We live in what some would say a most delectable time in human history, where the literal revelation, the apocalypse, of everything that was ever truly important is happening before our very eyes. Information on multiple fronts is wielded as a weapon, creating a battlefield for minds on both collective and individual fronts. It is indeed dangerous terrain.
More than a century ago in his landmark Pascendi, Pope Pius X warned:
3. [T]he danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate. Moreover, they lay the ax not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers. And once having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to diffuse poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt. Further, none is more skillful, none more astute than they, in the employment of a thousand noxious devices.
He was talking about the Church. But the world of geopolitics is one and the same.
The information and spiritual war churning toward a most explosive tipping point is a reflection of the larger struggle for truth and historical accuracy, and it can be incredibly difficult to distinguish friend from foe. It is a battle against deceit and manipulation, aimed at either preserving or distorting the narratives we’ve collected about nations and the world. Navigating misinformation requires the discernment of a serpent, as Our Lord teaches in the Gospel of St Matthew, which means that we disentangle the knots we’ve created in our own understanding.
Such an assault on imperfect minds is why Pope Gregory XVI warned against liberty of conscience in Mirari Vos:
14. This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” (Apoc 9:3) is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws — in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.
The sinister brilliance of our eternal enemy does not mean truth is inaccessible; it is precisely why Christ—the Way, the Truth, and the Life—was made Flesh. It means we, as fragile mankind, are not omniscient. We do not see the full machinery of empire at once, nor could we bear it if we did. God reveals what is necessary for salvation and permits enough confusion to test whether we will cling to Him or to the spectacle. We walk by faith in the embodiment of Truth—Jesus Christ—not by total exposure of the dealings of men.
As one recent example, this article may speak to you about the SSPX story in the news this week, and how difficult ascertaining truth can be, but what weapon we have that is the—dare I say it— ultimate trump card:
As an American, I have had to wiggle my way out of the false dialectics of Republican v Democrat and even Republican vs RINO over the years, and by the grace of God only. Based on an “awakening” that many had in 2020, rooted I’m sure in some truth and a whole potful of occult magick that has kept even “truthers” in the spectacle six years later, I got behind Donald Trump—basing it mostly if not solely on the ritual sacrifice of children issue. Simply put, dark discoveries made sense in relation to the upper echelons of society, politics, and the entertainment world, and his seeming war against it going back to executive enactments in 2017 gave me hope that God was, as he sometimes does, using a very flawed (and annoying) public figure to guide us through the darkness.
Turns out I was right, and wrong, with everything.
The Trump Deception and “Fake News”
The part about grasping that the enemy specifically utilizes truth to deceive us couldn’t be applied to a more worthy figure—in the judicious Catholic mind—than Trump.
The key to escaping Trump and the -ism attached to him was this, though: one had to have an uncrossable line and a time limit on Trump, and one had to have prayed, all along the way, for the guidance to, yes, co-opt the movement and the truth bombs while simultaneously preparing to jump ship when that line was crossed.
In other words, for whatever reason, I used Trump to course correct in my personal faith journey, in what turned out to be the discovery of a new-old religion in grandma’s attic. Such a turn of soul speaks more to my fallenness before 2020 and God’s amazing grace than it does any wisdom on my part.
I’ll give an example of this “co-opting” practice. Back in 2023, I came to understand Operation Mockingbird inside the context it was—as a conspiracy theory needing proof—one that illustrated a political scandal that could be solved with a political correction, a correction inspired by “We the People.” Most fringe thinkers thought that way and found company with each other; in fact, some still do. Many back then and others still believe there was a “wartime president” who was on our side and who could break the spell, name and arrest the enemies, and drag the empire of it all out into the open.
Indeed, that understanding for me personally actually led me to where I am today—
I was right about the seriousness of the forces that aim to drag my soul to hell. I was right about not truly grasping the surgical nature and severity of God’s justice. Yet I wasn’t right about the root inspiration that helped get me there—the very man—who opened the book for all of us to understand how evil works in America and the world.
For that I am thankful.
And yet as romantic as all of that sounds, all I had to do was believe St Paul in Ephesians 6 or Our Lord Himself in the Gospel of St John—or anything He taught, for that matter.
We wouldn’t have needed Trump had we just listened to Christ.
I was such a stiff-necked fool believing the poison of Modernism my whole life. What graciousness of a God do we have that He allowed one Donald Trump to be the catalyst for so many of our conversions?
It is one of the greatest ironies I could ever retell. For without Trump, none of the evil that stayed hidden for decades and centuries would’ve ever come to light—and yet as it turns out, he is appearing more and more to be one of the main cogs in the machine. Finding truth is a circuitous thing, for sure, even as we stay close to Christ and His Mother.
Am I regretful of supporting Trump? No, because a world was exposed that got me to finally living my life with the “fear and trembling” spoken of by St Paul.
