywhere in this dark age.



 

 

Category: The Transgender Cult

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