“I Wanted More”: A Selection from An Excess Of Love

The following selection comes from my recently released memoir, An Excess Of Love. The book concerns my 12 years teaching at a traditional Catholic school in Connecticut, the long scandalization and strangulation that sect worked on my affection, and why, if one must be idealistic, they must never waste their energies on middle class people. In my own bibulous and pissy way, the story is in fact optimistic; for, when one sloughs off half lovers and hobbyists, one finds out what the Holy Spirit can do with one’s vocation. You may purchase the book HERE.

What I saw in traditional Catholicism, and what I would see with my coming work at St. Esau’s school, was a system which could give secular modernity a run for its money. That is still my conclusion. Nothing in my beliefs changed with the failure of St. Esau’s high school. What drove me from traditional Catholicism, what I am trying to convey in this paper, is how I came to the realization that religious conservatives are too puny to establish their principles in society.

Always have I seen one enemy and one alone, secularism. I still believe the only system which is brawny enough to scotch secularism, at least in the West, is Catholicism. Unfortunately, it is the work of this essay to show how the mighty system of Catholicism is lodged in socio-economic strata which will never be able to establish it as a social reality. This is to say as long as Catholicism is strongest among the middle class there will be no Christendom.

Mission & Sacrifice

We will not dawdle on the history or legal irregularities of the Society Of St. Pius 501(c)3. Others have done this better than I can. It is not our focus here anyway. To grasp the doggedness of the St. Esau’s Project we must look at something more important. We must look at the SSPD’s sense of mission.

The founder of the Society was Archbishop Marcel Proust. He was a missionary in Africa for most of his career. This missionary spirit infused all of the clerics I came across in the SSPD. If one only understands the group from Internet apologetics and the sometimes lame and erratic laymen who frequent their chapels and glory in their pretended affiliation with the Society – for the Society are only the vowed religious and their hirelings – one will miss the fuel which fires the actual SSPD. That fuel is the missionary spirit.

There was additionally a spirit of sacrifice which greatly appealed to me. Everything could be united and supercharged by uniting it with Christ on the cross. No privation was too small to go unnoticed by heaven; no work too obscure but that it could contribute to the salvation of the world. This deeply jived with my total war mentality. Everything for the cause, and the cause was the salvation of everything.

Here were people – I thought – who were bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. They were more pacific than I, I suppose. What I called total war they termed the Little Way. Tomayto-tomahto. Adduced to witness this idea in history were the thousands of martyrs they read out each morning at Prime. And sure, wasn’t auld Jesus the only god worth a sin and a prayer and a beheading.

Diamonds for Souls

Because of my experiences at ‘Round Abouts Danbury, and their coreligionists farther afield, I do not believe traditional Catholics take themselves seriously. No matter how much my creed and praxis matched theirs, I eventually could no longer tarry with them when my final patience was exhausted. When those people take themselves seriously others will take them seriously. It is the work of this essay to explain how I arrived at this conclusion.

Still and all, I do not hesitate to mention that I met a handful of extraordinary people over my 12 years in Tradville, at the school, on pilgrimages, at camps. Wallahi, had I not seen these people I would not believe such men could exist! They were like people out of the books. For a rare few of them Christianity, too, was like a physical thing.

How taken aback I was my first Good Friday to see people emotionally overcome with the theme of the day. I remember one woman composed but forlorn enough to excuse herself from the ceremony. There was one cleric who walked the Camino so intently his toenails fell off afterwards. I saw people turned out by their families for their religious principles. I saw people turn out great addictions with the power of faith. I bloody the noses of not a few broads in this book; by God, though, didn’t I see some of them hold their family together with a will. When all of warm and massaging Postmodernity nibbled on their ears and said, “Divorce, divorce,” they roared back with Cathal Brugha, “I shall not!”

And for those divorced, as the Freemason attorneys reckon such things, I saw traditional Catholics take up their station with lonely Cato in Carthage; I saw these walking wounded from The World embrace singularity and continence in loyalty to their vows when their own married partners went the way of all flesh. The world stares in awe at these last ones. For while their matrimonial loyalty was strange to the world, these everlasting Penelopes were also written off as damaged goods by their haughty coreligionists.

Circumstances provided the pressure, Allahu alam, doctrine and narrative gave the matter, to forge diamonds of their souls. For all the overweening mediocrity I would discover, there were a few good skins at ‘Round Abouts Danbury.

First Contact

When I was young and I was in my day, I first found myself on St. Ignatius’ feast 2005 at the complex which would consume the next 12 years of my energy. I’d have been in the guts of my seventeenth year then. I was greeted by one of their priests, Fr. Habakkuk. He was a rotund man both holy and jolly. Often the genuine version of the former will naturally produce the latter characteristic. As I would find out with nearly every traditional cleric and religious I would come across, he was a man very much a credit to his vocation.

When I rolled in he and an old timer were putting an air conditioner into a window frame. He had the old guy, The Bull McCabe, guide me about the property. Bull McCabe was finishing up a years’ long project of soldering the stained glass windows. They were salvaged from a closed church, which could care less for them, and placed into this new temple. In a nutshell this was traditionalism: salvaging the patrimony of the past for the grateful. The Bull is long dead now but his window panes are as snug as ever. I was eventually taken by him to the office where I was given pamphlets concerning the SSPD by the kindly blue haired secretary.

On my way home I stopped at the Danbury Mall food court. Eating what I still remember was an excellent turkey grinder, I read through the packets and savored the memory of their hospitality.

In Retrospect

It must be understood that the SSPD(c)3 in 2005 was a different creature than it is today. This fundamentally had to do with the second generation of priests – those men ordained by Marcel Proust following their 1988 schism – being in their prime. As with all such ideological groups, this second generation had much of the fire in the belly which motivated their parents to embark on the protestant path before them.

What happened during my temporal footprint is that this second generation would be replaced by younger clerics who had no interaction with the actual Catholic Church nor the spirit that fired their traditional grandsirs. They and their parents were brought up in a traditional Catholicism which was already up and running.

Likewise with the laity. When I was involved with traditionalism we were seeing the third generation of people come up. These were the grandchildren of people who had seceded from Catholicism – or kept the faith when everyone apostatized, as you like. In any case, these ones were the generation I was to teach. I can tell you this rising cohort did not have anything like the grasp of Vatican II-related topics I understood, I who had read myself into the movement at 15. As they say, the first generation builds, the second coasts, the third wrecks the work. This is all of history, sacred and profane. Rinse and repeat.

In line with this, as the years wore on the SSPD would embark on a program of professionalization which would ensconce these dynamics. Pagan, Christian, or Jew, religious or secular, every group that has ever been must inevitably confront a scenario in their growth where they must soften their edges – or water things down, as you like – if they are to grow. Come to think of it, this is something all major languages have done as well. Religion is a group’s soul language, so perhaps we have stumbled on a big principle here. Anyway, during my footprint at ‘Round Abouts Danbury this necessary softening was happening.

All that was a ways off. That summer of 2005 I threw my energy into traditional Catholicism. In short order I began attending their liturgies, going on retreats, and entering into the rhythm of their parish life. A pivotal point would come the following summer of 2006. At that time I attended a pilgrimage which my new church organized. About a year later I was invited to teach at their school.

When the Saints Go Marching In

Before I explain the circumstances which hailed me into the school of St. Corporate Whore Church for the next decade, a word on that summer pilgrimage. This was the incarnation of everything I had hoped for, and more than I had hoped for, about traditionalism. The event went like this.

I worked in those days at a notable fast food chain specializing in roast beef sandwiches. In the best capitalist fashion of doing the most with the least, the night before my holy journey I was up late closing the store. We were understaffed. Circumstances at that time required me to walk some miles home afterwards at midnight. I did not have a car. Indeed I needed to bum a ride to the pilgrimage the next day. I had arranged a lift sight unseen with a man and his wife who would be important in my entry into St. Esau’s a year later. The man’s name was Van Dyke, the wife’s name was Mrs. Van Dyke.

Anyhow, about my fatigue. I worked late into the night the evening before the pilgrimage and walked home afterwards. I awoke early to meet Van Dyke and his wife for the three hour journey from Danbury to the shrine in Upstate New York, the pilgrimage start point. I began the subsequent 10-mile trek under moderate sleep deprivation and fatigue. I only ground down from there. There is something to be said for sleep deprivation. I suppose that’s why religions often use it. It puts one into a different state of mind.

In this triptych – the penny pinching, the fatigue, the determination to press on nevertheless – was the next decade of my life. Here too was the thing which explained the day and the decade: the beauty of that journey.

Labbaik Allahumma Labbaik

At that time the Auriesville Pilgrimage was held around Midsummer. School was just out, the baby priests were making their rounds of first blessings, and the liturgical fireworks finale of Pentecost-Trinity-Corpus Christi-Sacred Heart was fast approaching.

If memory serves, in fact, the Saturday of this pilgrimage was the Vigil Of Pentecost that year. Following the pilgrimage things got to be very quiet on the grounds of St. Corporate Whore’s, and at all Society chapels; so on top of everything there was the consciousness that people would only see each other sporadically over the next few months.

Thus for Northeast trads, regardless of age, the Auriesville pilgrimage was like both the first day of school and the last day of school at once, and the gate of heaven besides. They wanted to make the most of their time together. All of this combined with the natural exuberance of early summer to imbue the day with a fine energy for one so new “to tradition,” as the parlance was.

When we arrived it was the pissing down of rain. Van Dyke left me to my own devices, so I began wandering around. I haven’t the slightest recollection of how this came about, but I ended up in the back of a U-Hall van assisting some young men move equipment around. That year the head of the SSPD, Bishop Bernard Mallard was at Auriesville. This meant that attendance was much bigger than it normally would have been. He was going to preach from the back of the van this rainy morning, and we were getting that set up.

I spent the first half of the pilgrimage with the work crew. The foreman that day was a man who lived in the Retreat House, The Gaffer. I got to know him some in the years ahead and we’d come to get on like a house on fire. On our way to the lunch site, leap-frogging ahead of the pilgrimage, the lunch crew stopped at a gas station for some snacks on The Gaffer. I would find out in after years that this was a yearly ritual, his buying goodies for the lads. I’ve never forgotten this paltry kindness of his, and I don’t think all the guys who cycled through the U-Hall truck over the years ever have either.

Well, after the opening sermon, the step off, and the lunch set up, I walked the second stretch of the pilgrimage.

The weather had broken and a beautiful afternoon presented itself. The rail trail we were using was steaming. The procession went on for several miles. At the front of it teenage boys traded with their fathers in carrying a life-sized cross. Though hollow, that bastard weighed a lot. In time I came to find that traditionalist women loved denim skirts and sneakers for casual wear. As the lot of us were doffing our slickers, or our trash bags if we didn’t have proper coats, the beors took off their shoes. In women of a certain age the braids and bare feet and scapulars is a fetching look.

Yes, it was a pretty sight altogether: the steam and asphalt and the kids, and everyone jabbering out the Rosary and holy songs. A great quote of Brendan Behan’s comes to mind apropos to the mood that afternoon. He says, “I always get grateful and pious in good weather and this was the kind of day you’d know that Christ died for you. A bloody good job that I wasn’t born in the South of France or Miami Beach, or I’d be so grateful and holy for the sunshine that St. Paul of the Cross would be only trotting after me, skull, crossbones and all.”

I remember the sun and humidity and mosquitoes as big as a brick that afternoon. What I remember most is one young mother that day. She was with child. Herself was easy on the eyes which is how I suppose she got to be a mother in the first place. Now there were provisions made for the elderly and the knackered by way of a fleet of golf carts which patrolled the length of the march. She hailed one cart from behind me. As the trolly came trundling by I thought she looked as beautiful and delicate as a butterfly.

I briefly met that couple years later in Syracuse. The Butterfly was with child once again. Our plans that morning were scuppered by her having morning sickness. Her husband, slightly embarrassed by her digestive faux pas, was most generous in joining me for breakfast sandwiches and coffee after holy Mass. I learned after that a job offer eventually sucked the family into the wiles of Ohio and forever out of the East Coast orbit. It’s funny how people come in and out of your life. So it goes.

The last stretch of the hike was up a hill which people dubbed Purgatory Mountain, a la Dante. Some of the religious and the high schoolers from somewhere or other formed ranks on either side. As the balance of the procession hauled its way up the hillock they sang the Litany Of The Saints. It sure felt like Purgatory after 10 miles, or five in my case. At the High Mass which concluded the pilgrimage I nearly fell asleep – standing – during the Creed. I was terribly tired. The sense of completing the pilgrimage was a fine sensation, as the maid said to the soldier.

The Parting Glass

I should never forget that final scene as I prepared to return with my ride to Connecticut. The Shrine was on top of a hill whose head was flat. I’ve never had a problem reconciling the gospel accounts of the Sermon On The Mount vs. the Sermon On The Plain, because this Shrine was located on a plain which sat atop a mount. Because of the tension between the SSPD and the actual Catholic Church, the shrine authorities in fact limited our encampment to a neighboring field and parking lot. It was on the gift store side of the property, and, whatever the canonical status of the trads, their money was good in the store. In God we trust; all others pay cash.

What a scene we had the sultry sun-sinking evening! How the clerics rejoiced in their vocations; yes, how the packs of boys saw each priest a hero as they blessed and shrived and preached the day through; how the women rejoiced in their families; yes, how for one day in common – and women do all things in common – their arrayed minivans and strollers were trophies of defiance towards a sterile modernity which sneered at their fertility; how the children danced to folk music which had struck up from somewhere or other; how the fathers rejoiced in another year of being able to pay for those families. There is something in a pilgrimage completed, and a school year done, which briefly approximates for a man the paying off of a mortgage.

Blessing this bless’d scene were hundreds of sandwiches delivered on platters by the cutest children you ever saw, and plenty of chips and beer besides. It was all paid for by a man as kind as he was anonymous. You’ll remember that Bishop Mallard was at this thing, so all the stops were out for that big man with a big hat. The lot of us blessed the unknown mensch as we downed his drink and ate his food. That lot of us were, indeed, a lot of us, and a very hungry bunch we were after hiking ten miles in the summer sun and singing ourselves through a High Mass.

Since my fourteenth year I have said the breviary. There are many things in this book which must strike you, kind reader, as strange about me. This sentence is the only place where I join you. Yes, I have said the Office since I was 14. What a queer thing to do for one so young. Well, on that holy, hilly pilgrimage plateau I remembered that auld canticle of Jeremiah’s: “Shouting, they shall mount the heights of Zion, they shall come streaming to the Lord’s blessings; The grain, the wine, the oil, the sheep and the oxen; They themselves shall be like watered gardens, never again shall they languish. Then the virgins shall make merry and dance, and young men and old as well.”

By inches the day would come that I would snicker at those clerics as primadonnas, those children as disappointments for cluelessly joining as adults a ruling class bureaucracy fundamentally at war with their nominal Christianity, and those fathers as simps who could not control their wives any sooner than their deracinated society from which this pilgrimage was such a welcome relief.

What of those glowing mammies? Those traditional Catholic mothers, so young and holy and alive on that New York plateau in June of 2006, would in time earn my blackest and immortal opprobrium. All this was in the future, though. With the summer sun westerning as I flopped into Van Dyke’s car to go back home, surfeited on subs and very tired, I saw Catholicism lived. I wanted more.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

O, Sister! On The Nature Of Tyranny & The Resistance Of Schoolmen

Besides conveying personal sentiments to a most precious person, this letter is a pivot between my memoir, An Excess Of Love, and the finale of this triptych concerning nudism, family rearing, and education, Pearls Before Swine. It is a distillation of dynamics which attend The Problem, namely the lateness of the hour, the appropriate response of the republic to the occupation, and the sexual shift which must immediately attend the resistance if the good seeds yet sown are to bear fruit.

Introduction: Rumbles From The Goldfish

Spring ‘24

O, Sister!, Ya, Shaqiqa!,

The time of the hobbyist has passed. There is much work to do and the hour is late.

Any number of people have followed and follow the development of Apocatastasis Institute this decade of glory. I see the statistics on the school’s website and newsletters, I read the correspondence we get, I am flagged down by men about town – most of whom believe I am mad – to speak about the Institute.

The numbers of these things are healthy enough and regular enough to know that if my work is lonely, it is the loneliness of a goldfish in a bowl. But for all the eyeballs the Institute draws, I don’t know how many of the yoes I am still on speaking terms with. I did not make this cold situation, their women did, but that is besides the point.

As you know, I’ve two works out this spring; one on my time in ‘Rounds About Danbury on Holy Saturday, An Excess Of Love, and the other concerning naturism and child rearing on St. Anthony’s Day, Pearls Before Swine. Those are polemical works as soon as they are artistic; they are meant to provoke as soon as they are meant to inform. Patrick Pearse asked Thomas Clarke how to speak at Glasnevin. “Make it hot as hell,” the old jailbird said. “Throw discretion to the winds.” So have I, though even on a good day you’d never say I was the prudent sort. Before these two literary clouds burst, however, a rumble of thunder. I thought it worthwhile here to sketch in miniature the situation and principles which background both coming works; and I thought to do so to those who have been so patient to one so odd: to the Chosen Lady and to her children.

In this we walk a tightrope. Herein we must comprehend a tyranny of massive dimensions and subtle complexity, make allowances for people’s duty of state and ignorant complicity in The Problem, critique us putzers for our incompetence heretofore, and for all these handicaps we must sketch the appropriate response; and we must do all this in brief.

Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming: The Problem

The enormity of The Problem is a daunting thing. Its mass invites one to say with John The Revelator, “Who can make war on the beast?” The vanquishing of this thing has been my sole professional and personal focus for twenty years.

We might bog down in an hundred places when trying to comprehend what exactly is The Problem. It is really quite simple, though. “The Problem” is a catchall for the parasitic social combinations which have arisen in each and all areas of society (i.e., educational, economical, religious, political, telephonic, artistic, etc). These combinations prey on their hosts to the misery and impoverishment of their victims. This situation has obtained because a queer perpetual motion machine has developed. It has been made to develop by wicked men with wicked ends.

The Problem has engineered a system with two lines which meet in a node. On the one it has finessed a culture of child rearing and formal education which primes a man to be a lifelong victim – perhaps a sucker – for The Problem. On the other node, as The Problem is energetic (or “spiritual”), The Problem has equally finessed a culture where the most promising of its chattel – for we are all but livestock for this system – will be enlisted to be the arms and ears and eyes of this selfsame oppression.

The node where these things meet is the child. It is the education of the child which will largely decide if he will be a saint or a parasite in later years. The soul and heart and the mind of the child is the battlefield. The Problem knows this. Do we?

The Nature of the Occupation

Tyranny is but a spirit. If it is to hove into men it needs arms and legs. What is different with our tyranny is that it has so successfully made those it has conquered believe they are free. Nothing in my historical knowledge offers a parallel to this success, to convince a nation of shackled surfs they are the freest beings in the history of Man. We walk down the street and see a society whose each storefront, bank, and civil office sits upon the republic as a conquering army – and this isn’t polemical, their own legal system is clear on this point (you may start with the Lieber Code) – and we are bid believe these enemy combinations mean us well and are us.

The nature of the occupation is such that decade by decade it takes millions of little boys and girls and turns them into its pining servants. It is hard to believe, Ya Shaqiqa, but banks turn couples out of the home they raised their families in, the state sends CPS agents to scare young mothers to vaccinate their babbies, and police pigs pull over women and children to shake them down on the side of the road. Astaghfirullah! I cannot imagine such things, but I am told they happen very close to home.

Now it is true that all decent mankind would gladly disembowel themselves before being found in the costume of a banker, a CPS lackey, or a police pig, but we are faced with the reality that The Problem hasn’t the slightest difficulty enlisting willing accomplices into their tyranny by the millions each year. How has The Problem done this? By subtly inclining each and every aspect of pedagogy in its favor.

It is the bounden duty of parents and teachers to instill such an ethic into youth that they would never entertain going over to the enemy to staff their systems of oppression. The republic fails every time a youth grows up to become a landlord, police pig, ghost writer, attorney, AMA doctor, or CPS eunuch; every time any of the offices of oppression are staffed with those who were once little boys and girls.

Every work in the class, and every moment with the family, must build the contrary spirit; the spirit of holiness, charity, and freedom.

Iron Sobriety

The months contemporary to this letter’s composition have seen the savaging of the Palestinians in the worst fitna in eighty years of crimes done them. I saw a bombed up little girl in hospital; she only had one arm. She said her limbs had gone to heaven before her. I saw a father amputate the leg of his maiden daughter on their kitchen table. I’ve seen again and again the Yahudi telling refugees to flee to “safe zones” only for their AI targeting system – named “The Gospel” – to blow the families to smithereens. And I’ve watched this happen while American Christians have snickered, and yawned, and egged on the colonists and their rabbis.

Mark my words, this level of violence will be used on all non-hackers the world over in due course. Palestine is but one open air testing ground of the archons. This violence is the natural conclusion of The Problem if left unchecked. Always does this reality background my every word and work; and when you wonder why I do strange things and say hard words, O Sister, it is because I know the iron sobriety of what is coming.

In the face of this overwhelming tyranny we must be patient in our daily duty. Our trials are nothing compared to what the Palestinians have known, but we ought to be prepared to feel their chains in due course. Part of the tyranny is provoking the helpless. I have seen the Yahudi stealing the bicycles of children only to throw them in dumpsters, and I have seen them dacking old men in front of their grandkids. There is nothing the abused can do in their slavery but move on. We must always brace ourselves for the patience of such a situation. Sabr, sabr, sabr; patience, patience, patience.

Our sorts are not serious people. We dick around with half-baked ideas and slogans, and flake out the first time drama or fear is dangled before our nose. (B’Zeus, look at how the Connecticut munafiqun have treated me all these years, and me the best friend they ever had.) When our children are double and triple amputees, and when we haven’t eaten in five days, and when white phosphorus is sprinkling down, and burning our faces and flesh down to the bone, perhaps our sorts will stop playing games. When that day comes, Apocatastasis Institute will not seem so strange to people; on that day they will see what I was trying to head off. And should it not come, is there not wisdom in living each day as if it’s your last?

The Solution

Some years ago I wrote in The Trotsky Train, “Only when there’s stability to society, when men own their capital, when they memorize the poetry of the land, when local musical compositions and books proliferate, when the churches are packed each morning, standing room only, for Lauds, and the same twice over for Sunday Mass, then the scholar can take a cigarette break, but only for a minute before he’s back at it again. It is your work, it is my work. There is your end [telos] to education, there is your wealth, there is your success.” Strangely enough, it was rather favorable religious sentiments like this which caused the church rats of ‘Round Abouts Danbury to run me out on a rail. This has always been the program of Apocatastasis Institute.

The hope to scotch The Problem is, as it has always been, the youth. Here we do not praise them as The World does, for their vapid qualities, their vices, and the ease with which they can be separated from their money. We praise the youth for what God saw in Daniel and Apostle John, St. Lawrence and Claire Crockett; we praise them for their gaiety and idealism, their passion and their purity. God has given the talents, it merely remains for pedagoges to keep these virtues from being strangled out of them.

The Headwinds

Four gales and five roar in the face of educational and social reform. In no particular order they are the dominance of visual media over written/oral culture, the absence of living examples to model our efforts on, our double-minded mien, the nesting of present Christianity within the bourgeoisie, and the feminine spirit out of order.

The shift in the last hundred years from a text-based to a visual society has brought with it many social changes. One of these is that abstract ideas become increasingly difficult for people to comprehend. It’s tangential to this letter, but more than anything else this is why there has been such a falling away from conventional religion since World War II; people literally cannot imagine abstract ideas like grace, God, or salvation any longer. Or look at that naked lecture I gave; people were so caught up with the visual novelty they never stopped to hear what I was talking about. What was it I was talking about?

Anyway, this difficulty to grasp abstraction isn’t a matter of native intelligence but of mental muscles which have been left go to seed. All that has kept school attendance so robust these last decades was social-cum-economic pressure to do so. Now that that economic incentive has been found wanting, we see interest in formal education rapidly recede. And into this declining interest and rising suspicion of high schools and colleges comes Apocatastasis Institute. What timing! B’Moses, if it was raining soup John Coleman’d be out there with a fork.

Next we see that, having grasped The Problem, the lot of us have no living models to form our response on. We are trying to revive familial, religious, social, and economic cultures from books and blogs. This necessarily produces clunky and incomplete results.

Another headwind we breast is our double-minded mien. We both hate this system, or at least we comprehend certain failures of the present order, and we want to fit into it. Do you remember that panel you so kindly invited me to? As the event was winding down I raised the question as to what society homeschooling was forming. I’ll never forget the looks on the women’s faces; it was clear the question had never occurred to them. They had no concept of the social aspect of formal learning.

This raises the next theme which will be so prominent in my coming writings, the futility of Christianity nesting in the middle class. Here there is very much an overlap with the previous point about our being double-minded, for the principles of Christ are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeoisie. The split of affections between those who want grace and respectability, those who want God and mammon, those who want the Beatitudes and barratry, are the reason why St. Esau’s high school failed, and the reason which has fundamentally recessed each parental tantrum I have weathered these twenty years.

We finally get to the most furious gale and the metatrend of An Excess Of Love and Pearls Before Swine, the feminine energy out of line. This is the gorilla in the room. However it is we describe our worldviews – different on a thousand particulars, O Kind One, but marvelously the same – our people are really just as afflicted by the same dominant feminine energy we associate with other sectors of society. Until this is put into line no social reform will last.

Duties Of State

Like all competent criminal and parasitic enterprises, The Problem has carefully fostered our complicity in our slavery. The vampire will have his prey invite him in; the street gang will compromise each new member in criminality; prions will hijack a host for its own ends. We have put the noose around our neck because everything from the cradle has suggested it to us.

Attending any invention of this complicity is overwhelming guilt. It is a spurious guilt for it is the “guilt” of a duped man. There is in fact no guilt, but The Problem must make their victim believe there is. There is in truth only one way a man can be guilty after learning he has been taken in by The Problem: that he continues the ways and days of Jahiliyyah after he knows the truth.

Emotional intelligence is sorely neglected in family rearing, formal education, and the workaday world, and the neglect of so vital an aspect of life has consequences. One of the consequences of this pseudo-guilt is that people lock up in defense.

Told that they damaged their child in one bogus John Rockerfeller medical procedure or another, they continue passing down trauma rather than admit the error theretofore; told they enslaved their child in a LEGAL NAME which will rob and reeve his every piece of property, which will put him under the galling yoke of the Bar Association, for the remainder of his days, they continue with birth certs; told they wasted the childhood of their offspring in an educational system designed to form workers hungry for strangers’ smiles and frowns, they continue. Only here is culpability, only here is guilt. As Oscar says, “He who sins a second time wakes a dead soul to pain/ And makes it stain it spotty shroud, and makes it bleed again.”

Still and all, every allowance must be made not only to salve the conscience of the abused but to make allowance for various compromises too. Not all men have the same duty of state, and we must never forget we are under an occupation. The resistance of a single man to The Problem is different from the resistance of a mother; the resistance of the able-bodied is different from the resistance of the so-called disabled; the resistance of a child is different from the resistance of an old couple. The nature of opposition is different based on circumstance, the spirit is the same. Only a broad, catholic (sic), and masculine spirit will be able to instill and marshall this sentiment properly for the liberation of the people.

This too is a fine line. Men no longer read for regular lengthy periods, so men do not have the mental muscles to grasp nuance. People cannot grasp our situation, a crisis which speaks gently to those used, abused, and complicit with The Problem; roughly to the active partisans of The Problem; and impatiently with pretended foes of this abuse whose incompetence has stalled out proper resistance. There is no nuance, and so people fall into us vs. them, black and white, thinking. One of the first casualties in such an environment is humor, at least the good sort. Our masters think in grays, in complexity, and that is why we are in slavery and they are not.

Sabr: The Generational Nature Of The Resistance

O Sister, the Solution is simple: preserve the natural virtues of youth – gaiety, idealism, passion, and purity – in the student until death; titanic is the vision and patience to effect this. The Problem has aligned the entirety of its social institutions to killing or co-opting these very things, all the soon to make an adulted slave. To nurture the above virtues into later life we need to scotch trauma, cultivate the four wealths, and be a fulcrum of unity.

Everything in this order is designed to traumatize men. From conception to burial the life of man on this plantation is one compounded hurt after another. I do not speak of the natural slings and arrows of this valley of tears but the carefully fostered hurts designed into our child rearing behaviors, and those of afteryears.

It was as clear as clear can be that the response of families last June and October vis-a-vis the nudist aspect of Apocatastasis’ work was triggering a great deal of trauma in those individuals which had nothing to do with me or the school. I mean in Pearls Before Swine to advocate for naturism in the classroom, family sleeping and bathing, and related health approaches which will diffuse or altogether do an end-run around designed hurts. How the devils of evil suspicion roared – or rather, texted – their filthy insinuations at – or rather, about – me. Apocatastasis Institute will exercise and heal those possessed harpies yet.

And what was the subject of that nude talk I gave in Manhattan, the one all the dusty Karens were clucking about with their innuendo? Vulnerability and mortality. It is really only in vulnerability that an high trust society can develop; it is only in consciousness of our mortality that we can be grateful. Let the classroom be such a wholesome training ground.

