I recently managed to pull back a bit from the nonstop torrent of current thing craziness. During Lent I “fasted” social media (with occasional exceptions for long-form writing on Substack), and this was a much overdue and badly needed detox. After Easter, I’ve managed — most of the time — to restrain the impulse to revisit the online attention traps. I sometimes yield to temptation and use nitter.poast.org to skim the conversation on X about wars and rumors of wars, or I’ll scan the video feed on Rumble or YouTube to see if there’s anything noteworthy happening there. Whenever I do, I come away with an unsettling feeling that the “dead internet theory” is essentially correct.

With very few exceptions, everything online is an endlessly recursive, self-referential hall of mirrors, and most of the “people” you encounter might as well be AI-generated avatars, recycling and repurposing memetic ingredients from yesteryear’s forgotten intrigues. Everything is derivative of something else online. Nothing is rooted in any kind of day-to-day, tangible reality anymore.

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Even the war with Iran, despite the dire warnings about fuel prices and fertilizer shortages and what not, feels … unreal. Forever wars are now the norm. Like says, the wars are fake, but the slaughter is real. Wars appear to have the same role in our world of 2026 that they had in George Orwell’s 1984, where Oceana was always at war with one of the other two world superpowers, and where real bombs sometimes fell and real people sometimes died, but the real geopolitical power structure was never for a moment seriously threatened. The wars in 1984 served as pressure-release valves, both for surplus ideologically-driven emotion and for surplus men and material, much like our 21st Century wars.

There’s another important purpose of war that was omitted by George Orwell in 1984, since Orwell was a materialist atheist. Our oligarchs profess a similar materialist atheism, but their actions speak louder than their words. They believe very strongly in occult religious rituals, especially blood sacrifices, and all the bloodshed and suffering caused by their bullshit wars are sacrificial offerings to their gods. It is all theater, but not in the way most people think. Most of the big newsworthy events are scripted, but it’s not humans writing the script. On this theme, the analysis articulated by Tree of Woe in his post about The Strategy of Evil remains relevant. The powers that be have made deals with devils and incurred reality debts they know they can’t ever pay. We still have seen only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corruption indicated by the Epstein files, and what little we have seen shows that our ruling class is at Sodom-and-Gomorrah-levels of wickedness. If they can buy themselves just a little more time to eat, drink, and be merry before they die, they will do it, even if it means engineering a massive blood offering to their demonic gods by way of another needless World War.

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Maybe it was always this way, and I was just sleepwalking through the shit show of postmodern life without recognizing how contrived and hollow everything about the culture is, including so many of the supposedly countercultural or heterodox movements that have come and gone since World War II. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, but musically and even spiritually, I felt more at home in the 60s. Looking back, I can only laugh when I think about how naive I was to ever believe that the hippie rock music scene was anything other than high-level cultural astroturfing to serve as marketing magic for the spooks’ inverted cultural revolution. Sure, there were some legitimately talented musicians and songwriters, but there are a lot of supremely talented musicians and songwriters who never achieve any kind of fame or fortune. When the wizards bless an artist, it’s never because they want to promote art that is good and true and beautiful for its own sake; there’s always a catch. The music may sound amazing, but the band’s lyrics and image are basically advertising campaigns for culturally corrosive agendas. Take, for example, the grunge psyop of the early 1990s, which the social engineers used to hypnotize white suburban teenagers with the message of, “Be depressed and suicidal, use drugs, and kill yourself.”1 Not so coincidentally, at the exact same time, the social engineers hit ghetto black teenagers with the message of, “Be aggressive and homicidal, sell drugs, and kill anyone who disrespects you.” So the psyops were there, but most of us were oblivious to them, and of course, this made them devastatingly effective.

Today, when I see the video of the lunar module (allegedly) launching from the surface of the Moon . . . I feel like there’s some kind of Mandela effect at work, like I swear I remember seeing footage from the Apollo missions that looked much better and more believable than this horseshit:

At this point, I can’t say for sure whether we did or did not go to the Moon, but I do know that this footage, and the official story of how this video was recorded — by a film camera, on the Moon’s surface, with technicians in Houston tilting and focusing the camera by remote control, in 1972 — is nonsense. Oh, and all that tech that allowed them to pull off this feat? They lost it. So we can’t go back now. Nor can we inspect the telemetry data, because you see, the federal government is famously frugal with its money. Reduce, reuse, recycle and all. So to save taxpayers a few dollars, NASA reused the tapes from the Apollo missions and recorded over all that data. The Library of Congress archives all kinds of records with far less cultural significance than the original tapes from the Apollo missions, but nobody saw fit to preserve any of them. Kind of like how the Smithsonian lost all those giant skeletons.

But really, no “deep dive” is needed to determine whether this video is what it purports to be, because it speaks for itself. It is childishly bad. How did we ever believe this was real? Or … could there actually be some sort of Mandela Effect at work, where the NASA footage and the story about the Apollo missions used to be more believable? Schizo as this feels to admit, I honestly don’t know anymore. I had a big NASA picture book as a kid that I swear had some amazing, lifelike photographs that made me a true believer in America’s space program. And I could swear that as a kid I saw PBS documentaries full of videos and still photos from the Apollo missions hat looked far better than the images I’m seeing from those same missions today, and this is really odd, because it is exactly the opposite of what has happened with old movies like The Wizard of Oz that have been digitally remastered and now look far sharper and much more vivid than they did when I saw them as a child. I don’t know what to make of that. Maybe this is a Mandela Effect I’m experiencing.

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Anyway, back to the subject of online current thing controversies. Even the developments that feel significant — for example, all of the growing skepticism about hallowed narratives from World War II and the Civil Rights Era — are all backwards-looking. I’m not saying that the conversations happening around these issues aren’t important; I’m just pointing out that they’re really going back over the same old ground we’ve already been discussing and hyper-focusing on for the past several decades. There are no similarly heated and impassioned conversations happening about visions for the future, not even about the immediate future. When you read 1950s science fiction, for example, you recognize very quickly that the people of that era were zealously optimistic and visionary about the world they wanted mankind to create (with the exception of the oddballs like Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick). No one is zealously optimistic and visionary like that today.

Even the social engineers are just dialing it in now. The wizards of the 20th Century were evil and cruel, but their psyops were so original and daring that they worked. They actually got people excited about what they were doing, or they came out of nowhere and scared everyone out of their wits. Leaving aside all the immorality and psychopathy of it, if you were to just analyze them clinically, you’d almost have to admire their competence and chutzpah. They had a vision, and they imposed it on the world. If you were alive in the 20th Century, your life was marked by at least one of those big “where were you when?” moments where time stood still and everyone just stood there shell-shocked by the awful news. Those were moments that marked a clear turning point, a definite before and after, and you knew it immediately, viscerally. In a perfect inversion of St. Paul’s words about the new life in Christ, each of these big psyops meant that the old world had passed away, and behold, all things had been made new.

Nobody is excited about the psyops of today. COVID only worked as well as it did because the wizards had generations of accumulated institutional trust and social capital at their disposal, and they blew it all on their big fireworks show of 2020. That was supposed to be it. They tried to move everything online and sell everyone the metaverse and a future of drugs and virtual reality video games (which sounded just like the backstory to a Gnostic creation myth). They tried to lock everything down, and they couldn’t execute. But they did succeed in waking a whole lot of people up.

Now, they really don’t have much of anything left in the old psyops tank. Just like the American missile stocks that have been needlessly and dangerously emptied for the benefit of the Zelensky regime in Ukraine and the Netenyahu regime in Israel, so too the regime’s stockpile of psyops has been emptied.

So now Clownworld’s wizards are getting ready to play their Trump card, the Ace they’ve been sitting on for the past century, that long-prophesied psyop to end all psyops, Project Bluebeam.

Perry Stone, a well-known evangelist, author and Bible teacher from Tennessee, warned that fellow pastors were recently invited to a secret meeting with US intelligence officials to prepare for the release of secret files on extraterrestrials.

According to Stone, the officials warned a small group of pastors with a large reach in the Christian community that the government was about to release reports and possibly videos of aliens and spacecraft which were not from this planet …

[O]fficials in this secret meeting allegedly said the information on its way may cause some Christians to question how the universe was created and even lose faith in religion.

Stone said: ‘You’re going to have people who are going to say if there are galaxies and there are allegedly other creations in the galaxies, then the whole creation story is a myth, and you’re going to have people that’s going to apostatize and turn from the Christian faith because they have no answer for what they’re about to hear.’2

I can already imagine the clickbait …

BREAKING: extraterrestrial visitor TOTALLY OWNS human race. DEMOLISHES belief in God. Announces intergalactic partnership called “Operation Imagine.” Introduces the globe to its messiah, the resurrected John Lennon. Reveals 3 year plan to BUILD THIRD TEMPLE, end climate change, and Make the Solar System Great Again!

Are you not impressed? Are you not amazed? Are you not ready to forget all the high-level crimes and corruption of the past many years and learn the truth about the Universe?

The same people who told us the truth about the Kennedy assassinations, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Kuwaiti babies getting killed by Iraqi soldiers, 9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, COVID-19, October 7th, Iran’s nuclear program, and Jeffrey Epstein are now totally telling us the truth about aliens. We can totally trust them now!

Their creator god, evolution by natural selection, has sustained a mortal injury, and they know they’ll need a replacement quickly. And just in the nick of time, here are extraterrestrials to serve as the gods of the evolutionary gaps by having selectively bred and genetically engineered our ancestors for any number of questionable purposes (e.g., as laborers for prehistoric gold mines). Will the aliens also bring us a new currency and access to a new financial system? Will they open a branch of the Bank of Intergalactic Settlements in the City of London? How many of Clownworld’s problems will our new alien overlords promise to solve for us?

