“This is all about control and destroying the souls of God’s children. If you don’t know what’s true, you can’t act. If you don’t act, you can’t resist. And if you can’t resist, you can be ruled.”

-“Pope St Pius X’s ‘Acerbo Nimis’ & Occupied America’s Assault on Truth,” April 2025

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I happened upon a YouTube video last night titled “Sophistry Exposed: How Emotional Appeals Replace Truth (Plato, Aristotle & Today),” a video lecture by seemingly Traditional Catholic priest, psychologist, and exorcist, Father Chad Ripperger. In it I recognized another avenue for sounding the alarm on the Modernists, just as Pope St Pius X warned about throughout his pontificate, something I have been exploring in great depth in recent days.

Pope Pius X, among many others I aim to explore in the coming months, said it very–very–differently than those we assume have been in the Chair since 1960.

It all spotlights the Law of Non-Contradiction that both St Thomas Aquinas and good ol’ common sense agree on. One cannot believe one thing and also believe something else entirely its opposite.

Schizophrenia is the result of any attempt, both on a personal and societal scale.

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Pope St Pius X’s ‘Acerbo Nimis’ & Occupied America’s Assault on Truth

There’s a reason so much of our modern discourse, both in the American and Church realms, feels like static–an endless flood of words that sound intelligent and compassionate, but leave us more confused than when we started. The ancients had a word for this: sophistry–persuasion without truth. Plato called it “making the lesser argument appear the greater,” and he despised it because it wasn’t merely error; it was a performance of reason, a counterfeit of wisdom meant to seduce the intellect rather than enlighten it.

It is precisely what Pius X was warning about when it came to faith becoming a sentiment, void of objective reality and instead resting in each person’s feelings.

It is Satan to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

In our age of pundits and influencers, where emotions are played and outrage is the product on both sides of any false binary, we have baptized this sophistry and called it “engagement.” Every issue is framed for reaction–a very specific and planned one–not for actual resolution. Every debate rewards noise, not logic. The Modernist heretics whom Pius X exposed in the landmark encyclical Pascendi (1907) built their entire theology on the same deceit. They traded revelation for feeling and sentiment, the intellect for vain desires tickled by the flesh’s nervous system. They did not deny God outright–they simply blurred him into the fog of human subconsciousness and consciousness, an attack so much more murderous than outright lying because it slithers in silence and unseen.

They make consciousness and revelation synonymous, Pius wrote, and that is the hinge of the modern deception.

The same hinge creaks beneath the door of every ideological trap today waiting there to devour us.

Sophistry thrives wherever emotion replaces reason. It’s the politician who pivots to tears instead of logic, the media host who moves the goalposts once his claim collapses, the “Christian” cleric who tells us that “modern man is different,” as if the truth that set the martyrs free somehow expired with the advent of the printing press or the novelty of indoor plumbing. Once truth becomes subjective, once revelation becomes feeling, anything can be justified.

Anything. Because we all feel different things. And on top of that, we are programmed to feel very specific emotions that will further the psychosis.

How does this all apply to the world, to America, beyond the Catholic Church? I’ll let a brief pull from an April article be a glimpse:

Take Libya. Take Ukraine. Take Israel. Take Syria. Take every major geopolitical event. Narratives are carefully crafted, not to inform, but to manipulate public opinion, to serve agendas that have little to do with the pursuit of truth and everything to do with the consolidation of power. It is a relentless barrage of half-truths and outright lies, preventing the seeds of truth from taking root in the hearts and minds of the populace, even Christians. The script is already written—included the opposition’s, the one we think is on our side. We’re just supposed to nod along, yell it out on social media that !we’re taking our country back!, and depend on Trump to fix everything.

Pius X saw it coming, as did his immediate predecessors Gregory XVI, Pius IX, and Leo XIII, not to mention Pius XI and Pius XII who would follow. Even earlier popes and Church Fathers warned against “it,” a very specific “it,” although Pius X is known most for his attack on what he called the “Modernists,” which perhaps makes it the most accessible both for me as a writer and for readers who indeed know only the comforts of indoor plumbing.

I invite you to peruse my previous work on Pius X, which has a gold mine of passages from Pascendi, unpacked and explained. Still more is planned.

Strip away the theology, strip away sound logic, strip away dependable argumentation, and that’s the DNA of modern media. The visible, the emotional, the viral–anything that gets clicks and a million followers–those are the new sacraments. Those are the new reality. We are conditioned to believe that what we feel is what is true, and what trends is what is real. Logic, natural law, and clear premises based on apostolic Church teaching have become relics of a pre-digital world–and I could pinpoint that statement directly to most Catholics.

I’m pinpointing it to myself. I too have grown up with the virus. I too am poisoned. I am simply one person who has been gifted the time and energy to be able to dig deeply enough to see it and to begin the long, arduous process of detoxification.

And now I’m just trying to share it.

Here’s one thing I’ll leave you with concerning the breadcrumbs of truth modern clerics are teaching, you know, the ones that give us hope that “we’re so back!…

The devil doesn’t mind if you know a little truth, so long as you never follow it to its end.

That’s why he came as a snake–silent, unseen.

Consider how the devil does this in modern times with our “compassionate” attention to the poor. Now juxtapose that–what modern clerics teach–with what Pius X taught, what the Church has taught since Christ himself taught:

We do not think it necessary to set forth here the praises of such instruction or to point out how meritorious it is in God’s sight. If, assuredly, the alms with which we relieve the needs of the poor are highly praised by the Lord, how much more precious in His eyes, then, will be the zeal and labor expended in teaching and admonishing, by which we provide not for the passing needs of the body but for the eternal profit of the soul! Nothing, surely, is more desirable, nothing more acceptable to Jesus Christ, the Savior of souls, Who testifies of Himself through Isaias: “To bring good news to the poor he has sent me.”

Do you see it? Do you see how the poor are used to teach a new Gospel today?

Think.

See.

Pray.

Respond.

Deception sprinkled with grains of truth is so much more diabolical and destructive than the outright lie.

This is why sophistry works. It gives us the pleasure of winning without the pain of thinking. It flatters us into believing that a “sincere” talking head equals truth and passion coming to us in pixels equals proof.

We believe the electronic screens more than we do loved ones sincerely working to persuade with love and truth.

So what is the way out of this nightmare, this cave, this prison of the mind the majority don’t even want to escape? It begins where Plato and Pius X would agree–by reclaiming reason as sacred. By learning again to argue honestly, to test premises, to trace conclusions without bending them to fit our comfort, without even to make peace with people who are not of the same faith persuasion as we are.

The cure isn’t novelty. It isn’t compromise.

It is reason and the true faith.

Read. Reflect. Reason.

And stop rewarding the noise.