O Kind One, to end trauma only brings one to the mark; it only brings one to the starting gate of life; it only brings one from the red, as the capitalists say, to $0. An healthy society needs to be rich in four things if they are to be sane. They must be rich in spiritual, cultural, social, and economic capital, and they must be ranked in this order, if they are to be lasting. The religious bounty of the community must be great; each man’s cultural knowledge, contribution, and engagement ought to be robust; our interpersonal comportment must always be in honor, and our social trust must be of a high level; and if a man must waste his time in commerce, at least let each and all own the means of his livelihood. How will we do this? By instilling these sentiments and training in his schooldays.

Finally, it falls to pedagogues and schools to form the fulcrum of unity in society. Stimulated by telephonic media, our society is fragmenting into a thousand pissy bubbles. Whilst stroking the egos of the partisans this only serves The Problem, for a people must be divided if they are to be conquered. After the church, the school is the place where a common ground may be cultivated free of factionalism and denominalization. Alas, I’m afraid the Church is no longer interested in any social role beyond pocketing checks from the DNC, so it falls to schoolmen alone to serve this social end.

Barefoot & Happy

Many moons ago, long before Apocatastasis, and long before even Nancy, before the saints ran my patient hide off from St. Esau’s, I saw a vision of what education could be. I saw a sight of barefoot teachers and learners allowed to live their vocations sans meddlers. O Good Sister, I cannot say our educational interaction has been perfect, muscha, but it has been as perfect as this vale of tears will allow. You and your dear husband come as close as I can hope to that oldsome vision: vulnerable lot we, we’re trying to make sense of this crazy life, and to milk the classroom for this end. Thank you.

Hark! A Voice like Thunder Spake

The men must rise at this hour. I do not say they must rise in physical force, for – should The Problem persist – that is a duty which obliges a future generation. (Arrah, it falls to us to rear this generation.) No, ours is not the generation capable of the gun. I say all healthy men and communities are those who can handle the gun; it is an altogether different matter whether they ought to do this.

Save for the shining example of the Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan, if the Muslims – a spiritually, familiarly, physically, and culturally healthier bunch than we – were unable to physically check The Problem in two decades of immortal and heroic struggle, there is no way the men of America will. Unlike the robust Musslemen, we North Americans are intoxicated, fat, estrogenated, sexually dissipated, and fragmented into an hundred political and a thousand religious parties.

So how must men rise? They must rise in leadership. The most pressing area where they are to do this is in religion, for The Problem is really a spiritual sickness; where grace, sacraments, and charity recede, like a tired, sugared, stressed body, The Problem comes in like a cold.

On the heels of a masculine religious revival, men are to rise intellectually; the working man as soon as the bourgeois, the Hottentot as soon as the stockjobber. The most immediate area where intellectual leadership bids us to labor is in formal education.

Querelle des Dames

You said I burned bridges. That is a dangerous metaphor to one so vain as I, for it is too tempting to make a comparison with Horatius! (It is Lent and I must resist temptation.) But let us stick with that analogy nonetheless, I burn bridges. So I speak bluntly if I speak at all: women ought now cede instructional roles in all educational modalities towards students aged at- or after puberty. Let us honor what good they have done, particularly in homeschooling, and show them the door. They have done some good yes; now let us magnify their labors, and to do this there must be a sexual changing of the guard.

The reality is that alternative education has stalled out for fifty years because it is almost completely a feminine enterprise, and it is not given to women to see beyond their family concerns. At this point men must lead in alternative education or the whole enterprise should stop wasting everyone’s time and fold up. As it stands, The Problem which alt ed-ers apprehend, and the educational Solution which will dismantle The Problem, cannot be shouldered by women. They have had half a century to prove themselves and they have stalled out at a kitchen table.

How loath I am to say this. In their diapers and in their heels, I have loved the daughters of the republic as they are, something like a sister or a daughter. Surely every little girl was once a snowflake in heaven. From their sundressed car seats to their seven year old sandaled feet, from their chokered necks and sixth grade scuffed knees to their prom rigouts and blushing smiles, I have gone out of my way to not so much as shake their hands. More times than not I cannot bring myself to look into their eyes, so fair are they. And horndog I, don’t I put the souls and virtues of Rachel Corrie and Israa Jaabis and Donna Mcguire on blast like none other, and don’t I hope my daughters will be strong as they were strong?

Yet for two decades I have watched formal education strangled by the feminine spirit. I saw St. Esau’s high school destroyed by menstrual rags (see, An Excess Of Love), and I have seen Apocatastasis Institute hampered again and again by the same (see, Pearls Before Swine). I was content for many years to cover their nakedness, to excuse the shortcomings which always attend women in the classroom. I said The Problem was big and that we needed each and all hands on deck were we to instantiate The Solution. I do not say that now, for I’ve seen again and again the unmoored feminine energy degrade our time in the class, waste our resources, and stall out in a stunted grasp of The Problem and The Solution.

In the essays to come I did not want to shove against the feminine energy as forcefully as I did, but the behavior of those Connecticut broads last year forced my hand. I have seen white trash behavior from that bunch, but last year was beyond the bounds. It is clear that sort is a liability to everything they profess. I love what they profess, and so I have shoved back against those liabilities. They were drunk, but not with wine; they staggered, but not with strong drink. Perhaps my writings will cause them to sober up.

The End Of The Matter

I thought it worthwhile to condense for you those major principles which background my coming works, An Excess Of Love and Pearls Before Swine. Besides, these are the assumptions I take into those dinnerly conversations which are such a welcome break from the administrative duties which so obsess my days of late. I imagine that I should become persona non grata when my projects are published, but we must grasp the sobriety of the moment and the weight of The Problem. If there must be a Cato in Carthage let it be me; let me sit in the ashes and rubble to make my point to the world. And if men will say I am mad after those essays drop, they at least won’t say that I lied as their teachers lied, that I was frivolous as their parents were frivolous, or that I sat around when there was work to be done.

You in your way, Shaqiqa, and I in mine, must keep our heads about us as we reestablish formal education on a free, holy, and agentic footing; and whilst instilling the durability of youthful virtues in afteryears, let us both continue being gay, idealistic, passionate, and pure.

Always children we, Sister,

I kiss your head, and your feet, and your hands,

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

Featured: Gust of Wind, by Jean-François Millet; painted ca. 1872.

School of Prayer, Medicine of Life: The Divine Office as Social Salve

Setting Out

One of the features which has accented Apocatastasis Institute from the word go has been the inclusion of the Divine Office in our daily schedule. I mean in this essay to explain why this is. Other and better men have done other and better jobs at explaining what the Office is, its mechanics, history, and spirituality. We are not rehashing that necessary material here. If you are deficient in those sciences, dear reader, put aside this paper and digest those topics before returning. By way of house rules, I will be using the terms Divine Office, the Office, the Discipline, the Liturgy Of The Hours, the Prayer (with a capital p), and the Liturgy (with a capital L) interchangeably.

In this exploration we will look at the Divine Office as a medicine for social wounds, one that is rightly administered in a school setting as schools ought to be directed toward this same end. It is a salve for the wounds of secularism, abstracted pedagogy, personal foibles, and historical accidents. Like any treatment it does not contain the totality of the solution. It nudges, it points, it guides towards the correction.

The Sickness

We are unrooted. Just as one’s posture can be thrown off by flat feet or a bum knee, from unrootedness come a flurry of other ills such as a low trust society, lack of agency, and discouragement. Exploiting these social and personal failures are unscrupulous men operating in unscrupulous combinations. Foundations once destroyed, what can the just do (cf. Ps.10/11)?

Part of our unrootedness stems from economic developments at first affecting Western man, and after the Second World War, all mankind. Part of this condition stems from deliberate schemes to make unrooted men. Modern education, marital laws, and telephonic communication, for example, appear deliberately to trip up natural personal, familial, and social harmony. Part of our unrooted condition is our own concupiscence, particularly our going with the flow of deracinating and deracinated culture. We may blame social institutions all we like, but at a certain point we must hold ourselves responsible for our cooperation with McWorld. The Office is a skeleton upon which to hang real life once more, and a school setting is an opportune place to do this. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and McWorld wasn’t either. If we are to build Christendom, we will need discipline. Hour by hour, brick by brick, the Divine Office is an handy trowel for this erection.

The Myopia of Alt Ed

When I was a little bit younger, I was quite enamored with the educational critique of homeschoolers and unschoolers. To a certain
extent my subsequent exasperation with those communities is that they have not developed their insights into anything more significant than personal necessity. Singular interest is the mark of an immature mind. It is the manful intellect which grasps that the individual is a cell of a larger society; it is the manful body which labors to bring this about.

Howsomeever, I remember at one conference a mot just out of high school—or at least she was of that age, as unschoolers of course don’t go to high school—was asked how to make unschooling more popular. I’ll never forget what she said; it was wisdom in a nutshell, for all true wisdom is pithy. The girl said she didn’t want unschooling to become popular because more people would necessarily mean a watering down of that modality.

Well, she was right. For those of us who have dedicated our energies towards alternative education, we ought to have been careful what we wished for. Our educational critique has become popularized, and much of that critique has become sloganized. As so often happens in history, the subtleties of maxims which slogans assume are lost over time and after a while only the naked maxims are known without the scaffolding of assumptions the sayings originally assumed.

Thus, in Rabbinic Judaism their concept of “the Torah” migrated from the Pentateuch to first include, then prefer, the Talmud. This enlarged “Torah” became unwieldy and was condensed into a third collection, the Gamara, before the rebbes ignited a “back to sources” reaction which began the same cycle of condensation-cum-back to basics cycle again.

In the same way the Christian Fathers were summarized in the Summa and Sentences of Scholasticism which were further condensed into catechisms before triggering a “back to sources” Reformation which shortly found—to the horror of its instigators—that the meaty “Sola Scriptura” rule of thumb was being taken literally. Likewise, the educational critique has fallen fast and far in the last fifty years.

All of this is a long way of saying that men do not think twice in saying, and they’ve all started podcasts to say, that “Public schools should be ended,” “We don’t need schools,” or, my favorite, “Schools are brainwashing camps.” Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone! How men of mature years say such things without reddening at the stupidity of such statements is a testimony to what the media, even—perhaps especially—the conservative media, does to one’s thinking process. Fifty years ago, the likes of John Holt, Raymond Moore, Ivan Illich, and other early pedagogical pioneers made like statements, but they did so from a place of erudition and nuance. It is we, their unlettered grandchildren, who rehash their ideas sans the mountain of meaning they assumed.

As I have often written, the problem with the rainbow of religious and secular conservativisms is that they have no grasp of solving their problems. They spend so much time talking about how they want things to be that their comprehension of things as they are is retarded. Thus the conserved have a fair knowledge of what’s amiss with industrial learning but they have no ability of how to solve these problems, problems which they assert do great harm to souls. Perplexed, they self-contentedly stall out at, “I only have to worry about my family.” What traitors. To conservatism? No, to mankind. To see an evil and not move might and main to right it is cowardice. If one sees a social problem, and they merely respond to it personally, this is effeminate. Prophet Ezekiel said to these epigones of Burke, “When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand” (Ez. 3:18).

So Here We Are

Into this cooling of public sentiment towards formal education came the COVID shutdowns and what is called Artificial Intelligence. As in many areas of life, these developments sped up processes already in motion. Casualizing trends of life were furthered. If education is simply the individual accrual of data, why not watch an appointed number of pre-recorded classes until the sufficient number of boxes are checked? Added to this is the demographic reality. Babies were not born 12 years ago during the Bush-Obama depression, what the Madison Avenue boys still spin as the “Great Recession,” babies who would just now be entering college. This has caused despair for private schools, who must shift for themselves, and glee for municipalities ever eager to trim the budget.
So here we are. Schools are challenged to explain why they exist. We ought to embrace this challenge.

Whatever the level schools ought to begin at the beginning, we ought to encourage rootedness. Only from this stability can we as educationalists and as citizens address those above-mentioned foul fruits of unrootedness, and only from this can we strike a blow against predatory political, economic, and social combinations.

For twenty years I have seen men appraise what we broadly call the New World Order only to stall out in their attempt to push back. We must start with rootedness in our lives, in our children’s lives, and in those communities which ripple out from that. The environment of formal education is the ideal place to do this, and the Divine Office is the ideal framing of a school day.

Filling The Void

The godlessness of a child’s day is the greatest strike against modern education. Note that I did not say “god-againsted-ness,” but god-less-ness. It is worse to be blasé of the divine than to be hostile. The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference. Before the carousel of errors which attend modern education, the absence of God is the greatest strike. It is the void of what should be there, like a missing limb or an empty seat so lately occupied by a departed. It is a crime that a young one not be told who made them and why they are on this earth. It is this void of meaning which chiefly explains the ever-rising percentage of teens who go mad.

You see, though, it is not enough to establish the fact of a student’s Creator, this must be often and commonly acknowledged. The school day is a liturgy of a sort, it certainly is ritualistic. The warm presence of God ought to assert itself in the educational rhythm just as formally and regularly as the schedule of instruction. Ergo, the Office.
Rhythm

The holy Office grounds us in time as the holy Mass does in space. This is to say, the Divine Liturgy accents the physicality of Christianity while the Office highlights our temporal rootedness. In both instances the holy Liturgy insists that religion is not an amalgam of beliefs one ascribes to. This error of definition is the result of the one-two punch of the Reformation and Enlightenment. By assembling for the Prayer in groups at the regular times we are reminded that the Kingdom Of God is already on this earth, that Christian life is a social reality not a me-and-Jesus duo, and that a soul wherein God dwells is in heaven now.

An Inconvenient Truth

Religion ought to have a certain inconvenience to it; its very imposition asserts its importance. You may remember that nugget the next time a Day of Devotion—what is now flatly named an Holy Day of Obligation—rolls around. Yes, the point of religion is to be inconvenient, to impose itself upon the mundane.

Let us recall the old apologetic for Abraham’s sacrifice of Issac: What one will not sacrifice automatically becomes one’s god. If something, someone, or some habit stands in the way of God, that thing in se is one’s deity. Congratulations Liquor, Anger, and Sloth, you’ve been promoted! But once God busts those fellas down to size one gets God back and not some idol. The clock can be an idol as soon as anything else. Musha, in a school the clock is more liable to be an idol than anywhere outside of a stock exchange, a racetrack, or a prison. That the Prayer interrupts a school day reminds both pedagogues and learners that there is a divine order greater than our daily concerns.

While this dynamic is true for genuinely sinful things it also holds that legitimate pleasures, persons, and habits may be sacrificed to stay in good form. The sacrifice of time, of my precious personal schedule, is just as fitting a way for the inconvenience of God to assert himself as in my diet (fasting) and sleep (vigils). St. Paul gave up his persecution (Acts 9), but he also gave up his hair in a vow (Acts 18), one was a sacrifice of his sin, the other was part of an optional vow, both moved him closer to God.
It is the genius of Catholicism to knead into daily life many opportunities to, “offer it up.”

The Office is a medicine to anomie by relentlessly and repeatedly squishing us together time and time again. It is a medicine to meaninglessness by taking our class time and sacrificing some of it to God.

Sacrifice is not a destruction, as Pope Benedict reminds us, “What then does sacrifice consist of? Not in destruction, not in this or that thing, but in the transformation of man. In the fact that he becomes himself conformed to God. He becomes conformed to God when he becomes love. ‘That is why true sacrifice is every work which allows us to unite ourselves to God in a holy fellowship,’ as Augustine puts it.” The Office provides the individual and social groups the opportunity to remember the imposition of the divine so often as he takes the Church up on the Discipline. The Prayer is work, and the manful soul does not shirk from the same. Whether I feel like praying or not, the Discipline reminds me that faith is not a feeling. In fact, the more disinclined I am to pray canonically the more I may learn this lesson.

Generosity

Manys the father has warily contemplated how the generosity of manys his daughter may find itself in the arms of some roguish and unworthy Chad. Yet behind this so middle class of anxieties is a calm and beautiful observation. Young people are in fact generous by nature. Youth may benefit from the mature mien of the Divine Office precisely in proportion to the delightful excess of sentiment which characterizes that chapter of life.

The other-directed focus of liturgy is a defining characteristic of this highest of prayers. When this is rightly conveyed to young ones their natural generosity of spirit will ignite great attraction towards the Liturgy. Present to students the other-centeredness of the liturgy with the same tone of voice as one speaks of the Peace Corp, Teach For America, military service, and environmental protection and you will see them rise to the occasion.

We have seen the popularization of “service hours” as part of both grade and tertiary education in these states United. On the one hand it is laudable students be led to understand education is not the isolated accumulation of knowledge and successful completion of hoops jumped; on the other this codification is a sure sign of social decomposition. The moment virtue can only be furthered by institutionalization is the moment that virtue has died in a people. Ask Augustus if his sumptuary and fertility laws revived the Arcadian manliness of the early Republic. Forsooth, if authority must impose on students artificial charity via service hours this is a greater commentary on the sour parental souls which reared such lead-eyed children. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Join students at the generous prayer for the world which is the Liturgy Of The Hours and you will prime the pump for civic generosity in later life, Chads notwithstanding.

The Office in schools is advisable because it trains the student to a regime of prayers offered chiefly for others, not himself. The Discipline breaks the consumerist attitude which does such damage at present in the religious and academic spheres. It is a sacrificial work of charity where the young pray-er learns quickly he is not the star of the show.

Community

The Discipline roots us in our neighborhood. Another poverty of Modernity which the Divine Office enriches is community. Over the last decade every Freemason town council from coast to coast has slapped “community” on their letterheads and welcome signs. Like “fresh” food and “democratic” government, it may be the use of the word expresses the desires for the thing more than the thing itself contains, but it’s a start.

The Divine Office forms community. It ought always be done in a group, and preference must be given to this aspect of the prayer over every other. Community before everything with it comes to the Office. Here we see once again how the Prayer checks our own eccentricities. It happens that when I say the Prayer myself I do tick off many liturgical boxes I do not when I go to my local parish. When I’m by myself I strike off, “Ad Orientem,” “Latin,” “posture,” and “chant.” Yes, in some ways my private performance of the ritual is in tighter conformity with the history and mind of the Church than it is at the church down the street, but those ways, alas, are Orthodox and protestant (sic) ways.

This is to say that Catholicism is the only Christian group which is realistic; Catholicism is the only group to say that the Church is a present reality, not a fetish of the First Century or the First Millenium. “Realistic” and “reality” come from the Latin word “res,” physical thing. Catholicism is the church par excellence which believes the Church is a social reality now, one may join its ceremonies now, pray with its adherents now, and phone up its ministers now. Most importantly, the Church Of Rome is the only church which at once umpires Christian heritage while adamantly refusing to become a slave of the past or of the present. It is the only church to see the Holy Spirit’s role in history in the eternal now, to see it in kairos time. It is on this point one must always prefer common celebration of the Hours over private.

At manys the church I’ve joined in at the Office there has rarely been a consciousness of orientation, sacred language, physicality, or musical quality. In fact, in the best bare bones American liturgical tradition, I am certain that the people at the local parishes I join at the Office haven’t the slightest idea that the normative setting of the Office is recto tono chant to say nothing of the other niceties. Theirs is a celebration as banal as we’ve come to expect from all suburban religion. The people there are befuddled by even minor calendric variations, even if those variations have been encountered hundreds of times before. These dear souls are like the forgetful Dory in Finding Nemo. I sometimes wonder how they operated a vehicle competently enough to get to the building. Nevertheless the communal dimension of the prayer outweighs all other considerations, and their common banality outweighs whatever traditional elements I may personally bring to the ritual.

This supremacy doubly wars against individuality, it wars against the inherent protestant tendency Americans are drawn to as a feature of our national character, and it wars against the individuality consumerism is eager to stoke in men. It’s all the easier to sells tchotchkes to isolated and lonely people than those who know they are cells in something great, be it a family, country, or church. When one is unrooted, your capitalist moneyman is the least of your problems. If one is isolated, he is prey to all sorts of personal and political tyrannies. If you think it is rough falling into the hands of the living God, you should try the embrace of a dead god. Isolate men and watch the attorney, the drug man, and the usurer come into their own… on your neck. Isolate men and you will learn what real chains are. But welcome school children into a living community in conversation with the living God, and all liturgy is conversation, and those ones will grow up and put to flight those pimps. One appreciates the common Office as one matures, and a chronic solo prayer when community participation is possible must be scorned as the fruit of a juvenile soul.

As Fr. Charles Miller writes in his handy commentary Making The Day Holy, “It is true that bishops and major religious superiors have the authority to commute the Office to some other form of prayer [for those under vows]. Such commutation may be justified in individual cases and for a period of time, but the arrangement and content of the Office allow for and even occasion a spiritual development and maturity which cannot be found elsewhere.” Vows or no’, the liturgy teaches the participant maturity.

The Office’s job is to cramp my style and yours. It’s easier to stay home and pray by myself. When online celebration of the liturgy came in vogue during the COVID days, it was easier not to boot up the computer. While the ease of saying the Office increased, I still was making excuses. What the Liturgy was inviting me to was to reach outside of myself into community.

What makes the Office especially appropriate to schools is the existing congregation of learners. In a sense the Office in schools sacramentalizes the academic community. This is nothing more than what all liturgy ought to do, take the work-a-day and point it, if only from time to time, towards God. This is true for sacramental ceremonies and the Divine Office all the way down to the objects of the Rituale, be it a blessing for a mug of beer, a motorcycle, or a puppy dog.

How often does the student ask quietly and out loud, why are we doing this? It is often an unsatisfactory or absent response from a teacher which triggers a life of intellectual apathy. If one’s teachers were not able to pitch a life of the mind, the student sensibly concludes, it probably isn’t worthwhile. The Office allows all those involved in an educational setting, instructors, students, and—my enemies until I had to become one—administrators—to take our time in school and in a concrete, ritualized fashion offer it in a meaningful way to God, the ground of meaning.

Finally, the regular celebration of the Hours breaks the isolation which the modern top-down classroom nurtures, and which the COVID days exacerbated. Surely, I cannot be the only man who has noticed the rise of people averting their gaze in daily interactions. Lowering eyes were once the province of the young child and the cutpurse. What does it say that a nation’s people comport themselves as such? Externals show internals, and you know as soon as I the feeble spirit which shifty eyes announce.

At Apocatastasis we smash shyness by lassoing all, including the reticent, into the ceremony. We do this by developing a schedule of who will be cantor and hebdomadarian from day to day; these roles throw the shy student into a role of leadership. In a low-stakes setting it breaks the shyness of our time. By inches student participation at the Divine Office builds confidence in the young learner, confidence being the necessary footing of an agentic life in years to come. Rear a generation weaned on agency and watch the tyrants run like rabbits.

A Gentle Reminder

It is the hour of the times that just as the nature of Postmodernity is making itself known, that the last fumes of Christianity are wafting off from the West. The Baby Boomers were hardly evangelized, but they had enough of the old-time religion to keep up some Christian habits. If they wouldn’t go to church each week, they’d at least go quarterly or annually; if their tongue wasn’t squeaky clean, they at least didn’t want cussing on television; if their personal creed likely had all sorts of heresies imbibed from pop culture, they at least put their child in CCD. Those Boomers have now aged out of active society. But as lukewarm as that generation was, they acted as a dam against nasty social developments. Should you wonder why one sees a quickening of unchristian social trends, know it is because that lamely Christian generation are going to their fathers. What is worse than lame faith? No faith. Lame religion at least is a start. Go ask Apollos if he had an easier time working with people who knew of the Holy Spirit or with those who didn’t (Acts 19). One has a better chance reaching people with a distant, sentimental memory of God than people who’ve no foundation a’tall.

Ecumenism

The Great Speckled Bird is looking a bit rough. If we see a paganization of society, what purports to be Christianity itself has seen better days. The mainline protestant denominations have gone the way of all flesh. The old-time protestants who have successfully maintained the “mere Christianity” of the Reformation, those who have not been swept into the Church Of What’s Happening Now, are shattering into a hundred (more) ham-fisted sects in response to the stresses of Postmodernity.

If the secular conservative who baldly asserts, “We don’t need no education,” is incapable of seizing the authority in society—the actual authority, what we might call gravitas—worse by far is Pastor Billy’s Bible Church. The protestants are good men, and they’re Christian men, and they’re holy, but the Radical Reformation protestantism which defines American religion is hopelessly shattered. Unmoored from tradition, canon law, hierarchy, and the example of the saints, American low down, hoedown Christianity is more apt to speed up secularism as anything else. Who can blame men scandalized by these sectarians when they conclude that the husks of the World are more tolerable than the fads and eccentricities of the Saved.

Protestantism can do fughall in the face of an organizationally unified New World Order and the secularism which philosophically undergirds it. In fact, I make bold to say the abysmal failure of conservatism, particularly religious conservatism, to conserve anything stems from the absence of a liturgical consciousness. Until they put on this mind they will continue riding around as so many Lone Rangers. Then again, there’s a strange thrill many of the conserved get fancying they’re the last of the Mohicans. Anyone up for an hotel room Latin Mass or Gab group?

Mind you, all is not well in Catholicville. Near as I can tell, the Roman Catholic faithful are split on the one hand between normies who have no understanding of present dechristianization, and on the other hand, nervous Savonarola types who’ve made totems of the past, and the neither of them has the slightest interest or energy for evangelization. Sure, life gets you coming and going.

The Church Reaches Out

As we labor in the classroom to form an intelligent and agentic generation we see the Divine Office extending two arms, one to the lost World and one to a shattered and anemic Church.

Towards the Postmodern world it offers beauty. Things are far too far gone to make rational appeals to men. A wallop upside the head by beauty is the surest way to attract the lost. As Dostoevsky’s Idiot says, “Beauty will save the world.” Of course, rational appeals can be beautiful, but for a society given to images it is the physical which is fetching.

It is on this account care ought to be shown towards the chant tradition and posture, even in humble, mundane, and yes—grouch as I might—in individual celebration. While clerics are too easy to dismiss liturgical complexity on pastoral grounds, perhaps those with the care of souls have their finger on a pulse which ought to be heeded. Allahu a’alam. In a school, however, greater attention ought to be given to posture and music in the beautiful drama of the Office and the liturgy in toto. As scholastics we must see ourselves as marking time until general society has the maturity and appreciation of these elements of the liturgy once more.

What people often forget when discussing the simplification of the liturgy in the Twentieth Century is that the educational soil of the masses, which once had been fairly grounded in the Classics, including not just the rudiments of Latin but a familiarity with a canvas of ancient literature and allusions, was so eroded by the 1930s and ‘40s that the ceremonial of the Church necessarily had to change to be intelligible. This was not the fault of clerics but of schoolmen. That the New American Bible, the liturgical version of the scriptures used in Yankeeland, is written for a seventh-grade reading level is proof of how far general education has gone down the tubes. The liturgical simplifications we see are a loving condescension of the Church to the aliteracy of the modern man. Perhaps if enough teachers and students take our vocations seriously, we will raise the sophistication of mankind high enough to forge a people once again capable of enjoying a fuller rituale.

You never know who is watching, nor who might be struck by your diligent performance of the Prayer. In manys the field trip and like outing of Apocatastasis’ we have had occasion to establish the Prayer in public. The students always bring beauty and poise to the workaday bustle. The celebration of the Office is neither preachy, lengthy, nor self-important; three strikes against protestantized America Christianity (and I include much of Catholicism under this umbrella). Those elements of formal faith which has so turned off the mass of our countrymen are not present in the Liturgy. It is a chaste prayer, deliberately short and to the point in the Western tradition.

Towards those souls baptized into Christ but outside Christ’s Church, the Office poses neither the sacramental nor the sacerdotal difficulties encountered when the topic of ecumenism meets that of the holy Mass. At an hour where, on the one hand, Catholic schools for financial reasons must allow students from diverse faith traditions or none a’tall (and “nones” are the fastest growing religious demographic at present), and at an hour where the general population is more and more seeking alternatives to public education, many are the ecumenical possibilities of the Divine Office. You see, ecumenical celebration of the holy Mass runs aground because the sectarian is necessarily unable to receive communion, whereas the Office allows for full participation of the Catholic, the protestant, and the Orthodox, hell, even of your Druids and your voodoo men, without the climax of the prayer leaving some excluded. The Office may be an ecumenical halfway house between private prayers and that full liturgical participation which must await reception into the Catholic Church to enjoy. The Office is a gentle introduction of liturgical prayer which may in time, please God, invite the worshiper into the fullness of the Church.

At the same time the Hours pointedly assert the grave wound ecumenism means to address and heal: authority. By participating in the liturgy one de facto acknowledges the authority of the magisterial Church. One doesn’t make a de jure submission to the Church of Christ, true, but one at least verbs submission to the hierarchy and all that means, if only in the interest of practicality and order.

It is in the Office celebrated over a lengthy period one can see the Church’s mind on topics brought into contention by sectarians such as the sacraments, the role of Mary, and even the hierarchy itself known not as a statement to be asserted intellectually but as a reality manifested in living contact with the living God. Those doctrines proper to Rome are massaged into the rhythm of prayer in a manner disarming to American protestants so used to polemical disputation.
Patience

The Office teaches patience with myself and with others. It teaches us that the perfect and be the enemy of the good. It does not take long with students new to the Prayer is realize that, “Today things won’t look like Solesmes!” This is good. The halting, the wrong pages and antiphons, the rough pronunciation, all of these are good in learning the beauty of imperfection; they check whatever of the anal retentive we may have.

The imperfection of our celebration is itself a sacramental. Various trends presently combine to make men more apt to sever ties. Regardless of one’s worldview, those others of his mind are more liable to end relationships as they purity spiral off their high horses. This is hardly a leftist or secular trait. The Office teaches us to bear with each others’ superfluities in patience.

