MARCH 13: Five Years Later, A Look Back at My Start as a Catholic Political Writer
Five years ago today, we we were sent home from school with the “understanding” that we would be back in two weeks. I remember shaking my head with some fellow teachers and saying, “We’re not coming back.”
The signs were there. Sure, I gave the system and the “pandemic” a chance like a good obedient little boy, but after a few weeks I turned on that system and started writing about it in earnest, both for The Hayride and in a book chronicling my consecration to Jesus through his Mother Mary–a uniquely Catholic practice of asking her to help us look at Jesus, hold Jesus, love Jesus, as she did.
Around that time, the world of my religion and the world of politics collided in a way I hadn’t expected when I started writing the book. It would end up being not only a spiritual memoir of my personal journey through those 33 days and repenting of my past, but a growing realization that this personal world was fascinatingly parallel to the universal, the geopolitical.
I want to share two short chapters of that journey today with you, from April 2020. The world we are in today is an offshoot of that time, which as we are finding was simply an earlier offshoot sprouted from a seed planted long, long ago.
If you are so inspired, please support my work. The book can be purchased here.
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17 APRIL
I WAKE UP AT LEAST A COUPLE OF TIMES every night, but last night and Tuesday, I have not even tried to go back to sleep at 3 AM. Instead I have moved around and gotten some writing done. This morning, I continued to reflect on this coronavirus situation, not necessarily the virus itself per se, but all the underlying forces that could be at work here.
I do not have a family, or a wife, or a girlfriend, or anything I’m beholden to really besides my blood family and a few close friends. I feel somewhat responsible to be one of the individuals keeping an eye on not only the political, but more so the underlying cosmic, forces that are brewing here.
Not only this, but the responsibility I feel has been insistent, to offer up my lonely desert trial up to God to beseech his mercy on our country and world. It is one of the beauties of this consecration to Mary, this giving of my all. I can trust that when I write on personal things, she delivers the graces where they most need to go. Equally so, I can trust that when I write on universal things, she delivers the graces where they most need to go as well.
This morning there were some things concerning evil in our world I wanted to express, so I fingered some thoughts down on the keyboard. I wasn’t quite ready to write the chapter for today yet, but still I felt the need to move my fingers. Here are those early morning thoughts. Mary, take them, and take over….
It is interesting to think back to some of the students to whom I once taught Star Wars-Revenge of the Sith, who laughed at Anakin for falling prey to the chancellor’s schemes, who swore they’d never get caught in Palpatine’s web of deceit. I wonder how many of them are holding true to that in this time, when it could be an allegory for what we are experiencing. I hope many of them. One difference is that at this point, the chancellor is not only one individual; “he” is a select group of people behind the scenes, more like a “Phantom Menace” of Episode I right now. And there are plenty of clones in America who have been our allies for years ready to attack if you fight for liberty, who unwittingly could very quickly push us through the dark side of Episodes II and III.
There are friends of ours, right now, who believe that staying home is their only option because Big Brother is saying so.
They are good people. They mean well. They love their families. None of this is the issue.
In fact, it could be this very virtue that the phantom menace is counting on to work in its favor.
I am asking all of my former students and anyone else who so desires to think about this. To risk being wrong. In class we frequently talked about the fact that if America were ever to be conquered, it would not be an obvious direct hit from without, but a slow, creeping, series of inscrutable hits from within, catching people unawares while they live their merry lives.
We know America is strong. But we also know world history. And we’ve seen how great nations and empires have been lulled into complacency and ruin in the past.
How do you destroy a robust, thriving nation?
Create a problem in a society, that doesn’t exist previously, at least not to a certain, visible level (the virus). Use that problem to leverage power to achieve “peace and security” (“health safety”) for the masses unable or unwilling to see what’s going on (stay home while we feed you misinformation to incite fear and dependence on us). Rise to power and use those masses we just “saved” to silence anyone who dares to question our motives and end game (our refusal to give up the power attained in keeping you “safe”).[1]
I am reminded of Senator Padmé Amidala in Star Wars-Attack of the Clones. When Palpatine rises to the position of supreme ruler, she says with sadness, sarcasm, and disbelief: “So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause.”
There is a phantom menace behind the scenes—and sometimes right under our noses—watching how we respond to this situation. I wonder sometimes how we are doing, if we are responding the best we could be.
Yes, the virus is real. Yes, people are dying. But you’ve seen the numbers inflation. You’ve seen the lies. You’ve seen the cover-ups. I suspect more on this misinformation will come. But that could very well be a part of a bigger plan to lull us to sleep, to lull us into inaction in the name of people’s health, to lull us into becoming a nation of clones who think we are on the right side but are actually just pawns in the phantom menace’s scheme to turn Americans against their friends, have them cannibalize each other, and in the end use the disarray and hysteria to rise to power in order to control everyone.
—In order to destroy America and everything it could be—from within.
No one in history ever thinks it can happen to them. Until it does.
