Most of us indulge in mild fortune-telling. We think ‘If the light changes before I count to five, I’ll get the job’ or ‘If the solitaire hand comes out my tests will be negative’, and so on. We understand prophecy as the ability to foretell the future. But biblically, prophecy was not prediction but castigation. And prophets were those who were inspired by God to describe the present. Dr King, Malcolm X and Charlie Kirk were modern prophets. Their lives and speech forced the populace to confront the unacceptable and obvious, which is why they were killed. Mass murderers and political assassins are incapable of facing the truth that their fury is not caused by ‘the other’ but by their own mind. They kill to eliminate a demon they’ve misidentified and when their solutions necessarily fail, they turn their guns on themselves.

What of the delusion of shedding blood as the antidote for terror? Religion teaches the efficacy of sacrifice as the specific for anxiety. Monetary donations, service, confession, study and prayer are all sacrifices. They offer time, effort and restraint in place of the ancient pagan sacrifice of blood. Before the Torah and the Gospels, pagan religions appeased their gods by offering their most precious gift: their children. Abraham was about to kill his firstborn son, Isaac, when an angel of the Lord intervened, ending child sacrifice among the Jews. Christianity recapitulates the ban through the crucifixion of God’s Only Begotten Son. Jesus’s death on the cross is a warning to Christians: do not do this, your sins against Jesus make you complicit. The essence of Judeo-Christianity is the rejection of child sacrifice. The Jewish equivalent to the Christian’s horror and awe at Christ’s death is the ceremony of circumcision. The Bible commands Jews to circumcise all males after eight days of life. It’s been suggested that the ceremony is protection against disease and/or that it identifies all Jewish warriors in battle, forcing them to fight or die. I understand it more viscerally: as the demonstration of the horror of child sacrifice. That is, you’ve shed one drop of infant blood – God’s commanded you to do so, so that, appalled, you’ll shed no more.

Our cultural memory of child sacrifice is ineradicable. Fairy tales remind us of it constantly. ‘Snow White’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’ unite the parent and the child in fantasies of terror retold in safety. At bedtime, the child is soothed by recitation of horrors diffused by and through his parents, sharing the gift they received: the parental acknowledgement of childhood fear and the reality of parental protection. The Santa Claus myth, ostensibly a popularisation of Christianity, is, at heart, a reassertion of the utility of child sacrifice. Behind the happy blather about good or bad children is the inherited memory of parents’ terror that their child would be chosen by the tribe for death at the Winter Solstice.

‘Rumpelstiltskin’ is the countervailing sacrifice myth. A young woman is betrothed to the king. Married, she finds he is an ogre – he locks her in a turret and demands she spin flax into gold. A champion appears in her despair. He tells her he can teach her to create the gold and gain her freedom. His price, her firstborn son. She can be free, then, if she indulges in child sacrifice. But she’s told she can escape if she can guess the creature’s name. If, that is, she can be strong enough to name the horror. The monster, Rumpelstiltskin, the Devil, is assured she cannot do so. Why? She is weak. How does he know? She has married, for security, a man who enslaves her and then accepts the first man who says he can undo the mistake. Both are the Devil, and they are the same man; and she, the co-dependant, is incapable of recognising it, until he makes a demand she will not fulfil. She will not sacrifice her son. She faces her own complicity and resolves to resist the Devil. The moment she resolves, she is free, and prepared to hear the horror say its name.

In the 1960s the western university system devolved into diploma mills hawking sex, drugs and status; and, of late, the thrill of permitted violence. Charlie Kirk saw this perversion of the young not as an incurable problem, but as a potential solution, as it offered a signpost back to western moral integrity. As a teenager, Charlie saw he and his coevals were most vulnerable to perversion during the last moments between the warring attractions of immaturity and the obligations of adulthood. Those adolescents of parents corrupted by Marxism and atheism were being moulded, in their last plastic years, by forces they could not overcome.

But the disaffected young were still in a process of formation. Their very disaffection was, to Kirk, an invitation. The problem was the culture. The solution was not ‘to change minds’, which is near-impossible, but to form minds, which is relatively simple. Dennis Prager said that the sole accomplishment of the left was its demonisation of the right – a contemporary rendition of ‘tell the truth and shame the Devil’. The young may not yet realise there is honour in shaming the Devil, as they do not yet have to face the shame of their own complicity. The modern transgender insanity, which is accepted by so many of the young, is in essence child sacrifice. It’s the ultimate delusion of a populace trying to gain autonomy in a universe they understand as ruled by malevolence appeaseable by shed blood. The Devil will go to any lengths to prevent his victims from saying his name.