Liberality

It also instructs us in liberality. There was a time, and more than a passing phase, when I was personally quite strict with the easterly direction of prayer, chant, posture, and the like. The high point of this energy was when I said Terce on and in a MetroNorth train bathroom.

As I’ve gotten older, I turned into a terrible liberal. While I still keep up with the whole cursus of the Liturgia Horarum, I only mind the above trappings twice a day. The other hours are apportioned between online groups and pacing recitation; I’ve even taken to combining hours, using the Angelus as a palate cleanser between one prayer and another. Ah, musha, if I keep up like this, I’ll be a grunting Hottentot in no time!

In later years I’ve worked in a balance between the present books and prior editions of the Office. In doing so I’ve come across the subtleties different rites and orders have developed in their prayer. An especially happy invention and subsequent addition to my celebration has been the reading of monastic rules as part of the morning cursus. This develops of width of vision when it comes to life which nothing else can offer. The diversity of the Divine Office undermines the “my way or the highway” mien which affects both modern religious life, and—as politics serves the role of religion for many skins—differences of worldview.

A maturity develops in all of these. As one learns of the vastness of the liturgical tradition in one’s rite and in the Church at large it becomes obvious that one cannot reasonably do each facet of the Office each day and still see to their duty of state. In fact, the tradition is so grand that a monastic could not do as much. In response to this one, learns moderation, one learns that the liturgy is an organ which pulses on beyond oneself. Rather than being a watering down, this necessary moderation teaches one they are a living cell, part of a larger whole.

Applied Education

As a teacher of the humanities, the Prayer drives home points taught in class which only repetitious ceremonies can develop over months, years, and decades. Because of the nature of industrial education, a model which has largely been adopted into homeschooling, it happens that students come to the Institute with a nigh on impossible ability to imagine different sciences connected one to another. Because of the way disciplines are broken up, the learner’s mental muscle of seeing life in a united whole is atrophied.

The Liturgy Of The Hours is a corrective to this handicap. The hymns, antiphons, Psalms, lessons, and collects were written at widely different times, yet they speak of a united reality. It is a literary museum of sorts, with the different elements a pastiche of various cultures and personalities. The Office teaches not only a liturgical tradition, but it trains the mind to grasp what academic traditions are.

Rebuilding

The Office is nothing more than the spiritual radio station of the Church. What an honor for schools to participate in educating a people fit to tune into this station. Yes, it is true that vernacular liturgy is permissible at present, and doubly yes, it is true that vernacular celebration is the expressed policy of the American episcopate. This is a sign not of liberalism or watering anything down; vernacular celebration is a pastoral allowance in the face of the population’s receding education. As hours in class increase, and more and more men sport advanced degrees, it seems the actual general education declines.

While acknowledging pastoral necessity—it may be the population is too dull to appreciate things like chant, for example—it is the charge of schoolmen to not just meet present needs but to make provision for a future society better educated. When that time comes what laurels teachers will have for having formed men capable of joining in the Church’s rich caeremoniale with all of its august trappings. Yes, it is as clear as clear can be the Church does not care about its liturgical heritage. Let us mark time until it does once more.

The Big Picture

Never have I ever blushed in saying that the fundamental telos of Apocatastasis Institute has been to form a people capable of personal, economic, political, and cultural self-defense. Indeed, the role of all right schools is to form such a people, men capable of asserting their rights against bullies and pimps. Forsooth, the Lord above only game man a body so that he may throw it against evil.

Here at home, it is certain that the tyranny which is building in one corner, and the liberty which men are nurturing in another, will meet in a fight. These two energetic lines will have it out in physical force. It is the solemn duty of all right education to form men mentally, spiritually, and socially capable for this exertion. Unlike what the goofy conservatives and truth community hold, that this row will happen when The Cathedral pushes too many people too far, this fight to the knife will not be won by free mankind for some generations out, not in this part of the world at least. Those who think they have a bead on events are bugged the hell out on The Patriot and Rambo films; the conservatives speak like little boys watching Westerns.

Hayya ‘Ala-l-falah

It is a point of record that the most muscular and competent response to the New World Order has been from the Ummah of Mohammed. If my above assertion about schools and self-defense is correct, then it behooves us to observe the role which canonical prayer played in forming a homogeneous Islamic population capable of the discipline of physical exertion. The point, and it is a point best learned early, is that spiritual liberation precedes physical efforts at the same. That is what the Muslims’ manly striving teaches us.

There will be a fight, forsooth, but it will not be in our time if it’s to be successful. It is for schoolmen to prepare a people fit for a national liberation struggle which is generations distant. Before men can responsibly assert themselves in arms, for a physical force struggle is the highest test of a community’s coherence and competence, there must be a spiritual, mental, and interpersonal revival.

I do not say it is given to us to arrange what must be, I do not say it is for us to advocate for it, I do not even say that when the time ripens to bring the tyrants to heel that it will be advisable to engage in a fight. I say that what goes for individuals goes for societies, that vigilance is the price of security, and that complete men capable of spiritual, mental, and physical self-defense can check criminals when they come looking for trouble. It is for schools to form such a pacific but prepared people.

Of all the lessons learned in school, the daily Office teaches a master class in the lessons of dedication, piety, patience, and comity, those things which prevent physical striving for liberty from becoming seven times more unjust than what preceded it. The errors of Islam notwithstanding, the discipline which their salah instilled in them was the biggest ingredient in their drubbing of the globalists’ armies.

Remember Baghuz!

Yes, the greatest opposition the confederates of the New World Order have faced in our day was from the Muslims when they trespassed on their lands. I have lost count of the number of amputees of a certain age I have come across hobbling about Connecticut as a grim testimony of this fact.

It is advisable that patriots note how the men of other lands have struggled against the New World Order. In all the times and climes, we may observe, the victory of the Taliban is the greatest triumph of self-determination in our lifetime. Close on the heels of that I adduce the insurgency of the Second Iraq War and elements of the Arab Spring. Now don’t worry, I’ll not be going in for that damn Islam anytime soon, and I am well aware of the fanaticism, insanity, criminality, and infiltration which characterized the Middle Eastern, if not the Central Asian, Islamic response to the New World Order. Still and all, the globalists were dressed down in their attempt to lasso the Dar al-Islam into their banking network. This Western banking scheme explains in a nutshell the last 20 years of the Western and Islamic tussle. Still and all, who is sitting in Kabul?

I followed the saga of the War On Terror closely, I follow it yet. How many stories are there of Muslims praying Salawat in the middle of military operations, sometimes amidst the red rush of battle itself. Who did not stare in awe to see the men of ISIS maintaining to the last their liturgical cursus even as the Kurdish communists set upon them in the football field of Baghuz Fawqani. I care not that Islam is a false religion, nor that ISIS represented the worst of the Muslim people, nor that the group was riven with supergrasses and madmen. What I hold up from that strange group at that desperate hour is the sociological value of canonical prayer as a stiffener against overwhelming odds.

Conclusion

The Divine Office is particularly fitted to a school because it grounds the student’s life and study in meaning, teaches by rote academic lessons which cannot be grasped in a lecture, refines our etiquette, and offers a calm onramp to liturgical prayer to a multiconfessional people.

Being an other-centered-prayer, the Office teaches us piety classically understood, piety as the outlay of energy and attention given for the health of the polis. The Prayer formalizes good citizenship as it calls us in the classroom and neighborhood together again and again and again and reminds us of our Creator and the symphony of salvation of which we are all a part. In so doing, the Divine Office checks the antisocial habits telephonic interaction not only tolerates but encourages. The Prayer is a gentle curative to the schisms of the last 500 years.

Finally, the discipline of the Office nurtures a cornucopia of sentiments and virtues which are prerequisites of any national liberation effort. We may say that the percentage of the community who regularly join in the Prayer will broadly be an indicator of the percentage of men capable of putting bullies in their place. All of this, bully banging as soon as anything else, are lessons best introduced during one’s formative school years. Root a child in his Creator, his community, and in meaning and watch an oak of a man grow.

Well, that’s that, as the girl said to the sailor.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

Featured: Modi orandi sancti Domini, ca. 14th-15th centuries.

One Month, Two Speeches

Introduction

Summer’s westerning month of September was bookended by two notable speeches. On the first of the month the American bureaucracy wheeled up to the podium at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Independence Hall former Vice President Joseph R. Biden. On September 30th, with cranky Jerome looking down from heaven, a cranky Vladimir Putin strode up to the ambo of Moscow’s St. George’s Hall. When in place both men proceeded to give speeches. Displayed for all was the dichotomy of the present world order. The contrast could not be starker. It is the purpose of this essay to lay bare the startling divergence of the hour: a degenerate Enlightenment order and a rising east with knowledge of itself and determination to not buckle to bullies.

House Rules

Please be aware that I will be using “Atlanticist,” “globalist,” “neoliberal,” and “neoconservative” interchangeably. While there are denominational differences among these sons of Scratch, readability must have a say.

Location, Location, Location

Let us start with the location chosen for each missive. Only part of communication concerns actual vocal or written messages. A great deal is said by other means, location is one such channel. When Christ, the new lawgiver, was reconstituting Israel he deliberately staged certain pronouncements to allude to Moses, the old lawgiver. For example, compare Matthew 5-7 to Exodus 21-24. When the Council of Trent finally met in 1545 the Council Fathers purposely chose to meet at a city within the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire. This was both sensible and symbolic given their goal to address the late upset to the north. When the Germans defeated the French in 1940 Chancellor Hitler made a point of having them sign the surrender order in the selfsame train car which saw previously-defeated Germans sign the 1918 Armistice agreement. Locations matter because locations speak.

A Decrepit Shell Speaking in a Crumbling City on the Ruins of a Revolution

When the former Senator from Delaware was guided by his beloved caretaker Jill Biden to the ambo of Independence Hall, what was the message of the place? The Hall is famous for being the location 250 odd years ago where the Founding Fathers met to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It is also the place several years later where a clique of those men successfully overthrew that Revolution during their Constitutional Convention coup. Note well that during Mr. Biden’s talk while there were many mentions of the Constitution, the Declaration received but one acknowledgement.

How fitting that Joe Biden, who was installed in the White House in an equally underhanded manner, gave his speech in the same place where the North American Novus Ordo Seclorum was so shadily codified in the first place. Biden’s location was not merely a nod to history but the completion of that Ordo; things have come full circle. The grandsons of the same sort of clique which hijacked the Revolution brought things home on September 1 of this year. The sacrifice was complete. Whatever of the old American spirit which subsisted in the state was finally dead.

It was a moving touch that the broadcast was persistently dogged by police sirens. Philadelphia has turned into the typical Democratic Party garbage heap. It is the kind of trash pile which the world has come to expect every time the DNC takes control of a major city, state, or nation.

The former Vice President’s cough-filled address marked the logical conclusion of the American saga. The bureaucracy came to its apotheosis on September 1. On that account I suppose he was right calling Independence Hall, “Sacred ground.” On that day they replaced the UNITED STATES color of law system, which itself deposed the Constitutional system on March 28, 1861, and that Constitutional arrangement dashed the hopes and sacrifices of the Revolution it pretended to canonize on September 17, 1789. The snake eats its tail, and one revolution topples its predecessor.

I don’t know the gematria of all these dates, but I know what something is when I see it. This latest drama which Biden’s talk inaugurated began on November 22, 1963, the day John Kennedy popped his clogs in a murder most foul. The drama closed out in success this September 1st at Independence Hall. The Frankenstein-like accession of the civil departments of the Federal government over their creators, the nominal office holders, was complete. With it ends America’s Imperial phase. Now commences our Dominate.

The Slayer of Dragons

The first thing which strikes one about the location of President Putin’s speech is its name, St. George’s Hall. George was a Christian saint, famous for slaying a large reptilian beastie many moons ago. In fact, England adopted this selfsame anti-lizard patron during the days of the Byzantine Empire when Anglo-Saxon mercenaries brought back his devotion from their service at Constantinople, the Second Rome. This is the same node from whence his cult entered Russia.

Howsomeever, a building being named for a saint! I rack my auld wet brain to think of any such edifices associated with the UNITED STATES corporation. Do any of our big shots hold their conventuals in a “Jesus Building,” “St. Mary’s Auditorium,” or “Venerable Bene Town Hall?” No, I suppose such names would jar with the Masonic cornerstones most American civil buildings have ensconced within them.
Biden’s speech had plenty of the civil religion buzz words developed for a people who’ve never enjoyed a unified cult. The state for Americans has come to act as a sacramental, visible placeholder for an institutional church, but it just doesn’t quite cut it. The closest Americans have to Russia’s St. George’s Hall is an idolatrous Capitol Building dedicated to another St. George, Washington in this case. This deified American St. George is surrounded by a medley of pagan gods and Founding Fathers (well, at least Federalist ones). While Jill Biden’s geriatric patient filled his speech with shibboleths to the American civil religion, the speaker’s religious messages were as meaningless as possible. The ancients did a much better job at state worship. Only the broad, generic McGod so beloved by test audiences got a nod from Brandon.

One last point on location, Philadelphia has quite an occult history. I suppose the ghost of occulty old Ben Franklin has something to do with this. Their massive city hall is the creepiest building I’ve been in, and this is something coming from someone who has acted in his fair share of haunted houses. The thing is covered with spiritualist statuary. The best examples are on the lower parts of the building which show the support columns resting on the backs of people. What a fitting motif for the enlightened government of barristers and bankers! For special effect the Hall sits kitty-corner to the famous Masonic Temple. All of this sits on Broad Street, and I’ve enough holy rolling in me to remember that: “Broad is the way that leads to destruction.” The Biden administration could not have asked for a better location.

Lights, Camera, Action!

What You Have Spoken in Darkness…

The devil is in the details.

The-most-popular-president-in-American-history-whom-no-one-remembers-voting-for was backgrounded by blue, red, and blue (sic) lights projected on the side of Independence Hall. Because the former Vice President is so popular the thoughtful press has consistently close-cropped the filming of his public appearances. Oddly enough, even though the display of America’s national colors is always red, white, and blue, in that order, the September 1 speech indeed saw blue, red, and blue. Note that red and blue are colors of two of the main denominations of Freemasonry. Thus, crusty Biden was bathed in sinister red for the whole of his speech. This doubtless was an accident. In no way was it an attempt to intimidate the considerable number of Donald Trump’s supporters who were the whipping boy of Biden’s sermon. Finally, sarcasm aside, the dark of night added an oppressive, claustrophobic feel to the Pennsylvania speech.

As for those in attendance, I have not been able to find any detailing of them. We must assume they were municipal nobodies, perhaps members of the Philly City Council or the Chamber of Commerce cajoled to attend. This attendance mystery is entirely fitting as it nicely mirrors the question of who exactly is in control of the Executive Branch at present. (Then again, perhaps we have our answer if we think about those colors.) Politics aside, few determined observers can believe that Joe Biden or Kamala Harris run anything. As I’ve said before, the bureaucracy is large and in charge. That was the purpose of the whole speech.

The slutty pretense of executive autonomy, which in fairness was very much unraveling during the Trump days, has gone by the wayside now. For example, on June 16th, 2021 Hunter Biden’s father met with Vladimir Putin in Geneva. He said in effect that the UNITED STATES had no intractable disagreement with the Russian government. Atlanticist interests could be reconciled with those of Russia. Before the day was out the State Department contradicted Biden. As this article goes to press the G7 meeting is soon set to be held in Indonesia. The former Vice President again put out an olive branch, albeit an anemic one, saying he would speak to President Putin if their paths crossed. The White House press office, with the lackey MSM in tow, wasted no time “reimagining” Biden’s remarks to be an absolute “no.” Under no circumstances will Biden and Putin be allowed to speak, they said. I have said the bureaucracy has toppled the state; that the September 1st address was a wrap party for the plan so long in the making. There is no esoterica in this. If the nominal Executive says something, and his nominal employees publicly countermand him, that’s all she wrote. My point is made.

… Shall be Heard in the Light

As for President Putin’s speech, it was conducted indoors in a large, well-lit room. This allowed television viewers to see who was in attendance, assisted by the regular cuts to the audience which the Russian broadcasters included during the 40-odd minute speech. Those in attendance consisted of holders of high office, military big shots, religious leaders of various faiths, and other notable Russian personages. However, CNN’s Matthew Chance and Nick Walsh assured their viewers that none of Putin’s auditors were convinced by his presentation on Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s former territories. How they know this is any man’s guess. Perhaps they have access to the same scrying mirror which the White House Press Office has. It’s called the old gaslight.

The Thing Itself

Having addressed the externals of the September 1st and 30th talks, what are we to make of the speeches themselves?

Priorities

Dark Brandon has shown adept management of crises during his two de facto years in office. The Afghan withdrawal, securing America’s southern border, and engaging with spiraling stagflation are all incidents which manifest the deft Democratic touch. Furthermore, the Biden Administration has made putting Ashkenazi Jews and transsexuals, two groups which have been completely ignored by the power structure these last 20 years, into prominent positions of power. (Ah, musha, there’s that sarcasm again).

In fact, concerning this last group, to address possible troop shortages in the event of a major war, Brandon’s Pentagon recently reminded male crossdressers that they are still liable for the UNITED STATES’ draft. On “National Coming Out Day ” the former Vice President said, “Today and every day, I want every member of the LGBTQ+ community to know that you are loved and accepted just the way you are – regardless of whether or not you’ve come out.”

Preferring the liturgical calendar to the ersatz pop one we’re given, I don’t go in for all these days and months of awareness, but fair play. Nihilominus, are there no bigger fish to fry than the condition of minuscule sexual minorities? Is there no homelessness address? Is there no addiction to see to? Were the crossdressers even asking the power structure, dripping in blood and usury from head to toe, to belly up to their cause in the first place? And where is Brandon’s gushy spirit as his pirates turn Ukraine into, not a front company like Burisma or a laundering project like Hunter’s art career, but a front nation? Where is the compassion of those Washington devils as Orthodox Ukrainians and Orthodox Russians, some of the last so-called white people left who still have an ethno-religious consciousness, kill each other by the thousands?

Yes, indeed, priorities have always been tops at the Biden White House. Thus, when the administration asked for aire time for 8pm, Thursday, September 1st everyone knew the topic was critical. And what did the most-popular-president-in-American-history discourse on? What was so pressing as to require a coast-to-coast prime time slot? Was it inflation, energy supply, or the resurgent opioid crisis? No, it was something graver still: the danger of “M.A.G.A forces,” an irresistible “threat to our democracy.”

Vassals

Putin’s speech concerned actual threats. He said the quiet part out loud. The Foggy Bottom bunch overthrew the USSR. This was a point doubtless startling to Western auditors of the talk who still irenicly believe the fall of the Berlin Wall was some groundswell of democratic sentiment.

Washington had to gin up the next enemy. With the commies gone scary brown Saddam Hussain became the of enemy of the Bush I White House, then white militias became the foe of the Clintons, they were switched out for Muslims during the Bush years, and now the Caucasian threat is back as “election deniers.” The carousel of make-believe American enemies is a hard ride to get off of. Anyhow, Putin mentioned actual threats to Russians in his talk, including Russian ethnic nationals in formerly-eastern Ukraine who were the victims of actual racism, discrimination, and violent attacks.

Perspective

Of course, before continuing we ought to put the internal paranoia of the American ruling class and their European lackeys, as well as the defensive and critical stance of Russia’s top caste, into a larger global perspective.

If At First You Don’t Succeed

After picking away for nigh on a decade, the darlings at Foggy Bottom succeeded in provoking the Russian Federation into invading Ukraine in February 2022. This sort of thing had been tried before. During the closing weeks of the sadsome Bush II administration globalists tried setting off a major war between Georgia and Russia. Sidestepping for a moment the 2014 neoliberal hijacking of Ukraine, as late as January 2022 the State Department attempted to spark a war between Russia and Kazakhstan via the old stalking horse of a color revolution. This was quickly beaten back and forgotten as eyes moved east in the following days.

Biden’s talk was a paranoid sloughing of ruling class anxieties. And it is well they are anxious. Their designs for a unipolar world order have been set back decades. Up to and through the Coronavirus upset this order seemed monolithic. Not so now. Events move apace. Events turn screws. As the pressure and failure of the West’s gamble mount, the sweat is beginning to show.

Under the Bus is a Crowded Place Indeed

Three meta-adjustments have come about because of the ongoing Ukrainian war. First, an alternative power block is being hung upon the heretofore moribund skeleton of the B.R.I.C.S. association (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Second, African and Middle Eastern nations, heretofore cowed by the caresses and threats of Atlanticists, have been decidedly stand-offish during the whole Eastern European saga. Finally, watching the scheme they worked so hard to effect crumble on the battlefields of Ukraine, the ruling cliques of the UNITED STATES and NATO organizations have thrown the nations of Europe under the bus.

The ongoing world realignment is the necessary background to understand why the American power elite chose to focus on the spurious MAGA movement as a threat to “our democracy.” The New World Order which seemed a fiat accompli is over for the foreseeable future. This span of time will likely be longer than those now in high station (in and out office) will live for. In its place two or more power blocks will divvy up world allegiance, with the B.R.I.C.S. confederacy and China being the main contenders. As of this writing Saudi Arabia is courting them both. If this proposal is successful then the Kissinger-engineered world order, including the petrodollar, will be over, and the U.S.’s geopolitical order will sink that much faster.

Second, the heretofore scrapping Second and Third World governments, who were so easily led by the nose during, for example, the Second Iraq War are decidedly going to let the neoliberals figure their way out of Ukraine by themselves. That Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin had to make a summertime junket of Africa weeks after Serge Lavrov visited the continent shows their hand. Blinken was told in no uncertain terms by Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s Minister of Internal Relations, that Africans will no longer be at the beck and call of every northern hemisphere government which snaps its fingers. Further, and these statements were said during a press conference, Africans will not take being spoken to in the patronizing manner which has been tolerated heretofore.

When the developing world has addressed the war in Eastern Europe they have been in the favor of the Russian cause, or at least sympathetic to their position. One need only peruse Arab or African papers to see this is so. The Chechens, having been duped by the globalists in the 1990s, have since come to their senses and now prove to be a valuable asset for the Russian military. (A rump of dummy jihadis finds itself fighting for Ukraine in the Sheik Mansur and Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalions. More on these sorts later).

Then there are the economic shifts to consider. See the meeting of the Commonwealth Of Independent States in Astana, Kazakhstan held in the middle of October. Also, there is the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This “Davos in the desert” featured visits by stockjobbers Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, and—always my darling in these articles—Jared Kushner of Kushner (Really. That’s the name of his interest. It’s a perfect appellation for a man who never once, even in public office, has thought about anyone’s welfare but his own).

Lastly, Western European countries have been left high and dry by the American Deep State and the NATO loons. What was looking to be a difficult winter in Europe in terms of heating and electricity became grimmer still with the Nord Stream pipelines shutdown on September 26. They ran through the Baltic Sea from northwestern Russia to Germany, bringing natural gas into Central and Western Europe. This event, more than the referendums, set the tone of Vladimir Putin’s speech a few days later. Whoever did that sabotage certainly is getting their frequent flier miles in. On October 13 several people were arrested trying to blow the TurkStream gas line sky high, a line which roughly runs under the Black Sea from the Crimean Peninsula to Istanbul.

Why is this betrayal of NATO allies a surprise to anyone? The Europeans thought they could ride the coattails of the globalists. Little did know that the same mad sect which threw the 1956 Hungarians, 1975 South Vietnamese, 1991’s Shias and Kurds, and 2021’s Afghan National Army, under the bus with n’er a second thought, would do the same to them. The only people more pitiable than Western Europeans in this tragic-comedy are the sucker Ukrainians. It’s one thing to be a lackey for the globalists, but in bellying up to newly-minted “the rules-based order” of Europe, Ukraine merely hoped to be a lackey to lackeys. Being the slave of slaves is never an enviable position to be in.
The Ukrainian army has been losing this war from day one. Like a patient bleeding out on an operating table, were Ukraine not receiving fresh infusions of cash and weapons to throw away on the battlefield and embezzle afresh this war would have long been over.

Having been built up by Western militaries since the Maidan coup in 2014, by the summer of this year it had been ground down to a nub of its former self. From midsummer until September their capacities were being rebuilt by NATO advisors, but they shot their bolt in the ill-fated Kherson Offensive which was costly for an army in no position to expend resources. From that offensive until now the Ukrainian military has been under the direct command of NATO. One need only pursue the multiple Tic Toks of foreign mercenaries in their army, many with American accents, to get the gist of things.

As long as this situation obtains, we can expect the course of the Ukraine war to look like the other instances of Foggy Bottom and NATO military intervention. Think of places like Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. What is the modus operandi of the globalists? Slow bleeds. The Atlanticists will turn Ukraine into a festering forever-war like those other places. The best-case scenario Ukraine can hope for right now is to still exist as a heavily indebted failed state.

All these factors moved the American ruling class to get Biden to give his September speech. When all else fails, look inwards for boogeymen. But note that the same ethnic and national consciousness which was decried in America on September 1 (“white supremacists”) is the same bait which the globalists used to fire up the Ukrainians internally, and rally support for them abroad. Included in this of course is the Nazi Azov Battalion, beloved by the New York Times and the ADL.

Everything the neoconservatives touch turns to ash. Their scheme in Ukraine has gone so badly that ISIS men from Syria have been shipped into theater to aid Zelensky’s errand. You know things are bad for NATO when they have to resort to such an old hat. Those jihadists are getting old by now, and they must be getting sick of impromptu relocations. The old fly-in-the-Islamists routine was used to move Al Qaeda from Afghanistan to Pakistan (2001), from Pakistan to Libya (2011), and from Libya into Syria (2013). Poor old Libyan jihadist Abdelhakim Belhaj, who himself once innocently marveled at his supposed enemies thoughtfulness in carting around his buddies, is going to need a hip replacement soon.

Beads of Sweat

The point of all this is that the neoliberals are cornered. Everything has blown up in their collective Western face, and their collective Western Alfred E. Newman composure is breaking down (“What, me worry?”). On October 13th Josep Borrell, the European Union Foreign Affairs And Security representative, showed the hand of his ilk. He said,

Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden. The gardeners have to go to the jungle.

This strange horticultural-cum-stockjobber simile (“the jungle has a strong growth capacity”) succinctly shows that the West is fundamentally offensive in its outlook no matter how it pretends that its support for Ukraine is defensive.

Not to be outdone, on September 15 Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, visited Ukraine dressed in blue and yellow, the colors of their flag. Having thrown dupe Ukraine into the woodchipper, she eased the turmoil of the moment by promising Ukrainians access to the E.U.’s cell phone network. Ukrainians will doubtless remember her thoughtful generosity as they stumble through freezing, electricity-less homes this winter. But Ukrainians are not the only ones in luck. Western Europeans, anxious about coming heating and electrical bills, and closer to a larger theater of operations should the war develop in that direction, doubtless had their anxieties calmed when Ursula said to Zelensky, “Your European friends are by your side as long as it takes.” As Swedes learn to enjoy the trebling of their electricity bills in the weeks after that meeting, they took heart their Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s donation of one billion more krona to assist in Ukraine’s heroic embezzling operation.

The globalists will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, and maybe the last European too. Much has been made of Annalena Baerbock’s September 10th statement, “We will continue to stand by Ukraine as long as necessary.” Perhaps the foreclosed Germans to whom Baerbock is superficially obliged will shiver that much more proudly as they huddle around burning barrels swathed beneath their Ukraine flags. Yes, much has been made of that comment. For my money though, the last sentence of the address is more staggering yet. She said, “All of Europe knows that Ukraine is defending our peaceful order.” Thou sayest, Annalena, thou sayest.

Back to the Speech

Backgrounded by these events, we return to Biden’s speech. I would be remiss not to note his multiple invocations of “We the People.” As I reviewed his talk for this article, I thrilled that one of my favorite hobby horses was on such proud display. “We honor the will of the people,” said the man sworn in behind barbed wire, said the man whose election was so resoundingly popular and squeaky clean that someone, somewhere on the MSM each day since makes a point to remind the viewers of this certainly adamantine truth.

You see, though, you and I are not “the People.” I’ll not rehash my earlier series of articles on this topic except to point out that the Constitution’s capital P is a proper noun referring to a specific group of people. In short, the People are the historic signers of the state and national constitutions of America, their genetic descendants, and whatever fresh blood the People deign to admit in via their Ivy League vetting process. In a rare moment of lucidity, and a rarer moment of honesty from a member of the Biden crime family, Hunter’s father boldly stated, “We must never forget: We, the people, are the true heirs of the American experiment that began more than two centuries ago.” Former senator Biden does work for the People. It is one of the great questions of the 2020 election—the December event not to be confused with the worthless though famous November mass strawpoll—to speculate on how and why the bloodline stat electors chose Biden.

Likewise, the mummy from Scranton repeatedly confused the UNITED STATES organization, of whose Executive branch he is the nominal head, with America, the lived reality of many millions of men reaching back some thousands of years. Biden further confused his UNITED STATES company with the common law republic of 1789-1861. I will not bog down in the nitty-gritty of this distinction. Yet I adduce the People/people and US/America differences to buttress an appraisal of the Enlightenment, and all of its works and pomp (including its enlightened state structures), which have obtained in Russia for some time. Namely, the nation-states birthed by the 18th and 19th Century philosophical and political upheavals are full of fluff and feathers concerning their freedom jabber. If governmental organizations were so solicitous for the liberty of their peoples they would not need to resort to the sort of linguistic subterfuge Mr. Biden used in Philadelphia.