Here’s the good news in all this: if they seriously give us Project Bluebeam, you know they — and by “they,” I mean the bosses of Jeffrey Epstein’s bosses — are getting desperate. This is not a sign of strength, but of weakness. The wizard knows the jig is just about up, so he does one final trick in which he aims to create as much pandemonium as he possibly can in order to escape undetected and be as far away as possible by the time order is finally restored — and the true nature and extent of his crimes are at last revealed, and a lynch mob starts forming and demanding his blood. The bad news is, there are some dark and dangerous times ahead, and probably sooner than most of us are ready for. The silver lining is that you can decide whether you go through Hell or go through Purgatory, because God gives us each that choice. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6: 21.) To paraphrase a scene from the movie Jacob’s Ladder, “If you’re frightened of losing what this world has to offer and you’re still holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then you’ll see the collapse of this world as a gift from God, freeing your soul.” Purgatory is painful, but there’s real life on the other side of it.

These words of Christ will be especially apropos during the next few years: I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. (John 16: 33 (ESV).) Perspective is everything.

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We live in a parasite-ocracy. Parasites hate freedom, because genuine freedom requires accountability. Parasites love liability shields, because they eliminate accountability. Parasites hate nothing more than accountability.

Freedom Requires Obligation

The opposite of Freedom is not Responsibility; it’s Anarchy. This truth is so important that Clownworld’s social engineers (and the demonic spiritual forces that control them) have spent centuries trying to cover it up and psyop everyone into believing that traditional obligations were oppressive chains to be broken and that a lifetime of adolescent self-indulgence is the ideal.

Freedom and Responsibility are two sides of the same coin. In some ways, the relationship between them seems paradoxical – i.e., an instance of “the Truth standing on its head to get attention,” to borrow G. K. Chesterton’s description of Paradox – but the connection between Freedom and Responsibility becomes obvious when we observe the consequences that befall a society, such as ours, that equates Freedom and Anarchy.

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Anarchy ends not in Freedom for all, but in tyranny and nihilism. All anarchy ends up as “anarcho-tyranny.” The Hobbesian hell where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” occurs not in a state of nature, but in a postmodern clownworld where the system operates according to the principle of “live and let live” when it comes to anything that makes you a slave to your appetites (so pornography becomes “free speech:) or that undermines trust and cohesion in your local society (so antisocial behavior and violent crime get a pass), but then suddenly turns draconian and sadistic whenever anyone tries to exercise genuine sovereignty in their own lives. The Clownworld Order is like a lurking crocodile: most of the time it looks half-dead and just kind of lies there, getting in everyone’s way, but as soon as someone tries to maneuver around it, the beast suddenly becomes hyper-focused and hypercompetent and attacks the perceived threat with surprising ferocity, speed, and agility.

You don’t get that kind of cruelty and capriciousness in a society where people are personally responsible for the work they do and for the organizations they lead. You get it when decision-makers are remote and protected by layers upon layers of late-stage bureaucracy and lawyerly liability shields.

In a world where everyone disclaims responsibility for anything and everything except for maximizing his own base, hedonic self-interest, no one is truly Free. For one thing, you aren’t setting your own priorities if you live that way, you are just an animal being conditioned to respond impulsively to incentives, so whoever socially engineers your incentives is your master, and you are a slave.

Also, in a world where nobody feels obligated to do anything other than respond to incentives like a trained animal, you can’t really predict what anyone else will do long term. Sure, you can figure out how the incentives work and then predict future behavior based on that, but that only works as long as the incentives stay the same. But unless you are operating at a high enough level to be the one socially engineering the incentives, you can’t assume that the incentives in place today will be in place tomorrow. So you can act today, but you can’t really predict how others will respond. You can think of many examples of this during the woke era or the scamdemic, where incentives suddenly changed and people behaved in ways that were incomprehensible if you based your assumptions on the incentives that had been in place only a short time before. Now, if you are dealing with someone who is moral and who acts based on settled convictions, then you don’t have to worry about them suddenly changing their behavior based on an arbitrary shift in the incentive structure. So in a moral society where people obligate themselves is more free, because you can act with a knowledge of how others will respond, and that in turn gives you a greater ability to change the world around you (meaning you are freer).

Healthy societies require boundaries, just as healthy bodies do. Maintaining boundaries means imposing obligations. For starters, you are obligated not to shit in the street or in a public waterway, because it spreads disease. Boundaries must be maintained to prevent literal shit from mixing with drinking water. But a society that brainwashes its citizens into believing that boundaries are inherently oppressive, and that “liberation” means tearing down and violating boundaries, eventually degrades to the point that it gets hopelessly contaminated with shit, literal and metaphorical. In such a society, you may be free to shit anywhere you like, but you can never be free from the stench of shit.

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True Freedom requires Autonomy or Sovereignty

True Freedom requires responsibility, and responsibility requires autonomy or sovereignty. If you are truly responsible for something or for another person, then you must have the capacity to do, or not do, what is required for that thing or person to thrive under your care. If you are instead micromanaged, you are not ultimately responsible for the thing or person, the micromanager is, because the micromanager is the one with the decision-making authority and the one who will take credit for anything that goes well, as well as the one who will be stuck with the losses if they don’t. Your risk is limited to being dismissed from your office, after which you would have no ongoing involvement with the thing or person for which you were only nominally responsible. True Freedom means distributed ownership, or Distributism. What this looks like in practice is a local economy comprised of small businesses and family farms.

This is the opposite of the centralized managerialism that is the de facto governing system of both Capitalism and Communism, which are opposite horns of the same demon. Under both systems, the average person owns nothing and is supposed to be happy just being a cog in a big machine owned by, and operated for the benefit of, someone else. Hence, the uncanny convergence between the de facto governing systems of communist China and capitalist America noted by N.S. Lyons. Of course, what makes Capitalism, as we know it, possible is not a “free market,” but a fraudulent financial system based on a government-backed private banking cartel that can create money out of thin air in the form of “notes” that the government forces its citizens to repay (in the forms of taxes and inflation).

Something for Nothing requires separating Ownership from Accountability

Clownworld is premised on the lie of something for nothing, and for this lie to appear plausible, Ownership and Accountability must be decoupled. The only way to do this is through adopting the ethos of parasitism, and that is precisely what our ruling class has done. Only a parasite can get something for nothing, but of course that only means that the cost is passed onto the host.

I mentioned our fraudulent financial system. The Federal Reserve Bank produces sound money like a magician produces live rabbits out of a hat. In reality, the rabbit already exists and is pulled from somewhere else, and it’s only because of an elaborately crafted illusion that anyone is fooled into thinking the hat actually created a rabbit out of thin air. But that’s exactly how the Fed’s wizards create dollars, only it’s even worse, because a magician’s audience doesn’t have to pay compounding interest to the magician for all the rabbits he pulls out of his hat. Imagine a magician pulling 40 trillion rabbits out of a hat – or creating a debt instrument representing 40 trillion rabbits that theoretically exist inside his hat – and then obligating every man, woman, and child (whether they agreed to it or not) to service that debt via taxes and inflation, and you pretty much have our financial system. (Check out The Creature from Jekyll Island by or the long-form essay at NeoFuedalism.substack.com for more on the pyramid scheme that is our financial system.)

Besides the financial system, the wizards primarily use two other parasitic methods to separate Ownership and Accountability and to keep Ownership for themselves while passing off Accountability onto others: (1) compromised officials and (2) corporate liability shields.

The first method of parasitic extraction is obvious. The joint Mossad/CIA operation known as Jeffrey Epstein is just the latest and most flagrant example. Compromise the officials with bribes or blackmail, and then use them to steal from the institutions they run. If you run this scheme at a high enough level, and especially if you involve enough intermediaries and sufficient plausible deniability, then you can do this with impunity. When shit hits the fan, you sacrifice the corrupt officials. If enough shit hits the fan, you sacrifice an intermediary (like Jeffrey Epstein). You just replace him with another errand boy and move onto your next scheme. The costs are ultimately borne by whoever is still foolish enough to support the now-corrupted and skinsuited institution, based on whatever legitimate purpose it used to serve and whatever credibility it once had.

How could you prevent the parasitic wizards from compromising officials? Requiring officials to have some skin in the game would go a long way. Imagine if public officials had to post bond whenever they obligated the public to pay for some scheme. For example, let’s say your governor is pushing for a $231 billion high-speed rail project. Would he still support that project if he was personally liable to reimburse the State if it failed or if it went over budget? Or imagine a politician telling Americans we have to go to war to stop a country in the Middle East from getting weapons of mass destruction. What if that politician knew that he would forfeit all his property and spend the rest of his life in a work camp if it was later revealed that he lied about the casis belli for the war he led the country into?

The second method of parasitic extraction doesn’t get enough attention: the corporate liability shields. Yes, I get it that this is what allows companies to raise money by selling stock to passive investors who know their downside is limited to whatever they invest. If buying stock in a new startup meant being personally liable for any judgment any random plaintiff might win in a lawsuit against that company later, then far fewer people would be willing to invest in new businesses. But that rationale has been expanded to basically include everyone, including owners who actively manage the business. And now we have reached the penultimate stage of reductio ad absurdum with corporate liability shields: private equity.

