The Politics of Humiliation

If we have learned anything in the last four months, it’s that nearly every element of American society is run, at its highest levels, by people who hate you. This isn’t exactly news to readers of this blog, as I’ve been harping on this point for quite a long time. The difference is, as I mentioned in my last post on the subject, the masks are off and they aren’t even bothering to hide their disdain.

The ultimate question here, as always, is how to win. Can America be turned back into a country conducive to the needs of what should be considered normal for ordinary Americans? Is it possible to scale back the extent that the sexual revolution has perverted morality? Can immigration be walked back? Can Free Trade and the corporatization of American industries be brought under control? Can we at least prevent the United States from turning into the sort of left-wing totalitarian hell-state that the Anti-Racism narrative heralds?

In order to answer some of these questions, we’ll review the last four months as a microcosm of their tactics in order to properly discern the enemy’s motive.

Review

In March, we witnessed the spread of an unpredictable virus that had experts drawing up one wildly incorrect model of deaths and catastrophe after another, which facilitated a nationwide lock down. The lock down cost millions of Americans their jobs, and thousands of them their lives.  After just four or five weeks of lock down, the prolonged psychological stresses of abandoning careers, livelihoods, and bread-winning jobs left many Americans out in the rain.  Their tech- and service-working peers, spoiled but fortunate that the lock downs only cut their commute times to zero, were all-too willing to fold into the hysterical narrative.  Business owners, menial workers, and laborers, however, were not so lucky.

When it became clear that this virus was not the plague it was billed as, figures in our government and media—rather than walking back their rhetoric—doubled down, predictably, and insisted that more lock downs were necessary. Someone like Governor Andrew Cuomo could get away with an absurd statement claiming domestic abuse was preferable to “death”, live on national television, and nobody batted an eye. He authorized the use of elderly care homes as virus clinics, which exacerbated his already miserable handling of the pandemic by sending thousands of old people into premature graves. When asked about it, he claimed questioning that order was politicizing a tragedy and in the same breath condemned people who didn’t vote for him. When Florida’s testing efforts started to bear fruit and it turned out more people had been infected—but didn’t suffer serious symptoms—than was previously known, Cuomo was eager to claim that Governor DeSantis has blood on his hands. DeSantis’ state has had, so far, 3,731 COVID-related deaths in the last four months; Cuomo’s 32,188. New York’s population is 19.5 million; Florida’s is 21.5.

In April, we witnessed countless videos of two different colors. The first was a terrible deluge of Tik Tok footage featuring precise, choreographed dance routines of nurses and doctors in hospitals around the country. Ostensibly, this was done to celebrate the efforts of medical professionals. Some people took the bait, but those of us with an IQ above room temperature recognized that they were dancing in empty hallways, empty rooms, and empty wings, and that the deluge of this idiocy indicated a mounting problem with the narrative. In China, footage had leaked of bodies piling up in corridors and nurses dropping from exhaustion, but in the USA, they had enough free time, extra energy and spare room to perfect superfluous choreography that made them look like fools.

The other videos were those of parents being dragged away in handcuffs by neighborhood cops for bringing their children to wide open parks. We got to watch policemen harass normal people for going outside, under the pretenses that they were defying lock down orders. Of course, it didn’t matter that these parents were alone with their children, or in small groups. What mattered was that they dared to leave their houses in the middle of an undeclared quarantine. These instances, coupled with the cop who lost his job for publicly speaking out against this sort of unreasonable behavior, drove a thin blue nail through the idea that there are any good cops who would defend the American way of life if a totalitarian regime ever commandeered the auspices of power. Instead of seeing cops acting with common sense and defending their local communities, our timelines were flooded with officers harassing people they know won’t fight back for the crime of walking around outside.

In May, we were told that every preventative measure that we were supposed to use to combat this virus and its spread was wrong. We were told that the virus couldn’t actually live for weeks at a time on surfaces. We were told that it was far more likely to spread by coughing. We were told that rather making no difference at all, and in fact opening you up to respiratory and oxygenation problems, masks would be mandated by government fiat by nearly every governor of every state. Meanwhile, investigations had revealed hospitals were a little overenthusiastic in their zeal to attribute deaths to the virus, due in part to unintended federal funding incentives. This contorted the actual death stats to the point of illegibility, but nonetheless, the New York Times would celebrate reaching the coveted 100,000 fatality figure by the end of the month with a front page deluge of names. Although its celebration was shrouded in doom and panic, it was only two months beforehand that the common media consensus indicated a body count should have by then been in the millions.