“We believe in honesty and decency,” said the patriarch of a top shelf seedy family. In the course of Biden’s talk he spoke also of “MAGA forces.” Later he went on to associate them with “white supremacists and extremists.” And here we have something a damn sight more serious than the larger farce of the Brandon administration. We have in this talk the further kettling of dissenting voices. Former Vice President Biden’s words were the continuation of a dialogical and mental redefinition process going back over a decade. This process means to turn any and all dissidents (n.b., including actual leftists, and those beyond the usual paradigm) into “conservatives,” and these newly minted “conservatives” will then be designated as “terrorists.” This work has been loyally assisted by Silicone Valley and the MSM every step of the way. By using the martial language of “forces” we see the broad coalition of Trump supporters slip neatly into the “domestic terrorist” category.

The Clinton administration lives, and moves, and has its being in the Brandon White House. The plot to maneuver American patriots of various worldviews into the “conservative extremist” legal camp began in the 1990s with outrages like Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombings. These were provocations wrapped in false flags smothered in the defamation of America’s so-called white working class. Who is former Senator Biden’s Attorney General? None other than that proud son of Zion Merrick Garland, the Federal prosecutor for the OKC trial. It’s funny how, as the Washington Post has lately phrased it, “The domestic terrorism threat that has metastasized, with white supremacists and conspiracy-minded anti-government types emboldened,” at just the same time a minion of the Clinton crew, who ginned up the first round of this nonsense, is the top Bar Association member in the UNITED STATES group. Then again, in another lucid moment, perhaps Brandon meant low men like himself and Garland when he bemoaned those, “living in the shadows of lies.”

We have no time to delve into the nonsense about Governor Gretchen Whitmer and her staged FBI-inspired kidnapping, Hilary Clinton’s seeded the narrative of a 2024 GOP election steal (talk about the pot called the kettle black), the recent Vice/HBO special about extremism in the US military (as if any patriot could stomach Mark Milley’s army), or the White House’s August 2022 United We Stand: Countering Hate-Fueled Violence Together summit (stoking the nonsense of Americans being at each other’s throats). It is sufficient to assert that all this internal instability jazz is a deflection from the global consequences of Ukraine.

The Real “Soul of the Nation” Speech

While America’s former Vice President mentioned the immorality of Trump’s supporters, the Russian President spent considerably more time on the ethical dynamics of the hour. As Biden’s talk had the air of offense, albeit domestic offense, throughout Putin’s lecture the defensive nature of Russia’s actions provided a single linking theme. While Brandon’s speech writer chose to invoke the historic civil mythology of America, Putin invoked the 1990s as a chronological anchor point. “We remember the challenging years,” he said, alluding to the Western-instigated privations which many millions of Russian citizens very much do recall to this day.

Putin dropped a number of bombs during his September speech, and none was bigger than his reference of U.S. “vassals.” What an apt word. The feudal order, which was well along reasserting itself by the Interwar Years of the last century, is now nakedly pressing upon the enlightened peoples of the West. Statutory suzerainty slithered itself into the lives of the once-proud common law American republic. Beyond America, where do we look except we see a renter’s life sprawled out before the peoples of the collective West? Rent, rent everywhere. I do not limit this grim surfly prognostication solely to the realm of real estate. All aspects of life will be owned and apportioned by middlemen—I’m sorry, middlezirs (or whatever your favorite neologism be)—if the globalists have their way. Just the other day I spoke to a young one who informed me that even video games are now largely accessed through a subscription model. Of course, the shimmy of bankers and lawyers into the living habits of Westerners is not what Putin had in mind by mentioning “vassals.” Pertinent though my alleyway is, the “vassals” he doubtless meant were the above-described Western Europeans, backstabbing and backstabbed.
Not content to make a hell of their part of the world, the Atlanticists wish to spread their poison east. As Putin said, “They want us to be their slaves.” Western missile placements, and NATO memberships vie with pride parades and social media in their aggression towards Russian state power and cultural autonomy.

“We’re told the West is there to protect the rules. Who defined the rules?” asked Putin. As it happens, the International Bar Association defines those rules. Do not forget for a moment the provocation pulling Russia into Ukraine was not an end in itself. The globalists pulled that stunt in order to justify kicking out the economic legs of Moscow by cutting their business ties. That was supposed to trigger a color revolution whose end was the toppling of the present Russian administration.

There was even talk in the MSM at one point, in the more rabid neoliberal journals, going back years before this war calling for Russia to be declared a rogue state. This is not a rhetorical term. Such a Bar designation would put the Federation in the geopolitically impotent camps of Taliban Afghanistan and the former ISIS territory in Syria and Iraq. Russia would be kicked out of the nation-state club. It would go from being one legal entity approved and admitted by other legal entities into their “community of nations” mafia to being “merely” a lawful government cut off from the entirety of world commerce. By the by, this system is not much different from how your local Masonic lodges or Chambers of Commerce admit and refuse members. It’s the same system, it’s really just a matter of scale. Traditionally the ability to hold territory and conduct courts were the only conditions of being a lawful ruler. What one’s national neighbors thought of your legitimacy was irrelevant to being a sovereign state. Not so when sticky barristers and moneymen run the show. With them you also get the feminine obsession of others’ approval thrown in. The West has deconstructed all aspects of life. This would not be so bad. Revisionism can be as good for peoples as it is for people. Sure, doesn’t the Church kick off Compline with an examination of conscience? Revisionism is fine. What is alarming is that the West has nothing, absolutely nothing, to replace their deconstructed world with. We can tear down but we do not have it in us to build up.

Putin encapsulated the madness of the hour, mentioning, “Parent 1 and parent 2” towards the end of his sermon. According to The New York Times there “are more than 60 comprehensive gender clinics in the United States.” The article notes that there are many dozens of less all-encompassing offices for transsexual persons (i.e., they offer hormones but don’t do surgery). Now I know enough to tell you that no one does anything in this Babylon world unless they can make money off of it. If there are dozens of these chop shops that means this is a sensible commercial decision. And that means there is clientele enough to float these ventures.

Because America’s misrulers have decided to bet it all on one roll of the Ukrainian dice, at least some solid degenerate American values are rubbing off. On October 10th the Jerusalem Post reported there is an app in Ukraine—now easily accessible, thanks to Ursula’s cell phone bonus!—whereby enrollees will be notified if Putin drops a nuke. Upon this notification the sensualists of Kiev will hoof it out to a nearby hill for an orgy. Fifteen thousand people have registered. Logistics will be assisted by color-coded wristbands advertising the wearer’s favorite sexual positions. This is the Ukraine the globalists are gunning for.

Making an allusion to the unthinkable in the liberated West, Putin closed out his lecture by quoting Christ. He said, “By their fruits you will know them.” Indeed.

Conclusion

As a decrepit Biden coughed his way to the finish line of his shameful speech, amidst hecklers and police sirens he said, “I see a very different America—an America with an unlimited future, an America that is about to take off. I hope you see it as well. Just look around.” He may well be correct. Joe, Crusty Joe, Creepy Joe, Sadsome Joe, Joe-who-may-yet-make-good-on-that-baptism-of-yours: if the crew about you does not cool it, America, the whole stinking “rules-based order,” and the lot of us auld raggy oldies besides, will take off alright. We’re going to be blown very high indeed. Cool it and do what grace beckons.

Epilogue: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Because of the timeliness of this essay I have feverishly spent October writing. As we watch the Atlanticist pups play an irresponsible game of chicken with the lives of us all, the kind editors of this site have humored my own game of chicken with deadlines. Coming down to the calendric wire as this essay has, the two lines of thought which the September 1st and 30th address suggested have continued to play out as October fades into November.

The historical and philosophical consciousness which Vladimir Putin demonstrated in St. George’s Hall continued with his October 27th speech in Moscow at the Valdai Discussion Club. The geopolitical shift, that being the end of the post-WWII world and what will replace it, was the umbrella item over his lengthy speech/Q&A. The right of societies to determine their politics and morals contrasted with the McWorld model of the G.A.E. It was a nice, ever so subtle touch to begin the talk with a reference to the globalist obsession with climate change and its threat to species. Putin used this motif to pivot to the danger a unipolar world poses to local cultures. More immediately,

Putin noted the West continues to play a “dangerous, bloody, and dirty game,” once again suggesting negotiations to end the war.
The more principled leftists in Congress agreed. Thirty progressive Democrats underwrote a letter sent to Hunter Biden’s father calling for negotiations with Russia, a cooler tone, and a realization of the worldwide economic implications of this Ukraine errand. This harkened back to the one time in my life honest Democrats did something nobel, the heroic and hopeless stand a few of them made to stop the Second Iraq War 20 years ago. This time around their backs gave out. After submitting the letter they shamefacedly walked it back a few days later. Their paymasters in Raytheon and Lockheed snapped their fingers.

Since Barack Obama’s point man shuffled out of Independence Hall on the arm of Nurse Jill, the marvel and byword which is Late Imperial America continues to be what it is (as all things must). Joe Biden has had four major “senile moments” since Philly. On September 29th he wander away from a F.E.M.A. podium off cue and began greeting everyone as his handlers tried in vein to reign him in. As he left a U.N. event in October he confusedly stood on the stage pantomiming to Secret Service agents as to what to do next. In the middle of that month in Oregon the former Vice President added to the many peculiar incidents of him sniffing people’s hair. Last week from the write of these closing lines, he “blanked out” when asked about a 2024 run. The reporter quickly ended the interview.

These are silly things from a silly man. Like Biden’s September 1st talk, however, the month did not pass without something darker again stirring. The “conservative extremists” were back. Boo! Within spitting distance of Halloween the Deep State rolled out a ludicrous story surrounding Paul Pelosi, the besotted husband of the Speaker of the House, a visitor in his underwear, and a hammer. The details of this weird attack do not concern us. What is pertinent is that the sun did not set before the former Delaware senator, with MSM hot on his heels, linked the “extremism” of this latest San Francisco false flag with that other sideshow, the January 6th boomer-conservative-cum-agent-provocateur rally. This would all be funny except that people don’t seem to notice the mental state of the former Vice President, nor do they have the discernment to see through a patently false story fed out for obvious political reasons. If they can’t see what’s going on in Ukraine why should they see this? Be it dying West or rising East, so it goes.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

The Church in America: Vatican I, the Catholic Meltdown, and a Bright Tomorrow

I am not a Catholic. Odds are if you consider yourself a serious member of the Church of Rome you are not one either. The more Marys and John Pauls you have in the backseat of your transit van, the more scapulars and rosaries you use, the more you rack up those Latin Masses and novenas, the less likely you are in fact a Catholic, according to how that organization defines its membership. In this, we have much to unpack.

If the following essay is unpleasant to read, it is just as unpleasant to write. It will mean putting to death many illusions we have cherished. At the core, we must understand that a Catholic is exactly what the owners of that corporation define a Catholic to be at the present moment, and not whatever definition we fancy. This essay is disillusioning. To be disillusioned is a good thing. It is a blessing to be free of one’s misapprehensions.

To shoulder our task, we must look at history both sacred and profane, we must come to grips with the consequences of Church councils past and Church happenings present, and we must sound out the spirit of legalism, a tool which the Fathers of Rome have embraced for some time.

More than anything we must extricate from our conversation that fondest of fallacies, dear to men in general, dearest of all to conservative sorts: we must cease speaking of things as we would like them to be. We must speak of things as they are. Lastly, we will break out our divining rods as we look towards the future of Catholicism. This future may yet be bright, but only if Catholics—or rather Catholic-ing people—accept the stark impasse they are at. It’s a checkmate so adamantine and painful that even the most ardent traditionalists will not acknowledge it.

And towards what end do we do this? Towards the love of the Church of Christ, the Catholic Church.

The Impasse

Things are deadlocked. They are at such an impasse that I need only mention “The Crisis,” and I am likely to be understood. Some men make careers detailing the blow-by-blow decomposition of Catholicism in the Postmodern West. They plumb villainous and criminal activity of villainous and criminal men, and they expose the mediocrity of forgettable men; from an endless well of indignation as loud as it is innocent, they critique the oatmeal thoughts of oatmeal-brained men; and these commentators have an endless store of indignation towards banal suburban liturgies attended by banal suburban men. But you shall not put a stumbling block before the blind, Leviticus says, and you shall not flog a normie for being unimpressive, I say. Given these obvious dynamics I do not see why the Catholic meltdown forever renews itself in outrage from the devout. At the end of the day, for all their verbosity, there is little value in punditland.

It is remarkable that for half a century Roman Catholics have thrashed about concerning the state of the Church. The topic has filled a lot of conference halls, it has sold gobs of books, and it has gotten many, many clicks online. This talk has solved precisely nothing. However, in this exercise papists are not different from the secular conservatives they so often get used and duped by. In both instances, and many others besides, people are not grasping the dynamics of the communities they associate with.

In response to The Crisis people have developed certain solutions. These express themselves in a spectrum of formal and corporate works which include everything from participating in online forums and radio shows, to establishing congregations complete with seminaries, schools, pilgrimage agencies, and even rest homes. Beyond these efforts, printing houses and websites advertise bushels of theories about Vatican II, who is the real pope, and, especially, why the older liturgical books are allegedly better than the new ones. The diversity of these solutions are superficial. While these perturbed people exert their efforts in different directions, sometimes heroically be it said, their appraisal and solution to The Crisis is ultimately the same.

Namely, to some extent or other these people, these orthodox Catholics, or devout Catholics, or traditional Catholics, or conservative Catholics, these flattering-adjective Catholics, believe that Catholicism is occluded by the Church hierarchy at present. However, mirabile dictu, they say, real Catholicism can be accessed merely by doing old Catholic things. If one does these things enough, and if one gets enough people doing them, then soon or late The Crisis will be over. Problem solved. Crisis solved. The entire spectrum of Catholicisms (sic) believe these points and adhere to this approach. Their denominations only differ in degrees and methods.

Alas, this is a dead-end. You see, the same Catholic tradition these commendable people believe they are maintaining in fact forbade their methodology 150 years ago. Doing and believing and living holy Christian lives does not make one a good Catholic. Being in perfect legal submission to the regulations and teachings of the Diocese of Rome makes one a good Catholic. To wit, I adduce Canon 205 of Rome’s Codex, “Those baptized are fully in the communion of the Catholic Church on this earth who are joined with Christ in its visible structure by the bonds of the profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical governance.” Again, this is how the Roman Catholic Church defines its membership, and it is only their definition which matters. A man acting under any other definition is holy and wholly LARPing. This is the dark wood of legalism.

As we proceed there are some nuances I ought to address so that I am understood correctly. I have no substantive disagreement with the spread of approaches found in the so-called traditional groups mentioned above, their quirks, egos, theological blind-spots notwithstanding. However, because I apprehend the conclusions of Vatican I and the entirety of 19th Century ecclesiology, without a shadow of a doubt neither I nor the sects above are Catholic. Post-1870 the Church is whatever the Churchman say it is at the moment, and there is no doubt from the pope down to the Curia down to the college of bishops, the presbytery, and the vast bulk of the Christian people that likely you and certainly I with our mantillas and our missals are not a faithful representation of the mind of that community.

Until the legalism which has copper-fastened the Bride of Christ to barritry is dissolved The Crisis will not change. It may ameliorate for a season, perhaps a Pius XIII or a Benedict XVII may toddle along, but as long as legal path prevails The Crisis will return soon or late. Yes, I am saying that your conservatives and your traditionalists and your orthodox Catholics are not part of that religion, but I am saying the same of myself.

Also, it is not my purpose in this essay to change people’s beliefs. Those who adhere to any denomination of flattering-adjective Catholicism may believe what they wish. It is my intention to establish in triplicate that a man who chooses to operate a Roman Catholic municipal person, what the Vatican’s Codex calls a “faithful,” does not have the liberty to entertain, even mentally(!), the type of critical discourse which has become mother’s milk to many of the devout, much less does such a municep have leave to publicly act on this discourse.

Furthermore, I assert that if we wish to continue this critical tone we must respect the Catholic Church enough to admit we do not fit their definition of a Catholic, particularly concerning the canonical clause on “government” above, and that appeals to anything before 1870 are totally moot for reasons I will lay out below.

I am in hearty agreement with the general conclusions of the so-called traditionalist so-called Catholics. They are correct in discerning any number of ruptures. Furthermore, they are correct in comprehending the gravity of these ruptures in “the big picture” of things, and that these breaks undermine the authoritative claims of Catholicism. I believe the traditionalist critique is correct, but I remind myself that beliefs are worthless. Only what is matters. Alas, neither I nor any who hold such traditional positions match the definition of the Catholic Church’s canonical “faithful” status, a designation which is identical to the “citizen” status in those lands ruled by the Bar Association. Recall the Church’s definition of itself (not yours),

[The one Church of Christ], constituted and organized as a society in this present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and truth can be found outside her structure; such elements, as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel towards Catholic unity.

This quotation hails from part eight of Lumen Gentium. The clear division between the Mystical Body of Christ and the juristic, structural Church may startle many lay Catholics who assumed the realities were one and the same. But there you go. One will often find in the documents of legal-land a remarkable honesty. Perhaps the Vatican’s attorneys were just unconsciously blunt and illuminative (and all Roman priests are attorneys).

Oddly enough, while this part of Lumen Gentium is one of the stock faults traditionalists see in the late Council, they have internalized that selfsame bipolar thinking. In their mental edifice it forms a necessary lynchpin. Keep your ear to the track long enough and you will hear from them, as perhaps you’ve said yourself, mention of “the Church as it” and “the Church as her.” In other words, I can ignore the Novus Ordo and Pacha Mama and St. Paul VI at the United Nations because that’s only the structural Church (“the Church as it”). I may ignore all that jazz in favor of what I believe is real, old-timey Catholicism (“the Church as her”). Alas, alas, not so fast. As Lumen Gentium instructs,

The society structured with hierarchical organs and the Mystical Body of Christ, are not to be considered as two realities, nor are the visible assembly and the spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things; rather they form one complex reality which coalesces from a divine and a human element.

You see, here’s the rub: one may not motte-and-bailey their way out of The Crisis. Municipal Catholics, those the Vatican numbers as its faithful, must acknowledge the Church as it and she are one and the same. The type of mental, vocal, and lived out picking and choosing many of us Catholic-ing people do with our faith is simply a walled-off option. We must either keep Catholic-ing and renounce representing the Vatican’s legal person, including pretending we are part of that organization, or sit down and shut up.

Lastly, so that I am understood at the outset, there is a large slice of humble pie we have to eat as we digest the thesis of this essay. It happens that the same sort of people who go in for Latin Masses and rosaries and catechisms, many of whom I am arguing are not Catholic according to Rome’s definition of its membership, are the same sorts who give the greatest grief to protestant and Orthodox sectarians. Grasping the ramifications of Vatican I, other binding 19th Century documents, and canon law, it looks like we are all schismatics now. Since many Catholic-ing people have reached the exact same conclusions and praxis as the Greeks from 1000 years ago and the protestants of 500 years vintage, perhaps we Catholic LARPers can get off our high horses. We should put a sock in our haughty Extra Ecclesiam jabber, at least until we actually join the Ecclesia we’re so fond of giving others grief for not belonging to.

Lastly, a note on punctuation. Throughout this essay, as you can see above, I refer to Christians who hail from Reformation communities as lower-case protestants. This was the original way various Reformation congregations referred to themselves, and it most accurately expresses the truth which the reformers were grasping at. Namely, protestantism is an attempt to live a Christian life outside of the legal-canonical structure which predominated East and West until that time. Statutory structures (i.e., legal systems) have many things to recommend them. Nothing has yet been found which so effectively harnesses human attention and energy. However, statutory structures are totally fictional. For the Christian this proves to be a pickle. On the one hand, how can one worship reality, Logos, while at the same time swathing the day to day functioning of the Church in the dead fictions of barrity? On the other hand, how can there be a visible, hierarchical, incarnate Christian community, the Church in other words, without something like a legal system? It is not our work to answer that question here. What I will point out, however, is that because every single legal word, statute, jurisdiction, and person is make-believe it is therefore dead.

There is an entropy here which has consistently worn down every vital reality which has bellied up to legalism. Every community, every religion, every philosophy, every nation, every man which has put itself into barritry irresistibly begins compromising their principles. Find me one man or community in legalland which 10 or 20 or 100 or 500 years in has held to their original idealism. The living cannot be wed to the dead. This is a pickle indeed. Like “christian,” “protestant” was a verb, then it became an adjective; 500 years on it ends its days as a noun. This is the way of all flesh. In fact I suppose every spiritual community in history has known this sadsome slide from lived reality to dead object. Nihilominus, in no sense does protestant appear lower-cased in this essay in a pejorative fashion. Insofar as traditional Catholics are in no uncertain terms protestants, I believe the antique usage of protestant captures the reality both Reformation Christians and traditional Catholics hunger for: Christianity, a verb once more!

You see, flattering-adjective Catholicism is a hodge-podge of expectations which have largely developed in response – always in response, like all failed conservatism, never proactively – to The Crisis. It is so much a creature of discourse and argument that orthodox Catholicism has unwittingly wandered down alleys trod centuries or millennia ago. To wit, the spectrum of traditionalisms has arrived at an ecclesiology which is substantively somewhere between Eastern Orthodoxy and American hoedown protestantism. Aesthetically they are surely closer to the former, logically they are closer to the latter. These dear Catholicish souls, commendable for their loyalty to a religious structure which has done them great pastoral wrong, tragic for their inability to understand the governing principles of their nominal religion, essentially have created an ideal Church, i.e., a Church of the romantic heart, of the mental, of the numinous, of the World of Forms.

With full awareness for how shoddily Catholicing people of traditional attachment have been kicked about, with every agreement for their aesthetics and spirituality, with all regard for their occasional heroism, how in God’s name does the “Eternal Rome” construction of Marcel Lefebvre, how does the “Faith of the Ages” which these people go on about differ from the Orthodox fantasy of the “Church of the First Millennium” or the protestant errand of reviving the early days of The Way?

Accepting the above thesis is only half our work. Once we painfully come to grips that decades of battling to restore Catholicism has been built on a foundation of sand, because all legalism is sand, once we swallow the hard pill that those of us who have grounded our identity on being Catholic are not in fact members of that faith, then we turn to the exciting part of our time together. What might Catholicism look like once it is freed from the tomb of a 19th Century ecclesiology and mindset which has both caused The Crisis and yet makes void all prevailing solutions of the same?

Fanboys Out!

At a certain point one must come to terms with reality. For many of us this is difficult. Perhaps we have experienced the unhappy condition of a friend or relation whom we hope will shape up in some way or another. Maybe we have known some kind of long-term estrangement, but we keep alive the hope that so-and-so will one day walk through our door. In some scenarios at some times it is no longer rational to maintain these hopeful positions. Alas, the bottle wins out b’times, the porch light stays on never to embrace a prodigal’s return, and the sick child wastes away. After a point to continue in hope is to live in fantasy.

No man ever held the Catholic vision of life and society as dear as I. In the second part of this essay I will describe how I blew a decade of my life trying to instantiate that vision. But time moves apace and I’ll just say here that it is literally impossible to want something for a society whose participants are not interested. So little by little among a thousand disappointments and failures and betrayals I saw among the flatteringly-adjectived that American Catholics are as myopic as protestants in their comprehension of the height and depth and breadth of what Christian life and society promises. All they wanted was their family and their Jesus, the world be damned. And so little by little my idealism died. I saw what was up. It’s cold comfort, but it is a good thing to be disillusioned.

Howsomever, as regards the Church that final disillusion was their participating in the Coronavirus Lockdown. That event was such an admission of faulty sacramental understanding, such a lack of faith interiorly and discernment exteriorly, and such a betrayal of a damn sight more people than you’d imagine, souls who rely on the Church not just for religious services, but also for basic social solace from the blast of cold modernity, that I should never think I will reclaim my long-suffering esteem for Catholicism.

Oh, don’t worry, I still keep up with my rosaries and my brevaries, and my holy boozy bones darken church portals exactly as regular as Rome’s shuffling lawyers have scratched out “obligation.” And my heart sinks at the precarity of saying this, but as lame and crooked as its clerics and attendees are, Catholicism is the only shovel out of the mess which the Enlightenment has brought us to. Still and all, after Covid my long-dying hope that Catholicism would prove a tardy counter to Modernity in my lifetime gave up the ghost.

More than my worthless esteem, however, the decision to belly-up to the Coronavirus hype killed in me my filial tendency to spin or downplay obvious Church mismanagement. For many moons it was obvious to me that the Church was part of the New World Order, but I tried to paper-over things when I saw them. This modest grace I do not extend to myself, and it is not something I extend to other actors on the world stage, but for decades my piety pushed me to “cover of nakedness” of Catholic governance and society. After two American waves of sexual scandals strung out over 20 years, after less flashy but more numerous financial wheeling-and-dealing, and after a tuneless and ham-fisted liturgical reform, as pastorally inept as it was iconoclastic, Covid was the straw which broke the camel’s back. Like a child watching his alcoholic father drink hand sanitizer, I can no longer fanboy for the Church. I’m not going anywhere, but I’m not papering over things either. And this includes nonsense in traditional Catholicville, they who think they most have their act together, they whose heads are as big as hot air balloons. Ergo this essay.

Ah, musha, you say, feeding me your best and most canned apologetics, one mustn’t judge the Church on the failures of her members. It is besides the point to mention that a tree can indeed be judged for its fruits. What is on point is that my difficulty is a bit more nuanced than leaving the Catholic Church. As I mentioned, I said my rosary today and I mean to be at Mass this Sunday just as I was last Sunday. I’m not going anywhere. But after Covid I must admit what you conservatives will not. Namely,

1) While the post-Conciliar traditionalist criticism is correct in its general outline,
2) The de jure Vatican I papacy permits each and everyone of these post-Conciliar aberrations to occur (i.e., Again, after Vatican I, Catholicism is whatever the people in the Curia says it is),
3) That a Roman Catholic corporate faithful does not have the liberty under the Syllabus of Errors, Pastor Aeternus, Denzinger, Ott, nor canon law to hold any critique related to point one above. Thus,
4) The only honest solution is indeed to keep doing Catholic things but not to claim to be part of that communion. To do otherwise is to lie to the agents of that
5) organization and oneself.

Two Worldly Comparisons and Three

“We The People”

Let me explain this selfsame tragic disconnect within two other communities whose denizens fail to grasp the true picture of things. These are they who advocate for social and political conservatism and those who work for educational reform. Like your orthodox Catholic sorts, I am profoundly sympathetic towards these positions and these communities. However, like Catholics, conservatives and pedagogues are clueless as to the actual dynamics at play in their respective bailiwicks.

For example, if one does not understand that legal states are foreign to the men they allegedly rule over, political happenings become one fluster after another. Many a talk radio host has made a career off of this reality. Taxes, wars, zoning, health regulations, inflation, and many more things besides, make no sense until the moment one realizes they are not part of The People. You indeed are a person, but you have no truck with The People to whom civil servants so oft’ refer. When this understanding happens, when one grasps that legal governments exist in a state of enmity towards those they rule, all the “crazy” and “insane” goings on in the political order are quite sensible. One realization can illuminate everything.

Occupy Wall Street, from the dear dead days gone by, and the late Ottawa and Washington convoys are examples of this reality at play. Those American and Canadian patriots could quote all the charters, and bills of rights, and court precedents, and moral laws they pleased, but The People—the bloodline descendants of those who constituted their nation-states generations ago – have no obligation to the Tom, Dick, and Harry regular people. As we will see with the educational critique, politics are not broken. They are working just fine. Everything is running smoothly, but only if we grasp the principles. If one does not get the principles at play then they run the risk of wasting an entire intellectual life in conservative-land by forever reacting to the symptoms but never the cause. Those Occupiers and those Convoymen were beautiful and democratic and wholesome, they were the best of their peoples, but like the orthodox Catholics, their efforts were moot because they never grasped the societies they operated in.

“My” (Birth Certificated) Children

Another example comes from my own avocation of education. It concerns public schools. Nowadays, in the best tradition of cringy conservative lingo, “government brainwashing camps,” have replaced the expression “public schools” in some circles. (Your real big shots use “indoctrination” in place of “brainwashing;” thus, “government indoctrination camps.”) What was once a pointed and thoughtful jab when used 20 years ago in a measured way has become a tedious pitter-patter hurled by parents, typically women, at America’s latest national pastime: emotional school board meetings.

Often at these sadsome gatherings two fallacies appear. One is that parents believe they have lawful rights over “their” children, the other is that public schools exist for the betterment of pupils in se. However, like the civic example above and like the Catholic one we’re dwelling on throughout this essay, there are profound misapprehensions at play by parents, and these lead to false conclusions and false solutions. Let’s take this nice and slow, partner.

Any child enrolled in a public school, and any state-registered private school, can only do so if they have a birth certificate. Anyone with a birth certificate—a process always initiated by parents, mind you, never by the state—is forever alienated in law from his former natural parents. By filling out the certificate application Daddy and Mommy unwittingly declare to the state that Junior is a foundling. They declare that Junior has no estate with them in law or in fact. Under pain of perjury Daddy and Mommy freely state that this selfsame Junior which came from their bodies is effectively a lost child. Via the birth cert application Junior is declared to be no different than a kid found wandering the mall or the streets or the woods. In benevolent response to this declaration the state seamlessly returns their new ward, Junior, back to the custody of Daddy and Mommy. The only difference is that now Daddy and Mommy are now mere legal parents who henceforth have conditional custody of the state’s child, Junior.