Am I regretful of supporting Trump? Yes, because, simply put, he isn’t on the side of Truth, capital T, hopeful as I was that he would eventually convert.
Alas, the fruits increasingly suggest something other than Christian discipleship.
It’s not that the nefarious Mockingbird government-media hydra isn’t real, but more nefariously, the deeper lesson is uglier: the Hidden Hand does not care which party you clap for, and it will happily use conservative outrage as fuel, the same way it uses progressive outrage as fuel, even as some of us prided ourselves on not representing the extreme versions of those parties.
The point of the monster is not to persuade us. The point is to keep us inside the cave, staring at shadows on the wall, arguing with our neighbors about which shadow is true or untrue, red-pilled or blue-pilled, Clarisse or Mildred inside a Ray Bradbury novel.
Making It Facebook Official
It certainly should be obvious to family, friends, and faithful readers by now, but my dance with Donald Trump ended some time ago, probably this time last year when I put out a similar article around Valentine’s Day, even as I continued the co-opting strategy for probably 4-5 months more hoping I could help more of my loved ones come to the same realization not just of him, but again, through him—and more, through his shiftiness and antics.
It’s one thing to do all of that before you’re the President; it’s another altogether to do it when you’re claiming gulfs and countries for America but are still unable to force an arrest of some of the most notorious villains in human history. When he failed at that, after all the pomp and circumstance about it, that’s when I started walking away.
It took some time to fully let go.
What troubled me most was not mere incompetence as the left thought, or mere fraud as an ever-growing number of conservatives thought, but fruit. Leo XIII’s diagnosis of hidden causes and visible fruits come to mind here:
10. For, no matter how great may be men’s cleverness in concealing and their experience in Iying, it is impossible to prevent the effects of any cause from showing, in some way, the intrinsic nature of the cause whence they come. “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor a bad tree produce good fruit.” Now, the masonic sect produces fruits that are pernicious and of the bitterest savor. For, from what We have above most clearly shown, that which is their ultimate purpose forces itself into view — namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas….
It is how I have come to see Donald Trump.
And the truly tragic thing is that even now, people could co-opt the spotlight on Trump to see what shadows he himself is drawing attention to—but they don’t. They won’t repent of the Trump mistake, the mistake of Americanism Leo XIII and others warned about, and indeed could be doubling down to their doom.
The tactics Trump and others are employing, whether knowingly or not, are ancient. They go back to the enmity God placed between the devil and the Woman and her seed in the very beginning, Genesis III.15. And ultimately, this enmity is the Hidden Hand behind a weaker evil Trump was seemingly warring against all along, what most understood as the “Deep State,” when the truth seems to be something much more serious, much more sinister and apocalyptic: that it was all a distraction to make good people clamoring for change and common sense think they were finally winning.
Recognizing this, only by God’s grace, combined with reading the Old Testament in linear order, is what helped me understand the physics—while still not the magnitude perhaps—of the great deception.
I came to understand how and why God “gives people over” to the operation of error found in St Paul’s letters. God actually wills it in His justice, yes, but for our sakes—in His mercy. That is how stupid and blind we are, that it should take such drastic measures to call us back to Him. The two articles I place after the conclusion below are two of my favorites that get into this operation of error, as well as something called “The Revelation of the Method.” It is chilling.
My readers know I indulge in reading old papal encyclicals. The reason is because all of this that I’ve written today—in some way, in some place tucked away in both the things said and the things left unsaid—is all there.
Even Pope Leo XIII ventured to say it unambiguously in his long version of the St Michael Prayer. If you click that link and read it in the footnotes, ask yourself, why do we never hear any shepherd discussing what on earth Leo meant in that one, single, bone-chilling sentence?
It may give a whole new dimension to that controversial picture Trump posted after Francis’ death—of him as the pope.
All along, pre-conciliar popes were describing a perennial war—one that moves through empires, parties, ideologies, false dialectics, and charismatic figures alike. They warned that error rarely announces itself. It lies latent beneath the surface, whispering the language of change, reform, unity, and renewal without end.
The world of politics is just another tentacle of Modernism.
The operation of error is not chaos, nor is it something men and women merely stumble into. It is a path chosen each time we run counter to tried-and-true Church teaching. It is permission—permission granted by a God who never forces, so that those who prefer shadows may have them, but also so that those finally wounded enough by the teeth of divine justice may crawl back to Him, begging for mercy.
Christ remains King no matter what. And if we anchor there—in His Ark, in His Church, in His sacraments, in the long-suffering of His saints—the operation begins to manifest as the rose garden of our Blessed Mother, instead of the thorns of eternal hellfire.
Minneapolis, the ‘Revelation of the Method’, and a Potentially Good Psyop
Gregory XVI’s ‘Mirari Vos’ and the Theater of American Politics