Suppose you are a high-level “investor” (the way this term is used is a complete bastardization of it, because they don’t invest; they only extract) in the private equity world. You are a member in good standing of the bankster class, so you get preferred access to their magic “something for nothing” money, which means you get it before its value has been inflated away, unlike the suckers who work for a living and who produce real, tangible goods and services. In fact, this money is created out of nothing the instant that you borrow it, so you and your friends basically create money from nothing in order to buy a legitimate business, say a legacy retailer that owns its own stores, like Sears or Toys ‘R Us. So you form a limited liability company (LLC) to act as a holding company, and your LLC borrows money and uses it to buy Sears or Toys ‘R Us. You form another LLC that serves a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Your REIT then borrows more money (again created out of thin air) and buys all the retailer’s real properties (the physical stores). The retailer books this as a profit and pays your holding company a handsome dividend, which your holding company then passes on to you. Then, your REIT charges the retailer exorbitant rent for the properties it used to own. Now, your REIT is paying you a handsome dividend from all those rents that are rolling in. But oh no, the retailer is now losing money, because it has to pay such high rent, so it starts selling off or mortgaging every asset it has left in order to pay rent to your REIT. After your retailer has sold or mortgaged everything it can and slashed its spending on its actual business as close to zero as possible (thereby starving the business to death), it defaults on its rental payments to your REIT, so your REIT terminates the leases and rents the space to someone else. Now, you’ve got an REIT worth billions of dollars. Who paid for it? Not you! And as for that once-proud retail giant, like Sears or Toys ‘R Us, that is spiraling towards bankruptcy? Well, you are not personally liable for any of its debts, so you walk away scot-free, secure behind several layers of corporate veils that no bankruptcy court will ever pierce. You just wrecked a once viable business by parasitizing its profits while dodging liability for all of its losses (that you directly caused). And that has been the process that has been repeated countless times over the past several decades, whereby the bankster class has financialized the entire economy and extracted wealth while socializing costs.

Now, take the parasitic practices of private equity and add in the whole 2008 financial crisis and the government response of making private debts public, and you have the Clownworld economy, where everything is fake and gay, where costs are always going up and quality is always going down, and where responsibility is obfuscated and accountability diffused throughout byzantine layers so that, to quote the Howard Jones song, “No one’s ever to blame.” Yep, no one’s ever to blame, but everyone has to pay.

Inevitably, and probably sooner rather than later, the day of reckoning will arrive for all this, and we’ll have another generational economic crisis. When it does, some of the wizards will be exposed, and they’ll scurry around like the rats that they are. It will basically be like in The Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Followed by bombastic threats and a bunch of how dare you’s. If the bankster wizards are really feeling cornered, they’ll switch tactics and start promising everyone a bunch of free and amazing stuff, and they’ll try to reinflate the bubble and kick the can down the road again.

But in the aftermath of the next collapse, if people are serious about fixing the system so that it doesn’t happen again, the corporate liability shields will have to be seriously curtailed. At most, investors should be able to form Limited Partnerships, where management of the business is handled by a general partner who is personally liable for the businesses debts and obligations.

Basically, real reform requires fusing Ownership and Accountability back together. I’m not optimistic that anything like that will happen, given how deep and pervasive the rot is in the current system, but the good news is that Reality has a way of reasserting itself, and eventually the cost of ignoring Reality becomes impossible for corrupt institutions to pay.

[Post script: I originally intended this post to focus more on the personal level of responsibility and accountability, but a digression about the macro-level social side of it became too unwieldy for it to be part of the same essay, so I did the macro/social as a separate post that will serve as an introduction for forthcoming post(s) about how responsibility/accountability and freedom are related in terms of one’s own personal life. Also, I think it will serve the same rhetorical device that Socrates described in The Republic, where the larger scale of society magnifies things that are subtler and harder to see at the smaller scale of the personal. So this post is basically an introduction to the more personal-level posts that I hope to finish up and post here soon.]

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God is beyond our understanding, but there are many profound analogies that can help us understand key aspects of God’s nature, as well as the dynamics of his relationship with us. There’s God as Father, God as Gardener, God as Craftsman (e.g., a potter), etc. In this essay, I want to explore the analogy of God as Storyteller or Author.

This essay has evolved a lot since I began writing it and has gone through many different cycles of death and rebirth. Some people write this way, where they write a first draft with the voice of their inner editor muted, and then they scrap it and write an entirely new draft, and they keep doing this until they finally have something ready for publication. My own style is to edit as I write, so that I usually do only one draft, but that draft takes a long time and ends up taking on a life of its own by the time it’s all said and done. However, with this post, I was unable to do it that way. I would write the post, realize that I had bitten off more than I could possibly chew in a single essay, and then scrap it and start over from scratch. I was trying to bring a linguistic order out of the chaos of Life, but every time I felt like I had finished saying what I wanted to say, I would take a step back from it and feel deeply unsettled, like there was a deeper and higher order with which I was not properly aligned. It was like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube and getting one or two sides done, before realizing that the other sides were all hopelessly jumbled. So I focused on the sides that were in disarray, but quickly found that in fixing them, I had undone the sides that I had previously finished. So I kept starting over and trying again. And again. And again. And as I did this, I kept thinking that this is the same pattern I find in my own life and in the bigger story of the world around me.

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Some people are dogs, some people are cats …

For most people, Life is pretty simple and straightforward. It may be challenging, but the challenge is in doing the business of Life, not figuring out what the business of Life should be. For most people, whatever path they happen to land on, they find that it fits them well enough, and they apply themselves to it without worrying much about whether their path is the right one for them. This is a good thing, because I don’t think society could function at all if everyone was constantly questioning the fundamentals of their own lives.

However, for some of us (and if you are a regular reader here, I suspect this probably includes you), this disposition and way of living (where Life is simple and straightforward) is completely foreign. You might admire those who just do, rather than analyze and question, and you may even try to turn off your mind and just live like they live, but the undeniable fact remains that you are wired differently. If you deny that aspect of your own nature, it may work for a time, but it’s not a viable long-term arrangement. It’s like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. It’s exhausting and deadening. It feels like you’re trying to live a life that’s been tailor made for someone fundamentally different than you are.

Some people are more inclined towards contentedly doing, while others are inclined towards discontentedly seeking. As a shorthand for discussing these two very different kinds of people, I’ll refer to them as dogs and cats.

Dogs are naturally friendly and fun-loving and just happy to do whatever. If you have a dog, it will be obvious to you why dogs are considered “Man’s best friend.” Whatever you are doing, they want to do, no questions asked. Most people are like dogs, and given that we are interdependent and social creatures, that is natural and good.

Cats are the opposite. They like to go their own way and do their own thing. The saying that springs to mind here is, “Curiosity killed the cat.” But there’s another saying, “Cats have nine lives.” These sayings are related. Some people are like cats. Their relentless curiosity and congenital discontentedness keep them from forming a single stable lifestyle or identity, so they constantly explore different interests. Whereas a dog sticks to his own household or pack, a cat roams restlessly, and the same cat may be known by different names by people all around the neighborhood who see him come and go and interact with him only in passing.

One way of thinking about your identity is to see it as the synthesis of the various elements of your life (e.g., your relationships, experiences, beliefs, practices, etc.). If you’re like a dog, your identity is stable and clearly defined, and you see no reason to question it or change it. You don’t need nine lives, because you’re happy with the one you’re already living. But if you are like a cat, then your curiosities have probably killed your “identity” several times already, and your life has moved through distinct, though overlapping, cycles of samsara, or metaphorical dis-ease, death, and rebirth.

When it comes to storytelling, the best stories are those that convey the perspectives of both dogs and cats, and that place each perspective in its proper context. These stories tend to be the ones that have been passed down across the ages, the archetypal epics and religious myths (and here, the term “myth” does not mean “completely made up and historically false”). But when it comes to contemporary storytelling (modern novels and movies), most of the stories are told by delusional cats who think their own perspective is the only one that matters, that dogs are the cause of all the world’s problems, and that the solution is for everyone to become more catlike. Their ideal is a world where cats are rewarded for being cats, while dogs are punished for being dogs. But society needs dogs more than it needs cats — not to say that there aren’t important roles for cats to play, but cats will never be “Man’s best friend” the way dogs are — and when feline storytellers tell stories set in a world where cats are more popular than dogs, they are telling lies, because the real world cannot ever operate like that. For cats, the humbling reality is this: although a good story needs drama, a cat’s drama comes not from wholeness but from brokenness. Moreover, in order to form a coherent story with a satisfactory resolution, the story requires elements that are stable and coherent from beginning to end. In fact, most of a story’s elements must remain stable and coherent throughout the story; otherwise, it’s not a story, it’s a chronology of random events that no reader or listener could ever follow. So for a cat to tell a story that makes any sense at all, even just a simple story about his own life, he must make use of the stable and coherent elements that the dogs around him provide. This is true in art as well as in Life: cats need dogs in order to make sense of themselves and the world around them, but dogs don’t really need cats. The dogs can benefit from having a few cats around, but only if the cats know their place and mind their own business.

There are many more roles for dogs to play in a home than there are for cats. You can have a bunch of dogs in the same household, and they all get along pretty well. That’s not how it is for cats though. I have two cats who are brothers and who have been together since they were kittens, so they get along pretty well, but that’s definitely not the norm. Cats may tolerate the presence of other cats, in limited doses, but they prefer to keep to themselves. When it comes to these two kinds of people, cats and dogs, society is the same way: there is a lot more room, and many more roles, for dogs than there are for cats. That’s just how it is. That’s how it has to be. So if you are a cat, you will almost certainly have a much harder time finding your place in the world, and you may have to perform the role of a dog sometimes because it needs to be done or because you need the money, and it will be painful for you in a way that it never is for the dogs, but that’s just the way it is. You will probably be tempted towards resentment and bitterness towards dogs — why should the world be made for them, rather than you? But if you complain, if you indulge the dubious luxuries of resentment and bitterness, you will only make it worse than it has to be, both for yourself and for everyone around you.