And then, in June, we watched the country burn. We watched statues topple. We watched people get shot, run over, maced, set on fire. We watched business get trashed, drivers harassed, monuments defaced. We saw what carried with it every outward indication of a revolution, and it had the complete backing of the major media establishments, big corporate enterprises, and—considering the embarrassing degree of non-resistance by so many local authorities—regional governments. When white business owners stormed the Michigan statehouse with guns in May to protest the lock down measures, they were smeared as violent extremists, but they all went back home that night, no one was injured, and not a single round was fired. A month later, leftist college-age students and their TAs took over Seattle’s Capitol Hill and, for about six weeks, turned the region into an anarchic zone with open-air drug markets, prostitution, and a four people dead from gun violence. The mayor, Jenny Durkan, sat back and let it happen. It wasn’t until they marched on her house and threatened her personal safety that she decided to take action; the next day the police walked in and calmly dismantled their little project and arrested about twenty people. The anticlimax was matched only by the absurdity that it had happened at all.

But their protest was legitimate. It was legitimate because it was violent. It was legitimate because it supported the backstage regime.

While mobs paraded in the streets, breaking windows and setting fires at night, the media again tried desperately to gaslight their viewers into defending Black Lives Matter protests while simultaneously attacking the anti-lock down protests. It didn’t really work, for the most part, but enough of the country still believed in the legitimacy of the BLM narrative that it didn’t matter. The mere attempt, however, should be enough to prove the extent to which the media wants to humiliate you. And I mean you, personally, reading this. Even if you agree with BLM, they don’t agree with you. They don’t even care about you. The media, backing BLM’s offensive, was so lazy in their gaslighting that they didn’t believe anyone deserved the weakest attempt at a con.

This also extends to the BLM movement itself, of course. They will tell you that the phrase “Black Lives Matter” just means that blacks should be allowed to play on an equal playing field as whites and every other ethnic group in the country. Meanwhile, the man with the gun and the megaphone next to them will make open threats against white people, promise violence if they don’t get what they want, and be found spray painting “Kill Whitey” on the ruins of statues they’ve torn down.

It’s now July. The autonomous zones have been dismantled and most of the country has settled down. Portland remains a scene of unmitigated unrest every night, and Brooklyn still groans under the weight of frequent riots, but the violence in Minneapolis, Seattle, DC and the rest has all returned to pre-May levels of peace. In their wake, of course, are hundreds, if not thousands of burnt husks of businesses. Many of them won’t reopen.

Governors have, however, capitulated to demands of tearing down statues. Richmond’s mayor decided, with the unanimous backing of its city council, to remove its historic monument to Stonewall Jackson; the decision remains the most vivid act of bending an overenthusiastic knee to a belligerent mob of uneducated college students. The Coronavirus narrative has returned in full force, as testing has been made more available and known cases receive a sharp uptick—even as virus-related deaths have cratered to the point of being almost irrelevant statistics.

Between these two issues sits a trend common to left wing yarns: normalize the absurd. A decade ago, you could have been forgiven if you believed that the left still had valid, reasonable points to make. The Occupy movement that had been the immediate reaction to the financial crisis was a good example, until it was taken over by the absurd less than two weeks into its existence. Even if their ideology was mistaken, you could have still dismissed elements of the absurd as irrelevant; at the time, the third offensive of the sexual revolution was still in its infancy, and Obama’s disastrous administration hadn’t had a chance to utterly decimate race relations yet. The young girls clamoring for media attention as they pushed dialogues of oppression hierarchy were recognized by most people following Occupy to be provocateurs unrelated to the general desire to lynch bankers. They were fringe. In retrospect, they were the future. At the time, the left, although emboldened by sweeping political victories, still presented itself as a respectable political ideology—not a lifestyle.

As Obama’s term drew to a close, however, it became apparent to everyone how deeply the political divide had penetrated into the culture. Eight years of a race-baiting president who openly and unashamedly gaslit the American public with the assistance of a complicit, fawning media empire had turned media-savvy liberals into uninformed, self-righteous morons. On the other hand, the triumph of Fox News and the ascendancy of alt-media online transformed conservatives into apocalyptic and reactionary libertarians. This galvanization of political discourse made it easier to push more radical, revolutionary ideas; it’s how we got from Obergefell to glorifying child drag queens in less than four years.

