Let’s Not Catch 66
I bounce between the capture of the evil dictator! story and the story about Micah Kim dying of the flu to make a point about a deeper evil today, the same evil all Americans really should be cognizant of by now.
A catch-22, to simply quote Wikipedia, is a paradoxical situation from which we cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations. The term was coined by Joseph Heller, who used it in his 1961 novel Catch-22.
There is, however, a modern tale being spun, a horror tale written by government, media, and the entertainment industry, where the contradiction is much more harrowing.
And every chapter of this tale begins with something simple—that little electronic screen.
A “new threat” is always in arrival mode—often wearing the familiar costume of illness, contamination, dictatorship, and emergency language—followed by the predictable demand that we outsource discernment to the very institutions we swear we’ll never trust again after the last psyop. When we’re bombarded through that electronic screen—particularly with appeals to emotion and children or with the fear of an ever-looming boogeyman—the default assumption should be one thing and one thing only: psyop. The reason is that fear, however dressed (so many outfits for Maduro!), moves the soul out from under God and into the hands of men and the “magick” of ancient forces that do not love us.
In other words, we are asked to trust the very people who can practically force us to weep, in another viral story this past weekend, over a child we don’t even know—while so many of those same institutions have poisoned every child born in this country for the last century.
Let’s not even get into their bloodlust for the unborn.
We have to learn how to pay attention to what the screen demands we think, no matter if the “news story” or viral post is true or not. And while no one is perfect—and I certainly have my blind spots—it still stuns me how people have not caught on to some of the simplest precepts of this narrative war through which God Himself is leading us.
For example, how is 60 Minutes at the ready with a full-blown story and analysis, complete with video narrative and interviews, practically right in the middle of a hot button news story still in the process of playing out? They were talking the Maduro story after the Broncos and Chargers finished up on the tube yesterday evening like it was a story from last January.
Does this not make us question?
Sure, once you see it, you can never unsee it. But the year 2025 made me believe something counter to what I’d been hoping—most of us don’t even want to see it. Not really.
FURTHER READING
Invaluable Venezuela | August 2024
Trump Election Gives Chance to Revisit Invaluable Venezuela | November 2024
The Potential Catch-22 of Rejecting Fear and the Woke Establishment | April 2024
The Potential Trap
Regarding the flu story, there could be a trap here, I suppose, if you want to call it that: what if one of these threats one of these days is real? What if one day it truly is a killer flu, or a truly evil dictator, and the danger is not imaginary? Then the catch-22 tightens. If you distrust the Hegelian Dialectic “solution” pre-planned and provided by our overlords, you are labeled heartless. If you comply, you may be surrendering your body, your conscience, and your freedom to receive the sacraments to a machine that knows you only as a data point—and a soul to harvest.
Order 66 does not end with blasters in a Star Wars movie. It begins and ends with a commandment.
The very first one.
That commandment gives God Almighty not only love and respect around our busy lives, but primacy. Worshipping Him and attaining eternal life with Him should be the paramount energy running through a society.
Yet the commandment of that society is always the opposite: safety in this life is the highest good, and therefore we must do whatever it takes to ensure that that happens, even handing over the principle of primacy to our overlords. And once such misplaced authority expands, it never shrinks back to its old size. It lingers—like a new ingredient added to a dish that is eventually the only thing you can taste.
This cycle has been churning for decades and decades, and depending on who you ask, perhaps even centuries.
Some really smart folks argue and argue well that true Christians never really had an ally in government even in the very beginning.
Hm.
This is where our “trauma events” motif in recent months intersects the catch-22 conundrum in many of our feeds today. Trauma events don’t merely horrify or sadden; they corral. They compress a population into a single emotional posture, a most overpowering memetic energy, and then the “obvious” social response—which invites the overlords’ policy response—“organically” appears: silence, shaming, new definitions of love, sudden concern for Catholic families, new coordination between agencies, and the real kicker—new hit lists for the people simply trying to remind folks of how staged everything about that last virus was.
It wasn’t that long ago, my friends. Indeed, it is never-ending.
The mechanism rarely begins with the end goal, with the law; it begins culturally—stigmatize, conflate, normalize—until an entire people, whom we thought had finally learned its lesson, is stealthily brought back to the same conclusion. The State merely arrives to ratify what the mind has already accepted. Once the crowd feels the conclusion en masse, it becomes easy to codify it against them.
What is happening now, in general but also with the Maduro story, is why I spent so much time in the past scaffolding as an educator the support of Trump and seeing the good in what was happening because of him simultaneously with the caveat that we had better be detaching ourselves from both him and the Republican-Democrat dialectic.
There are well-meaning people following Order 66 from Chancellor Palpatine as we speak.
Do we think we’re not being programmed just because the electronic heads agree with us on boys in girls’ bathrooms?
We’ve seen pulls on our heartstrings with these illnesses before. We’ve seen regime change before. And many of us have come to conclusions that were right about the world we must be consistent with now.
What does any of this have to do with the Feast of Epiphany, the Christmas season, and this new year 2026?
Only everything.
We Must Have Our Own Epiphany: The Point Isn’t This Life
This Epiphany, Christmas season through February 2, and a new year are not a scented candle competing for attention. It can be a coordinated time of training—watchfulness, restraint, memory, the refusal to be managed by panic or sadness with folks we don’t even know, with Mockingbird media news stories that never stopped lying to us. The world wants you reactive about fears in this life, because a reactive man is a governable man, a man blind to the real goal of eternal life. The Church, when she still remembers she is the Church Militant and not the community house for everyone or pep rallies with lasers and lights, forms Christian soldiers who can suffer without surrendering their conscience, who can grieve without being herded, who can see headlines as headlines—not as marching orders.
The chances of them lying to us on that screen are high. But even if they aren’t, don’t get duped into the emotional play. Keep your heart sharpened on eternal things—on the Four Last Things of death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
Something else the Church taught for centuries.
The modern machine wants unity without the truth of Christ, brotherhood without conversion to Him, peace without the Cross that is the only path to salvation. It is always offering a softer Christ: a therapeutic Jesus who exists to validate our feelings—who “gets us”—while the State “solves” the latest “scare.”
Jesus Christ does not want us acting like wimps with what comes through these screens, no matter what the appearances are. He wants men who can watch without being bewitched.
God put us here because He wants us with Him forever. The first place He insists on ruling is the interior kingdom: the mind, the senses, the will. If we do not learn detachment from these screens and the emotional hijacking they unleash, we will keep confusing the glow of emergency messaging for light—and we will keep trading away the very freedom we claim to defend.
And when it’s all on the line, we will choose people over God, because we think being gooey over people is the same thing as loving Him.
Even when those people are pixelated.
So yes, follow the news. But also notice the patterns. Ask the questions. Wonder if it’s really true, of all the people who die every single day in the world, if it’s logical that we should be bombarded with just one. Wonder if it’s really true, that this American foreign regime change op is truly on the up and up unlike all the other ones.
Christmas, Epiphany, New Year: It is an opportunity to ask God for a rare gift—the ability to step back from the stage, to recognize the script when it repeats, and to refuse the premise that man can engineer health and safety by expanding control.
Because the only escape from the catch-22 is not “being right.” It is being holy.
Even when the screen gives you 66 reasons to believe it.