Or you may be tempted to escape, to drop all your obligations and relationships and just flee. But if you do, once you arrive wherever you end up, you will find that Life brings the same lessons back to you, again and again, until you finally surrender and stay with the process until you have mastered whatever Life is trying to teach you.

Here’s the bigger issue: what even is this Life? If you take a purely materialist view, such that material success in this world is the only potential good, then you will be depressed, because that is a depressing view. Maybe it’s not depressing for a dog, because this world is made for dogs in a way that it cannot be made for cats, so dogs are mostly happy with things as they are. But for you, a cat, unless you’re one of the lucky few who gets to make his living doing catlike things, such a view really would be depressing, because it means that the only world you will ever know is a world that is completely alien to your deepest nature. But if this world is something more like Purgatory, if this world is an opportunity to improve your soul and develop the capacity to be a blessing to others, then being a cat in a dog’s world should also be rewarding and purposeful.

Do you trust the True God, the Author of Life’s Rich Pageant? Sure, God has given us the capacity to create and to change both ourselves and the world around us for the better, but there are limits to this capacity that are beyond our control. If you find yourself in a season where you have to sacrifice by denying your feline nature and acting like a dog in order to meet the demands of Life, then that is where the rubber meets the road: do you trust God or not? Are you a mistake? Does God make mistakes? Or are you exactly where you should be, faced with exactly the sort of challenges that you most need to face, right here and right now?

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Narrative Cycles in Life, Literature, and World History: The Garden of Eden and Its Aftermath

The Garden of Eden is the archetypal story, or at least one-half of the archetypal story. It begins with a stable arrangement and contented characters, but there’s also a fatal flaw foreshadowed by the backstory. The primordial humans, Adam (Man) and Eve (Life), could live like loyal and happy dogs, serving their master Yahweh and enjoying heaven on earth indefinitely. They live in a fenced-in garden. They have jobs to do, and they do those jobs quietly and consistently. They can enjoy a coherent and well-ordered cosmos, so long as they keep to their proper station within that perfectly integrated whole. They are the dogs; they are not the master. The fence around the boundaries of their cosmos is a protective barrier, and all is well until they are tempted by someone on the other side of it. The dogs discover something cat-like within them, whispering to them about more exciting possibilities and loftier identities, and they succumb to a curiosity that ultimately kills them. They are immediately exiled from their orderly and nurturing cosmos and cast out into a disorderly and inhospitable universe.

This story resonates as it does because it speaks to a deep dilemma at the heart of the human condition. Many of us were taught this story as children, so there’s a tendency to think of it as a childish fairy tale, but there’s a depth and subtlety to it that can keep you guessing about its meaning your whole life. In my own spiritual journey, I have moved through different phases that were each marked by different interpretations of the Adam and Eve saga.

If you, like me, had a religious fundamentalist type of upbringing, you got hit with the obvious surface-level lesson at a very young age: follow the rules and don’t ask why, because look what happens when you disobey. That lasts for about as long as it takes for you to make friends with people who don’t follow the rules and … nothing bad seems to happen to them, and they even look like they’re having fun! God becomes a cosmic busybody, trying to guilt-trip everyone constantly so that nobody has a good time. (J. B. Phillips wrote about this view of God in his excellent book Your God is Too Small.) This is the interpretation that the “new atheist” crowd got stuck on.

If you’ve spent any time exploring esoterica, you are no doubt already familiar with interpretations of the story that make the serpent out to be the hero, because he offers Man wisdom and understanding (real goods), while Yahweh wants Man to remain in ignorance, which raises a bunch of questions about Yahweh’s nature and motives (like, is Yahweh even the real God?). I considered this angle for a while — I even wrote about it in the context of a review of The Barbie Movie (of all things) — but I no longer endorse such views, not even my own from just over a year ago.

Esoteric interpretations of these ancient stories are interesting, and there are some valid insights that you can glean from many of them, but they can also be very dangerous. There are numerous pitfalls for the unwary along that path, and you really have to be discerning and honest with yourself in order to avoid them. What caused the devil’s fall from grace? Pride. And while there is a legitimate desire to know the Truth, regardless of what it means or which sacred cows Truth demands that you sacrifice, there’s also the very real temptation of Pride when you think there’s a secret truth that only a discerning few are able to see.

I think this is the reason why so many Gnostics end up with the Rainbow Demon Church kind of Pride, like the Wachowski brothers — er, make that sisters — who directed The Matrix. Seriously, transgenderism is a weird and revolting rabbit hole that leads straight into the depths of Kabbalah and Gnosticism.

And it’s not just transgenderism, it’s all kinds of criminally insane pathologies and perversions. Just look at the most malicious villains being unmasked as the hidden architects of clownworld today (e.g., the perpetrators who are all over the Epstein files, especially those whose identities have been redacted): practically all of them subscribe to the esoteric reading of the Garden of Eden story; they have made a god of the serpent; and look at the depravity that ensues. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The serpent is not your friend. I’ll just leave it at that.

There’s also a psychological reading which sees Adam as a primal and undivided self and the serpent as a burgeoning life-force energy that inflames the soul with a craving for experience (including, but not limited to, sexual experience). This experiential knowledge is represented by the forbidden fruit, and this experiential knowledge leads, in turn, to a dualistic consciousness, to knowledge of the self as self, separate and distinct from God, as well as divided within itself (because desires conflict with each other and with one’s external environment, leading to frustrations that must be dealt with). Under the psychological interpretation, the path of redemption is through a process of something like Jungian individuation to reunify the discordant energies within and without and to integrate them into a more coherent whole. From what I understand of it, Daoism is consistent with this view. has some interesting writings on this path and on issues related to it. Personally, I think that this kind of approach does yield some very helpful and important insights, but I also believe that there are limits to what one should seek to unify or integrate oneself with.

Once again, there is the problem of Evil. It is one thing to view everything, ultimately, as being part of God when you are merely talking about preferences (which are inherently subjective), but it’s quite another matter if you believe some things are objectively Good and others are objectively Evil. These terms are hard to define, but it’s like the infamous Supreme Court opinion about pornography, in that you know it when you see it, especially when it comes to extreme instances, such as the crimes indicated in the Epstein files (which is only the tip of the iceberg). There is no way to integrate such practices with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Once again, there is a real serpent (devil), that serpent is our enemy, and there can be no compromise with that enemy. Boundaries must be maintained. Judgments must be made and enforced.

Maybe at a higher level (i.e., the mind of God) everything can be synthesized in a coherent and virtuous way, but at our level (the mind of Man), attempting that project would be analogous to trying to connect your home’s electric panel directly to the transmission power lines (the extra-high voltage lines carrying electricity over long distances): the ultra-high voltage power from the transmission lines would immediately fry everything electrical in your home (and probably set a bunch of things on fire and incinerate your body in the process); trying to integrate a demon’s mind into your own would do equivalent damage to your own brain and soul.

Here’s how I read the Garden of Eden story now. It’s a warning about what happens when you feel discontented and decide to change your life, but not in a way where you maintain coherence and integrity (i.e., in a manner that is good and true and beautiful), but rather in a way that lacks continuity and leads to alienation, both from God and from the true self.

The Garden of Eden is not a story about the origin of Evil. Evil is present in the first creation account (Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3) and is found in the primordial chaos of a world “without form and void” and totally covered in darkness. God enters that darkness and begins to bring coherence and light into it, bringing the elements into a perfect unity.

The Garden of Eden story is essentially the same story as The Wizard of Oz (which Owen Benjamin discusses in a very interesting way in How to Slay a Wizard). Dorothy lives on a Kansas farm. Boring! She wants to go to a magical place far away, where everyone is living large and having fun, but once she actually gets there, she quickly realizes that her best shot at happiness is the life she left behind in Kansas.

The comedian Bill Hicks had a great bit about Adam and Eve that was a dig at the female tendency to be dissatisfied, always. He talked about how this couple lived in paradise and had everything they could ever need or want, how they could live forever and never get old or sick, and how the woman still wasn’t happy and just wanted more. It’s a funny bit, but it strikes at a deep and difficult truth about our human Nature.

Here’s Bill Hicks doing the bit:

“It’s just not enough …” That’s the root problem.

For someone who lacks the ability to be content, paradise is impossible. “Wherever you go, there you are” and all that. And if you managed to get into heaven, you’d corrupt it with your presence. You’d go about trying to introduce a bunch of insidious artificiality into the world around you to distract you from yourself.

Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls (Proverbs 25: 28 (NKJV)).

Meaning you are exposed and susceptible to scavengers and parasites and predators.

Owen Benjamin recently turned his Ladle.tv series How to Slay a Wizard into a book of the same name. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Wizardry is how Evil bridges the gap between the spiritual and the material realms. Wizards have pushed materialism hard for the past few generations — they replaced a well-ordered and purposeful Cosmos with a barren and empty Universe; they replaced God as the Source of Life with a completely random and nonconscious process of Evolution by natural selection; and they turned economies based on real productive wealth into a financial system based on imaginary bankster fiat money — and you better believe that each of those cultural developments are interrelated and astroturfed by the same wizard cabal.

