Imagine living in a despotic, Communist regime. You cannot practice your faith freely. You are prohibited from instructing your children in it. There can be no religious symbols on the exterior of your church. Family members have been arrested for “smuggling” Bibles into the country. International human rights organizations keep reporting on your plight, but little changes. There are reports that political and religious prisoners are having their organs harvested.

Then, the largest free country in the world announces an increased trade partnership with your government, because the goods provided by the poor working conditions in your country are cheap. Such is the relationship between the United States and China.

Our building of a greater relationship with China is not a neutral act even from a strategic perspective. So much of our industry is already reliant on that country: pharmaceuticals, vaccines, food additives, processed foods, clothing, and of course, electronic devices. This reduces our ability to engage in meaningful pressure to reform.

Some might object, opining that our situation is already dire and thus that it’s “already too late” to do anything meaningful with regard to China. But surely a situation’s grimness does not justify or necessitate its worsening. Increasingly, the American policy toward China has been to establish friendly relations as if they were a free country that shared a similar moral code.

President Trump has rightly warned about America’s relationship with China since the 1990s, at times advocating for restricted trade between our nations to allow American (and even European) countries to compete. Unfortunately, those warnings seem like mere echoes of a different era. Over the past week, an American delegation to China resulted in promises of an increased trade relationship, without any mention of their despotism.

China is known for a host of abuses, even if you limit your scope of criticism to the narrow field of economic unfairness. China’s economic model has long been intertwined with currency manipulation, prison labor, forced labor among political and religious prisoners, and worker conditions so poor that meaningful redress is often impossible. Thus, even from a pragmatic standard, equal relations with China inherently disfavor companies that try to make moral decisions and which therefore operate in countries that treat their citizens well.

We are currently in a farcical moment wherein China is our biggest trading partner yet we actively prosecute Chinese spies on American soil. An American mayor was charged by the FBI just this week. As someone who works in media, I can say that stories involving the arrest of Chinese spies are so frequent as to be tiresome, yet they are rarely covered by the mainstream press.

If we step back and consider how we ought to relate to such a country, admitting that decades of problematic political decisions have left us in an unnecessarily vulnerable situation, then we could make at least some assertions:

1. Let us not discard the most vulnerable in those countries, such as the Christians who are being persecuted by an evil regime. We must recognize that when we seek a greater alliance with such a government without a recognition of glaring moral issues, we cast aside those who are suffering for righteousness’ sake.

2. Trade is inherently formative of some dependency. As such, the willingness to increase trade beyond our current status represents an extended hand, in trust. If we do not even have verbal acknowledgement of moral reform, let us not endanger ourselves with further reliance.

There are some who wish to separate trade from morality completely, as if fiscal decisions have no bearing on our social standing or upon those who are suffering under the boot of a tyrannical regime. Unfortunately, that cannot be true. Trade relationships help to bolster fellow countries, both in terms of their economy and their perceived social status among other nations.

Further, we have a tendency in modern discourse to pretend that all nation-states have equal, if different, moral structures. Yet it is not the case that “all cultures are beautiful” or that all regimes are equally acceptable. There are times when we must assert that certain behaviors are so egregious that we cannot pretend them away or act as friends to their perpetrators. In doing so, we don’t just assert what is good, we act in a way that is good. Acting with indifference toward evils, especially in a way that encourages them to continue, is an evil act in itself.

Every dollar spent is ultimately a vote for the systems and institutions that produce the goods we consume. We know this. It’s why we like to fund small businesses and we shudder at funding the goliaths that are counter to our values. The issue does not change when the producers are entire countries. Instead, the harm is magnified and the body count is sometimes literal.

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It has now been revealed that the devastating Palisades Fire in California was not due to careless campers or even to climate change (to the chagrin of propagandists). Rather, an arsonist has been charged. Headlines emphasize that he was mad at the world:

In fact, he was mad at a particular group: the rich.

So, this was another act of leftist aggression in an increasingly prolific line-up. Where we once heard about the far-right boogeyman and the threat of militias, we are seeing the rise of actual violent acts by far-left extremists. The litany of trans shooters, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, repeated assassination attempts against President Trump, and the doxxing of even vaguely conservative figures (such as Tim Pool) show an escalation of political violence and an abandonment of discourse.