It’s easy to assume that these people think you’re stupid, but that isn’t quite the case. It’s worse than that. They know that the things they do and the things they say are in direct opposition to one another. When someone like Nancy Pelosi excuses the destruction of public and private property in the name of equality, she knows she’s giving a certain amount of public support to the media-stylized revolutionaries who have run roughshod over Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. When Fauci says things like we’ll have to abolish the handshake or does total about-faces on his medical opinions on a weekly basis, he knows that what he’s talking about doesn’t make any sense. When Obama still claims that his administration had zero scandals and lacked even a smidgen of corruption, he knows that most of the American public doesn’t believe him.

What puts all of this in perspective is what they do believe: that you’re docile. That you are, in fact, smart enough to know when you’re being lied to. That maybe twenty years ago, you weren’t, but you most definitely are now. That you know when they’re trying to gaslight you, ruse you, pull fast ones, etcetera. But that you also won’t do anything, because they’ve already rigged every system in the government, culture, and judicial structure that you could appeal to. That not only won’t you do anything, you can’t do anything.

This is what humiliation politics means. It’s the one thread that binds every aspect of modernity together, from the sexual revolution to the race riots, from the legal divorce away from common good jurisprudence to the secularization of the public square, from the infantalization of entertainment to the consolidation of consumer culture; Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, the Media-Activist Complex, the universities, public schooling curricula, all of it boils down not merely to control, but to humiliation. It isn’t enough to have systems of control, because even they recognize that the human will cannot be completely extinguished. But to humiliate you into either being a self-shamed guilt drone that marches along with their absurd remarks, or otherwise to make yourself an easy target for the mob—that’s enough to keep the control they want. It is a war against reason waged by people who already know they’ve won and are doing it to spite you.

Humiliation

I say they’ve already won, but when you look around, it’s clear that America is not some Amazon-Google-Facebook-atized version of the Soviet Union. Yet. If you move to the right state, it’s still not too difficult to legally obtain firearms. You still have a choice not to engage with social media, though not carrying any form of cellular device can be difficult in today’s world. The COVID efforts have moved us much closer to a cashless society, but credit-only policies in stores may lift if given enough time. And, as pornographied as our culture is, we’ve yet to see legitimate, actual pornography pasted on billboards to an extent where you simply have no choice in whether you view it or not—although in a world with dopamine-addled smartphone users, you could make the argument that such efforts aren’t even necessary anymore.

Now, these issues are all big-picture issues, far beyond the purview of what we’re looking at with the virus and rioting of the last four months, but the big picture should be kept in mind. Notice as well that each element of the modern world began life as a tool of social control, but within that control apparatus was a means of inflicting humiliation. Indeed, as the control became standardized enough, and as the social engineering matured, the humiliation became the point. The sexual revolution’s first offensive was to legitimize fornication, to enslave a people to their desires. But that’s just control. The recently-completed third offensive, having wrapped up with Bostock v Clayton County, wasn’t about control anymore, but rather rubbing the American people’s noses in the dirt of the incomprehensible.

What’s clear is the laziness of the lies. In the last four months, the media has done nothing to even attempt convincing the average American of their sincerity. Instead, they bully and ridicule anyone who questions the narrative they shamelessly peddle on national television. And the governors who permitted their states to burn and the mayors who permitted literal anarchy in their cities are even worse.

But what purpose does this humiliation really serve? The immediate deduction is the one drawn above: the vindictive spite of victorious revolutionaries. It’s the sort of behavior you could extrapolate two or three years down the road to see paralleling the abhorrent behavior of the Spanish Republicans during their civil war. The desecration of churches began during the riots, the demolition of monuments, the gleeful and willful ignorance of the pathetic revolutionaries—if you think it’s alarmist to call these the early signs of a revolution, you’re either historically illiterate or an outright liar. The fact that the revolution is heralded at a time when every major corporation, more than half of the federal government, a major plurality of elected officials, and most of the media apparatus is championing the revolutionaries’ alleged values just goes to show how closely this parallels Spain’s upheaval a century ago. Back then, as today, the revolutionaries thought they’d already won, and that their acts of desecration were victory laps around a demoralized public.

