One of the most deflating revelations anyone can have is the realization that their world has been infiltrated, and those whom they counted as friends are not what one thought. Betrayal, and worse, gaslighting, leave a very bitter taste, and give rise to cynicism, with a whole host of worse temptations in its train. Frustration, disillusionment, loss, and anguish have always been the stock in trade of demons, with which they crush the ignorant and the innocent. And so this post is primarily to help the unwary navigate the "fever swamps" of "conspiracy theory".
For those newly exposed to the truth that the world around them is not what it appears to be, the first reaction, understandably, is one of denial. But then, after the repeated blows upon the empire of lies by the hammer of truth, the ugly reality is finally acknowledged; either that, or the denial reinforces itself with layers of alcoholic beverages, sugary foods, and narcotics, and/or a fanatical involvement in sports venues or the "entertainment industry" including pornography.
Newcomers to the somber reality of the modern world must quickly realize that the deception has many layers, and many agents. So the first thing newcomers must realize is that if they are to combat the ultimate errors, they must know and cling to the ultimate truths. The ultimate truth, of course, is that life here below heaven is but a pilgrimage to a better future, one of Union with God and unimaginable bliss. And the ultimate truth is that life here below is an often bitter warfare with demonic powers and principalities until one takes his last breath, and that one's primary weapons are the Deposit of Faith, prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and utter, uncompromising enmity with this fallen world and its voteries, of whatever stripe they may show themselves. Unless one has that ultimate perspective, one will become hopelessly lost.
Moreover, the most effective weapon we have is the Most Holy Rosary. St Sr Lucia, the principle Apostle of Our Lady of Fatima, in an epochal interview with Fr Augustine Fuentes on Dec 26th 1957, uttered the following: "As for the Holy Rosary, Father, in these last times in which we are living, the Blessed Virgin has given a new efficacy to the praying of the Holy Rosary. This in such a way that there is no problem that cannot be resolved by praying the Rosary, no matter how difficult it is - be it temporal or above all spiritual - in the spiritual life of each of us or the lives of our families, be they our families in the world or Religious Communities, or even in the lives of peoples and nations. I repeat, there is no problem, as difficult as it may be, that we cannot resolve at this time by praying the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will save ourselves, sanctify ourselves, console Our Lord and obtain the salvation of many souls."
Unfortunate, indeed, are those souls who scoff at Our Lady of Fatima. Our Lady of Fatima came not to a church, or a bishop, or a president, but to the world. She worked the Greatest Public Miracle since Moses parted the Red Sea on Oct 13th, 1917. Even anti-Catholic newspapers reported the event, which was undeniable. As much a part of the historical record as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the "dancing of the sun" was seen by over 70,000 people- saints and sinners, priests and libertarians, rich and poor, ignorant clodhoppers and college professors. And an even bigger miracle was foretold, and happened, on Jan 25th, 1938: the night sky was illuminated all around the horizon with a red glow that made roosters crow, and had alarms called in to fire departments across Europe, Asia, Japan, and North America. What scientists glibly tried to dismiss as an "aurora borealis" was seen as far south as Mexico City and Tunis. From eskimos in the Yukon to Berbers on the Sahara, a billion people gazed at the night sky and wondered.
As we near the end to the latest Great Chapter of Salvation History, which started in 1054 with the Great Schism and the cleaving of Christendom, as everything becomes manifestly clearer, the Ancient Serpent has redoubled his effort to muddy the proverbial waters. Now, as St Paul says, our Adversary always tries to appear as "An Angel of Light" in manners diverse and sundry, and even advocates for what is naturally good, though always at the expense of the supernatural. But as of late he has also emphasized another stratagem, that of a false opposition, which serves two main purposes. The first is to try and frustrate and ultimately disenfranchise those searching for truth and the second is to lead people on wild chases into the preternatural. The second purpose also has the effect of convincing those still ensnared in the Empire of Lies that those who contradict the "party line" are insane fanatics.
And so, with no further ado, let us visit the King of the Shills, Alex Jones and his Infowars/Prison-Planet cartel. Here one will find much truth, even to a very miniscule level. But for every bona fide researcher that Alex interviews, he also hosts someone telling us the Egyptian Pyramids were built by Space Aliens, or that Queen Elizabeth was a Green Lizard, or that Nephthalim are running the governments of the world from vast underground bases. This lore gets diffused far and wide, sometimes incorporated by other shills, sometimes believed by gullible researchers who then become "useful idiots". Needless to say, the closer one gets to the supernatural, the thicker the fairy tales become, until one becomes convinced reality is just one cosmic dream, and that ultimately nothing matters.
