Although Chris Paul’s January article “Joe Biden Was Never President” may seem like a late-to-the-game piece based on the autopen story, he is actually one of the analysts who were commenting not only on the inanity of Biden winning 81 million votes, but also on the inanity of anyone thinking any of our elections are legitimate in the first place.

Here is one of the many good pulls from that article, certainly worth considering at least for conservatives:

Keep in mind that this space was beating the stolen election drum early on, even whilst many an American—even many a conservative—mocked the idea. Nor is the election story unique. COVID-19 and all that came after was another. Even in 2020, many mainstream conservatives still treated the deeper implications of the “Deep State” as tinfoil-hat territory. Today, the phrase is tucked neatly into the ordinary conservative lexicon.

What we have rarely seen, however, is a current conservative commentator acknowledge that some of the positions he now presents as his own were being articulated years ago by the same conspiracy theorists he once mocked. I say that less to demand apologies than to raise the more consequential question: How do forbidden ideas suddenly become permissible, fashionable, and useful—and who benefits from the timing?

Having already been there and seen what time and context have done since, we now wonder: Was that story kept conspiratorial by the legacy media and the controlled alt-Right media precisely to allow time to pass before it became legitimate—and useful to them?

Think about the Hegelian Dialectic in this. Think about how they always do this to people, through the decades, for any number of issues.

Paul’s position is more discriminating than a quick summary or even his own history of writing might suggest. While continuing to interpret Trump as a lone wolf operating against the global Regime, he criticizes the secret-plan operation and culture that turns every disappointment into a supposed concealed victory. Closing the article, he writes:

I occupied roughly the same position from 2020 until sometime in the last two years, even though even in my most supportive days of Trump I was also calling on people not to place him on a pedestal above God or Christ as King. Following Badlands Media and Jon Herold, I was one who found coherence in an alternative “conservative” view whilst still being able to oppose the Democrats. I treated Devolution as a serious possibility, even writing about it publicly in 2023. When Trump delayed, compromised, or appeared to retreat, I defended him based on the notion of narrative warfare, the Art of War or the Deal, on the assumption that he was biding his time, preserving the continuity of government and our country while allowing the institutional rot to expose itself.

In order for more and more Americans to wake up in waves.

As time has passed, however, that explanation has become less persuasive, not only because of my changing perspective on Trump, but, more importantly, because of the faith I have lost in the American people—and it all really started with our collective shrug over the apparent release of the JFK files.

My veer now proceeds beyond Paul’s warning. Trump, just like any of us, even if he does mean well, may be embedded within the operation of error he appears to be exposing—the operation of error we have written on so often in the last year, inspired by 2 Thessalonians.

The corruption is real, certainly, and has been for decades, maybe centuries. But the branded “Deep State” presented to truthers over the last decade may be a sacrificial shell—a curated and increasingly obsolete layer of the system, populated with designated villains and purposely constructed long ago only to eventually be demolished in the public space as “evidence” of Trump and his administration’s goodwill. By recognizing its corruption before everyone else, by being labeled tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists even by conservatives who now write on the election fraud every day, truthers received the intoxicating impression of operating at the informational frontier, following disclosures that felt rebellious and real because no one else was saying it, or because they found company in being mocked for it.

From Paul’s perspective and mine, that all may have been selected for us from the beginning. We may have been the target all along.

Viewed through the Hegelian dialectic perspective, another framework we have used to raise questions, the possibility is insidious. The visible establishment supplies the problem over the course of decades or longer. Trump and the truth movement provide reason and confidence for the people to have a reaction. Emerging from the collision of the two is a synthesis or solution that preserves the deeper architecture of control while discarding institutions the ruling system had already outgrown. What appears to be liberation may instead be a most sinister controlled demolition, preparing the ground for something more centralized, technologically proficient, and difficult to resist.

Many souls may not be able to articulate it, but this is precisely the concern over the proliferation of data centers, and it would be charitable for conservatives opining on this issue from an economic perspective to remember that. I say that only with a respectful reminder that there are those opposed to this data center sprawl who are not Democrats.

I am hopeful on all of this as an alt-conservative, of course, from data centers to Trump to everything, but enough time has passed for me to have to say Trump must first deliver on some promises that led me to get behind him in the first place.

One can do that and still loathe the principles of the Democrat Party.

Because this remains a hypothesis, albeit rooted in the discipline of the Divine Office, it should not harden into another inverted certainty, having you transfer to today’s “this” the undying trust you placed in yesterday’s “that” four, six, or ten years ago. Yet conservatives would be wise not to surrender their entire faculty of trust to Trump, his administration, seemingly conservative economic principles, or the personalities interpreting his every maneuver as providential. Supporting a just policy here and there does not require the canonization of the man who advances it.

I invite you, once again, to 2 Thessalonians 2, Romans 1, and Psalms 77-80.

It is chilling what God allows and what we can fall for because of it, all the while believing we have it all figured out, simply because the Democrats don’t think it.

If Trump and the powers around him are genuinely exposing the rot, continued discernment on our part will not impede him. If he is in fact part of an elaborate dialectical operation, though, prayerful detachment and the discipline of the monks may be the only defense we have left.