But before we get to Spain, let’s study humiliation in a deeper sense. For this, we have to analyze the archetypal act of humiliation around which all of history turns: Our Lord’s Passion. There is no greater series of acts that better characterize the nature of humiliation than the Passion endured by Our Lord on the very precipice of His victory—specifically the scourging, crowning with thorns, and carrying of His cross to Golgotha. Scripture tells us relatively little of these events, save that they happened; Pilate ordered Him scourged by soldiers, and with attitudes of mockery they fashioned a circlet of thorns and pushed it into His head, spitting and jeering Him all the while. He was given a reed and a purple cloak to complete the farce.

The visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, however, offer what is likely greater insight into the sufferings of Our Lord’s Passion. Best known today for having been a direct source for the writing of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Blessed Anne’s visions comprise a lengthy corpus that covers the lives of Our Lord and Our Lady, with special attention given to His Passion and Resurrection.

The scourging is particularly highlighted in The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, comprising six or seven chapters, depending on how they’re counted. I’ll quote at length here, as the full detail of the scourging is important for our purposes.

Blessed Anne writes:

The pillar where criminals were scourged stood to the north of Pilate’s palace, near the guard-house, and the executioners soon arrived, carrying whips, rods, and ropes, which they tossed down at its base. They were six in number, dark, swarthy men, somewhat shorter than Jesus; their chests were covered with a piece of leather, or with some dirty stuff; their loins were girded, and their hairy, sinewy arms bare. They were malefactors from the frontiers of Egypt, who had been condemned for their crimes to hard labour, and were employed principally in making canals, and in erecting public buildings, the most criminal being selected to act as executioners in the Praetorium.

These cruel men had many times scourged poor criminals to death at this pillar. They resembled wild beasts or demons, and appeared to be half drunk. They struck our Lord with their fists, and dragged him by the cords with which he was pinioned, although he followed them without offering the least resistance, and, finally, they barbarously knocked him down against the pillar. This pillar, placed in the centre of the court, stood alone, and did not serve to sustain any part of the building; it was not very high, for a tall man could touch the summit by stretching out his arm; there was a large iron ring at the top, and both rings and hooks a little lower down. It is quite impossible to describe the cruelty shown by these ruffians towards Jesus: they tore off the mantle with which he had been clothed in derision at the court of Herod, and almost threw him prostrate again.

Jesus trembled and shuddered as he stood before the pillar, and took off his garments as quickly as he could, but his hands were bloody and swollen. The only return he made when his brutal executioners struck and abused him was to pray for them in the most touching manner: he turned his face once towards his Mother, who was standing overcome with grief; this look quite unnerved her: she fainted, and would have fallen, had not the holy women who were there supported her. Jesus put his arms round the pillar, and when his hands were thus raised, the archers fastened them to the iron ring which was at the top of the pillar; they then dragged his arms to such a height that his feet, which were tightly bound to the base of the pillar, scarcely touched the ground. Thus was the Holy of holies violently stretched, without a particle of clothing, on a pillar used for the punishment of the greatest criminals; and then did two furious ruffians who were thirsting for his blood begin in the most barbarous manner to scourge his sacred body from head to foot. The whips or scourges which they first made use of appeared to me to be made of a species of flexible white wood, but perhaps they were composed of the sinews of the ox, or of strips of leather.

And slightly further on:

The two fresh executioners commenced scourging Jesus with the greatest possible fury; they made use of a different kind of rod,—a species of thorny stick, covered with knots and splinters. The blows from these sticks tore his flesh to pieces; his blood spouted out so as to stain their arms, and he groaned, prayed, and shuddered. At this moment, some strangers mounted on camels passed through the forum; they stopped for a moment, and were quite overcome with pity and horror at the scene before them, upon which some of the bystanders explained the cause of what they witnessed. Some of these travellers had been baptised by John, and others had heard the sermon of Jesus on the mountain. The noise and the tumult of the mob was even more deafening near the house of Pilate.

Two fresh executioners took the places of the last mentioned, who were beginning to flag; their scourges were composed of small chains, or straps covered with iron hooks, which penetrated to the bone, and tore off large pieces of flesh at every blow. What word, alas! could describe this terrible—this heartrending scene!

The cruelty of these barbarians was nevertheless not yet satiated; they untied Jesus, and again fastened him up with his back turned towards the pillar. As he was totally unable to support himself in an upright position, they passed cords round his waist, under his arms, and above his knees, and having bound his hands tightly into the rings which were placed at the upper part of the pillar, they recommenced scourging him with even greater fury than before; and one among them struck him constantly on the face with a new rod. The body of our Lord was perfectly torn to shreds,—it was but one wound. He looked at his torturers with his eyes filled with blood, as if entreating mercy; but their brutality appeared to increase, and his moans each moment became more feeble.