This is exactly what happens when we register our newly bought cars at the DMV. One’s actual ownership of the machine is traded for mere legal ownership which can be regulated by the state (e.g., speed regulations, taxes, seatbelt requirements). By the bye, anyone care to guess what happens when the Catholic priest takes the newly baptized baby and fills our the baptism certificate?. I care not whether this is good or bad, nor if this transfer of authority is moral; I care not what I believe about this, nor what you believe about this. All that matters is that this is the process at play. All the wine moms east of the Mississippi can roar about the school board’s obligation to them and “their” children, but until they grasp what they did in that hospital, nothing will be grasped.

“Schools are Failing”

Secondly, at these school board meetings we often see objections to school curricula. Now the only thing more given over to fads and fancies than the world of pedagogy is the world of conservative bellyaching over schools. Like the parental mistake above, namely the misunderstanding parents have about whose registered children in fact attend registered schools, so here too people are so wrapped up in what they believe about schools that they do not grasp what schools are.

Public schools are municipal subdivisions of the township. Therefore, they are legal entities. Like all legal entities, public schools operate under the circumscribed parameters of legal language. In other words – and this is where we’re going as we return to the religious theme of this essay – it does not matter what I think the word “public” means any sooner than my impression of who constitutes “the People” matters. It matters what the public school board says “public” means, it matters what the state says its schools’ title means. At base it really only matters what legal attorneys say a legal entity is. Thus, like anything legal, the word “public” has a specific meaning. Public means commercial. Thus, the raison d’ être of public schools are to produce commercially successful consumers. Once all these points are understood one’s conclusions must be reevaluated. In the terrible justice of the points above, one sees the farce which is the critique of mainstream education. Pagan, Christian, or Jew, black man or white, no one denies that public schools do a solid job of making public—commercial—people.

As for Them, So for Us

The same goes for Catholicism. In place of, or in ignorance of, an appraisal of things as they are, to confront The Crisis the lot of us have thrown up our beliefs as to how things ought to be. More or less we believe we can ignore or actively scorn the things from Rome we believe don’t fit in our idea of what Catholicism is. This the Church does not permit. Remember that beliefs do not matter, fundamentals do. Post-1870 there is no appeal to anything outside of this moment’s Vatican, and the Vatican says a Catholic is someone in complete external and internal submission to Rome’s governance.

Once one understands that The Crisis of the present Roman Catholic Church is the logical outcome of Vatican I, and indeed that it is the result of trends going back nearly a millennium, and once one comes to accept that it is absolutely forbidden for Catholics to disagree with the popes, and the councils, and the liturgies of the Church, vocally or in the quiet of one’s mind (again, !), one can see what a fool’s errand the devout Catholic world has been on. Consider this statement from session four of the First Vatican Council,

Wherefore we teach and declare that, by divine ordinance, the Roman church possesses a pre-eminence of ordinary power over every other church, and that this jurisdictional power of the Roman pontiff is both episcopal and immediate. Both clergy and faithful, of whatever rite and dignity, both singly and collectively, are bound to submit to this power by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, and this not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those which regard the discipline and government of the church throughout the world.

Pay attention to that last clause. “Discipline and government,” include everything trads gripe about. After 1870 those topics were off the table for Catholics to buck up against. And remember, in case you thought you could out-lawyer a lawyer, this cutting criticism from Pascendi Domini Gregis: “In the meanwhile the proper course for the [‘modernist’] Catholic will be to proclaim publicly his profound respect for authority – and continue to follow his own bent.” Those of us who drink deeply at the well of Western faith, orthodoxy, and tradition must simply admit we do not believe, much less abide by, the present tense de fide Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. In trying to be traditionalists we became modernists.

Reorientation

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s catch our breath. Again, firstly, this article intends in its own little way to ultimately advance the Catholic religion. There is no gotcha-ism here, no amble of a secular mien. But we must come to grips that a large segment of men who are often the most erudite, personally devout, and occasionally admirable are in fact not Catholics according to the present parameters of their religious leaders, and remember it’s those leaders who decide who is and is not a member. Not God, nor you, nor some appeal to the past defines a Catholic; once Rome threw itself headfirst into the barrister’s make-believe world only Rome gets to decide who is a Catholic.

On a note of sympathy here, I also do not suggest anything sinister in the legalism of Roman Catholicism either, neither its historical bent as compared to the Eastern Churches, nor ts 19th Century doubling-down on barratry. The statutory system is a deliciously tempting tool to organize human activity. However, because everything and anything legal is artificial, and because religion deals with reality, soon or late there must be a correction. Catholicism is paying that pound of flesh for its legal dalliance right now. However I have never sensed anything wicked or manipulative in this unhappy tryst.

One must also remember the context of Vatican I, its ultramontanism and its legalism. The 19th Century West was fast dechristianizing. Surely Churchmen thought they could fight fire with fire by reimagining the Church itself as a nation on parity with the rising nation-state order. Again, this was a regretful choice in hindsight, but in the moment – with the Church ringed ‘round with Masons and businessmen and barristers, with the Papal States literally compassed by Garibaldi’s barking legions – it may have seemed the best option. Rome’s decision was regretful but not wicked.

Play Time

Imagine if I filled my house with McDonalds paraphernalia from the ground up. Imagine if every shelf had a Happy Meal toy on it, every table featured menus going back to the ‘60s. Imagine if I forgo a staircase in my home for a slide, and if I chose neither carpet nor tile for my downstairs floor, but instead I put in a ball pit. Imagine if I dress in a McDonalds’ uniform on one day and as Ronald McDonald the next. Would any of this make me a member of the McDonalds’ organization? No, it would all be a Live Action Role Playing, it would all be LARPing. Even if I cooked their same food, and knew their history, even befriended the local managers and employees, I would never be a member of McDonalds following this methodology. I must be hired to work there, and to be hired I must fit McDonalds’ criteria and no one else’s.

This silly example is the condition which a good lot of Catholic-ing people are in at present. In place of the actual Church headquartered in Rome, and way-stationed in every dioceasan cathedral, and in every local town, these hapless and holy souls have more or less created a mental church, an ideal Catholicism, an “eternal Rome” which consists of whatever beliefs and practices the individual considers “traditional” (read: a late-19th or early-20th Century custom). In their quest for real Catholicism the flatteringly-adjectived have arrived at an ecclesiology somewhere between that of protestantism and Orthodoxy. Catholics have fundamentally failed to understand how the Church defines itself.

It’s Not as Easy as That, I’m Afraid

It’s only since traditional Catholic-ville left me that I’ve had cause to marvel that, while I heard loads and loads about Trent and Vatican II, while I even got plenty of Quas Primas and Pascendi, I cannot recall a single instance of Vatican I being referenced in all those 15-odd years. Reflecting on things since then, I see why. Adjective Catholics do not speak of Vatican I because that Council, which their logic binds them to in a way immune to their typical lawyering, defined the Magisterium in such absolute language that their typical appeals to previous usage, earlier synods, Church Fathers, famous Scholastics, saint quotes, and reason itself became dead points after 1870.

I assert that there are two points from the First Vatican Council which press upon the nerve of The Crisis. Most people involved in the dialogue about The Crisis, those laudably knee-deep in working to right The Crisis, come and go and live and die without ever considering these points.

The first is that the parade of novelty and rupture which has altered everything starting with St. Pius X’s fiddling with the Breviary to Pope Francis’ latest off-the-cuff heresy is absolutely and comfortably within the ken of the Vatican I papacy. (By the by, whatever his personal holiness, it is astonishing that Pius X is considered to be a hero by traditionalists precisely for his alleged fidelity to the liturgy. His trespass upon the Office gave precedent 50 years later to the Fathers of Vatican II to adjust the Mass. There would be no Mass of St. Paul VI without the Breviary of St. Pius X.)

New Masses, kissed Qurans, Communion for those in concubinage, Communion for those who publicly suborn murder, no Communion for people who want to go to the Latin Mass, yes, synods for days, each and every one of these things is permitted by the logic of Pastor Aeturnus. This is where the pious err. There has been no break with the past, at least not according to Church the reboot of 1870.

Indeed, if I may adduce America’s secular conservatives once again, isn’t it interesting that for as long as we have been following the state of the land the lot of us have seen nothing but “unconstitutional” actions. Literally nearly every action which state and federal administrations implement day in and day out is in shouting defiance of 1787. We can do the thoughtless thing as we roll our eyes at “the liberals” or “the Deep State,” and move on to our next outrage five minutes hence, or we can consider if perhaps another dynamic is not at play. Maybe there is a reality which we have never considered and one which better explains what otherwise appears to be a massive departure from America’s founding principles. As it happens, the latter is the case.

The answer, as plain as the nose on our face, is that the U.S. Constitution is not in effect. Period. The Constitution has had no force of law since March of 1861. That’s our answer. Go read the Congressional Record for March 28th of that year and learn what “sine die” means, and if that organic Congress ever reconvened. Do that and you can stop carrying around that pocket Constitution.

The same goes for Catholicism at this hour. Its former methodology ceased to exist on July 18th, 1870, the day Pastor Aeternus was passed. But we don’t want to face it. It’s too painful. As long as we are under the misapprehension that a pre-Vatican I methodology is a permissible route to take out of The Crisis, as long as we try to quote the Fathers and the Schoolmen and the old popes, we will be as pitiable as the dear and clueless Americans ranting about their voided Constitution, or the admirable and naive Canadians jabbering about their Charter of Rights. For a Catholic to cite anything prior to 1870 is as useless as an American arguing at the Department of Motor Vehicles about his right to travel under the Articles of Confederation, or for that matter the conclusions of Napoleonic Law, Islamic Fiqh, or the wisdom of Shaka Zulu. Those points may all be right in se, but they have no standing within the DMV system. Likewise, whatever faith of our fathers existed pre-Vatican I had no standing thereafter.

The second point which follows from the Vatican I ethos is that almost every critique of the Church across the diverse spectrum of Catholicisms (sic) is off the table. Everything from individual griping about alter girls on the way home from church, and a thousand annoyances besides, to the profound but restrained discourse of FSSP and Institute attendees, to the fantastically erudite theories of the SSPX, SSPV, Resistance, and sectarians farther afield, every moaning and groaning about Church administration from the small to the large, was completely shut down a century-and-a-half-ago. In our theories and criticism of Church development this last century we have run counter to the Oath Against Modernism we’re forever lauding when it says,

I reject the opinion of those who hold that a professor lecturing or writing on a historico-theological subject should first put aside any preconceived opinion about the supernatural origin of Catholic tradition or about the divine promise of help to preserve all revealed truth forever; and that they should then interpret the writings of each of the Fathers solely by scientific principles, excluding all sacred authority, and with the same liberty of judgment that is common in the investigation of all ordinary historical documents.

Have not the “anti-Modernist” conservatives taken this selfsame “modernist” tack? Have these Catholicing people not criticized Vatican II and everything since in the exact manner which their favorite secular and protestant radio hosts talk about any workaday topic? Do they not treat everything Rome has taught since the 1960s as being altogether on the natural plain?

Like many traditional-minded people, I will not square the circle. I cannot pretend to a continuity of Catholic belief and practice which is not altogether there. However, I’m not going to do the conservative cope and to set up a deus ex machina solution whereby I can ignore whatever I believe contradicts what I think Catholicism is. As queer as it sounds, the only honest solution is to keep doing Catholic things but stop pretending to be Catholic.

Let me put it this way. The Coronavirus regulations adhered to by the diocese by which I live, forbade the giving of Communion on one’s tongue for the length of the pandemic. Now I have my objections to Communion on the hand; those objections are somewhere different than your run-of-the-mill ones, but there they are.

As a result, I held back receiving Communion for much of those two years. This outrageous pastoral situation, however, is one which no one at that parish is aware of because I kept my thoughts to myself. My objection was altogether private. On the other end of the spectrum is Pope Michael of Kansas, USA. He is a most gracious gentleman whom I have had the pleasure of interviewing a couple of times as part of my show, A Conversation With. Given his vocation and his position, Pope Michael necessarily has a theological scaffolding and publicity miles away from yours truly in my Novus Ordo pew. Here’s the rub though: whether it’s my silent reservation or a public position like Pope Michael’s, or anything in between or elsewhere, neither of us are in union with the Syllabus of Errors nor with Vatican I.

If one might mentally wiggle out of Vatican II and all the 20th Century stuff they don’t like, take heed: you may not do so given the 19th Century and Pastor Aeternus. Oddly enough, the “whishy-washy” pastoral language so derided by the orthodox know-it-alls has itself allowed the traditionalist cornucopia of theories to spawn in the first place. Alas, the vaunted laser-beam language of the 19th Century Church leaves the lot of us ecclesiastically sprawling on a pin no less pitiably than Mr. Prufrock.

Of Death Rides and Dawns

Because we have focused on Vatican I in this article it seems right to me to make an analogy to that time. The Catholic Church is on a “deathride.” Deathrides were an interesting military feature in the 19th Century, that most literate era which came in with Romanticism and departed with Impressionism. In hopeless situations soldiers of the time would occasionally throw themselves against an irresistible foe in one last burst of virility. They might achieve their objectives, they probably would not. No matter, it was enough in any case to die with one’s boots on. The Charge of the Light Brigade is the most famous example of this; Pickett’s Charge is an American analogue, Easter Week an Irish. As the years wore on the frequency and enthusiasm for this kind of thing waned.

At this hour I have no doubt that a large percentage of upper clerics, including in the Curia, are intentionally liquidating the patrimony of the Church. If observation these past decades wasn’t enough, nor the Coronavirus shutdowns, the deliberate provocation and alienation of traditionally-minded people via Traditionis Custodes and the “Synod on Synodality” ought to seal the deal. Yes, the Church in its present constitution is on a deadride, one absolutely permissible according to parameters of Pastor Aeternus. But true to form in these, our chinless days, this deadride is less a Manilla Bay and more a Scapa Flow.

These military allusions from another century are most appropriate because it is from the 19th Century whence comes the ecclesiology which is smothering the Church of Christ. You see here’s the rub: both the hippest Novus Ordo devotee and the most self-imagined rock-ribbed traditionalist are both living out the consequences of Vatican I. Let me say that again, when Pope Francis utters his latest statement leaving the Acta Apostlicae Sedis men scrambling to explain him, and when the SSPX & co. have their latest schism over whatever minutiae gets their pride up, both are continuing lines of legal and ultramontanist thought initiated long before they came on the scene.

The Precision and Pain of Legalism

Let us explore dynamics of Catholicism which are rarely mentioned, the most operant dynamic being the nature of the strict or “legal” law.

In a sense the Catholic Church is the last department of the Western Roman Empire which is still functioning in our day. The Church is much like Hiroo Onoda, the last soldier of Imperial Japan, fighting on long after the fall of that regime. Imagine if your state or province’s government faded away but through happenstance the post office kept running. On a natural level this is what the Roman Catholic Church is: the last bureaucracy of the Roman Empire. Of course, the Church is more than an appendage of Ancient Rome, it is more than some antiquarian curiosity surviving into modernity. Because of that historical connection to the Imperium, Roman Catholicism adopted the governing system thereto. Again, I imply nothing underhanded here. This is simply an artifact of history. Just like the McDonalds example above, the Roman Senate operated under legal law, a system of organization wherein membership in a juristic body is solely determined by the creator and inheritors of the body. And so, the Church.

A Working Example

This talk of the First Vatican Council and the Syllabus has all been very theoretical. We need an example to clarify things. And have one we do in the mantle of public health. The discussion around Coronavirus vaccines illustrates the dead-end which the Catholic world finds itself in 150 years following Vatican I.

On the one hand is the Church corporate, a body which is tripping over itself to catch up to Mencius Molburg’s “Cathedral.” Thus, Rome approved their faithfuls’ reception of the Corona shots. If this counsel is advised or not is irrelevant; all that matters is that it is. As Pope Francis said, “Vaccines are not a magical means of healing, yet surely they represent, in addition to other treatments that need to be developed, the most reasonable solution for the prevention of the disease.”

On the other hand, we have Catholics who have refused the selfsame treatment. They do this on what they believe are moral grounds. And here as in a petri dish we see the sadsome corner which flattering-adjective Catholics are painted into. Unaware of their religion’s moral theologians, whose support guided their clerics to back the vaccines, these Catholics instead turned to radio personalities or online pundits to form their opinion. If they are right or wrong in their conclusions, if it is wise that Catholics’ have turned to secular radio hosts for their moral theology, if it is good they reason more like Evangelical sectarians each day, I care not. Like with the Curia’s position, so here.

All that matters is that this is the position many Catholics are in; that this position is not in conformity with their Church, and that to pretend that here—and in a hundred like places—there is not a direct break between their beliefs and their obligation under canon law to be in perfect external and internal submission to the Holy See is to play the proverbial ostrich. What is the point of having a de fide Magisterium, a Curial hobbyhorse a thousand years in the making, when people can quotemine themselves out of whatever they don’t like coming from Rome? What is the point of having a Magisterium if one can equally appeal to the tradition of Catholicism? How is this not different from Eastern Orthodoxy?

Wither Wanderest Thou?

What is to come of things? Who knows? God knows. This impasse over Vatican I will shake itself out soon or late. One scenario is that the structural Church will so belly up to an iron-toothed globalism that we will see replayed en masse the situation of the Church in France in the 18th Century. During the French Revolution the National Assembly erected the “Constitutional Church.” That organization served very much the same purpose which the Patriotic Church serves in modern China, namely, it made the Church a subsidiary entity of the State. Since the Tridentine seminary system was (and is) a factory for producing bootless yes-men, the Constitutional Church played into priests’ predilection for being told what to do by the civil power because now their bishop, after all, was a hireling of the state.

And here’s where things get interesting. You see, there was a problem in the French Church, called Gallicanism. This described the situation wherein the pope effectively had no jurisdiction in France. The agreement was distantly a relic of Conciliarism, made during about French military activity in Italy from an earlier age, and also detritus stemming from the Reformation.

The French Revolution forced an issue: did Catholic priests believe the pope had a supernatural jurisdiction which trumped the natural National Assembly or not? Up until 1789 there was a theoretical and humoring acceptance of the papacy in the Gallican Church. The Constitutional Church forced an issue which everyone was content to have remain ambiguous. Chinless seminarians became chinless priests, and you’ll not be surprised to hear that most French clerics joined the Constitutional Church. [As an aside, the nature of Roman Catholic clerical formation along the Tridentine model, a model wherein the candidate is profoundly—unbelievably—at the pleasure of his sponsoring bishop, joins Vatican I as being a twin culprit of The Crisis. If Vatican I has received little scholarly attention, then the seminary critique has received none.]

Then 1793 came and so did the radicals. The Constitutional Church was left to wither away until 1801 when Napoleon signed the Concordat that year. The result of all this is that Gallicanism resolved itself in a roundabout way. Those priests most given to it were either dead, had left religious life, or were so ignored by locals that they were a non-issue. On the other hand, those clergymen who refused to swear to the National Assembly all along not only won the esteem of the people, but their time “on the run,” as the Irish say of those on the outs with the law, produced a fervent, doctrinally solid, and organizationally competent presbytery. It is these men who rebuilt the strong French Church of the 19th Century.

My parallel between our situation and the Constitutional Church is not perfect. In our case the National Assembly is the Curia. However, the situation of Catholicism is not what it was two centuries ago. The Church in the 21st Century cannot and does not pretend to speak as an equal to the state. It scrapes and bows to globalists of various denominations and schemes like the NGO which Church leaders want the Church to be. Pope Francis will not be able to pull off with Mr. Schwab what Pius VII pulled off with Mr. Bonaparte.

For some time, the Roman Curia has subscribed to something like Arnold Toynbee’s concept of historical waves, and why it is that some societies survive and others do not. From Vatican II through to Laudato Si, the Catholic Church has been trying to crest an historical wave scholars have known is coming for the better part of a century. Only people with a deep reading of history and historical analysis can appreciate the dynamics of this. In this tack the Curia is to be commended for their provision. What we’ve lately come to call “The Great Reset” is something the Fathers of Rome have been bracing for since the 1940s.

Yes, the Curia is to be regarded on this point; but they have not grasped the sorts they’re dealing with. Again, Mr. Schwab is not Mr. Napoleon. The order which is rising will make the National Assembly’s anticlericalism seem quaint by comparison. What is coming wishes to remove root and branch all remembrance of God from the earth. It is a system of total fiction, including the falsification of the natural order down to DNA. It is a system I suspect only old John on Patmos could rightly tell us of.

Ergo, to my Gallican simile, the Catholic Church will belly up the powers that be. For a season all will be well. Those teeth will show themselves soon or late, however, and the episcopacy of the Roman Church will be as dead and marginal and scorned as were the Juring clergy of Napoleon’s day. The only functioning Church left will be the medley of extra-canonical (read: non-Catholic) “Catholic-ing” societies who have developed competent pastoral administrations as they’ve been “on the run” in their own way these last few decades.

I shudder to consider the jurisdictional, canonical, and theological mess that generation will face (a mess, be it said, which those same “traditional” groups have somewhat contributed to). The only thing that I caution future generation of is to be wary of recreating the same conditions which led to The Crisis in the first place. If people of devout habits do not confront that Pastor Aeternus created this situation, they will be setting back a minute hand which will strike again in the future. I know that to do so directly denies the Romans’ belief in their infallible Magisterium, but it is a pill which must be chomped.

Unless these post-persecution Christians confront what I am saying, they will be as luckless as American Conservatives wanting to go back to an 18th Century Constitution which set the stage for what the subsequent United States has become. One may keep setting things back to 1776, but they will only set themselves up for a future of Groundhog’s Day identical failures. But if those future churchmen men bravely extricate the habits of mind which have smothered the Church since the 19th Century, if they end Catholicism’s queer obsession with barritry and centralization, they will have an opportunity to truly revive tradition on a solid footing.

These points will be difficult, but capable men appear in every age. When they do, they will find that the Reformation is over. Secularism neutralized the mainline magisterial denominations decades ago. Mainline protestants have gone in for The Cathedral and there they will remain. The rump of the Reformation which carries on does so in a devout and sincere Evangelicalism, a sheepfold as chaotic as it is theologically and liturgically ambivalent. In other words, there exists no theological reason for protestantism. It exists as a sociological and historical artifact—and there is very little beyond those points standing in the way of reunion.

Catholicism in its own way separated from itself at the Reformation; and if protestantism is only 500 years old we can say something of the same for Catholicism. In this scenario of a Church steeled by persecution, liberated from the 19th Century, and reunited with other Western Christians, we will have in our hands an opportunity to reassert the dominant Hellenistic genes of Catholicism which were forgotten in the strident Semitic speechifying of the Reformation.

As the beast with teeth of iron makes war on the saints, circling the wagons will seem as advisable now as it was during the Dark Ages when the barbarians last trod through the West. Back then various Christian factions, the Roman Church, the Celtic Church, and the monastic movement, united into what we know as the Catholic Church. In the face of the new barbarians, it will be an easy thing closing up the schisms of the past to brave the brunt at hand. Catholic or protestant, Christianity has not been fun since the 16th Century. If something like this scenario works out, we will really see what the dynamite of the Gospel can do.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

Featured: “Healing the Blind Man,” by Václav Mánes; painted in 1832.

An American Journal Of Days, Or The Conservative Washout

Introduction

With some temporal distance behind us, and much soul searching, let us examine the coup which deposed Donald John Trump in the winter of 2020-2021 and installed Kamala Devi Harris and her sidekick, Joseph Robinette Biden, as the highest Executive officers of these United States. Herein, we’ve a day’s work, for some things were born and many things died that sadsome season. Those three months saw the longtime fissures of the Trump Administration buckle and fail besides decades of contradictions festering within the conservative movement. Under the weight of a stiff and coordinated faction, but not an irresistible one, the unthinkable happened. This unthinkable thing is not that Donald Trump ceased being President. This unthinkable thing is that the long-benighted public sphere, incarnated in the State and asserted in arms in 1775, failed against a spectrum of confederated private interests. It will not rise again within our lives. The Enlightenment ended; Feudalism began anew.

In the months since America’s Swamp creatures inserted the Harris (sic) Administration into the White House, the MAGA spectrum has faded away. We who swore off FoxNews in December have quietly returned to our old habits. We who spit to hear the GOP mentioned in January, find ourselves enthralled in party politics once more. And the earnestness of resolutions, and our fecklessness, cuts both ways. We who saw how Mr. Trump twice insulted, and finally abandoned, his most loyal supporters, now thrill to see his latest interviews on OANN and NewsMax. The media, for their part proud as punch in their complicity in the Biden coup, since January, have published two major articles (Time, “The Secret History” and New Yorker, “Forced To Choose“) broadcasting their role in Trump’s removal. And life goes on; but it does so like in a hangover, or a David Lynch movie.

Those of us who saw what happened still stagger at the enormity of what occurred. Trump’s going and Biden’s coming was more than one office holder switched out for another. What went down was more even than one party using dirty means to get into power. These things have always happened. From Caesar’s Rubicon through Dante’s exile, from Thermidor to the Night of the Long Knives, they will continue to happen in saecula saeculorum. What happened last year was not down and dirty politicking. It was an overthrow. It was nothing more, nothing less.

Yes, the 2020 election was a slow and rolling coup d’état. It was the very sort of thing which America’s archons have executed overseas dozens of times throughout the last half-century. As the dust settles, as the outrages of winter fade, as we slap Trump 2024 stickers on our cars. The world still whirls around, but the Biden Administration is in power and cheaters win.

Making things queerer still, it seems as if few Americans, even those who keep an eye on current events, are aware of the full scope of what happened. We know there was a coup. Nothing is true, if that is not true. After all, no man ever made can sit in a basement for nine months and become President. Political affiliations aside, everyone who followed events knows there was a steal. For all its awful enormity, however, we’ve only the vaguest idea of what happened. This essay is a sketch of that operation.

With the perspective of at least a few months breathing room, we can now lay out the main stepping stones of the Biden operation, sometimes right from the mouths of the spoilers themselves. This exploration honestly admits its ignorance. It is not comprehensive. No doubt later authors will uncover more points, connect more dots; I myself could have doubled this essay’s length for abundance of material. However, a comprehensive treatment of the 2020 Steal is not the end of this paper. It is merely a skeleton. Beyond that, this essay is a work of solidarity. It is an encouragement to my countrymen in the face of six months of media smirking and gaslighting that, yes, they did smell something fishy, and, yes, other people remember it.

When You Point One Finger, Three More Point Back

In the pages ahead I mean to address the specifics which deposed Trump. I will make a concise record, as best I can, of the mad and vicious crew that ultimately seized Federal power. I hope it will assist the general reader in sizing things up; and I especially hope it will give other authors an outline to build on. I also mean to expose and scorn and mock the chinless institutions whose estrogen levels all knew were high, but institutions we at least gave the benefit of the doubt to as being, however lame and incompetent, ever in good faith. The media, the Church, the schools, public academics, and what’s left of the reading public failed their obligations of being social guardians.

More than that lot, though, I mean to expose, however tacitly, what’s become of the broad conservative movement. By this I lasso everyone from Mitch McConnell and CIA-pin wearing Sean Hannity, to the washouts of the Alt Right and Moral Majority, to people like myself who flatter ourselves with different adjectives, thoughtfully chosen no doubt, but who are more or less conservative-adjacent, or woke, or patriot, or alternative. For the lot of us, foundations once destroyed, what can the just do? More than your DNC and your Silicone Valley and your CCP—we blew it. In the months since Harris’ installation, institutional conservatism is tripping over itself to catch up with the Overton Window. What is manifesting itself externally was a long time in coming. How did we not see this?

The Appeal

What built to a crescendo and flopped about and died on the Epiphany was a certain dream of America. I will revisit the specifics of the dearly departed at the end of this essay, but it had to do with hope. To use a word which has pleasantly become popularized this last half-decade, what died was a certain narrative of America. Allow me now a personal appraisal of Donald Trump, and what the Make America Great Again movement meant to me, and how it represented the last hurrah of that narrative. I should think I speak for something of his base.

Always was I a distant fan of Trump. Having moved beyond disgust with the political order to a belief that the government and its agents are in fact enemy occupiers, by 2016 I had ceased to participate in the elections of the color of law UNITED STATES entity. Thus I never rendered Trump any formal voting booth support. After the Bush years, after the continued Obama-era neo-conning of John McCain (of unhappy memory), after so many traffic stops and child removals and drug charges, a certain percentage of a certain sort of men swore off participation in that political system. I am one of them. After having apprehended the morass of the American order, all that is left us is withdrawal. So only from a distance did Trump catch my attention; but catch it he did.

What was invigorating about the man was his willingness to mock the culture of Washington, D.C., particularly its toady media. You see, vast swaths of America had been written out of political discourse. People of European extraction, so-called “white” people, particularly white men, were especially ignored over these last 50 years. Early in Trump’s campaign, in its initial flush of talent, it was commendable for tapping into communities who themselves had written off ever being taken seriously by “mainstream” society. Steve Bannon well deserves the moniker “wizkid,” groundlessly given a decade before to Karl Rove, for his observation that the many dozens of social eddies dismissed by the mainstream “cathedral” of power could be leveraged into a single coordinated opposition movement.

