The headlines aren’t reporting history anymore–they’re manufacturing it.

We aren’t discerning truth anymore–we’re reacting to whatever the machine wants us to feel.

We keep pretending we’re living through politics, living life as concerned citizens and that that’s what our Creator wants from us. The truth, if we’re honest, is that we’re living through headlines and quick TikTok videos–headlines and shots engineered to become tomorrow’s history. As Chris Paul for Badlands Media puts it—

In 20 or 50 or 100 years, the headlines pushed with all this force–that’s what will remain permanent. They don’t care if the headlines are true. They don’t care if we know they’re not true. They only care that future generations see those headlines as history. We’ve built deep emotional positions on shit that doesn’t matter at all and isn’t attached to any reality. At some point you can just back out of all of it. You don’t have to be attached to any of it. The idea that we can turn on a screen and understand what’s happening across the world–that’s nonsense.

I would add or revise the point that they don’t care if we know they’re not true. That is in fact the case, but if Paul is right in his reasoning, I would add another: they relish the mockery–our distraction, our wandering eyes, our slow-motion participation in our own undoing.

Not just in the future. In the here and now.

Also keep in mind that Paul is not, to my knowledge, Catholic, nor has he, to my knowledge raised serious questions about Trump in relation to latter times prophecies. He and Badlands Media, for the most part, appear to be behind Trump full throttle. Of course I don’t follow them as I once did, so there’s that to consider.

Back to the moment. Here we are again: Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the “Epstein files”— an entire nation whipped into emotional frenzy over stories that may not even qualify as “events.” Yet we react to every sentence as if it already happened in the real world, or if it has indeed happened, that it’s just now happening–just because it’s now coming across that screen. We melt down over stray quotes, detached from context, the historical and cosmic timeline, or the spectacle and strategy. Virtue signaling from the right or left and tests of that virtue from the opposite side are replacing actual discernment, prayer, and authentic trust in God.

Chris Paul again:

They’re not events. They’re not policies. They’re things someone said about someone else. People react to every sentence like it’s already been done in the real world. They convince thousands of people that Trump “let down MAGA” because they saw a quote floating around… just he said this thing, therefore panic. This is what happens when emotional loyalty and purity tests get put above rational thinking.

Emotion and sentiment is precisely what Pius X was warning about concerning Modernism. Do you see how everything we’ve been exploring in the last several weeks is connected across Church and State lines?

It is an ecosystem of thought I invite you to explore.

We’ve built deep emotional positions on things that “aren’t attached to any reality,” because they have, with our help, stolen the only ultimate reality there is.  We don’t test spirits as Scripture commands we do. We defend whatever side we’re on like holy relics while rolling our eyes at the holy relics of religion.

The result is that we believe the screens are teaching us how to live, a kind of political divination, as Paul puts it, a form of idolatry as I’ve termed it, looking to the screen to learn how to live, how to feel, even exactly what and how to fear. It’s spiritual malpractice dressed up as civic duty.

Are we really deciding to believe the “official story” coming from our government concerning Charlie Kirk?

This is precisely why revolutions, both political and religious, have been taking place over the last 500 years. They have been busy about making the State our Church.

Even the Trump-MTG drama thingy carries the scent of pre-written narrative beats, designed to stir the audience rather than inform them. Breaking news isn’t new–it’s scripted.

Is Trump–and the strategists behind him–writing the narrative to snap America out of the spell? Maybe. Some of the Badlands folks think so. But they could easily be part of the psyop too–Chris Paul included. I still believe we needed Trump to get elected last fall, if nothing else, to continue to break the binary trap of right and left. But if you’ve been reading my work, you know I veer toward another storyteller altogether.

The one who has been scripting this story of man’s salvation since the very beginning.

It’s almost funny how quickly we forget the Binder Circus from late February–that weird little media fever dream that hit about a month into Trump’s [third] term.

Remember that?

Some of the cornball influencers on the right all swearing they’d just been handed the sacred tablets of Mount Epstein, a whole party of counterfeit Moseses waving photocopied commandments.

And after that Season of Epstein died down, months later, here come MTG and Thomas Massie sprinting onto the stage again yelling, “Release the Epstein files!” like they just discovered fire.

And Massie finally made a score, or something.

It’s the same script. The same choreography.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Grovel, cattle. They gave me the binder. I’m your new priest now. See these consecrated hands….

A priesthood of performers, waving props.

And most of the country still bowing, still distracted, still looking in the completely wrong direction.

At some point, as Paul reminds us, “People just have to accept it: the TV screen is lying to me.”

That goes for those little handheld screens as well.

And maybe that’s the real calling of the moment, perhaps the many moments building up over 2025–detachment. Detachment from the world–it is precisely what we as Catholics meditate on while we pray the third Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, the Birth of Christ.

Back away.

Test spirits instead of unequivocally trusting headlines.

Find a Traditional Mass where the orientation is to the East, toward the altar, toward the direction Christ ascended and will return.

Ad orientum.

We do understand that was one of the most catastrophic changes in the Sacred Liturgy, right?

Eh, don’t go there with it today, LeJeune…

The truth is that if we don’t find our way back to the only Reality that matters, we won’t just be misled politically, and we won’t do it just this week.

We’ll follow the wrong spirit entirely–straight into eternity, and not the one we’ve hoped for.