Wizards love distress and discontentment. MK-Ultra is what happens when ancient wizardry meets modern science. It’s the opposite of alchemy. It takes base emotions and transmutes them into bondage. It’s the clinical application of trauma on vulnerable minds, in order to cause dissociation and internal conflict, thereby making the person more susceptible to additional trauma, which will lead to worse dissociation and conflict, which will lead to more trauma, etc., in a self-perpetuating doom loop. Wizards thrive on psychological trauma, and they’ve been studying the dark arts of social engineering and manipulation (“manufacturing consent”) since before recorded history. (Meaning most of recorded history has been fabricated by wizards for malicious ends.)

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In Medias Res

Childhood amnesia is a bizarre phenomenon. What it means is that for most people, we can clearly remember events from early childhood until somewhere around age ten to age twelve, and during that phase in our development, it’s like those early childhood memories just get wiped, like we become a new person with a past that we thereafter reconstruct from fragmented memories, stories we hear parents and older siblings and cousins tell, photographs, etc.

Then there’s the fact that we are born into a world where narratives abound, but Truth is difficult to discern. We are born naive and ignorant, with malleable minds, and by the time we develop the capacity to question the narratives we’ve been given, our minds have been shaped and warped in ways that are difficult to understand or overcome.

It’s like we wake up in the middle of a dream, or at least that’s how it feels like. But it feels like someone else’s dream, and there’s a long and befuddling backstory.

Here’s another thing. You look around the world from a human perspective, and things look one way, but if you zoom in with a microscope, you see a profoundly different order underlying the one that we inhabit, and you see very different kinds of creatures living there, with completely foreign lifestyles. On the other hand, if you zoom out far enough with a telescope, you can catch sight of another, larger order that is similarly radically different from our own. There is a similar dynamic at work when it comes to the concentric stories or narratives within which our own lives are situated. Zoom in, or zoom out, and you find wildly different story lines and character arcs that can be difficult to reconcile with your own experiences.

The television show Lost conveys a good visual representation of this dynamic. You are born into a world of exile, where everyone is getting on as best they can, trying to work together to survive, but also frequently coming into conflict with each other due to selfishness, laziness, envy, greed, and unresolved trauma, with that last part being key, because whatever unresolved trauma you have, this world of exile is like a dynamic “choose your own adventure” book or role playing game that will keep bringing you back to face that trauma until you resolve it. You are haunted by strange, fleeting, dreamlike memories of another life in another faraway place. You and your neighbors are also haunted by malicious and unseen forces that seem to be coordinated and purposeful, but every time you think you’ve figured out what they’re up to, they change strategies or reveal some new anomaly, and you have to throw out your old theories and start over. You discover that there are secret societies operating clandestinely in your midst, manipulating everyone (including the leadership of your own tribe or society) through a dark MK-Ultra-style social engineering that blends sophisticated technology and ancient occult wizardry. If you zoom out, you can see the outlines of spiritual forces that have worked through, and been embodied in, various individuals and groups and social arrangements and religious ideologies, throughout human history. Every time you solve one layer of the riddle, a deeper enigma is revealed.

If our ancestral origins were in the Garden of Eden, we now find ourselves lost in the Garden of Exile. To return for a moment to the two types of people, the dogs have miraculously managed to maintain a stable and coherent society in spite of all the madness. The dogs are relatively content with who and what they are. Their fundamental contentment makes them less vulnerable to the serpent’s schemes. But we cats have been a different story. The serpent figured out our weaknesses long ago. All he has to do is appeal to our insecurities and our insatiable curiosity, and he can get us to trespass against protective boundaries and run up unpayable debts to buy the latest forbidden fruit in the hopes of being distracted, however briefly, from our deep and abiding feelings of discontentment and distress. Hence, ill-advised relationships, drugs (whether dealt by a psychiatrist or a street dealer), reckless pastimes, farfetched fantasies, etc. Whatever it takes to calm your anxiety or anesthetize your existential despair, the serpent will offer you, and there will be a box for you to check indicating that you agree to all the pages and pages of terms and conditions in very small print. You better read them carefully. Or better yet, once you recognize the devil is the other party to the contract, you better rip it up and renounce whatever agreement you might have implicitly made.

In my own life, I have seen a few different drives at work, and one of the most persistently frustrating ones is the desire for things to make sense, to see a method to the apparent madness. This deep-seated need became especially salient during the aftermath of the scamdemic and all the other craziness that has afflicted our world since 2020. I was trying to figure out my own life, but I thought that the world around me was more or less stable. Definitely not perfect. I knew there were a lot of lies and dysfunction, but I thought that I more or less knew the lay of the land and that people, for the most part, acted in sensible ways from sensible incentives. But then, it was like society as a whole, at a very high level, suffered a psychotic break, and I realized there is no ultimate method to a lot of this madness, other than whatever petty and conflicting agendas a bunch of different pseudo-elites might have. And since then, it’s been back to the drawing board, only this time with a greater sense of urgency and anxiety about things. Lately, however, I have come to a sense of peace about it all. Not to say that I have it all figured out, far from it. And returning to the analogy of two types of people, I have not figured out how to be content as a cat, nor have I figured out how to force myself to be a good dog and just be happy going along with whatever the rest of the pack is doing. Instead, I am learning to be a human who combines both doglike and catlike elements, without resenting or aggrandizing either part of my nature.

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The Garden of Gethsemane and the Garden of Rebirth

I’ve been wrestling with the themes of this essay throughout the weeks of Lent. I plan to take different threads I’ve touched on in this post and develop them more fully in subsequent essays, and then hopefully tie them all together in some kind of fitting conclusion. And maybe that plan will work, and maybe it won’t, but either way, I think it will become exactly what it needs to be. I do think it’s fitting that I’m wrapping up this initial post on Easter Sunday, the day of celebrating Christ’s resurrection and the new life promised to all who are born again in Him.

We’ve lived in the Garden of Exile our entire lives. The Garden of Eden seems like an impossible dream, some ancestral memory of a way of life that we cannot enter being the kinds of creatures we fundamentally are, given our modern technologies, lifestyles, and perspectives. To escape our fate, we have to surrender a lot of things we idolize, a lot of sacred cows with which we identify so strongly that seeing them killed feels like we, ourselves, are the ones dying.

The Garden of Eden and the Garden of Exile are only half of the story. The wizards want your story to end there, in frustration and futility and despair. But Christ Jesus, the Author and finisher of our faith, has written a new beginning to the story, both for the world as a whole, and for each of us individually.

The path of redemption passes through the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s cliche, but only because it’s so profoundly true even though none of us want it to be true, so we ignore it and avoid it and deny it, but it keeps being true regardless. We want to be our own gods. Somehow, the idea entered our minds — at a social level, in the prehistoric infancy of our species, and at a personal level, during our own very early and scarcely remembered childhood — that we should be able to define Good and Evil in terms of our own preferences and self-interest. To make our deluded ethical judgments work, we had to redefine Truth from being something objective and independent of our own private preferences, to being something subjective and completely dependent on our personal and societal narratives. As we decoupled our lives and societies from Truth, we made ourselves and our world increasingly ugly and anti-human — we tried to make humans the gods of this world, and we made the world anti-human. This is wildly paradoxical yet also perfectly fitting. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:25 (ESV).)

The true self is content to take Life on Life’s terms. The false self would rather be somewhere else, doing something else, living another life than the one it is actually living. The false self craves escape, but the thing it seeks to escape is its own nature, and this is a dilemma that it can never escape. But the false self, being fundamentally false, cannot tell the truth about the nature of its own distress, so it creates narratives that justify it while shifting the blame onto everyone and everything else. The false self is attached to its own narratives, so when you stop reciting and reenacting those stories, the false self feels like it’s dying. But the death pangs of the old false self are also the labor pains of the true self being born again.

The true self is what remains after spending the night in the Garden of Gethsemane, without yielding to the temptation to take an easier, softer way. What is needed is major open heart surgery: something ugly and unnatural has to be cut out of you, without an anesthetic. You have to surrender to the True God, without knowing whether the process will kill you, and without any guarantee about who or what you will be on the other side of it. Following the example of Christ Jesus, you have to say, “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” And then you have to allow yourself to share in Christ’s death, so that your old false self is judged and crucified and killed, because only then can you become your true self and really live.

It’s interesting to me that the Bible uses a garden as the setting for Man’s rebellion from God (Eden), for Man’s surrender (Gethsemane), and for Man’s resurrection (the empty tomb in the garden). Before Man fell, he tended the garden. When Mary Magdalene encountered the risen Christ, she thought he was the gardener.

Being a gardener (or farmer) is not a glamorous or comfortable life. I’ve only tried homesteading on an extremely amateurish level (raising poultry and fruits and vegetables in a suburban backyard), and it has been a challenging and humbling, but also immensely rewarding experience. While working through various cycles of sowing and reaping, and while caring for animals in various stages of their lives, I have seen new insights into the agrarian principles found in the Bible specifically and in folk wisdom more generally, which really do map on, fractally, to high-level spiritual principles. Based on my own limited experience with it, I find that it has fulfilled a deep ancestral yearning that I didn’t even know I had. I think this has partly been because gardening and animal husbandry are embedded deeply in our human Nature, but also because farming is real and straight in all the ways that clownworld is fake and gay. (I will do another post exploring that theme soon, because there is a lot that can be said on the topic.) I’ve had more failures (learning experiences) than successes. Financially, I am not even close to breaking even. I have been able to replace some of what my family eats with what I am able to grow, but the overwhelming majority of our food still comes from the grocery store. It’s like a part time job that I keep losing money on, but it has also been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. And I think one of the most important lessons I have gained from my rudimentary farming endeavors has been that you have to work with Mother Nature, rather than in opposition to her, and that she sets the terms and conditions, not you. She won’t force you to do things her way; she’ll let you try your plans and schemes, and you’ll keep failing and getting frustrated; but when you are ready to listen and to learn and to do things her way, she will do wonders for you and feed you from her bounties.