By “mainstream,” of course, I mean the few millions of men more or less concentrated around New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles who frame the mental realities of the remaining 300 millions of Americans, and many overseas souls besides. Those subgroups, which Bannon harnessed, had long despaired of being acknowledged by American culture as even existing, let alone of being taken seriously.

One example of this, well into his presidency, was Donald Trump’s January 2020 appearance at the March For Life. The March is America’s largest annual anti-abortion protest. An always-robust gathering, it had also always been chronically bypassed by the media. Even “allied” groups never took the March to its bosom. The anti-abortion movement has always been an interest of only marginal concern to GOP bigshots, including previous “pro-life” Republican Presidents, men who campaigned on the platform but who barely managed to pump out a pre-recorded clip each winter. But after decades of neglect, there Trump was in 2020.

For someone, such as I, there was a lameness in Trump’s policies. Too much of the Swamp was still around, too much grandstanding about the southern border, and much too much Zionism. More fundamentally, though, there was a democratic streak to Trump which could excuse a thousand faults. Truckers fed up with the red tape of business, wary of the rise of their automated competition, would call up national talk radio with their petitions and pleas. Old timers who still had the icon of old America in their heart would phone national stations to warn Trump or laud him. These were things I heard many times over his four years.

Trump was able to include all sorts. There were people who showed up in the Trump administration whom I had last heard of on niche Evangelical television channels and conservative radio stations, circa 2005. And didn’t my jaw hit the bar one fine afternoon to see Trump’s helicopter landing at the Daytona track! The point is this: One guffaws to think of Clinton or Bush or Obama hearing, let alone acting upon, radio missives from cross-country truckers, but it was never beyond the pale to imagine Donald Trump doing so.

The President liked his “Fox And Friends;” and his fake tan and weird hair were endearing oddities. But whatever was cheesy or lame or quirky about him or the groups he courted, Trump acknowledged the existence of millions of Americans the ruling class thought they had successfully dismissed from “real life” decades ago. Whatever muse tickled Jefferson and Jack and Lincoln and Kennedy, also sang songs of the old America around Trump. It sang democracy. Not NATO democracy, not George Soros democracy did it chant—but the down-home type, school-board democracy, townhall democracy, the Mr. Smith type of democracy. And for that, the cathedral hated him—and for this I loved him.

Air From The Balloon

Life is oft-times covalent. Trump’s empowering of the marginalized and of the working man was grand, but his skewering of the mainstream media was divine. You see, I did not have much to do with the groups he and Bannon courted. It’s been years since I’ve been a fetus, I’ve never been a long-haul trucker. And I don’t have much to say for NASCAR beyond gratitude for the beer and casseroles I’m bid enjoy in large amounts each February during Daytona’s opening day. But across all the groups confederated in the MAGA coalition, a distrust of the national media organs was the common denominator which united them.

It has been five years since Trump first used “fake news” in his Twitter feed (of happy memory). In one brash expression Trump stole from under the noses of his MSM opponents a weapon of theirs; he took and rightly applied what it would take them five years to recover—he took their perceived authority. Trump said aloud what millions had been whispering about for decades: The newsmen are liars. He went on to use the expression “fake news” thousands of times. Trump even created his own “Fake News Awards” in 2018. With the half-decade since its use, overuse, and weaponization, we forget how powerful calling the fake news, fake news first was. We forgot—but the media did not forget.

Background Of The Coup

Context is everything. To begin at the beginning, we must consider the attempt to steal the 2016 Election. Anecdotally, Rick Wiles of TruNews and Alex Jones of InfoWars independently asserted that they witnessed late-night voter spikes, very much of the sort seen in 2020. For whatever reason, these spikes were scotched and the counting returned to a regular tally leading to a Trump win in 2016.

Fast-forward four years. How did Donald Trump walk into 2020 nearly guaranteed a second term only to leave a year later under a barrage of contempt, impeached a second time, deplatformed, with even the hoariest of D.C. insiders hissing about the 25th Amendment being used against him? Americans went mad over that year, that’s why.

As we will see, the mainstream media (MSM) did much to unseat Trump; but the toll of the Coronavirus reaction did much as well. The population’s already shaky reasoning skills were atrophied after a socially distanced year of Netflix-watching and alcohol-drinking. A nation already on edge from a capitalism wherein men regularly live, not just from paycheck-to-paycheck, but from credit-card to credit-card, saw what little economic autonomy they had evaporate, and replaced by a greasy Federal dole. COVID heightened Americans’ placid and mindless tendencies a damn sight more than even us pessimists imagined.

The Crowned And Conquering Child

As regards the election, one of the more meanspirited plot-points happened in June 2020. The actual threat of Coronavirus having passed, Trump was eager to get back to normal. That June, his campaign organized a rally. Those extraordinary events had become quite routine during the Trump years. In one regard he never stopped campaigning because he never stopped the rallies. Perhaps some of Trump’s lackluster policy legacy has to do with his diverted attention. He ought to have stopped campaigning and paid attention to his daily administration duties. It was like he kept trying to play and replay 2016 over again. And while he was static, the Swamp was not.

In any case, after the spring’s Coronavirus panic, one sure sign of normalcy would be to hold another rally. In June one was scheduled in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a heartland city Melania had visited a year before. It was a flop. Superficially spurred on by K-pop fans on the social media site TikToc, teens snapped up all the rally RSVPs. I say superficially because of Mark Moore’s recent report that, “The Pentagon is running a 60,000-strong secret army made up of soldiers, civilians and contractors, who travel the world under false identities embedded in consultancies and name-brand companies— without the knowledge of the American people or most of Congress— according to a report” (New York Post, 5/18/21). I’m led to conclude that many members of this “secret army” haunt social media sites to steer social perception. Whether it was because of teens or the Deep State, Trump went to a sold-out rally and no one showed up. The MSM, for whom reporting had long collapsed into entertainment, sensed blood in the water and set to work mocking the mocked.

BLM et al.

Then there were the riots. Throughout the summer of 2020, there were fierce racial riots whose stakes ramped up as time wore along. It was not enough that these disturbances simmered for months on end. They escalated. Protesters held city centers out West; and new “defund the police” talking points were released by the mainstream press at opportune times. In fact, there was something altogether theatrical about the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests. Those of us who remember the stage-managed school shootings of the Obama years got a whiff of the same as we watched municipalities drop-off pallets of bricks at choice urban locations.

You’ve Got Mail!

At the end of September, the Deep State flexed its muscle with 500 chinless Defense Department employees signing “An Open Letter To America.” Trump’s greatest offense against the Deep State was not giving the military a new war. It wasn’t enough that he kept the hireling forces of the United States involved in ways overt and covert in Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen and Libya – but by refusing to open fronts in Iran and elsewhere Trump crossed the devotees of Mars. In the lead up to the election, they flexed their muscle. The flattering impartiality which the military loves to remind Americans of was thrown out the window as the Deep State test-ran the coming winter’s narrative.

Once again on January 3rd, immediately before the Confirmation, Elizabeth Cheney, as wicked as her father and doubtless prompted by him, organized all the living Secretaries of Defense to write an op-ed against President Trump. “Joe Biden,” the Open Letter said of a man who had by then sat inert in his basement for seven months, and would do so for another two, “has the character, principles, wisdom, and leadership necessary to address a world on fire.” Stoned, Netflixed Americans bought it; their appetites whetted for more.

Of Laptops And Landmines

Lastly, there was the Hunter Biden cover-up. After the CIA turned Ukraine into an intelligence nest in 2014, in much the same way the states of the Arabian Gulf have been fronts for British intelligence since World War I, Joseph Biden made many connections in the Central European nation. Even in his dotage Biden made sure he was as removed from the financial schemes as possible. In April 2019 an intoxicated Hunter dropped off a laptop in Delaware State. Similar to his October 2018 incident, when a gun of his was found in a dumpster and the FBI attempted to obtain Hunter’s possibly incriminating paperwork, the press went to bat for him. But Hunter was the “bagman,” as Rudy Giuliani said. And this ought to have been investigated.

It was a wash. Most outlets ignored the story; some followed it for a while and let it slip away. Only the New York Post stuck with it. Of course, their doggedness meant nothing because the FBI didn’t investigate, and less law enforcement agencies stonewalled. In its own way, the “conservative” media showed its hand with the Biden story too. On an errand of faux investigative journalism, Tucker Carlson played footsie with the story, vowing to get to the bottom of things. For three weeks he ranted and raved about the story only to give up when his paymasters at Fox told him to stop. It was only at this point when Carlson informed Americans he and Hunter were good friends.

The media is not only propagandistic, it’s also sloppy. It forgets its own trade basics like avoiding conflicts of interest. As Carlson slunk away from the Hunter Biden story, he defended his cowardice by saying, “It was wrong to kick a man when he was down.” This was obfuscation. The laptop scandal was appropriate to pursue because Hunter Biden’s actions weren’t examples of personal flaws, they weren’t lurid sex stories best left in the National Enquirer. Based on the adjective-heavy, heavily veiled comments of Rudy Giuliani and John Paul MacIsaac (the Delaware computer shop owner who received Hunter’s laptop), the photos alleged to be on Biden’s computer largely involved child sexual abuse.

On the heels of Jeffery Epstein’s industrial compromise ring, on the heels of Miles Guo’s revelations of the color-coding of compromised politicians (with those sexually compromised being classed as “yellow”), and considering Joseph Biden’s repeated bragging of his relationships with CCP men like Xi Jinping, the Hunter Biden allegations were ripe for investigation. Since then, in a Stalinisticly-ironic, rub-it-in-your-face move by the cathedral, Hunter Biden, the beneficiary of several miraculous media cover-ups over the years, is now assisting in journalism classes at Tulane University.

The Foreground

The events recounted above comprise the main background of the Steal. Now we turn to the operation itself. Focused especially in the foreground of the 2020 Coup are three events and four. They stand out as especial tipping points in specific areas. They are: Trump’s January 21st, 2020 Davos speech regarding the international order; Mark Esper’s June 1st countermand of Trump’s troop deployment to Washington; and shortly afterwards, the third incident of note, this time in the spiritual realm, was Trump’s holding up of the Holy Bible in front of St. John’s Church. The moment he did that the die was cast against him.

Davos

In January of 2020 Donald Trump attended the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Along with dozens of heads of state, NGO leaders, and capitalists, Trump conferenced on a diverse array of financial topics, and none too soon. The repos markets had been tottering since the fall. On January 21, Trump spoke to the assembled guests of the WEF. He railed about socialism, he extolled the virtues of American individualism, and he vowed to put nationalism first.

In a room filled with the likes of Klaus Schwab, people who were putting the finishing touches on their Great Reset theories, people who had on their hands a scheme of great potential in the still-distant-though-known Coronavirus, this was too much. For the remainder of his time there, Trump was literally shunned. In the social nooks which offset the main panels, in the kaffeeklatsches and social hours of Davos, Trump found himself standing alone. This event signifies the collapse of Trump legitimacy on the international stage.

Countermand

In June of 2020, came the next institutional shoe to drop. Washington, D.C. joined many American cities that spring in being the focus of racial protests. On the basis of extensive rioting, Donald Trump called in various units of the National Guard to restore order. That very day they were sent home in the midst of continued rioting. What happened? Trump was overwritten.

You see, only two men have the authority to order soldiers in or out of the District of Columbia, the President and the Secretary of Defense. The President made his will known by deploying troops. This leaves the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper as the only one who could have contradicted the President. This event signifies the collapse of Trump’s authority over the military.

Apre Moi Le Deluge

The third incident was very much the first drop of a deluge to come: FoxNews’ John Roberts’ gaslighting of Kayleigh McEnany on October 1st. There were many tense, unedifying, and childish examples of conduct from both Trump and the press corp over their four years of interacting. With the riots falling back to a simmer, and with the Vote in just one month, on October 1st, McEnany was asked if Trump opposed racism. She responded in the negative, citing some words of his. In a sane world this ought to have been the end of the matter. Fox persisted, asking for more evidence. To this McEnany gave two or three examples. Fox kept asking and asking. Text does not do this queer interaction justice. You ought to watch it to understand how bizarre the exchange was.

More than anything else, the media was responsible for the Harris-Biden (sic) installation, and Fox’s fox Roberts test-ran their gaslighting weapon par excellence. This event signifies the media’s shifting from being hostile to being inimical towards Trump. What would unfold over the next three months would be payback for Trump’s four year of exposing their lies. And lest we forget, come the night of the Vote, it was Fox News which called the election for Biden.

The Rat

The above events are three Rubicon moments in Trump’s deposition, but there is a fourth. The final pylon to fail was Jared Kushner. In December, at the height of the Steal, Kushner who busy in the Middle East grandstanding for Zion with his Abraham Accords. There was no loyalty to the man, no devotion; Kushner ought never to have been allowed within a mile of the White House. Many of Trump’s worst hires and fires came on Kushner’s recommendation. This man was the finest example of the personnel failures which plagued the Trump Administration.

Because he was always in campaign mode, because was too busy skewering the MSM, Trump never had time, or interest, to choose solid men. Instead, he deferred to social climbers like his son-in-law. With rare exceptions such as Kayleigh McEnany, the people Trump had working for him were social climbers. They were either grandstanders in the moment, like Kushner or Pompeo, or they were trimming their sails for their post-Trump careers, like Mark Milley. In any case, Jared Kushner’s effeminate self-promotion, when his boss and father-in-law was in need of all hands-on deck, signifies the collapse of Trump’s inner circle.

The Steal

As to the DNC heist of November 2020 itself, that is a topic beyond the scope of this outline. Like the Fall of Troy, around which both The Iliad and The Odyssey revolve, but which is never directly described, I leave our late national blot silently brooding over every word of this essay, but never dissect it head on. For specifics on this matter, I direct your attention to Michael Lindell’s three features on this topic, Absolute Proof, Absolute Interference, and Scientific Proof. All are also available for free on his website.

And, as this essay goes to press, the ongoing audits in Arizona and Georgia give hope that the truth will out.

Pushback

With each electoral safety bulwark failing, as fall turned into winter, confidence in increasingly archaic schemes and legalities rose. The first hope to fail was in the realm of citizen protests and journalism. Getting the message out in the media, filing affidavits, and making the record were the orders of the day. There was plenty of work to do, as thousands of Americans came forward to document electoral errata. This course climaxed, sputtered, and failed on November 25.

On the day before Thanksgiving, a most poorly timed event, the Trump, team headed by Rudy Giuliani, gathered hundreds of men in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to testify to the many instances of voter fraud witnessed throughout the county. However, one month into The Steal, the MSM realized that if they could mock the charge of voter fraud in se, if they could preface what mentions they couldn’t ignore outright with “unfounded” or “not widespread,” or “lies,” there was nothing, absolutely nothing, which could stop their narrative from winning the day. An unlettered and deracinated American public could only sit and ingest what it was told.

More than anything else, Joseph Biden’s installation was the work of the media. There was a constellation of fellow-travelers and allies, but 2020 was predominantly a battle of perception; and that perception was ironclad by the press. It was the apotheosis of Edward Bernays’ work and Madison Avenue’s century of note-taking. Needless to say, despite hundreds of sworn testimonies, the Gettysburg event fizzled. Thousands of filings were thrown out of nationwide Bar Association courts in the following weeks.

The coup had works in the open, but it also did works in secret. On November 21, one of those quiet efforts leaked out. That day a story appeared in various sources about Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration. It told of how Trump finally released funds for the Biden Transition Team to use because she was being threatened to do so. She wrote to the Biden Team,

I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any Executive Branch official—including those who work at the White House or GSA—with regard to the substance or timing of my decision. To be clear, I did not receive any direction to delay my determination. I did, however, receive threats online, by phone, and by mail directed at my safety, my family, my staff, and even my pets in an effort to coerce me into making this determination prematurely. Even in the face of thousands of threats, I always remained committed to upholding the law.

For the peace of a harried bureaucrat ,Trump gave permission to release money to the spoilers. Like at the dummy Tulsa rally that spring, the MSM spun an abuse for their ends. Trump was conceding the election, so the story went. Score one for gaslighting.

The next hope to fail was the Presidential Election on December 14. Before detailing the Election vis. Trump, I must pause and clarify the official process whereby a man enters the Federal Executive office in America. There are three events of increasing gravity which are prescribed for this. Funnily enough, as their importance grows, their public awareness diminishes. Most American believe things begin and end on one day in November. In fact there are three stages a man must successfully go through to be President. These are the Presidential Vote (November), the Presidential Election (December), and the Presidential Confirmation (January). Things are not made easy by the fact that people refer interchangeably to the Vote as the Election, by which they mean the early November event.

What follows is a generalization, which I detailed in my recent series on “We, The People.” Briefly, the Vote recommends to the state Electors whom they should select for that state’s slate of electors to choose. It must be absolutely understood that the Vote is simply a suggestion, it does not oblige the Electors’ decisions whatsoever. However, typically, they do follow these suggestions. After the Election, there follows the Confirmation. This January event is the final chance to troubleshoot any procedural objections. It was in the context of the Confirmation that the riot of January 6th happened.

The point is that the media’s gaslighting and the putzing about of the Trump team throughout November were annoying but they were not particularly alarming because we who were watching things assumed all would be righted in the Election. The Electors are the People in “We, the People;” they are the Patricians; they are the archons; they are the owners of the country. Whatever the weirdness or objectionability of their system, we who took the time to learn the system assumed they were the adults in the room. You can rig a voting machine, you can’t rig a Person. We assumed they were of tougher mettle than the party pukes who stalk around polling stations with sacks of money and brass knuckles. After all the Electors are effectively those with the greatest material share in the country; they are the biggest landholders and businessmen throughout the 50 states. Trump did many things poorly, but he did well for America’s moneymen. The assumption was they would back him. We assumed wrong.

You know, six months on, having thought about this some, I don’t think the Electors needed to be as threatened or bribed to vote for Biden as I once did. Like with so much else, we didn’t realize how far down the rot was. So the Election came and the Election went, and Biden was elected that December. Michigan’s Republican delegation made a stink, showing up at the State House and being locked out, and there was some talk down in Georgia of the same; but it came to nothing. When the media and the offices of state decide to stonewall there is nothing lawful men can do.

After such serious official collapses, the tone of Trump supporters changed. A lot gave up hope; but some of the well-read remembered that there was a third stage to the choice of an Executive, the Confirmation. If few Americans know the difference between the Vote and the Election, fewer still are aware of the Confirmation. This is Congress’s opportunity to review the preceding two stages, and to voice any concerns over any irregularities raised. It is around this least conventionally “political” of the three stages, this emergency valve, where attention turned as Christmas approached.

As the MSM couldn’t altogether ignore the discontent throughout the country, they were forced to acknowledge it. It was at this time, late December, that some voices arose on the national scene, who threw in their lot with the Trump defense. They were grandstanders in retrospect, trimmers some, useless men with big mouths others, but around the likes of Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Mike Pence, hope began to grow that various emergency procedures might be implemented on January 6.

To Stir The Pot

Even if Trump showed more than a half-hearted desire to beat back the Steal, which he never did, there was no hope that the right would out, following the Election. We will return to the specific hopes and theories which Americans began placing in the sixth of January, the date of the Confirmation, in a little bit. I wish now to address the role of intelligence agencies in the coup. Americans, whose political system excels in overthrowing governments, who live in a decade of such overthrows, seem strangely ambivalent to the possibility of those self-same agencies doing as much in America.

What was the situation by late December? The Vote was stolen in plain sight. Neither the Electors nor the courts were interested in hearing out thousands of Americans who reported seeing funny business at that event. The media was in high psyops mode, and each day they dialed up their efforts. Trump’s defense was split and sloppy, and Trump himself was lukewarm when he wasn’t silent. As outraged Americans began planning their third and biggest rally, two things appeared on the scene. The first was talk of a civil war, the second was QAnon. Both were manifest works of the Deep State, and in both instances conservatives walked into a trap.

Ideas of civil strife gripping America were deliberately seeded during the opening months of 2020. The Atlantic gave over their entire December 2019 issue to the topic. Their “How To Stop A Civil War” publication was a textbook case of seeding a narrative. No one was talking of such before The Atlantic brought it up. One year, one overblown sickness, and one rent-a-mob summer later, and the talk was reintroduced.

The Protect Democracy Project ran workshops in June and October of 2020. In it, hundreds former and present bureaucrats from the Military Industrial Complex war-gamed the possibility of unrest accompanying the fall’s electoral process. These scenarios went under the heading of the Transition Integrity Project. The participants found there to be a high chance of civil unrest following the vote. If this sort of thing sounds familiar, if there’s something George Soros-esque about an outfit called “Protect Democracy,” the exercises it holds, and their pipeline to the press, it’s because it is run by Ian Bassin, a former member of the Obama White House and a man who pose-by-pose is a carbon copy of Barry Soetero. You see, Larry Sinclair’s boyfriend and his epigones never left D.C. From the moment Trump was elected, Obama and the Deep State and the Never Trumpers were at work for 2020. The point is, worked into the mix of COVID and electoral tension, the possibility of catastrophic violence was introduced. It is to the discredit of the late, great “alternative media” that they took the Protect Democracy bait. Nobody bothered to check to see who Protect Democracy was. It was a juicy story, so the alt press ran with it.

The next spoiler which came along was QAnon. The epitome of controlled opposition from the same sorts who built up ISIS, when the Q operation was through, Trump supporters seemed madder than an outhouse rat. As each hope failed, the Q people would double down—“trust the plan,” and schedule the next knock-out blow to the Deep State. For example, on the day of Harris’ inauguration, Q types were insisting the fencing around the Capitol was to keep the lawmakers in (because they were all surreptitiously under arrest); the military was going to arrest Biden and conduct a new election, and Trump would be back in office come mid-March. As of my May 2021 composition of this writing, in all seriousness I have been assured Donald Trump will be restored on August 15th. Hope springs eternal, or from Langley.

Fissures Forming

As these structural failings were happening, as the Vote’s steal went unchallenged throughout the states, as the MSM railroaded the perception that Biden’s win was unchallenged by all but madmen, as the Electors certified November’s crime, the response on the part of Donald Trump was jerky, erratic, and imprecise.

Firstly, it seems that a similar steal was affected in 2016. It is more speculative than 2020, but from what reports we have, the same kind of voter spikes happened, and they happened in the same states no less. In fact, the bizarre behavior of what’s called, rightly or wrongly, the “institutional left” during the four years of the Trump Administration only makes sense if they were expecting to have won only to have the prize snatched from under their noses at the last minute. What else explains their genuine hatred for a man who was pretty much a milquetoast, albeit loudmouth, conservative?

Background and questions aside, when Trump’s term finally organized a response, it was sloppy from the word go. At their first press conference within a week of the Vote, and a number of times in the following weeks, they were unwilling to provide any evidence of voter fraud. This incompetence is unbelievable, given that anyone could tune in half the radio shows in the county which were featuring men who saw paper shredding trucks at polling booths, vote minders boarding up windows, and clerks changing ballot rules at the last minute. The defense only went downhill from there. Soon Sydney Powell, and her meatier charges of overseas electoral tampering, was shown the door. And indeed, before all was said and done, Rudy Giuliani’s slowly dripping hair dye was the truest summary of Trump’s defense, and indeed of American conservatism.

Prester John

By late December, there began to be a discernible irrationality amongst Trump supporters. As the Book of Ecclesiastes says, oppression makes a wise man mad (7:7). As the ordinary channels of redress buckled under the bribes and bullies and caresses of the DNC and their confederates, those who saw what was happening began to place their hopes in increasingly far-flung hopes whereby the Trump Administration would come out on top.

This tendency is actually a regular feature through history. During the Crusades, as the situation of besieged Outremer darkened, the Christians of Europe began to place their hopes in “Prester John.” A confusion of Marco Polo’s far-flung observations and Eastern lacunae, John was supposed to be a mighty Ethiopian priest-king who was coming to the rescue of his Palestinian co-religionists at any moment. Alas, Fr. John never made the rounds. Close on the historical heels of fantasies about Trump’s survival were things like the 1890s Indians Ghost Dance and Hitler’s hopeless breakouts around Berlin during the Second World War. As in history, so with Trump’s supporters. The more the spoilers succeeded, the greater became the hopes of the MAGA train.

It is easy to mock this tendency. However, concerning the stolen election, recall that in the late fall of 2020, the alternatives to fantastical hopes were to resign oneself to (1) sitting by as a lawless clique seized power, and (2) observing that fellow Americans were either largely in agreement with such criminality (unlikely) or too apathetic to care (likely).

Questions

Whatever the case may be, if a 2016 steal was the case, as it appears to have been the case, why didn’t Trump’s men provide against it? Why did they not shore up the other routes beyond the Vote? Forget about the courts, the media, the Election, and the Confirmation, they did not even seem to do much to avoid in 2020 the kind of hanky-panky Vote fraud which happened in 2016.

Surely, they must have known the DNC et al. were going to deploy in 2020 fossers not only against the Vote, like they did with Hilary Clinton, but also against every subsequent route of redress? I have no answer to this question, beyond a speculation that Trump & Co. were depending on an incontrovertibly high popular vote to win the day, support so plain upon tables that any DNC sliminess in the courts, the Election, etc. would be risible.

There is another option I can’t pretend hasn’t crossed my mind. Worse by far than incompetence—that perhaps Trump threw the election. Perhaps it was all theater; perhaps the MAGA movement was itself controlled opposition all along. After all, what did the Trump train do for Red State America? He didn’t stop the Agenda. Everything he attempted to implement was rolled back within hours, within days of Harris’ (sic) installation, and the most ideologically solid conservatives, and few there be, are well on their way to being classified as terrorists by the Bar Association system. Was Trump a Pied Piper?

I hesitate to choose this explanation because while there was plenty of theater from both Trump and his adversaries, there were too many examples of disrespect and anger between them which jumped the script. Nancy Pelosi tearing up Trump’s speech during the State of the Union,=; Jim Acosta’s behavior in press conferences; the cruel mockery of Sarah Sanders’ appearance; and the lockstep coordination of Silicon Valley and America’s internal spy agencies following the January 6th riot were all events which exceeded, far exceeded, the type of Wrestlemania “antagonisms” which accent typical politics.

The third option is that Trump realized the enormity of what the DNC did, and he realized that neither the Republican Party nor the feckless men who worked in his Administration (his own hires, let it be said) were going to support him, and he lost heart by late November.

Of these three options, I believe Trump’s anemic response to the coup is explained to some degree by options one and three.

The messaging and execution of Trump’s legal defense was erratic and factional. It was a microcosm of the erratic staffing of his four years in office. Divisions formed early within Trump’s defense. When things coalesced by late December(!), Rudy Giuliani led the official team. The guts of their objection revolved around mail-in ballot fraud.

Sidney Powell had been cut loose by then. Soon to be joined by Lin Wood, this lesser group focused on the errata surrounding the voting machines, and the interference of American intelligence overseas in the Vote. It would not be until the eleventh hour of January 15, when Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame, clawed his way past grudging White House aides, when what was left of the Trump Administration backed objections to the graver findings from November (as compared to the child’s play about gerrymandering Guiliani was pursuing). Again we must ask why Donald Trump, who ran a nation with a long history of staging coups, did not anticipate such a thing happening to him?

Behind The Scenes

Then on December 18th, the previous four years of bad advice, distracted hiring, and self-serving hacks erupted in one disastrous meeting. For the remaining month of Trump’s presidency, there would effectively be no administration in any meaningful sense. That day there was a collision between the MAGA men, as we might call them, those who generally believed in Trump as a unifier of the conservative spectrum and who proximately acknowledged the Steal, and the trimmers, those who came from the Swamp, remained in the Swamp, and who will die in the Swamp. Additionally, that December day, there was a collision between the two wings of Trump’s election defense, as represented by Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell. Something of the chaos of that event leaked out. As reported by Business Insider:

You’re quitting! You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” [Michael] Flynn said of [Eric] Herschmann before turning to Trump and adding, “Sir, we need fighters.”
According to Axios, Herschmann responded, “Why the f— do you keep standing up and screaming at me?”
He added: “If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down.”

After the Allies opened their 1918 Hundred Days’ offensive, German general Erich Ludendorff reported to Kaiser Wilhelm that the war was unwinnable. He called it Germany’s “Black Day.” After the December 18th meeting, there was no hope of staunching the Steal. Everything after is postscript: The Confirmation, the riot, the reshuffling of the Defense and Homeland Security heads, the second impeachment, America.

As Things Stand

Donald Trump spent four years trying to recreate a set-piece reenactment of 2016, while his opponents spent their time perfecting their 2020 plan. The spoilers provided against every possible route of redress, while Trump was grandstanding and getting into Twitter fights. Trump was surrounded by the lowest, most useless sorts of men, all of them his own choices. The list of such men starts with Michael Pence.

By the time of the heated pre-Christmas meeting, Trump had brushed-off two massive rallies of his most devoted supporters, including many hundreds of men willing to testify to the crimes of November. Instead, Trump chose to spend his time campaigning for the likes of Kelly Loeffler, a woman who, 24 hours after Trump had his arm around her on a rally stage in Georgia, did not have the guts or gratitude to raise a stink about the offense done to him. His official defense team was limp-wristed and confused. In those three months, from the Vote to Harris’ White Entry, Donald Trump never knew where to exert his energy.

