In the series Swamp People there’s a moment in some of the fights when the water goes quiet.

Gator hunters tell us it’s the moment to focus even harder.

Because silence is where the monster moves.

And right now, from certain vantage points, the political Right, the conservative world, and the Catholic Church find themselves floating in a sort of quiet– a bayou brown surface covering an undercurrent of infiltration, spectacle, and spiritual drift that the “excommunicated” Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has been shouting about for years.

Here is a part of his latest:

“A dangerous subversive elite has infiltrated the highest levels of Western institutions to implement a criminal global plan.”

He says those who expose this “global coup” are silenced through:

• Censorship

• Intimidation

• Psychiatric abuse

• Arrest

We have covered it for you at length, going all the way back to 2020, which makes comments under a recent article like the following just silly, indeed sinful:

“But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall render an account for it in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” (St Matthew xii.36-37)

Viganò indeed has not “only just realized this.” The fact is he has to speak as though the information is new because so many people continue to be wrapped up in the bread and circuses of life.

And let’s enter the illusion that Viganò is in fact one of the vipers simply making accusations against folks like himself. Not to listen to him would be like dating and trusting a narcissist just because they say bad things about other narcissists. Such foolishness is spiritual suicide.

No, as I’ve exhorted time and time again, address and absorb the message. Don’t put your trust necessarily in the messenger.

I’d say the same thing about all of my own work, my own message as a messenger.

What is remarkable is not that elites are meddling with governments or that technocrats are pushing Agenda 2030 behind the scenes–that much should be obvious. That is the pattern across much of the world as much as heat is the pattern in a southeast Texas summer. What is truly remarkable is the degree to which the Right–the supposedly awake, alert, resistant Right–has become anesthetized to its own captivity.

Trump remains the captain.

The final guardian.

The iron bulwark against the world dictatorship.

At least that’s the story.

But when did we decide that one man not named Jesus Christ and apparently not a Christian himself could double as both captain and compass? And when did we start confusing a political garrison with the Kingdom of God?

Was it with Q?

What Viganò describes in the article–infiltration, global coordination, ideological capture, the merging of governments with managerial elites–fits eerily well with the cultural and ecclesiastical machinery my work has been tracing for months and months. The Frankfurt School. Hollywood. The Church’s flirtation with spectacle. The soft-focus humanitarianism that replaces doctrine with sentiment. The slow, quiet draining of transcendence from the sacraments.

The poison of Modernism in both Church and State and the damnation of how many souls because of it.

It’s all the same system.

Just viewed from different decks.

Which is why I have warned about Trump or MAGA worship for so long, despite my not being “a liberal” in the least.

Because idolatry is idolatry, no matter what color the hat is.

And this is where one key Socratic question swims up like a 13-foot bull beneath the boat: If the global elites infiltrated governments worldwide, why do we as Catholics assume the Church was somehow immune–particularly when it traditionally has held more power than those governments? And if the Church wasn’t immune, then why are conservatives so certain that their political messiahs are?

Viganò, purposely or not, is shedding light on a theological crisis buried under the MAGA crisis, despite his previous goodwill toward Trump. The spiritual is something very few want to talk about in relation to politics because it threatens the cherished illusion that the Right is the “good guys” by default. But the Frankfurt School didn’t infiltrate society because conservatives were too unaware or stupid to stop it. They infiltrated because the guardians of culture stopped guarding–and that includes the Catholic Church. Or maybe they never started here in America, as I’ve heard one pastor say it.

The American guardian, whatever that meant in earlier stages of our nation’s history, assumed the machinery would keep running in the right direction simply because it always had, based on the American dream, based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Based on supposed victories in World Wars I and II.

Based on Manifest Destiny.

All human “virtues” true, Traditional Catholic teaching once consistently warned about–and not that long ago.

Most Catholics don’t even know that, much less our brothers and sisters of non-Catholic persuasions.

