An enduring meme phrase used to describe out-of-touch and out-of-control Western elites is “the Vampire Castle.” This term gained traction because it’s easy to picture people like Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, or Klaus Schwab dangling upside down from the rafters of some crumbling fortress overlooking the Rhine. They may as well sleep in coffins and feed on blood–that’s how far their way of life has diverged from ours.
Eventually, the folks living in the village below get tired of the anemic nobles feeding on their virgins. This process used to end in a torch and pitchfork-bearing mob, but the vampires have finally learned from history. By offering the village leaders an occasional taste of blood and limited immunity from predation, the vampires turn elected officials from the people’s representatives into the ruling class’ agents.
Sure, the compromised ghouls will rattle their sabers against the continued–in fact, increased–rash of virgin murders. They’ll even berate the ruling class for its incompetence. “Why do those pasty, castle-dwelling elites keep pushing policies that facilitate virgin exsanguination? They are totally out to lunch!”
What the ghouls won’t do is publicly identify vampires as the problem. After all, they’re just as dependent on bloodsucking, if only secondhand. The villagers face a choice between vampires hell bent on draining virgins and their pet ghouls who also want vampirism, but slower.
An extra layer of demonic absurdity comes from the vampires’ passive-aggressive yet brazen openness about their agenda. “Vampirism is a conspiracy theory. Anyone who believes vampires are sucking the lifeblood of virgins is a necrophobe who totally deserves to have his virgin daughter’s blood sucked out by vampires. Which is inevitable, and that’s a good thing.”
And because those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, the ghouls chime in with, “Vampires are the real necrophobes! Don’t believe their gaslighting. The real culprits are that werewolf pack we eradicated decades ago. They hate our freedom!”
The ghouls proceed to urge that everyone stock up on silver and wolfsbane to keep the lycanthropes from infringing their rights as enumerated in the Vampire Castle Charter–which also enshrines ghouls and bats as protected groups.
If you want an example of real-life Renfield America, look no further than the mainstream Conservative rags. Here’s NRO reacting to public schools mandating child abuse by sperging about state budget overruns. Here we see the Renfield Americans in charge of most states welcoming the vampires’ gypsy servants with open arms.
“The blind leading the blind” is another apt metaphor with an even longer pedigree. Hard experience has borne it out. Worldly immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Ask any life insurance actuary. Feeding on human vitality might render a vampire immune to death by age and disease, but the odds of, say, a piano falling on you rise to 99.9999 percent after about 300 years.
That’s about how long the current vampiric ideology has ruled the West. When the elites’ own worldview blinds them to reality, it’s only a matter of time before they walk off a cliff. You can be sure the Renfields of the world will fall in lock step behind them. The dissident’s task is not to follow in their footsteps.
Brian
What Renfield refer to? Is it an American culture reference for ineffective people?
xavier
Wikipedia says that Renfield is a character from Bram Stoker’s DRACULA. He’s a lunatic who consumes living creatures to obtain their life-force.
More relevantly, he is in Dracula’s thrall. He consumes insects and other small animals in the hopes that consuming life in this way can grant him the same power that Dracula gains by draining blood. It’s pretty clear that Dracula views Renfield as utterly disposable though.
I’m also making a wink-and-nod reference to the old World of Darkness RPG setting. In those settings, a vampire can feed a human some of the vampire’s own blood to grant said human limited preternatural powers, including increased longevity. The price is that anyone who drinks vampire blood becomes dependent upon it and enthralled to the donor.
Vampires refer to such blood-bound thralls as ghouls, though they’re more disparagingly called Renfields.
Thanks everyone for the definitions!
Very helpful.
xavier
I liked Waits as Renfield in Coppola’s film. Reeves and Ryder, no
For me, Renfield will always be Dwight Frye. 🙂
“We eradicated the werewolves decades ago,” bragged the ghouls. But when faced with the latest outbreak of the pox, they proudly appealed to the ways of the werewolves. They told the humans, “We defeated the werewolves by coming together as a pack. We followed the expert guidance of seasoned hunters, and even when we hated the individuals of the breeding pair, we selflessly respected and obeyed them for the greater good—and we stopped calling them ‘alphas,’ because that was very bigoted of us. Now shut up and consume the blood of the unborn*, or else you’ll contract the pox and go blind.”
Worse yet, the ghouls never truly killed the werewolves. They merely puffed up with pride after one of the packs destroyed itself, and they accepted many investments from a pack from the Far East.
*The real-life coronavirus vaccines were made with the assistance of fetal cell lines, but according to the authorities, they don’t contain fetal body parts.