Five years ago today, we we were sent home from school with the “understanding” that we would be back in two weeks. I remember shaking my head with some fellow teachers and saying, “We’re not coming back.”

The signs were there. Sure, I gave the system and the “pandemic” a chance like a good obedient little boy, but after a few weeks I turned on that system and started writing about it in earnest, both here for The Hayride and in a book chronicling my consecration to Jesus through his Mother Mary–a uniquely Catholic practice of asking her to help us look at Jesus, hold Jesus, love Jesus, as she did.

Around that time, the world of my religion and the world of politics collided in a way I hadn’t expected when I started writing the book. It would end up being not only a spiritual memoir of my personal journey through those 33 days and repenting of my past, but a growing realization that this personal world was fascinatingly parallel to the universal, the geopolitical.

I want to share two short chapters of that journey today with you,  from April 2020. The world we are in today is an offshoot of that time, which as we are finding was simply an earlier offshoot sprouted from a seed planted long, long ago.

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17 APRIL 

I wake up at least a couple times every night, but last night and Tuesday, I have not even tried to go back to sleep at 3 AM. Instead I have moved around and gotten some writing done. This morning, I continued to reflect on this coronavirus situation, not necessarily the virus itself per se, but all the underlying forces that could be at work here.

I do not have a family, or a wife, or a girlfriend, or anything I’m beholden to really besides my blood family and a few close friends. I feel somewhat responsible to be one of the individuals keeping an eye on not only the political, but more so the underlying cosmic, forces that are brewing here.

Not only this, but the responsibility I feel has been insistent, to offer up my lonely desert trial up to God to beseech his mercy on our country and world. It is one of the beauties of this consecration to Mary, this giving of my all. I can trust that when I write on personal things, she delivers the graces where they most need to go. Equally so, I can trust that when I write on universal things, she delivers the graces where they most need to go as well.

This morning there were some things concerning evil in our world I wanted to express, so I fingered some thoughts down on the keyboard. I wasn’t quite ready to write the chapter for today yet, but still I felt the need to move my fingers. Here are those early morning thoughts. Mary, take them, and take over….

It is interesting to think back to some of the students to whom I once taught Star Wars-Revenge of the Sith, who laughed at Anakin for falling prey to the chancellor’s schemes, who swore they’d never get caught in Palpatine’s web of deceit. I wonder how many of them are holding true to that in this time, when it could be an allegory for what we are experiencing. I hope many of them. One difference is that at this point, the chancellor is not only one individual; “he” is a select group of people behind the scenes, more like a “Phantom Menace” of Episode I right now. And there are plenty of clones in America who have been our allies for years ready to attack if you fight for liberty, who unwittingly could very quickly push us through the dark side of Episodes II and III.

There are friends of ours, right now, who believe that staying home is their only option because Big Brother is saying so.

They are good people. They mean well. They love their families. None of this is the issue.

In fact, it could be this very virtue that the phantom menace is counting on to work in its favor.

I am asking all of my former students and anyone else who so desires to think about this. To risk being wrong. In class we frequently talked about the fact that if America were ever to be conquered, it would not be an obvious direct hit from without, but a slow, creeping, series of inscrutable hits from within, catching people unawares while they live their merry lives.

We know America is strong. But we also know world history. And we’ve seen how great nations and empires have been lulled into complacency and ruin in the past.

How do you destroy a robust, thriving nation?

Create a problem in a society, that doesn’t exist previously, at least not to a certain, visible level (the virus). Use that problem to leverage power to achieve “peace and security” (“health safety”) for the masses unable or unwilling to see what’s going on (stay home while we feed you misinformation to incite fear and dependence on us). Rise to power and use those masses we just “saved” to silence anyone who dares to question our motives and end game (our refusal to give up the power attained in keeping you “safe”).[1]

I am reminded of Senator Padmé Amidala in Star Wars-Attack of the Clones. When Palpatine rises to the position of supreme ruler, she says with sadness, sarcasm, and disbelief: “So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause.”

There is a phantom menace behind the scenes—and sometimes right under our noses—watching how we respond to this situation. I wonder sometimes how we are doing, if we are responding the best we could be.

Yes, the virus is real. Yes, people are dying. But you’ve seen the numbers inflation. You’ve seen the lies. You’ve seen the cover-ups. I suspect more on this misinformation will come. But that could very well be a part of a bigger plan to lull us to sleep, to lull us into inaction in the name of people’s health, to lull us into becoming a nation of clones who think we are on the right side but are actually just pawns in the phantom menace’s scheme to turn Americans against their friends, have them cannibalize each other, and in the end use the disarray and hysteria to rise to power in order to control everyone.

—In order to destroy America and everything it could be—from within.

No one in history ever thinks it can happen to them. Until it does.

Are you willing to risk being wrong for liberty’s sake? It’s not as if your life is on the line at this point. All you’re risking is what people think about you on social media. Is it worth it, to be wrong, if it means we preserve liberty and emerge from the quarantine a stronger nation for it, if it means we show the world what America is made of and thus discourage those who are observing how we react to this from thinking they can fool us, divide us, or attempt a second more sinister attack on our livelihood? Are you willing to risk it? Is it worth it?

Think about it. In your gut you know something is off. Don’t ignore that voice.

Everyone is depending on it, whether they know it or not.

Please God, rescue our nation. Rescue our world. It is so hard to really see what is happening, has been for decades, maybe longer. But you see it all. You see all of it behind the veil. Rescue us, Lord. Help us to see. Confuse the enemy’s tongue. Let the breaks go our way. Help us, help us, Lord.

Hmmm. No one in history ever thinks it can happen to them. Until it does. Optimism bias. It is actually a term in the field of psychology. It is very, very real. It is the bias that makes a student mock Anakin Skywalker and his fall to the dark side, assuming he or she could never possibly be so gullible.

“But God said to him, thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee, and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?” (Lk 12:20).

I am reminded of another example of this optimism bias, a non-political one, when in the year 79, Mount Vesuvius was coughing up warnings to the citizens of Pompeii, Italy before the eventual catastrophic explosion, one of the worst in European history, yet so many of them stayed in the city and were merrily going about their business as usual.

It is a hurricane party near the shore that turns disastrous when [the storm] arrives without a smile on her face.

It is what comes before the storyline in a novel like 1984.

Or Fahrenheit 451.

I think about the people I love. My family. My friends. My future wife and possible children she may have. I am concerned for them. I want Heaven for them. All I can do is hope that they are in the right place with God at any given moment, that optimism bias has not made them fall asleep to the very serious spiritual warfare raging around us at all times, especially right this very second.

Alas, in the end, what really can I do except give breadcrumbs of the information I come across and ultimately surrender the rest to God? If I am wrong and I pontificate too much, then they’re less likely to listen to me and others if and when the big one comes. I have to shun the boy who might be crying wolf, speak of the potential evil in a whisper, and give every single ounce of my trust and prayer to Mary. As the perfect Mother, she will handle it, she will take care of the ones I love, and so much more.

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[1] All the mainstream media outlets that matter, including those that go beyond the news, are owned by just six corporations. Down from 50 in the early 1980s. The dozens and dozens of options we think we have is a front. See “Operation Mockingbird,” maybe through DuckDuckGo, because deep-state Google will censor the term and call it a right-wing conspiracy theory.