Vampires are real.

When people say that what is happening today is something out of a dystopian novel, they normally think of “Brave New World” or “1984”. Of course, I see the parallels – more now to Huxley’s dystopian world but strangely enough, I think of “Dracula”.

I just finished re-reading the original “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. I do read classics like this every now and again to measure how far from the original the genre has deviated, and just like Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein”, the themes remain the same, but the set dressing and the players have changed significantly.

I was thinking about the players, the vampires (Dracula and his succubae), the familiars (the humans who assist the vampires like Renfield in the book), the victims (Miss Lucy Westenra and her mother), the public (the general population and the townsfolk) and the vampire hunters (like Mina, Harker, Holmwood, Seward, Morris -the Texan, and Dr. Van Helsing, of course) and how like our current sociopolitical conflicts parallel Stoker’s characters.

First, we have the antagonists, the vampires. They exist in the world of the undead, having lost their souls in their transition from human to demon. They roam the night, shapeshifting and casting spells on their targets, always content to take life and survive off the life blood of those with beating hearts.

Then there are the familiars – the humans who live in service to the vampire, either out of paralyzing, nihilistic fear or because they want to please their masters in hopes of becoming a vampire themselves one day.

Next comes the people, broken into two basic groups. There is general population – who, as a rule, are oblivious that vampires walk among them and completely blind to the threat vampires pose, and the townsfolk (citizens of the villages near Dracula’s castle in Transylvania) – the various populations that know vampires live and fear them so much they order their lives around avoiding and protecting themselves from the bloodsuckers (never going out at night, never leaving windows open, never inviting a stranger inside, keeping a bag of garlic and a silver cross handy).

There are the victims – the people who have had contact with the vampires, have fallen under their spells, been bitten, and are having their life’s blood slowly drained from their veins, doomed to become a bloodsucker after they die.

Last, but certainly not least, are protagonists, the vampire hunters – the intrepid crews who have personal proof vampires exist and Cassandra like, have told everybody about the danger only not to be believed and yet set a course to track down the undead and dead them again – for good. In Stoker’s book, by finding their bodies, driving a stake through their hearts, chopping off their heads and stuffing them with garlic.

Now think of this 1897 story in 2021 socioeconomic terms – we clearly have vampires, groups that seek to live off the life blood of others. That’s how government agencies work and that is what the communist agendas of BLM, the various race baiting groups who push Critical Race Theory, the Cloward-Piven cabals looking to crash the welfare system through open borders, the Green Nude Eel bunch, looking to destroy our economy to save the planet – are all about – all of these groups are vampires sucking on the jugular of American life.

The familiars are the go-along to get along Republicans, the progressive Democrats and the various collectivist movements, each either paralyzed into inaction due to fear of the vampires or dreaming of joining the undead if they please their masters enough. In Congress, the Schumer and Pelosi are clearly the greatest Renfields of them all (neither of them have a reflection in a mirror).

The victims are the shrinking number of law-abiding taxpayers, the bitten and forgotten people, of whom William Sumner famously wrote: “He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays…”. These are the people who work every day to support their families only to be slowly bled to death a drop at a time.

The people are all of America’s general population, the largest percentage of whom have no idea vampires exist. They cannot see them, won’t look for them, cannot even conceive of such a thing and because they cannot, they don’t exist – but there are townsfolk who have witnessed the terror, have lost friends and family to the bloodsuckers, and know vampires are real. They take steps to protect themselves. Today, that would amount to fighting to protect the Constitution and the Bill of rights (especially the First and Second Amendments) because the townsfolk know that our contemporary vampires fear these two things as much as the vampires of lore feared crosses, garlic, and the vamps know the First and Second Amendments are the wooden stakes.

Then there are the intrepid vampire hunters. Like Arthur Holmwood (who dug up the body of his fiancé, Lucy Westenra, and drove a stake in her heart), these are the people committed to tracking down Dracula’s fifty boxes of graveyard dirt and eliminating him once and for all. These are people like Milton Freidman, Rush Limbaugh, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson and Dr. Abraham Van Helsing reincarnated himself, Donald J. Trump (and many more) who want nothing more than to end the scourge of vampirism even at the risk of their lives and fortunes.

We are living in a novel, just not the one most people assume.