Once on to him, the novice has only begun the discernment process. So, at this point, allow me to demonstrate how the Snakes operate. First, one has to realize that there are two main types of snakes, King Snakes and Common Snakes. The King Snakes are the ones never seen, operating from their secure lairs far from the public eye, buried deep in government offices as mid-level bureaucrats. But make no mistake- they are running the show. The clowns seen on the television screen are only taking orders and following them, whether they be newscasters, politicians, generals, actors, athletes, or bomb throwers. I guarantee nobody will ever see a King Snake on the Big Screen. Their biggest nightmare is being doxxed. The Common Snakes might even be in one's life. They could be a boss, a pastor, a superior officer, or the chairman of the board. These know how to play the system, and their favorite hobby is making people miserable. They will shake with the right hand, while with the left they will plunge a dagger in the back and twist it. They can lie while smiling, and if accused of some dastardly deed, they can deny it with a smile or a river of crocodile tears. They excel at flipping the script and making victims into culprits. And they manufacture stories that have people disbelieving what they have seen with their own eyes. The technical name is diabolical narcissist, and their conscience is as dead as the bleached bones of a coyote on the Sonoma Desert.
Now let us follow the Standard Operating procedure. As an example, let us follow the drama of Hollywood as it attacked the virtue of purity from the early 1960's through the late 1980's. First, the line at the ankles went up while that below the neck went down, down, down, leaving only straps covering the bosom on the girl. Then the romance scenes became more avante garde. After a while it became easy to follow the drill. Push the envelope far enough to elicit a reaction but not so far that people might actually think the time to trash the television set had come, far enough that the pastors would squawk but not so far that the bishops would censure the production, and far enough that some would protest but not enough would boycott. Next, demonize the protestors as being "puritanical", "reactionary", and "ultra-conservative". Then wait for the furor to die down, and then repeat. After enough repetitions, advance to the next step. And by golly, it worked. America went from having the average woman dress little different from Catholic nuns to donning outfits that would have made a French prostitute blush. And all the while, their ace in the hole is the controlled opposition. The newscasters would be aghast when bikinis first emerged on the scene but gave low cut dresses that would have given Pius XII apoplexy a pass, and so it went. And meanwhile, the proverbial Overton Window kept being shifted to the point where perversions beyond the pale, such as sodomy, began to make appearances on film, and on the street.
This same operating procedure was used everywhere from the sanctuary to the classroom to the workplace, with wonderful results if one is rooting for complete anarchy and the collapse of civilization.
But nowhere are the shills more menacing and yet more attractive than those in the sinews of what purports to be Holy Mother Church. Often they sound Catholic, but most assuredly they are not. My four favorites are Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Carlos Marie Vigano, Bishop Athenasius Schneider, and, of recent addition, Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas. Let us demolish each of these in turn. Cardinal Burke, after "Pope Francis" issued the deplorable "Amoris Laetitiae", authored the famous "dubia" concerning the provision that "Catholics" who had "divorced and remarried" or were otherwise living in a state of public sin might receive Holy Communion, calling on "Pope Francis" to further clarify his position- as though that was not already clear enough. And, after five years, the cardinal has taken no further action, but just allowed the whole issue to disappear down a memory hole. Hardly the position of a pastor of souls who takes sin seriously. As for Archbishop Vigano, who was trotted out to do some serious damage control in the summer of 2018 when the whole Cardinal McCarrick affair threatened to expose the extent of the rot and skulduggery in the Vatican, he would go on to bandstand repeatedly for Donald Trump, even going so far as to call him the katechon holding back Antichrist. This buffoonery, to say nothing of the subsequent behavior of Mr Trump, should have instantly disqualified this man as a profound harbinger of anything, let alone as being a spokesman for Christian prudence amid the current apostasy. As for Bishop Schneider, he made the following statement in an interview concerning the SSPX: "The [Second Vatican] Council was stated by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI primarily and repeatedly a pastoral council, not a doctrinal nor dogmatic one. It was the intention of the Church not to give with the documents a definitive teaching. When there is not definitive teaching, there can be still some development on these issues or some corrections." Much more accurate statements were made by Cardinal Bea when he called Vatican II "The French Revolution in the Church" and Then-Father Karl Ratzinger when he called Vatican II a "counter syllabus" referring to the famous "syllabus of modern errors" of Pius IX. Vatican II contains slam-dunk heresies, and pretending that this was "pastoral council" of Holy Mother Church is disingenuous, at best. As St Paul put it:"Were we or an angel of light to preach to you a gospel different than what you have received, let him be anathema!" Yes, Bishop Schneider said some wonderfully lucid statements about the Muslims not worshipping the same God as Catholics contra "Pope Francis", but then he supports the muddying of the waters of Vatican II, and makes issue of the "SSPX', for example, being "canonically irregular", as though that can be a source of contention when the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is at stake. And as for Bishop Strickland, his welcome comments about "Amoris Laetitiae" some years back were just recently quietly deleted from his website without a clarification or retraction, to disappear down a cyberspace memory hole. Sorry, but that is not even close to cutting it. A gaff of that magnitude requires some penance in sackcloth and ashes on a dunghill, not a sly bait and switch.