Of course, it should go without saying that Blessed Anne’s private revelations do not carry the weight of Scripture, dogma, or even doctrine of magisterial teaching. Nonetheless, her Dolores Passion does carry both a nihil obstat and an imprimatur from the Holy See, indicating that no part of it is incongruous with the Catholic faith and, more importantly, that it is reasonable and acceptable for Catholics to use it in their spiritual development.

The degree of barbarity present in the scourging isn’t something solely attested to by Blessed Anne, either. We know from Scripture that He was beaten and bloodied so terribly that he could not even carry His Cross without assistance. We know from the Shroud of Turin, which by all reliable accounts and studies is exactly what it is purported to be, that the wounds He suffered during the scourging would have left strips of flesh hanging from His body. The brutality of this event is beyond measure. Ironically, based on all of this, if anything negative can be said about Gibson’s graphic depiction of the Passion, it would be that it wasn’t violent enough.

But let’s focus on His oppressors: Blessed Anne describes them as half-drunk swarthy men from the southern frontiers of the empire. This puts into perspective the sort of torment that Our Lord suffered at their hands. These were men beyond the scope of reason—something indicated already by their unflinching and literal assault on the incarnate Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. What Blessed Anne’s insights into their demeanor suggests, however, is men possessed by unthinking malice—free, of course, to act as they will, but nonetheless enslaved by a particularly wrathful ignorance that drives them away from sanity. Men enslaved by their passions lose all reason.

As Christ suffered under their torments, Blessed Anne says that he prayed unceasingly for mercy upon their souls. What greater mercy could have befallen them at that point than the clarity of thought to cease in their abuse? And yet, clearly, that did not come. We know that God dispenses upon us what is asked, as Our Lord taught while He was on Earth. This can only indicate that the wills of these cruel men were galvanized—their hearts were hardened—such that no act of God, while respecting their agency, could turn them away from their excesses.

When we reach the age of reason, each of us recognizes the tension between what is good and what is desired. Taken to its extreme, this tension manifests in an ultimatum one way or another: you must abandon yourself for God, or your must abandon yourself for your desires. Become a religious fanatic, or become a junkie, a drunk, an addict of some sort—throw yourself into your passions so severely that you lose sight of reason and, in doing so, lose sight of what agency you had over your will. By throwing yourself toward God, regardless of how you may stumble along the way, you are embracing what is good and fleeing from sin. By throwing your lot in with your passions, you do the opposite. In this sense, we can understand how damnation is an option chosen freely—or as freely as a will shackled to his passions can be—and not merely a just punishment for transgressions handed down from the Most High.

What we see in the actions of Our Lord’s aggressors are men who have clearly chosen the latter ultimatum. But why did they abandon themselves so thoroughly to violence? Did they love violence for its own sake? Perhaps, but a direct encounter with the incarnate Word indicates a unique moment in anyone’s life where that ultimatum becomes an unavoidable binary. When confronted with God, you either fall to the ground at His feet and cry out in love and beg for mercy, or you flee. In their own way, these men fled. And while it is sinful to flee, what’s more important is that it is sin that causes them to flee. There is the sin of an habitually enslaved will, corroded by indulgence in wrath and malice, certainly. But dig deeper, and where does that passionate malice have its root?

We return to fear. They were fleeing from Him when they were born, and each passionate embrace of sin is another frightful journey away from Him. And then, at that moment when He is there in the flesh, they were given that perfect option in no uncertain terms. But for men who have engaged so thoroughly with sin, and fled so far from Him, who could abandon that journey and return to Him? You could say it’s pride that darkens that option, as it is pride that hardens our hearts. Pride makes it impossible to give up what we believe to be ours. Since we know, ultimately, that we can take nothing with us into the grave except what we hold inside of ourselves, it is pride that allows us to clench our beings around our sufferings, and make us unwilling to offer them to God. Because our sufferings are our shames.

If we are ashamed, how can we go to God? If we suffer, how can we not be ashamed?

Man ought to be strong, but instead, he is weak.