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I will tie this back into the theme of storytelling and the search for Truth, but first let me quote the words of St. Paul:

I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:11-13 (ESV).)

Obviously, I have not attained the level of contentment that St. Paul did. However, when I look back at my life and my search for coherence and truth, I feel like I am finally making progress. Progress, not perfection, as they say in recovery groups. I am better able to deal with Life on Life’s terms. I am also able to accept my own role in Life’s Rich Pageant, the role for which the Author of the play cast me, and I can perform that role well and properly.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. (From As You Like It by Shakespeare.)

I am not the author. I don’t have to figure out how all the acts of this incomprehensibly vast story are going to all fit together or how all the multi-layered conflicts will finally be resolved. I can trust the Author to do what he does and handle the big picture in his own way.

I also know that without the Garden of Gethsemane and the Garden of the Empty Tomb, the story of the Garden of Eden is either a cruel joke or a depressing tragedy. But the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Exile are only half the story, and they’re not even the most important half. Like the song says, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” We are closer now to the curtain falling on our present age than ever. Be ready for what comes next.

Summing Up

I hope all of you have had a very happy Easter and that you connect with the story of Christ Jesus, and the reality of the True God as revealed in the Person of Christ, in whatever way the True God presents himself to you in it. And may the True God give us all the grace to accept our own role in that archetypal story, as well as in the smaller-scale stories that fill our everyday lives.

Once more, the words of St. Paul:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 (ESV).)

That’s our role, in a very general and abstract sense. Of course, working out the particulars day by day is where it gets both very challenging and very rewarding. That paradox is the place where powerful forces collide, and where tremendous energy is unleashed, similar to the way new earth is created where continental plates collide and volcanoes erupt and cracks in the world are opened, from which red-hot lava flows. The false self cannot approach this realm of such intense light and heat without being consumed and turned to smoke and ashes. The false self recoils in abject terror and seeks only to save itself. But by renouncing the false self and surrendering to Christ, we can truly become instruments in the hand of God, and the True God can then manifest the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in us and through us.

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:3-8 (ESV).)

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Where are we now? And what comes next? These are loaded questions. I’m reminded of Mitch Hedberg’s joke about doing a radio interview and the DJ asking him, “Who are you?” Hedberg said, “I was like, either this guy is really deep, or I’m at the wrong radio station.” Answering the question “Where are we now?” is similar.

It all depends on how you frame these questions …

On one level (political and cultural), the entire matter is absurd: we’re in the wrong place, after a series of wrong turns and social engineering experiments gone awry, and just figuring out where we’re supposed to be, let alone actually getting there (as a civic body), is going to be confusing and messy, and the odds are definitely not in our favor. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and for longer than I have been alive, our civilization’s past behavior has been abysmal: in all the ways that matter most, we’ve seen a continual decline. When “despair” is one…

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From Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. (Rule #4)

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. (Rule #12)

From Frank Herbert (Children of Dune):

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom, because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom, because that is according to my principles.

The quotes above illustrate a kind of guerilla moralizing characteristic of malignant narcissists, cult leaders, and communist operatives. Hoe_Math (in an X post I remember but can’t find now) observed that when communists make moral arguments, they are really saying, “These are the noises I have learned to make, so that you do what I want.” Or “These are the symbols I have to create on your screen to get you to do what I want.” They don’t actually care about Justice or Fairness or Christianity or anything else they w…

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This is an addendum to yesterday’s post about Darwinism and its role in the overarching social engineering project of the 20th and 21 centuries, and about Vox Day’s new book Probability Zero, which demonstrates the impossibility of what Darwinists claim, and a response to those who say I have misrepresented Darwinism. The focus of my post was the social engineering that Darwinism has been used to underwrite. I didn’t ever address the substance of Darwinism, because the substance of Darwinism is orthogonal to my point. If you’re interested in reading an argument that addresses the substance of evolution by natural selection, Vox Day has an entire book you can read.

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Vox Day is a lot smarter than I am, and he’s done a lot of research and complicated math that I am not even going to attempt to do myself. The math is over my head. I don’t understand Vox’s arguments. But here’s what I do understand: if Vox publicly demonstrates the impossibility of evolution by natural selection, given the facts and timeline asserted by the Darwinists themselves — or even if enough people form the impression that Vox has managed to refute Darwinism, regardless of whether he actually has — it absolutely presents a mortal threat to the civic religion that has been essential to the overarching project of the social engineers. That’s the point I was making in yesterday’s post. Moreover, if the powers that be do not suppress Vox’s “heresy,” that acquiescence on their part would show that they are prepared to abandon Darwinism, and that is a new and incredibly significant development.

In order to promote their antichristian civic religion, the social engineers had to first untether Western Man from belief in God, and specifically from belief in the Christian God. And to do that, the social engineers needed something (a false “god” to stand in the gap) to answer the fundamentally religious questions, Who are we? and How did we come to be? Without Darwinism, their antichristian civic religion would have never become the de facto faith of Western civilization. If Darwinism falls, their antichristian civic religion will fall. It may not happen overnight (just like it took decades for their civic religion to replace Christianity as the dominant religion in the West), but it absolutely will happen.

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Someone criticized my post in Notes because I conflated Darwinism with the physicalist interpretation of Darwinism that people like Richard Dawkins promote. Yes, that’s what I did. Again, the point I was making had to do with the way Darwinism has been used to advance a social engineering agenda, and the physicalist version of Darwinism is what’s relevant to that point.

There’s a parallel here to the philosophy of Existentialism. Yes, you can be like Kierkegaard and be both a Christian and an Existentialist, but the fact remains that this is not the version of Existentialism that has been such a destructive influence in our culture. The version of Existentialism at the heart of the West’s decay has been the idea (expressed by those like Sarte) that existence precedes essence, that we have no human “function” to fulfill and no telos to use as a standard for making moral judgments about ourselves or others, and that there exists no higher moral authority to judge our characters or actions. This kind of Existentialism is just a fancy way of saying, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” It’s inverted and demonic. And if the social engineers can sell it as a moral philosophy (however much they have to dumb it down or wrap it up in Hollywood narrative magic), they can morally disarm a nation. And if you point this out, it’s really a red herring for someone to object by saying, “Yeah, but you didn’t debunk Kierkegaard.”

Here’s a parable about Darwinism and its role in our culture. Imagine that a man named Darles Charwin wrote a book called “The Origin of Watermelons.” In it, he discusses how prehistoric vines developed fruits as an adaptation to spread their seeds by getting animals to eat their fruits and then deposit the seeds in their dung, which then served as a fertilizer; thus, plants with sweeter fruits would get eaten more often and be more likely to pass on their genes to future generations. Now, imagine that a social engineer is telling people that they can eliminate modern agriculture and still enjoy watermelons year-round. Why? Well, watermelons just sort of happened all on their own, without any involvement from human farmers, says the social engineer. In fact, a botanist named Dichard Rawkins even wrote a book called “The Blind Melon Farmer” that explains how the watermelons that you can buy at a supermarket just exist on their own, without any involvement from human farmers or genetic engineers. Haven’t you read it? So the social engineer manages to convince a lot of people to stop farming and to vote for politicians who support programs for confiscating farmland and using it to build Section Eight housing for Somalian immigrants. Why? Well, the farmers had nothing to do with all those watermelons that you’ve been eating, so who needs farmers? Then, Vox Day picks up a seedless watermelon, cuts it open, and points out that there is no way that any theory of evolution by natural selection can account for the existence of seedless watermelons. For those opposed to the social engineer who is trying to destroy farming, this would be an important development in the cultural conversation about watermelons, since it would clearly show that the social engineer’s agenda was premised on a lie. Obviously, this metaphor is inexact, but it maps onto the larger patterns of this cultural dialectic well enough. The metaphor is absurd, but so is the cultural dialectic around evolution by natural selection.

If you want to believe in a synthesis of Creationism and Darwinism (where Life came to be through a process directed by some higher conscious power), and if you believe that consciousness is fundamental and not merely an emergent property of non-conscious matter, then nothing that I said in yesterday’s post is an argument against your position. I don’t address your position, because it’s not relevant to the point I was making about the social engineers and their antichristian civic religion.

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You’ve probably had the experience of looking up into the sky and seeing two layers of clouds moving in opposite directions, or perhaps you’ve looked up and seen the clouds moving at a breakneck pace, while on the ground the air is perfectly still. There is something unsettling about those kinds of scenes, where you can see, visually, how different levels or layers of reality can operate according to different patterns. In the middle of each such level or layer, one would experience a kind of order and even uniformity, but on the fringes, where those levels or layers collide, one would experience chaos. Our world is now drifting towards the fringes of whatever the old order or logos has been, to the zone where the old order is colliding in chaotic ways with the beginnings of a new order.

Things are really getting weird and the weirdness is going to get more intense. The old historical and philosophical and scientific justifications for the old order are collapsing before our very eyes. There are a lot of questions we could ask about why these justifications are being dynamited at their foundations, and why the guardians of the old order are not doing more to protect them or to reinforce them, but the important thing to note is that “it’s happening” (to quote the old Ron Paul meme). While the old order’s useful idiots are still clinging to the sacred relics of their counterfeit religion, a significant number of the top clergy are already abandoning the citadel.