Interestingly, the Palisades arson was also an act of friendly fire, because the “rich” who lost their homes (and some of whom lost their lives), were disproportionately Democrat voters. The upper tier of the upper class, or the “0.1 percent” as Bernie Sanders likes to pronounce, is not limited to a specific political party—the most wealthy Americans are increasingly leaning to the Left, especially in the age of Big Tech. Communist agitators like to imply otherwise so that they can more easily blame their political opponents, but they do so falsely.

The suspected arsonist in Los Angeles was inspired by Luigi Mangione, the far-left anti-hero who shot an insurance executive in the back before triggering a nationwide manhunt. Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, oversaw massive donations from his company to the Democratic Party and to the Kamala Harris campaign specifically. So, once again, those on the far Left are targeting their own, likely without the self-awareness to realize it.

The production of young radicals has always been a dangerous affair, as perhaps best exemplified by China’s Red Guard, but no less prevalent in the child soldiers of the Congo. The ideologues who teach in high schools and colleges are churning out young people who are much more willing to engage in violence than their mentors.

When the suspected arsonist in Los Angeles was interviewed by law enforcement, he was asked why someone might start such a fire, to which he said that they would do so out of resentment for the rich, elaborating, “We’re basically being enslaved by them.” It’s a jarring statement to make in a country with one of the highest rates of wealth mobility in the history of the world. Yet, the ideology of covetousness, which is more typically labeled Marxism, never leaves its adherents satiated as long as others have more than they do.

The Palisades Fire killed twelve people and destroyed roughly 5,000 homes, disrupting people’s lives and burning the sentimental items that connected them to fading memories. Thus, in so many ways, the crime was anti-human. It sought to target the successes of people, simply for being greater than those of the villain. It wasn’t just items that were burned, it was communities that had been tied together by at least familiarity. Many of those families had lived in the same homes for generations.

What does it mean to set fire to a community that has done nothing to hurt you, while comparing oneself positively to a person (Luigi) who shot someone in the back? Support for Luigi Mangione is widespread among the political Left—even the defense counsel for this suspected arsonist is using that fact to downplay how he is an extremist. If his viewpoints are widespread, then he cannot be that extreme, it is implied. But they are.

Violent Leftists are becoming more common in the United States, following a history throughout the 20th Century of communism and its variants leading to mass murder. Finally, the violence over the past two decades has reached such a peak that the new counterterrorism strategy of the United States contains references to the so-called anti-fascist movement.

What we need to remember is that what they really want to burn down is civilization, along with all of the people who are trying to live normal, healthy lives. When communist movements announce their desire for a “Year Zero” from which to begin again, their immediate intent is one of targeting the pillars of civilization, even if they delude themselves with dreams of a Utopia to follow the devastation.

So, to the extremists of our age, the problem was never some rich people in California with more stuff, it’s the system that allowed those people to accrue wealth at all, to reach for prosperity, or to pass on an inheritance to their children. Philosophies and economic theories that center on covetousness are so dangerous because they know no limit. There will always be somebody with more, unless you destroy the mechanisms for self-betterment.

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Thomas Joseph White, O.P. tells us, “mortality is a boundary that sets a question to everything else the human person does in this life.”

What might seem morose at first glance will be the inevitable lens through which we must see all things at the end of our lives. It’s not simply wisdom that would cause such clarity, but pragmatism. Our other options for viewing ourselves and our decisions will have faded away. Yet to meditate upon that end earlier can defog our decision making today.

Most of us spend our lives distracted, both by the frenetic nature of each day and by the sense that we have to check certain boxes by certain ages in order to receive social approval or simply have a positive self-regard.

What does it mean, to “catch up” to where you should be? Most of us live with at least some sense of comparative self-awareness. We notice what our contemporaries are doing at certain ages, compare their accomplishments, and place ourselves in a self-made hierarchy. Even those who don’t consider themselves to be competitive find it difficult not to look at their colleagues’ successes with a sense of comparison.