None of these, of course, are going to discuss any of the 600 pound gorillas in the room, namely, the monstrous sacrilege that is the Novus Ordo Missae, the pernicious errors of Vatican II concerning the Jews, "religious liberty", the identity of the True Church, and omissions concerning modern errors- just to name a few, the unfulfilled requests of Our Lady of Fatima, and the galloping and rampant heresies in every corner of what purports to be the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Instead they turn a blind eye to false devotions like the "Divine Mercy" and the "Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary", false apparitions such as Garabandal and Akita, and, concerning other pernicious errors are, to paraphrase St Paul, trumpets giving quite an uncertain sound.
Sadly, even the SSPX, as of 2009, joined the shills. Up until about the time the Vatican released the bogus "Third Secret of Fatima", the SSPX, by and large, had been a lamp of truth, unabashedly denouncing Vatican II and the "Conciliar Church". But then Bishop Fellay was invited to dinner in Rome, and everything changed. The SSPX began to have secret "doctrinal discussions" with Rome- as though there was anything to discuss- which were not "negotiations" but then metamorphosed into negotiations because, as Bishop Fellay put it: "We are tired of being 'excommunicated'". And then came the "lifting of the excommunications" of the four SSPX Bishops, followed swiftly by the demonization of "holocaust-denying" Bishop Richard Williamson, and then finally culminating in the issuance of "Summorum Pontificum" which "freed" the Traditional Latin Mass, but making it the "extraordinary rite" of "Holy Mother Church". (Whatever that exactly means.) In retrospect, the whole affair appeared calculated to confuse, divide, and demoralize the SSPX churchgoers in particular, and those affiliated with Catholic Tradition in general. And that grandiose mission was accomplished perfectly, especially with the "retirement" of Pope Benedict and the "election" of "Pope Francis".
Today, alas, very few priests can elucidate the substantial position of the Catholic Church to the avalanche of impurity, perversion, heresy, sacrilege, and blasphemy which has destroyed every canonical structure of Holy Mother Church, from the religious congregations to the chanceries to the universities to the monasteries. And what family has not felt the ravages of apostasy, marital infidelity, betrayal, indifference, and the invasion of worldly "entertainments"? A man's most formidable enemies have become those of his own household. And in the search for an island of sanity and shelter from the current maelstrom, many have been cast repeatedly adrift as each supposed sanctuary revealed new and deeper horrors. Many, unfortunately, have sought refuge in Protestant and Orthodox sects, preferring human harmony to spiritual orthodoxy and tranquility.
And now, the times are about to get still darker. The upcoming "Synod on Synodality" is obviously the latest production of the Seat of the Antichrist. We can expect strides to be taken towards the "ordination" of women, the "Rite of Sodomy", and the further desacralization of what is left of "The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass". (Even at this late date, plenty of lipstick can be slathered on the Novus Ordo pig with Latin, incense, chant, vestments, and bells making it a fairly good-though invalid- facsimile of Apostolic Tradition.) And for the first time, apparently, a cardinal will be outside the gates to shake his crozier at the proceedings. All the usual suspects are lining up and one must be careful not to get distracted by the entertainment. And, like Lot fleeing Sodom, we must be careful not to be enchanted by the destruction, lest we too turn into useless pillars of salt.
Let us, as always, remain faithful to Our Lady of Fatima, continue to recite the Most Holy Rosary, and wait patiently for the Justice of God. "If the vision delays, wait for it. It shall surely come. It shall not disappoint!"
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us. You are our only hope!
The March of the Shills
Aye. If there is one thing the Synagogue of Satan knows how to do, it is to boil the frog gradually. As you eloquently stated, There are Worlds Better Than This.
Hail Victory!