Here is the biggest and most important example to date: Vox Day’s attack on the theory of evolution by natural selection.1 Saying “evolution is dead” today is like when Nietzsche said “God is dead” 140-odd years ago. Obviously, God never died and we humans were never capable of killing him, but we in the West did kill belief in God (and specifically belief in the Christian God) as the foundation of our culture, and then, with that foundation gone, everything collapsed, slowly at first, and then suddenly. Similarly, Darwinism is *the* lynchpin of the old civic religion and all of its various political and moral philosophies (or rather, immoral philosophies). Darwinism told us that we lived in a self-contained Universe where consciousness emerged from non-conscious matter, where everything is contingent and nothing is a priori Good or True or Beautiful besides whatever happens to be (all of which could have been completely different), a Universe where we no longer need God because there was nothing left for him to do, now that we could explain the origin of Man without him. There is no essence, only existence, and we can determine our essential nature for ourselves; hence, transgenderism, which is the logical conclusion of that demonic Enlightenment principle tabula rasa. But now, Darwinism is dead, and it is Vox Day (and his AI math team) that has killed it. The effects of this will take many years, maybe even many generations, to fully manifest, but the ground has well and truly shifted beneath our feet.

How will the guardians of the old order respond? If Vox Day’s book stays available on Amazon (where it remains the #1 bestseller in the category of genetic science, as of this writing), I think it will be a sign that they have decided to abandon Darwinism. What would that mean? I don’t know, other than the fact that it shows the rules of the game have changed in some very big and very important ways. It means that we are entering a new phase of history that is going to be wildly different from the one we’ve been living in.

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There are many other examples of old sacred cows being led out to slaughter, with the ruling elite either actively enabling the sacrifice or suddenly passively acquiescing, after having spent the last several decades viciously suppressing even the faintest hints of rebellion against the old religion. However, the collapse of Darwinism is the biggest and most consequential idol to be smashed, by far.

So that’s the big picture. When it comes to the daily political grind and all the ridiculous pageantry and all the endless commentary on that senseless shit-show, I think we’re in a similar place. There are still a lot of battles being fought; many of these battles are important, and a few of them are absolutely must-win; but on a fundamental level, something about our world has irrevocably changed.

Politically, we are past the point of no return. The Republic is crash-landing like the Hindenburg, after internal saboteurs decided to set fire to everything. Meanwhile, the Empire is throttling the engines and preparing for take-off. I am mixing metaphors, but we are living in mixed-up times, and America is presently like a train with locomotives on opposite ends of it, each going in opposite directions at the same time. Whatever comes next, it won’t be the America we have known and loved. That America is gone, and she ain’t coming back.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …

(William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming)

Earlier, I said that Darwinism was the lynchpin of the old order, but that’s not the whole story. The real lynchpin is a distillation of Darwinism, that is, the belief that an effect can be greater than its cause. That a blind watchmaker can make creatures with eyes to see. That nonconscious matter and energy can create consciousness. The “Big Bang” is even more preposterous: that nothing can create everything. Well, if the belief that an effect can be greater than its cause was the foundation of the old order, then there were two pillars resting on that foundation: Darwinism and Banksterism,2 and whereas Darwinism supplanted belief in God as the creator of Life, Banksterism supplanted belief in God as the creator of Value.

“In God We Trust” is stamped on every dollar bill, but which God? It’s like a magician pulling the same rabbit out of his hat over and over and telling his audience that each one is a unique rabbit, and then trying to sell his audience paper tokens representing particular magic rabbits, and then renting the magic-rabbit-token holders space in his “magic rabbit token vault” to store their tokens safely, and then loaning out magic rabbit tokens backed by the “reserve” of rabbit tokens in his vault, and then selling stock in his “magic rabbit token deposit bank and trust,” etc., etc. It’s all so ridiculous-sounding, but that’s essentially how our financial system operates. It claims to have created a lot of value out of thin air, by fiat and by fractional-reserve lending, but it’s all an illusion, with nothing backing it besides the “faith” of the people who own all the magic tokens. If you’ve read The Creature from Jekyll Island by or watched any of Owen Benjamin’s “How to Slay a Wizard” series on Ladle.tv, you already know all this.

Darwinism was the god of materialist scientism; Banksterism is the god of top Luciferian initiates; but each of them are different sides of the same demonic coin, or different agents of the same principal villain. If the guardians of the old order abandon Darwinism, what will they do about the Dollar?

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For more on Probability Zero, see also,

Sigma Game

SSH is Not Evolutionary Psychology

People frequently make wholly ignorant statements about the SSH, and one of the more common ones is that it is somehow related to evolutionary psychology, or that the various hierarchical ranks somehow evolved as part of Man’s development from hunter-gatherers…

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5 months ago · 148 likes · 88 comments · Vox Day

2

For a good primer on how money magic is used to rule the world, check out this post by Neoliberal Feudalism:

The Neo-Feudal Review

The global world order is centralized at levels above the nation-state

Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles. - Ezra Pound…

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2 years ago · 304 likes · 110 comments · Hermes of the Threshold

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that the New Year is off to a great start for you. Assuming our calendar is correct (big “if,” I know, but I will leave this giant rabbit hole alone for now), the Year of Our Lord 2025 is in the record books, and 2026 is upon us. It is hard to believe that the 2020s are already more than half over – more than 60% over, to be precise! Can you believe what a crazy decade it has already been? Something tells me we’re just getting started. After all, we are only four years away from whatever awaits in 2030, which as you no doubt already know, is the deadline declared by the kindly oligarchs at the WEF for the completion of their not-at-all-sinister-sounding “Agenda 2030.”

This post is something of a slightly belated reflection on the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. (Better late than never, right?) The theme for this post is this: when the divine light pierces the illusion…

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Recently, a very watered-down critique of the DIEversity regime, The Lost Generation by Jacob Savage, was published in Compact and quickly went viral among those on the Right. Even the Vice President of the United States tweeted about it, both from his personal and his official X accounts. Many have written insightful responses to Savage’s post already, like and , so for a discussion about the substance of Savage’s essay, I will refer you to their excellent posts, DEI, the Dispossessed Generation, and the Digital Koryos by John Carter and The White at the End of the Tunnel by Librarian. What I wish to discuss instead of the substance of Savage’s essay is the reaction it has provoked, especially on the dissident Right, where it has gone viral.

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As with the previous episode, the first part, containing my reading of the chapter, is available to everyone for free, but the second part with my commentary is exclusively for paid subscribers. (This series is the first audio content I’ve placed behind a paywall.) If you’d like to upgrade your subscription, there are discounts available on both annual and monthly subscriptions.

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Below is the text of the chapter …

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Despite being over 50 years old, The Camp of the Saints reads as if it was written only yesterday. It’s basically the story of the West since the end of World War II, condensed into a roughly two-month farce, set in the Spring of 1973.

It’s not a novel in the traditional sense; it’s more like a collection of sketches and vignettes depicting the reactions (and non-reactions) of various people throughout the West to an impending catastrophe. There are a few recurring characters, but none are really developed or undergo any meaningful changes. The main characters really aren’t any of the individual people depicted in the story, but rather the zeitgeists of two competing cultures: that of the ravenous, locust-like Global South, and that of the decadent and suicidal West.

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The overarching story is simple. An armada filled with migrants sets sail from India, bound for Western Europe, a land overflowing with milk and honey. The Western countries do nothing but dither and discuss possible responses. What little they do, the Western leaders do half-heartedly, either with a spirit of dour resignation or with the zeal of naive liberal lunacy. The West is like a termite-infested tree, where the termites are either the practitioners of a suicidally “compassionate” churchianity, or the adherents of a suicidally malignant Marxcissism. As soon as the migrants crash like a tidal wave of raw sewage onto the southern coast of France, the termite-infested tree collapses. Then, upon seeing that the West is unwilling to defend herself, innumerable more migrant armadas set sail from the Global South, their hearts set on pillaging the fresh carcass of Western Europe. Soon, a provisional government is established, comprised of murderous migrants and suicidally co-dependent Europeans, and the new government uses the military equipment and the misguided loyalties of remaining troops (who have been conditioned to obey any order from those wearing the emblems of authority) to wage war against the remaining “racist” holdouts. Of course, in The Camp of the Saints, as in our world, the word “racist” means nothing more than a white person who prefers to live amongst those with whom he shares a common culture. Eventually, all the “racists” retreat to Switzerland, the final holdout, but international pressure and internal sabotage from Marxcissists combine to break the country. The novel ends as Switzerland agrees to open her borders.

The Camp of the Saints raises some interesting questions. Who organized so many hundreds of boats and made them all available for the migrants to use? Who put the migrants up to it? Who coordinates the conspiracy of silence, and even of outright inversion of reality, adhered to by Western media? (Similar to the conspiracy of silence and inverted propaganda about post-apartheid South Africa that has only recently begun to come apart as the reality has grown too horrible for the Globohomo regime to keep it under wraps.1) A “great manipulator-in-chief” is hinted at, but never explicitly named; however, the title of the book, and the passage from the Book of Revelation quoted in its opening pages, make clear who this ultimate rabble-rouser really is:

And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city. (Revelation 20: 7-9.)

Here’s a tangential consideration. The characters of the book believe themselves to be living in the year 1975, just as we believe it to be (as of this writing) 2025. But we really don’t know what year it is, and we may very well be deep into the timeline described in Revelation 20: 1-102 — i.e., the era of satanic deception.