It’s common to use others as a yardstick, because without any measure at all, we do not know when we are failing. We likewise don’t know what we should be aspiring toward. Our approximation of ‘realistic’ goals is roughly found in the public accomplishments of our peers. Yet so many of the promoted successes are being distorted into things that we cannot acclaim:

Civil marriages increasingly predict little more than the potential for divorce. College degrees belie only their associated debt. Well-maintained social media profiles point to loneliness—for in isolation, people have the unstructured time to curate such personas of themselves.

So, if we instead return to the question of where we should be at particular times in our lives, we might wish to use another measure. As people of Faith, we must recognize that wherever we are, we are not alone or abandoned. There is a tendency to presume that because we have all made decisions that we regret, that the ideal version of ourselves is in some mythical future that we could have reached if only we had made all of the right choices. But God is either with us now, or not at all—he cannot be in some hypothetical place in the future or past that never happened.

St. Catherine of Siena, who we remember yesterday and today (in the new and old Roman calendars, respectively), implored us to “Start being brave about everything. Drive out darkness and spread light. Don’t look at your weaknesses.” In living that modus operandi, she successfully implored a Pope to return to Rome, beseeching him to act with courage.

It is part of the human condition to err, and to thus find ourselves in a spot different from even our own ideal. We are always a long journey from the imagined destination, in which there are no sins of our own or others, nor sickness, death, or unforeseen externalities. Yet the today that we are given is the only potential atonement for the pain of yesterday. At the day of our death, we will ultimately be helpless to right the ships of our lives and will have to accept the decisions that we have made. For now, we have some time.

Notice how the non-culture around us makes virtuous decisions more difficult than they ought to be. We are encouraged to live lives of decadence and degradation, choosing the momentary over the eternal. Those who try to live a moral life increasingly face ridicule. Moreover, our objects of comparison so often chase targets that will be their downfall. Thus, the disorder around us affects us if we fail to resist.

Likewise, our own peace (or disorder) can have an impact on others. How and where we aim will be noticed by those close to us. We change how people aspire simply by living good, moral lives. That is how a real culture is formed. If we want to build lives that we can reflect on positively when our mortality is at hand, then we must make decisions that point beyond this world and into the next. In so doing, we may even lead others Home too.

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Some of the erroneous ways of viewing children and familial relationships within the secular world are beginning to seep into the Catholic colloquial understanding, causing a fracturing of what it means to be part of a family and fostering a materialistic understanding of bearing children.

Emblematically, a priest was speaking to women about motherhood when he opined that those who cannot afford to homeschool or send their children to Catholic school should use Natural Family Planning to prevent children.

It’s a surreal expansion of the definition of poverty to include at least the lower 70 percent of the American socioeconomic strata—significantly more, by some accounts. We might legitimately ask when it is prudent to have children in times of economic hardship, but if we are drawing the line in a place above the standards of every parent throughout most of history, then we might consider that something is amiss.

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What should a state encourage in its citizens? We think of a government bureaucracy as entirely separate from the moral life of those who dwell within, but that’s largely a result of how individualistic we have become. We do not live in silos of one, and are instead influenced by authority as well as community, positively or otherwise. Looking upon the modern landscape, we can see how multiple state governments encourage the worst in their citizens, and they get what they ask for.

The State of Oregon is best understood as a compass, pointing toward the end point of a lived ethos. The state’s latest suicide report shows that a record number of lethal prescriptions were dispensed in 2025. Those deaths are the result of the euphemistically named Death with Dignity Act, which has been in place in Oregon since 1994.

Oregon Health Authority keeps information on the patients who have been killed in this manner, but the data is self-reported and there is no third-party oversight to ensure that the information is accurate. Thus, if a doctor finds a case problematic or difficult to defend, he may simply not report it. The Oregon Health Authority itself pronounces, “OHA does not investigate whether patients met the DWDA criteria, nor how their diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment options were determined.” Nobody seems to care.

As that death toll climbs, Oregon is embroiled in a legal battle over its mandate that employers must provide health insurance that covers abortion (even if that employer is explicitly pro-life). On both ends of life, the state encouragement is towards termination.