I’ll say it again to my Catholic friends and family–none of that was Catholic. Catholicism is hierarchical, based on authority, based on a court, all of which we believe represents the Kingdom of God. Most folks didn’t even like Catholics when America was first founded. It all goes back to England and the rest of Europe and what was happening with the Protestant Revolution. I don’t mean to antagonize anyone with that, not Protestant or Catholic. Trust me, I sympathize and I say none of this lightly. Historically speaking, though, that was simply the tenor of the the two groups 500 years ago.

The Vatican’s recent hobnobbing with Hollywood elites should be the perfect parable for conservatives right now. You can almost hear the defenders: “It’s evangelization. It’s outreach. It’s dialogue.”

When Francis literally–point blank–said we are not to proselytize, that every religion is a pathway to heaven, and Leo is following in those very “ambiguous” footsteps.

At some point, ambiguity becomes the message. And the message becomes the mistake.

When institutions like those Viganò is speaking about start outsourcing discernment to the glamour of the moment, whether that mean political or ecclesiastical, they send a message: influence outranks integrity. And if the Church and world governments alike can be seduced by the world’s cameras, how hard is it to seduce a political movement already addicted to its own reflection?

And this is a very non-liberal saying all of this, remember.

Trump speaks the language of strength, and that has its place. But the conservative world once ruined by the likes of Obama, and even now by other actors of the woke Left, has become so desperate for an anchor that it no longer asks whether the anchor is attached to anything solid, much less anything true and genuinely good. Strength without truth is just spectacle in a red or blue tie.

Many imagine they’re fighting globalism while cheering figures whose inner circle is stocked with globalists, who very much move like globalists themselves at times–always with a sprinkle of sovereignty of course to throw us off the scent. They think they’re resisting infiltration, that they’re “winning,” while ignoring that infiltration is not something you detect by vibes–it’s something you detect by truth, coherence, and fruit.

“By their fruits you shall know them” (Mt vii.16). And really and truly, we aren’t talking about political or even economic fruits here, even though those certainly could be treated as means to greater spiritual ends.

Fruit is the thing nobody checks anymore.

We check polling, sentiment, vibes, momentum.

We do not check fruit. Not God’s fruit.

But fruit is what Christ told us to look for.

And fruit–of the rotten variety–is what Viganò is warning about.

He’s warning about that bull lurking below, hungry and waiting.

What if the Right is not the resistance but simply the right wing of the same bird, the illusion of choice, the illusion of pushback?

What if the spectacle of populist politics is just another screen, another entertainment product, another pressure valve crafted by the very elites who claim to oppose it?

These questions aren’t meant to vilify Trump or canonize Viganò. They’re meant to recover something conservatives have lost: the instinct to discern–something I personally learned from Trump and his decade-long fight itself. The instinct to test spirits. The instinct to question what is being fed to me through an electronic screen. The instinct to verify whether a movement leads toward Christ or simply toward another round of social media dopamine.

The Church has long lost that instinct.

The Right should have been inspired to have that instinct–by the very political messiah who can do no wrong now.

And the prince of this world and all his minions is capitalizing on both losses.

The real dividing line is not between Left and Right. That is a trap, a distraction, a deflection.

The line is between truth and spectacle, fruit and poison, God and deception.

It’s the enmity of Genesis iii.15.

And spectacle and deception win precisely because it entertains us.

If Viganò is correct, and I think even conservatives would agree that he is, then the conservative movement’s crisis isn’t that the woke Left is attacking us. That’s the distraction to make us think we’re fighting the good fight. It’s that we’re standing on a boat deck built by the same architects. And the monster beneath doesn’t care which crew believes they’re the heroic ones. The monster simply wants to eat.

Which means we must decide–very soon if I had to guess–whether we want political victories or spiritual vigilance. Whether we want a people’s champion or a Shepherd. Whether we want a movement that wins elections or a movement that wins souls.

Do we have years? Probably. But consider how long it takes to build a body of muscle mass, how long it takes to lose that 60 pounds you’ve been meaning to shed.

Spiritual discernment works the same way: it’s muscle gained slowly, lost quickly.

Please, I beg you, start now.

Because the question is never “Who’s on my side?”

It’s “Who can calm the storm?”

Especially when the storm is lurking below.

And there has been only one Man who could ever do that.