Are you willing to risk being wrong for liberty’s sake? It’s not as if your life is on the line at this point. All you’re risking is what people think about you on social media. Is it worth it, to be wrong, if it means we preserve liberty and emerge from the quarantine a stronger nation for it, if it means we show the world what America is made of and thus discourage those who are observing how we react to this from thinking they can fool us, divide us, or attempt a second more sinister attack on our livelihood? Are you willing to risk it? Is it worth it?
Think about it. In your gut you know something is off. Don’t ignore that voice.
Everyone is depending on it, whether they know it or not.
Please God, rescue our nation. Rescue our world. It is so hard to really see what is happening, has been for decades, maybe longer. But you see it all. You see all of it behind the veil. Rescue us, Lord. Help us to see. Confuse the enemy’s tongue. Let the breaks go our way. Help us, help us, Lord.
Hmmm. No one in history ever thinks it can happen to them. Until it does. Optimism bias. It is actually a term in the field of psychology. It is very, very real. It is the bias that makes a student mock Anakin Skywalker and his fall to the dark side, assuming he or she could never possibly be so gullible.
“But God said to him, thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee, and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?” (Lk 12:20).
I am reminded of another example of this optimism bias, a non-political one, when in the year 79, Mount Vesuvius was coughing up warnings to the citizens of Pompeii, Italy before the eventual catastrophic explosion, one of the worst in European history, yet so many of them stayed in the city and were merrily going about their business as usual.
It is a hurricane party near the shore that turns disastrous when [the storm] arrives without a smile on her face.
It is what comes before the storyline in a novel like 1984.
Or Fahrenheit 451.
I think about the people I love. My family. My friends. My future wife and possible children she may have. I am concerned for them. I want Heaven for them. All I can do is hope that they are in the right place with God at any given moment, that optimism bias has not made them fall asleep to the very serious spiritual warfare raging around us at all times, especially right this very second.
Alas, in the end, what really can I do except give breadcrumbs of the information I come across and ultimately surrender the rest to God? If I am wrong and I pontificate too much, then they’re less likely to listen to me and others if and when the big one comes. I have to shun the boy who might be crying wolf, speak of the potential evil in a whisper, and give every single ounce of my trust and prayer to Mary. As the perfect Mother, she will handle it, she will take care of the ones I love, and so much more.
20 APRIL
HANGING BY NAILS FROM THE CROSS, Jesus gifted his very own Mother to the entire human race. He gave her to all people, of all ethnic backgrounds and of all systems of belief. Even in her momentous appearances at Fatima, she comes to a village with the name of Muhammad’s own daughter. She is a Mother for all peoples.
It must hurt her terribly to see her America divided along racial lines as it has been for so long. Sure, it may appear as if everyone is in the Covid-19 situation together, but the divisions forming even within that context illustrates that the spirit of discord is still there. In other words, it won’t take much for us to be ignited once again with the race war and forget about Covid-19. The fact that it is an election year doesn’t help.
It must make our Mother suffer to know that so few of us care to understand the incredible complexities and nuances of every race and every human being our Father made. “Black” and “white” are arbitrary creations, fashioned and nurtured by truly evil hands. One part of my heritage, Italian-American, provides an example of this. I’m not even going to get into the other part, Acadian French, and what awful things that people had to endure. This history involves those Acadian French, what we know now as Cajuns, being shackled with forced labor in Canada, America, and even in the Caribbean.
Yes, that means slavery. Not to mention other atrocities anyone reading this can feel free to explore.
But for this book, and its prevailing theme of motherhood, I want to give just a brief glimpse of the discrimination my grandparents on my Rosalie’s side received.
For those who now consider Italian-Americans “white”—if anyone even knows “Italian-American” actually holds such delineation in our country and history—understand that it wasn’t always so. Italian-Americans were once thought of as absolute scum in this country, a stereotype specifically preyed on in Chicago by the Saul Alinsky story mentioned earlier, and explored in the film A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Indeed, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891—and the victims were Italian-Americans, people that would be considered “white” today. What was the reaction of our country’s leaders to these lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet the president, famously said it was “a rather good thing.” The response in The New York Times on March 16, 1891 referred to the victims of the lynchings as “… sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.” An editorial the next day argued that “Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans….” John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be the governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.”
Italian-American Anthony Carroccio once wrote, “Being Italian from a tough Italian neighborhood I felt the residue of racism, and so did my family especially in the more established neighborhoods. However, we never defined ourselves by how others treated us. That’s what frustrates me about the world today…everybody cries racism.”
According to vocabulary standards set by government and media, not to mention our school system, I should be considered Italian-American. But that would mean every person’s unique heritage would have to be respected, which would create far too many nuances for the wicked Saul Alinsky model to work on our society. The construct must remain simple, and so it did—through meticulous planning and patience. Infiltration into media and the school system had to take place.
Over time, with the stealth of a glacier creeping south from the pole, uniqueness and nuance among peoples transformed into arbitrary groups often labeled and identified by color. This narrative the enemy began long ago was set up to brainwash us. The rules changed in order for many ethnic groups to be lumped together as “white,” while African-Americans remain African-American and linked directly to being slaves. Of course, once again to fit the narrative, we were made not to know or to ignore the fact that it was also African-Americans that betrayed their own people and were the sellers of those very slaves. I’ll never forget the time I said this in class and one of my black students said smugly, “I don’t know about that one.”