Where Things Stand

In the meta-look, one term or two, Donald Trump was a sandcastle at tide’s rise. And he was merely a sandcastle at one part of a very long beach, the political section, itself not even the most important part. In the vaunted “first hundred days” of the Harris Administration, we’ve seen enough to see where things are going. The wars are back on, the bailouts are back, the cultural manipulation moves apace. The Swamp stinks worse than it did before. The conservative movement as we knew it, something which orbited around the GOP and the Church and talk radio, is dead. It was betrayed by the aforementioned, and other false friends besides.

What remains of structural conservativism busies itself creating home pages on a hundred alt social media sites, pages soon to be deleted, and moving en masse to “Red States,” a clueless rehash of Libertarian fads from 20 years ago. Individuals of that persuasion content themselves with daily rosaries, social media reposts, and doubling down on the paranoia and anti-intellectualism which first threw them in the hole they’re in now. And so it goes. An Agenda which has marshalled ambivalence for its ends, and a resistance which doesn’t know its nose from its elbow.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

The featured image shows, Death and the Masks,” by James Ensor; painted in 1897.

Woke Moralism: #DisruptTexts And The Abrogation of Literature

Introduction

In the spring of 1966, before the violence of the Cultural Revolution washed over China, the CCP initiated a campaign against the “Four Olds.” This project aimed to eradicate Chinese culture in order to protect Chinese culture. “Sweep Away All Monsters And Demons,” enjoined the Party’s print organ. What followed was a violent “cancel culture.” As then, so now.

In 2018 the #DisruptTexts group was founded by Lorena German. Much like Black Lives Matters and AltRight, #DistruptTexts marshalled decades of critique into a single legal entity. Why the advocates of these edgy ideas are so intent on handing over their work to the Bar Association system is beyond me, but much as we speak of the AltRight and BLM, when I speak of #DisruptTexts I will be referring to the movement in general and not the fictional entity. So sue me.

This essay argues two points concerning the approach of #DisruptTexts. Insofar as this movement is principally a pedagogical effort, my first points concern the way we in the general public understand literature. The approach of #DisruptTexts is inappropriate because (1) American society is too unstable at present to dismantle narratives as we have too little to work with as is, and (2) their powerful observation of social dynamics, even the conscious inclusion of Critical Race Theory, is being taught to students who do not have the intellectual matrix to responsibly digest these ideas. As we consider #DisruptTexts in the context of the mass education crisis, and while I will address theoretical errors which exist in their approach, we need to realize how our own individual and social sloppiness exacerbates these woke errors. There is plenty of blame to go around, and #DisruptTexts is but one factor of several.

Concerning my second point, #DisruptTexts is problematic (how’s that for a Leftist word!) because of its inability to contribute towards the construction of a social order. There is on the Left too much breaking down, not enough building up. The racial genie has bewitched the partisans of #DisruptTexts and there is no end to the deconstruction road. And not to put too sharp a point on it, for people who are hip to what is called “race,” they should respect the white culture of America as much as the Indian culture of the Subcontinent, or anywhere else.

Orientation & House Rules

From the start I ought to say that #DisruptTexts is not especially alarming to me. It is one of a conga line of educational fads which regularly burn through my vocational field. In fact, as it lacks coordinated state patronage it is a few clicks less pressing than No Child Left Behind or Common Core, recent foci of educational wariness. It is always important to remember the frequency of these sorts of fads before emotionally reacting to them.

As I wrote in my late series on We The People, I assert that there is no day to day racism in America. It is an insult to both the dead generations of Americans who suffered actual racism, as well as those of our day who suffer like discrimination across the world. The tribulations of the Tutsi, the Uighurs, and the Rohingya are a damn sight more serious than the pettyfogging gripes of American academics. #DistruptTexts, Black Lives Matter, et al. represent one of a number of divide and conquer tactics which the American ruling class excels in implementing. Keeping the ethnic groups annoyed with each other distracts from the track-trace-database system Mr. Schwab and his eponyms are building; it distracts from the endless Pentagon wars and the thousand-front looting of the American working class.

What racism there is exists in institutions which are in an adversarial relationship to the population they rule over, and their crimes literally have nothing to do with subject Americans. #DisruptTexts is right in saying there is profound and systemic racism in social institutions, most outstandingly via subsidiary state corporations like their military branches, police departments, and prisons. However, the U.S. Federal and state governments, and the business/legal system of which the state is a product, have officially existed in a state of war against the American people since the 37th Congress (March 1860). Charges of racism in those arenas have nothing whatsoever to do with flesh and blood Americans. Deconstructing all the books in all the canons of the world will not do one thing to affect the guilty entities. I wish these racial critics well as they make the governments and their hirelings confront their racial errors. However, insofar as the American government is foreign to the population it claims rulership over, I as an uninvolved party wish to be left alone by #DisruptTexts.

The Concept

#DisruptTexts aims to reconsider the ways literature is taught and experienced in American schools. Where this immediately draws popular attention, as it eventually will from us, is in the specific choices of books assigned in class. However, their reconsideration only begins by challenging the canon. To focus primarily on their book selections is to miss the deeper point. Most educational critique does this, it gets caught up on the superficial externals with little grasp of the principles at play.

Now when we speak of “the canon” we mean the group of texts more or less taught throughout the country. Its advocates are aware, in ways most men are not, of “literature” being larger study than a simply a litany of stories. #DisruptTexts’ proponents are sensitive to dynamics such as intertextuality, discourse, and identities of all sorts, and their relationship to literature. In this they are to be praised.

The Canon

#DisruptTexts is not altogether without praise. In the interest of graciousness, and towards an honest understanding of their approach, I should want to continue my analysis on this note. For one, #DisruptTexts’ proponents are aware of both “the canon” and what was once called the “Great Conversation.” By the canon they mean those go-to books which form the core of American lit classes country-wide.

From sea to shining sea I’d bet Americans mucking about in their 20s through their 40s are more or less familiar with The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993), S.E. Hinton’s Outsiders (1967), Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Zora Neale Hurston (1937), and Streetcar Named Desire from the pen of Tennessee Williams (1947). This is the canon. It can change, it inevitably does change. Usually this happens during that unicorn of a department shakeup when old timers have been pensioned off and newer energetic teachers haven’t burned out and moved onto other avocations. In other words, the literary canon does change, but it does so only slowly, locally, and insofar as even the spunkiest of teachers can only take so much before other saner work beckons, the canon changes only temporarily before the old go-tos are back.

The Great Conversation

The “Great Conversation” is more abstract than the canon. It is the concept that authors are in a sense in a dialogue with each other over the centuries. That specific label comes from Robert Hutchins’ and Mortimer Adler’s essays of the same name which used to lead off the University of Chicago’s Great Books series. Ah, talk about changed reading habits! Just two or three generations back encyclopedia salesmen were a thing. Encyclopedia men fought with colleagues hawking The Story of Civilization and the Great Books of the Western World. More remarkable still, everyone had work. As a testament to our present contempt of knowledge, as of this article’s composition the entire 54-volume Great Books series is retailing on eBay for about $20 (and that’s $20 in devalued 2021 fiat dollars, mind you).

The Great Conversation is a thrilling concept. Just think, Plato and Bede and Renan and 10,000 other greats were all part of the same work. And mirabile dictu, that work was not a dead thing. No matter how mundane the world might see one, the Great Conversation held the promise of a millenia-long discourse anybody can plug into as soon as they can open the nearest book or pick up the closest pen. To familiarize yourself with the Great Conversation, if Adler doesn’t float your boat you might read Dean Swift’s delightful Battle of the Books tale for a humorous treatment of the same idea.

The Great Conversation is also a powerful concept. I’ll never forget when I came across the idea as a young teacher. It doubtless enriches one’s appreciation of literature as a discipline. It is a simple idea, a powerful one, and a democratic one. Like moveable type, phonetic alphabets, or chord notation, simplifications of existing technologies which greatly increased common access, the popularization of the slim and trim Great Conversation can do much to move the general public toward a consciousness that literature is more than a collection of subjectively good or bad entertainment, more than mental popcorn. Though they do not use the specific term, #DistruptTexts is right to popularize the idea of the Great Conversation.

Narrative

It is to the credit of the Left that as a general rule that they’ve a sharper sense of sociological dynamics than your regular John Q normie or—heaven forbid—your local conservative. During the preliminary stages of the 2020 Biden coup, during that hot summer of racial rent-a-mob riots, I’ll never forget the anchors of one conservative U.S. outfit. Throwing their papers on the desk they begged, “Please, we just want to live regular lives.” Clueless. They were seemingly unaware of the purpose of direct action.

Likewise, five solid years into the Left’s weaponization of gender dysphoria and most of your “black pilled” sorts, people who have “seen through the matrix” and flatter themselves in knowing all the backroom deals and agendas, don’t seem to have grasped that the academic Left has made a simple but adamatine distinction between gender and sex. Much less do they know how to respond to such a thesis. Ah musha, if it were raining soup your conservatives would be out and about with folks. But b’times Leftists lay off Twitter and they do read books. When they do, they learn things and they observe, and this wouldn’t serve any of us badly. One area of observation which undergirds #DistruptTexts is the idea of narrative.

Narratives are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They link the amalgam of experiences we as individuals and communities encounter into a manageable story. Without narratives we’re left with a nearly infinite blob of facts with no rhyme or reason to them. As John Gaddis writes in The Landscape of History, narrative makers are like map makers. For a map to be intelligible, just like the discipline of literature, those involved must include some things and they must leave out (most) others. If they didn’t the map would be 20 square miles, and literature would collapse into endless and random stories. Narratives are necessary. They are similar to worldviews, a concept which received widespread dissemination a decade or so ago, but they have more of communal quality to them because they explain who we are as a people.

Narratives are profoundly human. It is man’s fondness for narrative which will forever place the simple but story-filled Bible higher than the eloquent but pedantic Quran in the hearts of men. And in the grand sweep of things the lack of narrative thus will happily banish the tiring politio-religio-techo tracts of the modern West from the minds (to say nothing of the hearts) of later generations. The advocates of #DistruptTexts grasp the power of narrative, and they shudder at the profundity of it. We all must.

Critique, The First

With the duties of graciousness seen to, we turn to our critiques of #DistruptTexts. As we come to grips with the movement we must first appraise the state of the public. In this I do not mean the reading public, for such a thing does not exist. There are men, and they read; sometimes they read books; sometimes many people read many books. However we cannot speak of a reading public (or more magisterially, the reading public) in the manner people of a century ago did. Time moves apace. As it does the literacy of c.1750-1950 will be seen as the peculiarity it was. The public is alliterate at present. It can read but chooses not to. The Great Conversation is less and less a lived experience for Americans.

Because the Great Conversation is a fading memory, because it is a reality less men are participating in, it is taking its effect on society. The decline of religiosity can be pegged to the inability of Western men to envision abstract concepts, this is an ability which is kept in good form by reading. Religiosity in illiterate societies can be explained because, while illiteracy is more common, those skins often enjoy something deracinated Westerners do not, a cultural matrix which encourages the abstractions of faith. It seems that religion can carry on alright with either a strong reading population or a strong lived culture, ideally religion would do best with both, but if neither are available faith is doomed. The absolute thrall which the mainstream media is able to hold the country in, a spell which explains both Coronavirus saga and Mr. Biden’s outrageous yet effortless installation, are nearer examples of what readingless brains will tolerate.

When a movement such as #DisruptText comes along, a movement predicated on the reading habits of a century ago, it encounters men who read menus and cell phones and BuzzFeed. Powerful ideas are proposed to men whose sloth has not prepared them for serious ideas. It is like giving retarded people rocket launchers. Nothing but damage will result.

As a mighty tyranny comes into focus, it is ill advised to spread #DisruptTexts’ critique of literature. Until there is a substantive culture to work with, a substantive reading culture, a culture which will be strong enough to shove back the statists and technocrats, a culture which is powerful enough to keep its boot on the throat of commerce and legalism and the humorless crew now in the ascent, there is no sense in deconstructing anything. We must knit together the wisps of society into serviceable culture once again. The is not the time for #DisruptTexts. Until common agency, identity, and community are built into a bulwark against The Agenda, spreading #DisruptTexts’ ideas are a liability. There will be no books, woke or otherwise, down on Bill Gates’ plantation.

Critique, The Second

Continuing with our look at the people #DisruptTexts means to influence, I assert that their approach is inappropriate given the dynamics of modern pedagogy. As each year goes by the incompetence of our educational system comes more to the fore. By “educational system” I do not mean the bureaucratic structures of education, which is usually the meaning of that term when used. I mean the DNA of industrial learning, the structure of knowledge dissemination, the assumptions and daily rhythm of the classroom.

School is overburdened as is. There are too many demands, too many specializations, too much going on but yet the same amount of hours in the day. Like Madison Avenue’s ideal teenagehood, things like the after school job, the driver’s ed classes, SAT classes, social life, sports, band, modern education finds itself doing too much too often, and none of it well. Six or seven specialities are proposed to be taught, and all the Federal testing, and all the State Of testing, and all the mental health practices, and anti-bullying efforts, and, and, and… Busyness is the predominant fault of modern education.

Into this activity, into this clamor for hours and minutes, #DistruptTexts wishes to introduce an academic sophistication which cannot possibly be digested properly. In this, like with my above point, this is not the fault of the advocates of #DisruptTexts. It is the failure of American society and of our ridiculously overburdened school system. As stated above, there are actual strong points to #DisruptTexts, particularly their ideas of literature being in dialogue and their point about the canon being stale and largely being perpetuated because of laziness. However, at present #DisruptTexts is not realistic given the sorry state of pedagogy.

Let us embrace the seriousness which #DisruptTexts promises to bring to literature education, let us embrace the opportunity to change our pedagogical format to include, if not the specific sociological outlook they propose, at least their more substantive appreciation of letters. However, until this is systematically done—and this will not be done because the masters of this society do not want an erudite population of any political affiliation—#DisruptTexts will produce whining from all sides but little of academic substance.

Critique, The Third

Until now I have kept my analysis of #DisruptTexts confined to the larger milieu they mean to operate in. This is sensible insofar as a good many problems of education have more to do with the sorry intellectual condition we tolerate in our own individual lives, in our “real world” non-school society, than they have to do with plots to manipulate society. Plots there be, but all the Rockefellers and Nixons and NEAs don’t explain why I didn’t read a book last month. Charity begins at home, and so does criticism. But there are problems proper to #DisruptTexts, and to these we turn.

Ethnic Exaggeration

“White” is as clumsy an ethnic designation as “black,” and I pray that people stop using the labels which the merciless rulers of this society propose. There are no “white” people mentioned in Genesis’ Table of Nations, and it’s a great oversight that the same people who tear Darwinism to shreds are the same people who cleave so fondly to Charles’ ethnic designations. But for brevity’s sake #DisruptTexts is plainly anti-white.

There is nothing wrong with being of European stock, and #DisruptTexts’ assertion to the contrary is an error. I want little Arab children to be steeped in Arab culture, I want little African children to be steeped in African culture, and it frankly annoys me to see what is considered American culture holding the allegiance of non-American peoples the world over. However there is nothing wrong with American culture being taught to Americans, and there is nothing wrong in acknowledging that that culture is largely associated with people men call “white.” There are robust ethnic literatures which the American school canon, however musty and dated, already factors in. Indeed, so-called minorities may have a statistically larger place on the canon than their numbers warrant. The constant deconstruction of #DistruptTexts ignores the voice of whites in this country.

It has always been in the favor of reading that the activity puts the user’s life and circumstances in perspective. Broadcast media of various sorts does not have this quality; things are at once too dated and too fast. For example, a film on television invites the viewer to bog down in superficial details from the time of its production, and the tale will doubtless soon be interrupted by a commercial. This does not happen with literature. There are temporal aspects to the expression, of course. Les Miserables cannot be divorced from the 19th Century Republicanism which so inspired Hugo any more than the Bible can be split off from the time and culture of the ancient Hebrew.

The role of history on a specific text’s composition is as delicious a study as any, it’s analogous to historiography’s relationship to history, and it provides one of the great “Easter egg” surprises devoted readers may stumble upon. Nevertheless, literature of any lasting quality, and no small amount which has slipped the mind of the latest generation, transcends time.

#DisruptTexts will sever this multi-generational boon of art. Recent authors, indeed authors who for the most part may still be living on this earth, will crowd out the pens of past generations. Seen in the grand scope of things the dearest concerns of any given generation appear to those removed from that time and place as trifles.

Herein lies more than an irony of #DisruptTexts, but also a hole in its approach. In seeking to include the greatest number of voices (provided they’re “woke” and located on a relatively narrow bandwidth of the political spectrum) #DisruptTexts excludes the voice of the most ignored, maligned, and agentically-deprived group on the planet, the dead. Though they comprise a supermajority of humanity, the dead will receive no representation from the woke ones.

White man, black man, yellow man, Left, Right, and Center, we need to realize that authentic American culture has been sabotaged by this country’s ruling class. The advocates of #DistruptTexts ought to be on guard against their ideas being used to further this policy. Go read some books from the 1880s and ‘90s, listen to music from that time. You will see there was as true as true can be distinct American culture coming into focus at that time.

Evolution may be bunk in the biological order but in the cultural realm one culture certainly can morph into something its very own. That was absolutely happening by the late-19th Century. And just as true as true can be, this new specie was purposefully disassembled into the deracinated consumer which has gobbled up the last century of North American existence. Regardless of its intention, #DisruptTexts will contribute to this trend. Until the larger strata of culture can be improved and matured #DisruptTexts will be a danger.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

The featured image shows a Chinese communist poster from ca. 1966, which says, “Destroy the Four Olds [old ideas, old customs, old habits, old culture].” The banner reads, “Disruption is justified!”

Part III – The Schism: “We The People,” The American Crisis, And The Great Reset

This is Part III of a series of three: Part I and Part II.

Introduction

In our final treatment of “We The People,” who they are and are not, and the fissures among them, we confront a problem that not only has grown over the last five years, but one whose gravity has markedly increased since this analysis began two months ago.

The problem I speak of is the rift between the American People. This schism explains both the Coronavirus reaction and the fallout of the November vote. It must be understood in the context of a much larger shift happening in Western history.

Developments

The situation is critical. As this essay goes to press the 50 American states are more or less in the static condition of early April. The novelty of an unexpected world vacation has worn off, so has the fun of library Zoom presentations; “the show must go on” mood of classes thrown online en masse has been replaced with wearisome guessing as to when schools will go into their next two or three week shutdown. What remains, indeed what increases, is the anxiety and anger of watching one’s personal and communal stability torn down by barristers, computer programmers, and John Rockefeller’s sort of doctors.

On top of this testiness we have seen the Democratic Party (DNC) steal the November vote. Hundreds of thousands of digitally tallied Biden votes appearing in the middle of the night is a big pill to swallow, it’s almost as big a pill as several hundred thousand more votes dropping minutes later onto digital tallies; paper shredding trucks showing up at polling sites in broad daylight were bold, almost as bold as boarding up the windows when election monitors showed up.

The dead were not only remembered on the altars of America this November, but thanks to DNC employees, their memory was kept alive in the polling booth as well. Mitch McConnell had the tar beat out of him days before the election lest he be persuaded to fuss over the coming con, and Emily Murphy of the General services Administration reported “thousands” of threats she received to prematurely open up Federal funds for Biden’s transition team.

This bold, brazen, even comically obvious swindle ought not matter to a literate public. As we’ve learned in this series, after all, the vote of early November is advisory. The Electoral College and the Electoral College alone chooses the President; in no way, shape, or form does the November opinion survey of America’s 14th Amendment citizens bind December’s bloodline Electors to a decision. The meeting of the College is neither an archaic boilerplate in the American system nor a “ratification” of a state’s popular vote. The decision of the College is sovereign.

The late voting stunt, however, becomes serious in light of popular perception. Always in a working relationship, the DNC organization has confederated with broadcast media to assert Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris, once and present members of the Bar Association respectively, to be President and Vice President of these United States. The fawning of the Washington press corp and the coverage of nightly news shows is plain evidence of this relationship. Fox’s John Roberts took biased reporting into gaslighting territory this past October 1 by asking Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany a question on racism immediately after receiving a comprehensive answer to the same question he asked moments before.

Time will tell what’s to become of the Trump Administration. The members of the Electoral College do not meet until December 14, after the publication of this essay. Like the British People of the Crown Corporation whom their granddaddies replaced, the present American People are content to let the pop media spin whatever story it wants to. They keep their cards close to their chests. CNN can twitter and smirk as it pleases, Joe Biden can jog on all the stages he wants, and Barrister Harris can dance to Beyonce all night long, come mid-December the Electors alone matter.

Perception

We return to the topic of public perception, however. Much hinges on this point. The Trump Administration must vindicate its claims of fraud in the courts. If it fails to do this but wins the College they will not only be dogged by charges stealing the Presidency, but worse things will be in the offing. If the College, the bloodline People, elect Donald Trump but if he does not absolutely and finally expose and prosecute the Democrat’s fraud in court – mind you, this is a route which is possible and lawful, and for all the trouble it saves, deliciously tempting – then the DNC and broadcast media will instigate a violent reaction.

There is no doubt this will happen. They have spent the better part of a year hinting at this very thing. And this will not be violence of the mass shooting and racial protest sort, limited and controlled events with intelligence fingerprints all over them, events that are turned on and off at will. No, the DNC will split the state’s armed hirelings, the People’s police and military forces.

If the past four years tell us anything, indeed if Rudy Giuliani’s ongoing defense is an indication, the Trump Administration will flop in this necessary task. They will continue to let opportunities slip through their fingers (e.g., Bobulinksi at the final debate), they will continue to embrace the wrong people (e.g., Mike Pompeo) and alienate the right ones (e.g., Sidney Powell), they will continue trying the same media “hack” of 2016 (e.g., call the press out as liars, appeal to the public directly via social media). This last point was genius at the time, but its sun has set.

Like the scheming court eunuchs in whose footsteps they tread, mainstream media have well provided against another like 2016. Their strategy now is to smile, declare Biden the winner, and keep smiling and declaring him such no matter what. Adonijah, eat your heart out (1 Kgs. 1). Because Trump’s men will flop on the point about the vote, it will mean bloodletting, if the election is successful for them.

Civil strife is a narrative which has been seeded in the media for some time. Last December, for example, The Atlantic dedicated an entire issue to, “How to stop a civil war.” I dare say no one was thinking of civil war. It was predictive programming. So too was the spate of present and retired military men who came out against Trump during the height of the rioting this past spring. Similar programming was seen in Gavin Newsome’s calling California a “nation-state,” as was his Auntie Nancy [Pelosi] and her words on the 25th Amendment, her having spoken to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and her having “arrows in my quiver.”

Russian Dolls

We can go on in secula seculorum about what might happen, but between last month’s piece and this update, let us move on to the meat of the matter; let us move on to our final and most incisive probe into the split amongst the People. In brief, now that we know the People are the bloodline descendants of the Founding Fathers, and now that we know these united States exist under their sole control and for their sole benefit, and now that we have palpitated a fissure amongst them which helps explain the accentuated tensions of the last five years, let us conclude our examination reprising our historical analysis.

We will place the present political situation within the COVID saga, seeing how the Coronavirus reaction itself is merely a piece of the Technocrats’ “Great Reset.” To do this we will start at the end, the so-called Great Reset.

The Great Reset

In the June 2020 publication COVID-19: The Great Reset stockjobber Thierry Mallet and jetsetting gombeen man Klaus Schwab laid out how Technocrats mean to mold an effeminate Liberal West towards their end. In the book they lay out a world which is so altered by Coronavirus that some have taken to calling ours an epoch “BC” (before COVID) and “AC” (after COVID).

Though it lacked any spiritual or cultural insights, their critique of the moribund West contains some gems, some sensible points which readers of this site will likely agree with. Those with a touch for the delicacy of culture, for example, can only agree with their statement spoken in an economic context, “This new culture of immediacy, obsessed with speed, is apparent in all aspects of our lives, from ‘just-in-time’ supply chains to ‘high-frequency’ trading, from speed dating to fast food. It is so pervasive that some pundits call this new phenomenon the ‘dictatorship of urgency.’”

The Great Reset is an umbrella term for a number of reordered social relationships. The index of COVID-19: The Great Reset speaks of changes in the spheres of social contract, global government, pollution, time, and mental health. Their “stakeholder capitalism” seems to be a reworking of Adam Smith of the computer age. Always do they use the word “reset”; their vision of life is that of a coder.

What matters for our discussion are not the specifics of their plan, nor do we concern ourselves with the morality of continuing to scare people with a dubiously virulent disease. We will not waste our time on couldas, shouldas, and oughtas; we only care about what is. And what is at this moment is the fact that Messrs. Mallet and Schwab and their sort are in a position to implement their planned society. As they write in The Great Reset, “The broader point is this, the possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination.”

One of the aspects of the Liberal nation-state was the concept of the “public space,” a means by which every interest in society could be taken to account. The public space was supposed to provide a safety mechanism against the very schemes openly published in COVID-1 . If everyone in society ceded some of their freedom to the state, the philosophes argued, the public space would in a sense have more aggregate power than any single interest in society, or even any combination of interests.

This has been undermined to meaninglessness. Things like the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, where occulted realities like corporate “personhood” became widely known, were a preview of coming attractions. The fearsome Trans-Pacific Partnership was barely beaten back in 2017. It showed just how dilapidated the Liberal state had become prior to COVID, how evenly matched the power of business has become. And while it seems petty, the fact the companies like Twitter can censor the President itself shows the ability of companies to overpower states. When it comes to the People’s states and the Technocrats businesses, the People are backing up.

The Davos boys are assisted, of course, by a rank further down on the Technocrat totem pole. This station is filled by the likes of Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerburg. These are lesser actors; their folksy first names tip their hats to their smarminess.

Did we learn nothing of con artistry from “Fannie Mae” and “Fredie Mac?” Their motivations are more pecuniary than Schwab and Mallet, less inclined towards Victor Hugo-like reveries about the future. Second fiddle to the Davos clique, they represent the lower approaches of a business sector which now rivals the nation-state in terms of the resources it is able to muster.

Corona In Context

Working our way backwards, having sketched the Great Reset, we place the Coronavirus disruptions in context. The virility of the disease has greatly waned; our worst fears from March have come to naught. What deaths come from COVID as soon arise from inappropriate treatments such as ventilators as the pathogen itself. Indeed, one of the satisfactions of 2020 is watching the modern military apparatus fail so fully. With Isaiah (cf. 14:16) we laugh at those monsters who develop diseases in places like Wuhan, “Are these the men that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms?” The masters of war are not so masterful after all.

Nevertheless, the powers that be behind the Agenda, of which in truth the “Great Reset” is only one slickly marketed part of many, unexpectedly found COVID to be the perfect multitool for nigh on every plan of theirs. Cashless society, check; travel restrictions, check; education reduced to the naked collection of data, check; further fracturing of society (e.g., young vs. old, masked vs. faced), check; evisceration of small business, growth of conglomerates, check; vaccines, vaccines, vaccines, check and check.

The powers that be may have discovered COVID to be a perfect tool, but certain of them predicted, even planned, the reaction of this so-called pandemic. Those inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Mallet and Schwab’s assertion that Coronavirus is a “white swan” event, a happening which is certain, measurable, and ultimately blamed on human error, will temper their generosity in remembering the collaboration of the World Economic Forum with the Gates Foundation in staging the Event 201 workshop in October of 2019.

Rats’ Scramble

The Liberal nation-state is dead. It died long ago. In my own America, the national government established in 1787, what most men rightly or wrongly hold to be the fulfillment of the struggle concluded in 1781, itself ceased to exist in December of 1860. What was erected at the time of our Secession Crisis, and what has masqueraded as that united States government until this writing is merely an ad hoc corporation called the UNITED STATES (n.b., remember from Part I, legal capitalization has a meaning).

Throughout the 20th and 21st Century the reality of this shift from law to administration has come increasingly to the fore. Take five minutes on beleaguered Emily Murphy’s GSA website and you will clearly see the commercial nature of the UNITED STATES organization.

One of the reasons the Biden’s bogus vote is not especially upsetting is because the DNC’s crime, when placed in the context of the post-1860 UNITED STATES lie, seems almost inevitable. Things had to end up here. Of course, a presidential vote would eventually be stolen in broad daylight. What’s built on lies will end in lies.

Putting the American situation within the context of the Coronavirus fallout, and Corona within that of the rising order, we see that a minority – perhaps a third – of the bloodline People have thrown in their lot with the Technocrats. I guess this rough percentage based on the significant through not irresistible power which this clique has been able to leverage in the pop media and in coordinated events like the November swindle.

Unless Liberals get their act together these feckless People, these one-third of defectors from their ranks, cannot be faulted for jumping ship. They are only doing what the People of Rome and the People of the Enlightenment did in their turns. The deciding factor behind the Senator’s and the Equites’ occasional realignment, and the deciding factor forging the shopkeepers, barristers, and bankers who became the various Peoples of the Liberal nation-states into a political caste, was self-interest. (As an aside, the rise of the Medieval Christian order, a shift which occurred between those of Rome and the Enlightenment, did not come about by such machinations).

Why should the present turncoat People be pilloried for making the same decision as the Equites in the 1st Century BC and the middle class in the 18th Century AD? The Roman Patricians did not take their system seriously, they would not have developed their “bread and circus,” “client-patron” system if they did. If the Senators did not take themselves seriously why should the shut-out Equites have done so? Early Modern churchmen and nobles did not take their order seriously, there would not have been religious wars and an upstart banking power if they did.