Below is a passage from the book that speaks to the demonic spirit that has been revealing itself with ever increasing openness throughout the past several decades:

The world seems to be controlled, not by a single orchestra conductor, but by a new apocalyptic beast, a sort of anonymous, omnipresent monster who has vowed, first and foremost, to destroy the West. The beast has no specific plan. It takes advantage of the opportunities that present themselves . . . Perhaps it is of divine or, more likely, demoniacal origin? Dostoevsky analyzed this unlikely phenomenon, born two centuries ago. So did Péguy, albeit in other forms. As also did one of our earlier popes, Paul VI, after finally opening his eyes in the waning days of his pontificate. Nothing can stop the beast. Everyone knows it. Among the initiates, this lends a certain triumphalism to their way of thinking, whereas those who still struggle within themselves perceive the futility of their fight. A fallen archangel himself, Ballan immediately recognized the lackeys of the beast and offered them his services. (The Camp of the Saints, Chapter IX.)

As the grand cosmic drama, and all the innumerable smaller dramas playing out fractally within it, reach their climax, the various types of Evil will collapse into their basest form: a Sorathic Evil of sheer nihilism, so full of devouring hatred that it can’t even pretend to be anything else. It’s a universal solvent that seeks to disintegrate and blot out all life and finally consciousness itself.

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In this episode, I read a few of the many (too many to include them all in a single episode!) quotable passages from the book and discuss their significance in light of our civilization’s present conflicts. These conflicts are superficially political in nature, but they are really, at bottom, ultimately spiritual. In The Camp of the Saints, as in our world today, the West is only conquered by the locust-people after it has first been spiritually conquered by a demonic parasitic infection that initially manifests as egoic pride, then as a subtle and persistent existential malaise, thereafter as an overwhelming desire to numb self-awareness with empty palliatives, and finally as a nakedly suicidal self-hatred and hatred of Life itself. We can (and should) seal the borders, sink the migrants’ ships, and send the invaders back, but much more than that, we need to connect with the true God and rekindle the spiritual vitality that will bring moral clarity and a willingness to protect and promote our own interests. The West has not been charitable. Charity is a Christian virtue, and the West has become thoroughly antichristian. Rather than being charitable, the West has been selfless, which is the negative counterfeit of charity. It is the spirit of suicide masquerading as compassion for others — but only distant and abstract others, never neighbors near and like oneself. (It is this selflessness that serves as the basis for that anti-human “moral” philosophy known as Utilitarianism.) To love one’s neighbor as oneself, one must actually love oneself, that is, one must desire that which is good, rather than that which is harmful, for oneself.

I highly recommend this book (which is back in print again after actually having been a banned book for many years, unlike the purportedly “banned books” on display at public libraries and on mandatory reading lists in public schools). You can get it from Books a Million, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

And if you’re listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, check out the Substack page for this episode to see embedded content, leave a comment, or subscribe if you would like to do so.

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The differences could not be starker between what the Western media reported about South Africa, and what the ugly reality actually was. This essay says it all, very succinctly:

Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

REVIEW: South Africa's Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson

South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since The End Of Apartheid, R.W. Johnson (Overlook Press, 2009…

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3 years ago · 214 likes · 5 comments · John Psmith

In this post, we cover different manipulative tactics used in propaganda before examining a recent preposterous news story about the FBI allegedly busting a duo of would-be conquistadors and aspiring international sex-traffickers in the Dallas, Texas area.

Clickbait, Lab-Coat Headlines, and Hybrid Manipulations

For the most part, I’ve gotten pretty good about not falling for clickbait. If some portion of the title is in ALL CAPS, or if the headline includes a warning that I won’t believe what happens next, or if it contains the words “owns” or “destroys” or the phrase “instantly regrets it,” I assume the article (or video) is complete trash and disregard it. It’s pretty much an iron law of the internet that the more sensational the title or thumbnail, the more boringly banal the actual article is. Clickbait-and-switch, if you will.

But then there are those headlines that do the opposite: they state something preposterous in a straightforward and unemotional ma…

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It’s now been a year since Trump won re-election, and even though his second term has been markedly different from (and I would say, much more effective than) his first, the Right is still as divided as ever over the question of whether to “trust the plan, or chimp?” Or there’s a third option, which is to do nothing and just blackpill and complain and make fun of anyone who still believes in anything (i.e., the George Carlin method).

Are those of us who supported and voted for him just naive suckers? Winners of all those “Fell for It Again Awards” depicted in so many memes? Or is there still a solid plan in place, and should we trust that Trump and his team are already thinking eight moves ahead in their 7-dimensional geopolitical chess game? Or does the framing assumed by this line of questioning itself represent a false binary and maybe even a bit of psyopping wizardry?

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Honestly, I still don’t have a great read on Trump. Zoo…

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Earlier today, the Substack algorithm suggested I follow Zohran Mamdani. I thought this was odd. Mamdani is a new arrival to this platform. He has published no content whatsoever. He hasn’t even liked anything anyone else wrote on Substack yet. But somehow, he already has over 35,000 subscribers.

I’m guessing Mamdani will have a purple check soon. He appears destined to become one of those prolific Substackers who has, as so aptly put it, “tens of readers and tens of thousands of paid subscribers.” Substack now appears to the go-to method for The Powers That Be to launder their bribe money and dole it out to their most loyal shills and apparatchiks.

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As with the previous episode, the first part, containing my reading of the chapter, is available to everyone for free, but the second part with my commentary is exclusively for paid subscribers. (This series is the first audio content I’ve placed behind a paywall.) If you’d like to upgrade your subscription, there are discounts available on both annual and monthly subscriptions.

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Below is the text of the chapter …

Omar and the Sacred Vine

A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes American bars with an axe. In these discuss…

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I’ve been feeling a different kind of vibe shift lately. It’s been far more subtle than the political and culture-war vibe shift we experienced from the Summer of 2024 to the early part of this year, but this new vibe shift feels every bit as real, perhaps even more real. If our world was a skyscraper and we lived on the upper floors, it feels like the building’s foundations suddenly shifted, not as dramatically as in 2020 or 2001, but still enough to wonder what changes it portends.

I had heard rumors that there was some noteworthy occult significance to the date September 23, 2025, especially with it being both the Autumn Equinox and Rosh Hashana (apparently these dates do not often coincide), and so I had wondered if there would be some big 9/11-style psyop unveiled, but nothing seemed to happen at the time. Now, I find myself wondering if The Powers That Be, who are true believers in, and practitioners of, occult magic, ac…

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“There are weeks where decades happen,” said Lenin. Looking back, there have been many such weeks in the years since the publication of Gabor Maté’s bestselling book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts in 2008.

Back then, America was reeling from the one-two punch of warmonger fraud (Iraq War) and bankster fraud (the financial crisis) unleashed upon the country during the George W. Bush Administration. Barack Obama was campaigning for President, promising hope and change and racking up Nobel Peace Prizes and being fêted by the mainstream media as the long-awaited messiah who would finally bring to fulfillment all the glorious promises of the 1960s cultural revolution, especially the Civil Rights Movement. Decades have happened since then, and we all know how disastrously things turned out.

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In many ways, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is a product of its times that could not be written today. Its proposed social reforms (e.g., decriminalizing drug use, giving the drug-addicted homeless free range in our cities, etc.) have been conclusively refuted by the open-air fentanyl markets and homeless camps in America’s urban blue zones. Those portions of the book stand today as stark warnings against trusting naively in the counsel of overconfident “experts,” placing too great a weight on feminine virtues like “empathy,” and tolerating intolerable behaviors in public spaces.

But although the book’s social prescriptions are anachronisms of those quaint “before times” — i.e., before the cancer of gay race communism consumed America’s big cities and captured nearly every branch of the federal government during the Obama years — the author’s more personal anecdotes and observations are still very relevant and include some valuable insights about the way harmful addictions develop and why they are so difficult to break. This is especially true when the addictions in question involve compulsive behaviors rather than drug use, because even though the dynamic is nearly identical, it is more subtle and easy to rationalize away, making such addictions all the more hazardous.

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In the aftermath of the scamdemic, I have noticed many more beggars than ever before, begging in places where you never used to see them. Another difference is, most of these new beggars are white, and this demographic shift has brought about some interesting changes that provide further evidence of very real and meaningful group differences. They have gentrified the world of panhandling.

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This sudden preponderance of white panhandlers is no doubt largely the result of the ongoing cultural train-wreck that started with doctors overprescribing Oxycontin and other Big Pharma-produced opioids in the 2000s, accelerated when those prescription drugs were replaced with street heroin during the 2010s, and reached its apotheosis with the fentanyl crisis of the 2020s. In turn, the fentanyl crisis led to the martyrdom of Saint George Floyd and the Burn Loot Murder crusade and…

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As with the previous episode, the first part, containing my reading of the chapter, is available to everyone for free, but the second part with my commentary is exclusively for paid subscribers. (This series is the first audio content I’ve placed behind a paywall.) If you’d like to upgrade your subscription, there are discounts available on both annual and monthly subscriptions.

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I was still collecting my thoughts about the savage and senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska, in anticipation of writing a post about that, when I heard the news that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated at a college campus in Utah. I never really listened much to Kirk. His target audience was a generation or two younger than me, yet in spite of his youthful appeal, I also thought of him as a dinosaur of sorts, a throwback to an older, pre-Obama era of corporate conservatism that would never question the core tenets of the post-1964 political order. But after listening to various clips of his interviews and debates, I have come to really admire him. Whatever else he was (or was not), Charlie Kirk was sincere, good-hearted, and completely committed to the belief that we can and should talk to each other, no matter our differences. He gave the benefit of t…

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