The reason for this cover-up is simple, and is straight from the Alinsky playbook. The key for the wolf to succeed is the set-up of this arbitrary ideological war between sides I’ve been discussing, and thus the creation of an enemy. To fit the media’s narrative on race and keep these warring “opposites” in place, I must be called “white” to create a simple foil to “black.” It makes for a cleaner story, a more hate-filled one, devoid of any of the true complexity that makes up our country’s citizenry. Pit one dog against another and watch the carnage with bloodthirst, waiting for both to be destroyed enough before you take them both over, all the while pretending to be the friend of the “victim” against the “enemy” the whole time.
Once again, it’s divide and conquer. It is just one way many in the Nazi-infiltrated media and deep state are brainwashing us—and have been for well over a century.
If you don’t believe this because you’ve never heard of it before, just consider a simple question. When was the last time you heard the term Italian-American on the news? Irish-American? Acadian-French-American?
All of these groups have a history of being discriminated against here—right here in America. Yet all of them now are considered white and privileged in America.
Even a largely Hispanic man will be called white if it fits the narrative when a young black man is killed. Of course he would go right back to being Hispanic if the story in question involved someone white. This very fact played out before a national audience in 2012 to 2013 with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
This idea of sides or binaries was the driving force behind my teaching units from 2001-2011. I worked with students to decipher how those sides could be reconciled, how so oftentimes both sides are speaking truth but don’t see how the true enemy stages things to keep each at the other’s throats.
We are seeing it as we speak with Covid-19.
Even now in my new school and with new responsibilities, the class discussions very oftentimes maneuver in that direction. My perspective on this societal phenomenon is predicated on a Native American myth called “The Two Wolves,” a short parable about a good wolf and a bad wolf and how they choose to view what comes their way in life. Beyond any doubt, this Saul Alinsky duality trap is real, and it is vicious. Seeing the staged binaries in the historical context of the Wolf film aids in understanding this Covid-19 phenomenon, and certainly makes sense of why racism is seemingly such a nefarious and never-ending issue in our country.
See how cunningly and patiently Satan has moved while we have all been asleep, focusing on other merry things in our secular culture? We see it and hear it in the media, yet even if the whole of our instinct tells us something about it is amiss, we believe it anyway. Mind control has been the reality of our television sets for decades, and I am sickened that I am just now discovering the full extent of it. Watch the Wolf film and you will understand so much more. We as a country abandoned God a long time ago, leaving a crack the size of the Pacific Ocean for the Evil One to slip through.
Our one saving grace, however, may be that part of our abandonment was dictated by the illusion’s influence itself; perhaps God will understand this, that maybe we never really had a puncher’s chance, and will give us a real opportunity to make things right in this country. As I look at our heavy, heavy history back through the centuries, I’m not really sure we have ever had that chance. The mind control has been that deep. This is one of the things that gives me hope. I believe God wants to give his faithful a chance, and I believe he and his Son are extending that hope through the nurturing, merciful touch of Mary.
All of this, this clash of good and evil, reminds me of our Blessed Mother and her apparitions at Fatima in the final years of World War I, starting on May 13, 1917. She appeared to three young Portuguese children, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta. She came to promote world peace, to warn against the errors of communism, to inspire a spirit of reparation, and to urge the world to pray the Rosary in order to attain it all.
It was a prophetic message, one that announced the century of blood that was the 1900s, a time period that provided mankind with a collision of ideals that are continuing to war for the soul of America—whether we are aware of it or not.
Mary’s appearances at Fatima have universal implications, as I have pondered on at length in recent days. Incidentally, they have also provided me with the central Marian mythology for my personal journey, specifically since 2016.
It was at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Lafayette, through the direction of Fr Michael Russo, that I returned to the Mass in earnest in the spring of that year, which included a Lent where I was introduced to a Marian title I’d never heard of, and have since come to honor many times—the Undoer of Knots. In 2017, May 6, I completed my First Five Saturdays devotion, another request of Mary at Fatima. I was expecting a blessing, and sure enough I received. Little did I know that the blessing would come in the form of my mother being put in the hospital, to my family planning her funeral, to seeing her miraculously find her way back to us, all in a little under a month’s time.
My knowledge of the word “Fatima” goes back even further than that. I remember when I played basketball in junior high at St Joe, the name Fatima sounded scary to me, like we had no shot against this Fatima-sounding Goliath. It was one of those silly kid things you look back on as an adult and laugh at. In fact, when Mary mentioned the errors of Russia to the three children, they had no idea what she was talking about; Lucia is on record as saying she thought Russia was the name of a “mean lady.” It was once like that for me with Fatima….
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[1] All the mainstream media outlets that matter, including those that go beyond the news, are owned by just six corporations. Down from 50 in the early 1980s. The dozens and dozens of options we think we have is a front. See “Operation Mockingbird,” maybe through DuckDuckGo, because deep-state Google will censor the term and call it a right-wing conspiracy theory.