If the First and Second Estates of the Early Modern period did not regard their system why should shut-out shopkeepers prove any more loyal? Hear me well. I’d not be wanting to wake up to Gretchen Witmar and her crazy eyes any time soon, and I’ll not be jogging with Joe Biden on any stages, and I don’t trust Attorney Andrew Cuomo or Attorney Gavin Newson or Attorney Lori Lightfoot any farther than I can throw them. Howsoever, is it any wonder these lightweights prove disloyal to a Liberal order which does not take itself seriously?

Perhaps it is nostalgia which blinds us. In some ways the Liberal order is a beautiful vision. In some ways it improved over the Early Modern order. It was more receptive to social, economic, and philosophical changes which were in motion since the Late Medieval period, these were changes which the old order refused to acknowledge even into the 19th Century. But in the face of a Technocracy which nakedly does not believe in freedom of speech, human rationality, nor the autonomy of men, the inheritors of the Liberal order, the bloodline Posterity of the Founding Fathers, themselves barely believe these things.

COVID is buckling a half-hearted Liberal system. Like Pope’s drowsy troops at Chancellorsville, the rulers of Enlightenment states have been caught unawares; flanked by insurgent Technocracy throbbing with money, ideology, and vision, a good lot of the lukewarm People have decided for the Technocracy. Have you not detected lukewarmness in your civil servants? Mentioned above is the admiralty system, a statutory structure which masquerades as law. This would never have been tolerated over the last century if men who believed in the Enlightenment were in charge.

o this list of shame, we add the Liberal concept of a published law code. The point of this was to make law accessible to the common man. This too has turned absurd. Every legal word has been redefined; nobody can make sense of what lawyers say. Woe to fool who assumes his definitions are the definitions of barristers.

Beyond the words themselves, law codes, which were supposed to be brief tracts the builder or weaver or farmer could consult at need, have turned into mammoth publications of hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of pages. Are there not commonly found men in the Liberal nation-states called accountants whose entire avocation in life is to digest tax codes? An infamous example of codes-run-wild concerns the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Running to nearly 1,000 pages, Nancy Pelosi was giving good advice when she infamously said the Senate needed to, “Pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”

Lastly, the Liberal’s shocking and effective levee en masse burst onto the scene in the summer of 1793. What has this become of their armies 200 years later. As the likes of Blackwater, and the fee schedules of their regular armies attest, the forces of the Enlightenment have degenerated into bands of hirelings as craven as any Medieval stereotype.

The Choice

Between the two, between a decomposing Liberal order and the rising Technocracy, head and shoulders the Liberal system is preferable. At least it nominally provides for dissent and organization. Whilst 1776 is about 1776 years off from the Solution to our crisis, it provides a damn sight more to build with than Silicon Valley’s nightmare.

A revivification of the better aspects of Liberalism – free speech, an informed and self-employed citizenry, the abolition of admiralty administration and the exaltation of actual law – these are powerful dynamics to strive for. A man can be proud to leave such a legacy to his son. And if the Continental Congress runs a harsh and hypocritical government, it is not as cruel as what Davos has cooked up.

If you think Thomas Hobbes is a bad overseer, take a look at Bill Gates. In the interest of realism, in light of the desperation of the moment, at least for the moment we must use what’s left of the Liberal order to build from. It is pointless to speak about libertarianism, or Islam, or monarchy as systems to build. It is the eleventh hour and we must use what we already have, and that is the Enlightenment.

A significant minority of the bloodline People, both in America and across the world, are realigning with the rising Technocrats. This shift is behind America’s political chaos, it is behind the Coronavirus overreactions, and it is behind the popularization of the Great Reset.

At this hour, everything hangs on one question: has the Technocrats’ Agenda, an Agenda whose skids were greased by a century of Liberal compromise and cant, incorporated an irresistible number of people into itself? Have the last decades of Enlightenment compromise positioned so many men into jobs, and bank accounts, and social security numbers, and registrations that serious mass organization against the Great Reset is impossible?

We may jabber in protest about credit scores, contact tracing, and digital persons, but the fleshpots of Egypt are yummy, and their beds are soft. As a new Technocratic People asserts themselves on the ashes of the old Liberal People, with enough recruits to the former from the latter to make a type of apostolic succession plausible, time will tell if discontent over the vote, over COVID, over the Great Reset will manifest itself. One way or another a new chapter begins for We The People.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

The image shows, “Tribute to the American Working People,” by Honoré Sharrer, painted in 1956-1951.

Part II – A House Besieged: The American People Meet Their Match

This is Part II of a series of three: Part I and Part III.

Introduction

Last month we learned who the American People are. Armed with this information, this month we explore the unusual situation America finds itself in at this moment. The bloodline People have collided with various interests who have confederated against them. International conspiracy, dubious health regulations, peculiar weather, and rioting are intelligible in this context. As we’ll see, in this, there is nothing new under the sun.

As discussed in my previous essay, we learned who the People are. Using legal, historical, and observational data it is evident the People refer to the constitutors of the various American states, i.e., those men who signed the charters, declarations, and constitutions of the 18th Century which asserted that Britain’s North American colonies were no longer under the Crown corporation’s jurisdiction. Additionally, their families (i.e., the Posterity so often mentioned in writings of the period) are also the People. Finally, so as the People’s posterity not turn into an inbred caste, the constituting People allowed for the occasional addition of talented outsiders through marriage or adoption. This is the reason, for example, why America’s ruling class pays such attention to their Ivy League colleges.

Wait, you interject. Am I saying that when the town mayor and state rep and governor and president and senator talk about the People, and doing the best for the People, and fighting for the People, and protecting and serving the People, that they are not jabbering on about me? Alas, my friend, this is so. Break out your Kleenex.

Larger Context

By the by, while my comments here explore the localized American situation, this knowledge is applicable to world events in general. It is true that there are ideological differences throughout governments. Wahabi Arabia, Red China, and Republican France, for example, all have different governing systems. However, the nations of the world operate using a largely interchangeable legal system. Lost, these last few centuries, among the personalities and speeches and philosophies; lost among passionate and abstract discussions of monarchy and democracy, has been the irresistible rise of the worldwide legal system.

All such systems have come about in more or less the same fashion as America. Namely, some determined faction of the bourgeoisie, a crew somehow locked out of the hall of powers, declare themselves a People, they fight some war to a successful finish, and then they spend the rest of their lives encouraging fellow travelers in other nations to do the same. Rinse and repeat for 300 years.

Our order, the Liberal order, is the order of the People; it is the order of shopkeepers and attorneys. Since that crew wiggled out from under the thumbs of princes and bishops in the 18th Century, they have spared no effort in building their system. Like the Romans whose legacy they pretend to, the People are brusque to their foes, merciless to compatriots who break ranks.

The present pariah statuses of North Korea and Iran, the rough demise of Saddam Hussain and Muammar Gaddafi are suddenly intelligible in light of these dynamics. Second and Third World peoples, forever rag-dolled by the worldwide People, are coincidentally the less legalized populations of the planet. Less do their daily transactions, behaviors, and movements pass through the ledger of bankers, less are they subject to barristers’ regulable STRAWMAN persons, than the rest of mankind. Better than through the lens of race or economy, the poor treatment of these poor peoples can be understood via the dynamic of who the People are, who plays along with them, and who does not.

This Moment

Knowledge of who the People are is a hard pill to swallow. It’s cozier to think that I am the People. Just thinking, That political hack is talking to me! gives me tingles for days. However, tingles aside, knowledge is power, and a mature man knows that even unhappy knowledge allows one to discern events more sharply. It is not a bad thing to be disillusioned.

2020 has been a peculiar year. Whatever Coronavirus is, a botched bioweapon attack, an unintentional lab leak, a seasonal flu nastier than normal, the press has strung out a mild public threat into the story of the year. A sickness easy enough to protect vulnerable men from, has turned into another Black Death, at least on Plato’s 24/7 T.V. wall. America’s racial tension, what tension there is, was something that was either already ably being addressed by local community organizations or so removed from most people’s experience as to be merely an abstract academic conversation.

This marginal problem sparked intestine protests whose necessity only rivals for curiosity their apparent ability to be turned on and off like a switch. A country which still can’t bring itself to call the 2007 crash a depression finds itself with 25% unemployment, and no one seems especially concerned. This startling statistic. and its indifferent reaction, is only bested by an odder development, that universal basic income has found a warm reception in the land of independence.

Christianity, the one social force with enough heft to counter the overreach of the state, has shown itself a toothless shell. Besides some plucky and scattered congregations, the Protestant sects have stood down en masse and, less forgivable, the Catholic Church has become a crouching client of the Federal government. Lastly, much like the rioting of 2020, the dial of nature seems to be cranked up this year with bomb cyclones, derechos, biblical locusts, and a West Coast endlessly aflame. What a year!

The Confrontation

As sure as we know the membership of the People, America’s present instability can be understood as a confrontation between the People and various resentful outside forces who have joined their interests. They include various New Men (i.e., in the Roman sense; those like the Clinton or Obama families who’ve only lately been grafted into the patrician class; they who have little love for the People, nor the People for them), state interests (elements lately called the “Deep State,” including HAARP), and tech and fintech businesses who are quickly overtaking the nation-state in terms of the resources it can marshal for its ends.

For the sake of ease, I will refer to this diverse clique as “technocrats” since digital interests make up the stoutest contingent of this confederation. Their near-term goal is to shove back increasing regulation; their larger aim is the end of the nation state. This is what they mean by the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Historical Backdrop

What we are seeing is nothing new. Rome saw this same confrontation happen. While American Indian, ancient Greek, and Medieval European systems influenced the government of 1787, the Roman Republic provided the largest example for the Founding Fathers to emulate. The 18th Century was a time peculiarly given over to reading ancient Roman history. As such, the Founders were aware of a tension which developed in the old Italian state, namely, the Roman People, the patricians, were slowly but surely outmatched by the rising equites.

Originally, the equite (i.e., cavalry) class consisted of the lower ranks of the patricians. Necessity eventually required enlarging the membership of the equites to include the wealthier plebeians. As the obligations of the state, the size of the army, and the sloth of the ruling class increased in the Late Republic, by around the time of the Servile Wars (ca.,100 BC) the equites ceased to have any real military role in the Roman army. All that remained to consume their days was wealth and ambition. By artful patronage and social entropy, as the decades wore on, the equites were able to gain the upper hand in their struggle with the Senate.

Nothing New Under The Sun

A like dynamic to Rome’s is at play in America. In place of the Roman People, we have the American People. Both are principally defined by bloodline membership. In place of the equites we have the technocrats. Both the equites and the technocrats found themselves under systems which restricted their growth. Just as the cursus honorum restricted the upper echelons of Roman rule to the patricians, so do various elements of the Liberal order hold back the dreams and schemes of the technocrats.

Just as the equites chafed under the mos maiorum, the ancient customs and mindset which undergirded the civic behavior of the Republic, so the technocrats languish under the assumptions of the Liberal order. We may save the specifics of Rome for another day, but to grasp the dynamics of America in 2020, we must remind ourselves of three points assumed by the present order. These are rationality, free speech, and the public space. The People’s nation-state system at least nominally believes in these things; the technocrats do not. Indeed, these three assumptions stand in the way of the latter’s greater growth.

Underlying Suppositions Of The Liberal Order

The present order assumes most men are mostly rational most of the time. It believes men can act with maturity and foresight to make intelligent decisions. Voting only works, after all, if the voters are rational. This is the chief reason Enlightenment states are heavy-laden with schools, libraries, and news media. Whatever raisons d’etre those fields may put out to encourage participation, the state’s interest is to form a well-equipped citizenry.

Connected to this rationality is the idea of free speech. All those well-informed citizens need to be able to compare notes in an unfettered fashion.

Lastly, we have the concept of the public space. This is this most mysterious concept of the present order. We’ve all heard the expression, but what does it mean? The concept of the public space arose in opposition to the Medieval order, an arrangement where everything was private. Private roads, private forests, private rivers, private courts, everything was the private property of someone. The Early Modern public sphere allowed all the little guys in a community to form a social force which could counteract any private interest which arose. This often abused, nearly forgotten concept is the assumption behind all Liberal states.

A rational electorate, freedom of speech, and the public space are hard-forged concepts which rank amongst the defining ideas of the Modern age. Those given to the notion of there being a “Postmodern” age point to the mid-20th Century decomposition of these assumptions as the definitive parameters of this term. However, the long rot of those concepts is only now manifesting. Even five or ten years ago online platforms at least made idealistic pretenses to excuse censorship. Now they shamelessly cite willfulness.

The Dynamic

The parallels between the Roman People and the American People don’t end with our earlier examples. As French Royalist Mallet du Pan famously noted, “The revolution eats its own.” And so it does. Lest we get sentimental and fall into the conservative’s bad habit of automatically siding with an older group over a newer, we remember that in their day the Roman People were just as much haughty upstarts as their American pretenders. They who ejected the Etruscan kings were themselves ejected by the next upstarts, the equites. Just so the American People – they who ejected the agents of the Crown are now besieged by a new social troop.

In the midst of this siege here’s the rub: America’s People have no more fight in them than Rome’s in the days of Marius. Like in the ancient world, America’s People have come to scorn their mos maiorum just as the Roman Senate did theirs. If this were not so they would never have permitted an admiralty statutory system to masquerade as law, they would never have tolerated jobberism among Americans, they would never have erected FBIs on top of CIAs on top of NSAs on top of DARPAs, if they believed the assumptions of their Liberal order they inherited.

Here the People stand in 2020: faithless, compromised, and indifferent. They may yet spur themselves on to one or two more victories before they’re through. They may well beat back the present assault. History trends as history does, though, and the odds are always with the determined. Between the People and the technocrats, there is no doubt who has stamina and who does not. We lose in any case.

Go to Part III.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

The image shows, “Main Street, Gloucester,” by John Sloan, painted in 1917.

Part I – In Plain Sight: Who Are “We, The People?”

This is Part I of a series of three: Part II and Part III.

Introduction: Misunderstandings

Anyone with an ounce of spiritual awareness and emotional sensitivity knows low-level blues some of the time. Even our metric friends, they who hold but a diminutive gram’s worth of discernment, know well this vale of tears. In the catalogue of woes which stalk long downtrodden man, the disconnect between impression and reality is prominent.

At a political hearing I attended earlier this year, for example, I was taken aback to learn how divergent our general understanding of the immune system is as compared to where science presently stands. What we are taught in high school is about a century out of date.

Another example is seen with driverless trucking features on TV. Broadcast in North America and Europe, these specials have all the schadenfreude that reality TV can dish up. The producers narrate as high-tech lorries roll across the screen. As these programs unfold they inevitably cut back and forth to befuddled truckers. Always American Southerners, the interviewees coyishly confront their livelihood evaporating before their bloodshot eyes. Remarkably nonplussed (or fronting heavily), they assure the host that such machines will, “Never take off.” After all, “Who’d you trust on a highway, me or some robot.” The producers have made their point: the wagoneers are out of touch with reality.

We won’t even get started on the perception-reality dynamic surrounding face masks vis-a-vis virus protection.

Think of all the lost opportunities, the mistaken conclusions, the wasted health and wealth and peace of mind which is out there because people’s perceptions do not match reality. It adds up and it wears one down. I suppose there’s some proof of Original Sin in all this. And we see the same disconnect with politics.

A Most Popular Crew

One error heard throughout these States united concerns invocation of “the People.” Their mention, typically an ever-present warble, becomes a clashing gong each presidential election. And why wouldn’t it? The purported benefit to the people can justify any scheme. Is mechanical abortion good? Yes, because the people benefit. Should it be permitted? Of course not, babies are people too. Some foreign country must be invaded to avenge the people! No, it mustn’t. People might be killed. Taxes are necessary to provide services to the people. Taxes steal the people’s money. You get the point. Sprinkle the people on it, and any topic is justified.

The purpose of this article is to pin down the members of this timely clique. Who are the people? Or rather, who are the People? (n.b., We’ll get into the capitalization significance below). The People must really be special to have so many skins talking about them! The purpose of this article is not to lampoon the present condition of Western democracy, a ludicrous system custom-fit for every two-bit grifter from your town hall alderman to your Supreme Court heavy hitter. Nor do I write this with a moralizing spirit. I am not saying the conclusion herein is good or bad. Alas, political discourse is frustratingly given over to what people think of this or that occurrence; little attention is given to how things are. Let us put our emotions and impressions and solutions aside. Let us look at the naked reality.

The Rub

That we not beat around the bush, the People are a specific group of men distinct from the mass of Americans. Almost certainly you, kind reader, are not among the People. Their concerns are not your concerns, their loves are not your loves, their fears are not your fears. Only by a polite omission on the part of the People themselves, combined with a baseless and monstrous assumption on your part, do you believe you are among the People.

By blood, or marriage, the People were or are those related to the 18th-century constitutors of the state and Federal governments of America, as well as those men so involved with states later incorporated into these United States. Far from being a stealthy clique, they number in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps the millions. Far from being secretive, their identity is trumpeted in both the legal documents they publish and it is plainly seen in their behavior. With eyes to see, one stands in awe of just how explicit, frequent, and honest the People are in advertising their distinction from the regular Americans they rule over.

There are four reasons which support this unusual and uncomfortable, but inevitable, conclusion. They are (1) legal grammar, (2) the Founders’ historical awareness, (3) the U.S. Constitution, and (4) the present and historical behavior of the People.

Specificity & Hierarchy: Legal Grammar

The legal system is specific. Indeed, specificity is shy only of artificiality when comprehending the legal control matrix. Without general nouns there is no way whereby one group can be designated from another. Likewise, without proper nouns there is no way things of a kind can be isolated from their larger mass. What book-hoarding boon is a library card if it has no name to it and if anyone in the town may use it? What fear does a speeding ticket hold if there is no specific man to mail it to? Without specificity, statists cannot exert their will upon their subjects. Legality demands specificity.

General specificity only gets one so far. Hierarchy is needed for greater distinction. If we all have individualized library cards, to carry over the above example, who goes first if we both want to check out the same book? To see the People for who they are we need to unlock the hierarchy their system assumes. The maxims of law and the doctrine of capitis diminutio are our keys.

The maxims are the skeleton upon which the legal system hangs. They’re analogous to a Catholic’s examination of conscience for Confession. They are less a list of hard and fast regulations and more of a general collection of proverbs which explain the principles of legal land. Woe betide those who do not make this distinction! The penitent becomes a neurotic and the barrister a hack should they put such enumerations literally into practice. Many a soul and many a lawyer has been ruined by this oversight. When it comes to the maxims of law, the spirit rules and the letter kills.

The creator controls, is one such proverb. In fact, it’s a truism so fundamental to legalism that it often does not appear in published lists of maxims. Only the frequent reading of case law, or “reading between the lines” on the compiled legal proverbs cited in Black’s or Bouvier’s dictionaries, will discover this plain principle. Upon this doctrine, for example, I have the sole authority to decide what gets mentioned in this article. I am the creator of this article; I am it’s sovereign. However, should I desire this piece to be published on a platform created by another, I must submit this creation to that creation, myself being the petitioning party. I must subordinate this sovereign creation to that one (i.e., for editing, formatting, etc.). From the doctrine of “the creator controls” the whole legal structure flows.

Capitis deminutio is a principle which the Founding Fathers, mostly lifelong barristers and/or merchants, would have been familiar with, at the establishment of the country’s governing system. A concept from Roman law, a system which all English-speaking structures eventually default to, should there be no usable precedents, capitis deminutio designates the amount of control an entity is under. Long story short, so that we don’t get tangled in jargon, the capitalization of the first letter of a noun in legal land designates something as both a specific something, and under the ownership of another. If you are up for a load of jargon, here’s the definition of capitis diminutio from Black’s Law, 2nd edition: “In Roman law, [capitis diminutio was a] diminishing or abridgment of personality. This was a loss or curtailment of a man’s status or aggregate of legal attributes and qualifications, following upon certain changes in his civil condition. It was of three kinds, enumerated as follows:

Capitis diminutio maxima. The highest or most comprehensive loss of status. This occurred when a man’s condition was changed from one of freedom to one of bondage, when he became a slave. It swept away with it all rights of citizenship and all family rights.

Capitis diminutio media. A lesser or medium loss of status. This occurred where a man lost his rights of citizenship, but without losing his liberty. It carried away also the family rights.

Capitis diminutio minima. The lowest or least comprehensive degree of loss of status. This occurred where a man’s family relations alone were changed. It happened upon the arrogation of a person who had been his own master, (sui juris,) or upon the emancipation of one who had been under the patria potestas. It left the rights of liberty and citizenship unaltered. See Inst. 1, 1G, pr.; 1, 2, 3; Dig. 4, 5, 11; Mackeld. Rom. Law.”

Thus “the People” in a legal document, such as, the U.S. Constitution, or in the mouth of someone holding a legal office ultimately under the jurisdiction of the Constitution, refers to a specific group of people, rather than any old sinner walking on top of America.

Togas & Muskets: The Framers’ Historical Awareness

Second, the claim that the People refer to a specific caste of men is supported by the historical awareness of the Founding Fathers. They were a clutch deeply steeped in ancient history. Their use of antique references bolstered the point that their political arguments were timeless.
When news of the Battles of Lexington and Concord came to holy Connecticut, for example, jovial Israel Putnam immediately dropped his plowing in situ and raced Cincinnatus-style to join the Massachusetts rebels. About two months before Dr. Joseph Warren became Bunker Hill’s most famous casualty, he was seen speechifying on the streets of Boston in a Roman toga!

The American Revolution came at a time when various trends were at their zenith. The equality of armaments between rulers and ruled, is one example, the afterglow of a Protestant revival is another, and the obsession of that generation with the likes of Plutarch and Cicero is yet one more example. The Framers could not get enough of ancient history.

Those acquainted with Rome will be aware of the divide between the patrician and plebeian classes. The interaction between those who traced their families back to the original stock of Rome (patricians) and those who moved in later (plebeians) provides an enduring thread through all the turns and jolts of Roman history. But even the dullest pleb, a manifest client of Sulla or Caesar, one hopelessly addicted to bread and circuses, would never seriously think the “P” in SPQR (i.e., Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the People of Rome) meant him. The “P” for People meant the patricians. Everyone else was along for the ride.

Communist countries like China and North Korea are more in line with this Roman bluntness than the democratic West on this point. Everyone knows when an office holder in those countries talks about “the People” they’re referring to the members of the Party, which is considered to be a type of incarnation of the will of the populace.

The American Framers meant to provide against a repeat of the ancient slide towards democracy and chaos. Far from being a sexist, hypocritical oversight, their limit of the voting franchise to men, and only men of property at that, was a direct homage to the early Roman Republic. Of course, they would say, men of maturity and wealth – the material success stories of a community – ought to be the ones to steer the ship of state. Jobbers and renters were not fit to run a county, having so unimpressively run their lives. Reprising the paterfamilias role, the males of the early American republic would stand in for all their family members’ concerns in the public sphere. They would save – not exclude – women, children, and the indigent from the morass of electoral politics.

In Rome the patrician class was not static. There was the process of adoption. Far removed from motives of modern charity or conjugal sterility, adoption was offered to promising youths entering their adult years. The Emperor Augustus is the most famous example of this. It was a means to ensure inheritance in a society with disabilities on women’s ability to inherit property.

Teasing these points out, the existence and stability of the patrician class and their use of adoption, we see how the American constitutors were primed by their interest in Rome to create a governing caste in their “People,” which was stable yet occasionally open to fresh, well-vetted blood via marriage and other forms of incorporation.

In Plain View: The People Define Themselves

The third point is proof from the U.S. Constitution. We take the legal and historical setups above into this consideration. Now that we know the principles under which the Framers operated, the identity of the People is hardly a question at all, as we examine a document they produced.

The U.S. Constitution is a contract using specific legal language. It plainly states for whom the new government exists. It famously begins, “We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” There you have it. The United States Federal government, and its incorporated state entities, exist for the sole benefit of the People.

The “We” and “ourselves” refer to the signatories themselves, the 39 souls who met in Independence Hall. Through the doctrine of delegation, however, the People also included those men who constituted the several state governments which dispatched those representatives to Philadelphia. Remember, the creator controls. Thus, by the agentic, representative relationship, the Peoples of the 13 states were invisibly present at that Pennsylvania meeting, too.

Then there is the mention of “our Posterity.” Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary, a text whose definitions are closer to the Founding Fathers’ understanding than our dictionaries, defines posterity as, “Descendants; children, children’s children, etc. indefinitely; the race that proceeds from a progenitor. The whole human race are the posterity of Adam.” His second definition defines posterity as, “In a general sense, succeeding generations; opposed to ancestors.”

We know the first definition is what the constitutors intended because legal language is specific, not general. John Bouvier’s 1839 dictionary defines posterity as, “All the descendants of a person in a direct line.” Therefore, the Posterity mentioned in the Constitution refers to the descendants of the constitutors. Unless you are one of the fortunate few hundred thousand or millions of souls related to those state or national leaders, you are not the People. With the legal definitions, principles, maxims of the system itself, not what we assume they mean, we come to know who the People are. Only an undiscerning and gross assumption suggests that “We the People” applies to all Americans.

Distinctions, Distinctions, Distinctions: The Vote And The Election

Lost on Americans is the distinction between two events which the media conflate into one: The Presidential vote and the Presidential election. They are not the same event. The early November vote is largely a straw poll, while the December election makes the actual choice of President. The November event is a way to take the pulse of the country. It has no direct say-so on who becomes President. It is nearly, but as we shall see not totally, meaningless.

The November vote is analogous to Catholic parish administration. The priest has absolute, official, final say in ordinary decisions for his parish. In no way whatsoever is he obliged to listen to the directives of his council. Yet to go against the zeitgeist of the parish council in a major way would be foolish. It would create sullen, testy subjects. Such a rash override would form a block of uncertain loyalty should the priest run afoul of the bishop at some future date. In the Catholic parish council as soon as in the American vote, the mob has power of a sort. However, that power is consultative not formal. At base, the November vote serves as a psychological release valve. It lets off tension which otherwise would manifest itself in discord and revolution.

The election, a distinct event from the vote, is a quiet event which takes place in the 50 state capitals mid-December of each election cycle. This limited December event has in fact all of the import which people ascribe to the popular November event. The tally of the December electors decides who will be President, not the vote.

The electors are drawn from the suggestions of the state political parties. They’re largely the same sorts who participate as delegates at the state and national conventions charged with selecting the presidential candidates. To follow the cursus honorum of such party delegates/electors is to see the People in their natural habitat.

At this year’s Democratic National Convention, where state party delegates met to choose their national candidate, there was a remarkably helpful commercial released, entitled, “We The People at the Democratic Convention.” A superficial viewing showed a diverse collection of Americans of all races, classes, and creeds. However, a closer re-watch reveals that all participants were sitting office holders, Bar attorneys, or DNC representatives. Once you know who the People are, you’ll never hear politicians the same way again!

By Their Works: The People In Action

Lastly, the People are a specific clique based on the observable behavior of the American ruling class. From time to time, articles appear noting the relationship of this or that politician with this or that movie star or commercial mogul. If only in the interest of trivia, most Americans probably know a few examples of this.

The relationship between the second and sixth Presidents (Adamses), as well as the 41st and 43rd ones (Bushes), are commonly known. The simplified observation that California Governor Gavin Newson is the “nephew” of California Congresswoman and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (herself the daughter of a Maryland Congressman and the sister of a Baltimore mayor) has received some press, as Mr. Newson has run California off a financial cliff in 2020. Less well known is that Gavin Newson is the removed cousin of the far more useful soul, the harpist, Joanna Newson.

And relationality in the ruling class isn’t a modern phenomenon. Chilly Connecticut, where I compose this article, was started by a breakaway faction of Puritans led by Thomas Hooker. The good reverend left his mark in the new-found colony. Aaron Burr, George Catlin, J.P. Morgan, and William Howard Taft were all descendants, with Hooker’s blood running through the veins of the Pierpoint and Edwards families.

I could go on and on. If you spend an hour or two nosing around your socially-distanced library, if you connect the dots between the “related to’s” in the biography section, you’ll see the combination the People have going. You may even visit Google and use their “People also search for” feature to do the same. If you invest the time, these simple experiments about the People will solidify profound conclusions about American government than do isolated barroom anecdotes. If one understands the People to be the specific class they define themselves as, a great many baffling statements and state policies become sensible.

There is a Masonic aspect to this topic I only skirt now. It’s a theme which could swallow this discussion. Suffice it to say, the practitioners of occult schools were well represented at the state and national constituting conventions of late 18th-century America. Within those communities the use of adept symbolism and “open secrets” are no strangers. The occultation of the meaning of the word People is not beyond the pale in this context as well. But before we get all tangled up in “endless genealogies” (1 Tim. 1:4) we remember that, like the Roman system, the present order is simply codified nepotism. Don’t overthink the motives of the People.

Conclusion

Plato argued that societies need a noble lie to keep them living together harmoniously. Such is the spurious assumption that all Americans are the People. By quietly letting the mass of men believe they are this group, the American system rectified the failings of ancient experiments at self-government.

As noted, one of those failings was a tension between the patricians and the plebeians, the old blue bloods and later settlers. One way to provide against the selfsame tensions which destroyed the Roman Republic is not to mention this social division, however true it is. If the pleb believes he is a patrician a great source of resentment is avoided.

Power to the People!

Go to Part II.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

The image shows, Cincinnatus abandons the Plough to dictate Laws to Rome, by Juan Antonio de Ribera; painted in 1806.