The men that stood above Our Lord and scourged him could not be called victorious. Our Lord’s sacrifice on the Cross fulfilled the victory over sin that was preordained by Adam’s transgression. All who engage in sin, particularly with such recklessness, are throwing in their lot with those that have already lost. Satan fell like lightning from Heaven, and men such as these run to catch up with him.

So with all this in mind, did they scourge Our Lord, beat Him, humiliate Him, and curse Him because they believed they had won? If they did, they knew that this was a meaningless victory. If they really believed they had won, they were engaging in the sort of nihilism that so characterizes the modern world today—and nihilism itself is just a defeatist attitude too deluded to call a proper philosophy. If they believed they had won, they were believing a lie. They had already lost before they’d even had the opportunity to win, so great was their sin. Only by Christ’s sacrifice is winning even an option.

The Enemy

For the Enemy, of course, there is no option to win. Christ’s victory over sin meant also victory over the world and over the Devil—and the evil in the world is made worse by the Devil. But the Devil’s behavior in the world follows the same pattern as those oppressors at the Scourging; humiliation, violence, mocking, all to present an outward appearance of victory—a lie. By rejecting God, that’s all he knows.

Christ’s scourging is the archetype of humiliation played out in history; it followed a ritual, great suffering, great violence, and great mockery. We focused on the motives of his oppressors because by understanding those, we can come to know the method of he who guides them. By glimpsing his method, we can understand the sort of humiliation playing out on the world scale today.

When we see the mob dismantling our public square, lying to our faces, and setting buildings on fire, when we politicians pushing revolutionary narratives and stabbing the people of this country—sometimes literally—in the back, when we see faceless corporations push for divisiveness, stoke public outrage, and throw their own employees under the bus, we know we’re witnessing a ritualized humiliation procession on a massive scale, and the average American mind is the victim. If you bend the knee, you’re complicit. If you engage with them, you’re complicit. If you believe them acting in good faith, you’re complicit. If you think they are reasonable, you’re complicit. It’s understandable being duped, but at this point, the writing is on the wall: dialogue is not possible with people who do not believe that reason exists. It is the denial of God taken to its rational extreme. You can’t talk to people like that. Christ did not beg to them for mercy when he was scourged. He prayed to God to have mercy on them.

And this extends far past the recent rituals of humiliation. This extends into the realm of the sexual revolution, where pornography addiction and sex with strangers is considered normal, where homosexuality is considered a superior form of copulation, and where children are told that mutilation constitutes a transmogrification of sexes. It extends to the absurd manner in which our economy is set up. It extends into the education system, into our architecture, our city planning, demographic distributions. It extends into our entertainment, media, and art, into our music, into the very way we’re told to interpret information.

When you see the countless girls who have been poisoned by a liberal arts education, who entered university bright-eyed and beaming, only to be subjected to four years of ideological abuse and emerge, bleary-eyed and insane, with shaved heads and nose rings, angry, embittered and raving—you see the Enemy’s humiliation hard at work. He is humiliating the girls, but he is humiliating you, as well, because the Enemy knows that these are your daughters, your once-crushes, your future-fiances. These girls are the future of a nation that has bent the knee to the Enemy’s dominion, and he is exacting every ounce of humiliation he can get out of you. The Enemy hates you not for who you are, but because you can still win when he has already lost.

Try not to trivialize this analysis as a way of saying “bad people are bad,” or “those rioters tearing down statues are sinners.” That’s missing the point. We’re all sinners and, by the only metric that matters, we’re all bad. Within the context of social cohesion, some of us are certainly worse than others, but when you’re standing before God at your private judgment, He probably isn’t going to shrug His shoulders and say, “well, at least you weren’t Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Looking ahead, it goes without saying that things are going to get bad. We can all see the writing on the wall. The current regime is sympathetic to those who hate the faith. Presently, there are still enough at least nominally Christian people in the country to make wide-scale totalitarian-style persecution somewhat difficult to pull off without anyone noticing, but that doesn’t give us cause to be lax. Be prepared for it when it comes, because it’s going to come, either in your lifetime or in your kid’s.

The solution to the current crisis will manifest itself through the combined wills of those who do not give up hope. In St. Louis, hundreds of Catholics convened to pray before the statue of King St. Louis IX in order to deter the so-called protesters who wanted it torn down. They succeeded, and have made the effort, assisted by local clergy, to defend their monument. It took prayer and devotion. Going forward, remember their example, because pretty soon, that’s all we’ll have at our disposal.

Fili redemptor mundi Deus, miserere nobis.