While it is true that such deaths in places like Oregon have been made easier, we often pretend a false truth when we discuss assisted suicide. We act as if suicide were not always an option (in the material sense) for most of those with terminal or difficult illnesses. Methods of suicide have always been available, just not legally so. The current movement is about forcing societal acceptance and approval of what has always been derided in Christian societies. It is about mandating a social nod for what should always be lamented.

All of this raises the question: What is the role of the state in regards to its citizens? Some argue that it is merely in defense of people’s safety. If so, Oregon could already be said to be failing that minimal standard. But what we actually see is the state promoting a particular ideology. For it to do so is not really abnormal—that is what we have always seen throughout history. Because the person is political, social, and religious by nature, so are the organizations that he creates.

Oregon’s particular ideological slant is to see its citizens as burdensome, and to push them toward making choices that are counter to their continuation. Whether it is with the sick who may be nearing the end of their lives (we never really know) or with the young who are inherently reliant upon others, the state promotes an answer. It’s a coldly pragmatic reduction of man’s worth.

Tragically, it’s a worldview that’s spreading. It’s proliferating amongst the most vulnerable and those who should be caring for them. It’s expanding to those who were taught to provide healthcare. If doctors understood medicine as such, they would not partake in this monstrosity at all, but they do. Five percent of the deaths in Canada are now via state-assisted suicide. Those who follow the news headlines have been flooded with stories of Canadians who found it much easier to access MAiD than actual medical care.

In these cases, we get a sense of what a state wants of its citizens by what it makes easier. A properly ordered government would be geared towards helping its citizens to reach for the good. It would understand that it should not only prevent the hindrance of those living a moral life, but that it should encourage living morally by its policies, and that it should discourage the worst decisions by its laws. In a certain sense, it thereby helps citizens to both live a good life and reach Heaven.

There ought to be grief over the fact that we have moved so far away from that ideal that most people cannot articulate what is wrong with a state that “lets people do what they want,” which is the callous labeling we have given to such gross moral indifference. They can not mourn what they cannot remember ever being true, and they do not grieve for those who have been told explicitly or implicitly that the best option for all of us is that they end their lives.

We should weep for those who chose premature death so quickly because the societal bonds that ought to have provided a natural longing for life have already been severed, for those whose lives were reduced to financial calculations, and for those maturing in a society that can no longer defend its own continuation.

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Imagine: Carlos Rodriguez enters the United States illegally via the southern border. He accepts illicit employment from a shady employer and never pays taxes. The IRS does not even know that he is in the country. He is paid in cash and he keeps his funds in his apartment, periodically sending some back to Honduras via Western Union transfers.

Within a year, Carlos gets criminally charged with battery. Under the current administration, ICE lodges a detainer so that they can prevent him from being released back onto American streets. He is provided with a free lawyer to defend against the battery charge. According to a proposed law in California, he will also be provided with a free legal defense in immigration court—even though he never held legal status in the United States.

Under Assembly Bill 2600, taxpayer funds would pay for immigration defense attorneys for those facing deportation. It represents a perverse redistribution of resources away from the innocent, and is inherently contrary to justice. It completely disregards the rights of Americans for the direct benefit of lawbreakers.

Remember: Most American citizens do not just pay taxes into the system themselves, but they have for generations. So, when an American has need of the social safety net, he is collecting on what he and his forebears have been paying into throughout their lifetimes. This cannot be said for immigrants without legal status.

It is already the case that illegal immigrants who commit criminal acts and are prosecuted in U.S. courts are given free access to a legal defense. Hence, those who have committed serious crimes on American soil are burdensome in overlapping ways—they harm the Americans who are the victims of their crimes, then they harm the country economically too. Criminal legal defenses are not minor costs. This is one reason to enforce immigration laws before waiting to see what other laws are broken thereafter.

Immigration law has historically been kept distinct from criminal law in part because we do not wish to provide attorneys free-of-charge as soon as anyone crosses the border. An immigrant does not risk long-term incarceration and thus the loss of years of his life in custody over immigration claims, for he can usually simply return to his home country. The new proposal is not just absurd, it’s harmful to other immigrants who have legitimate claims in already clogged immigration courts.

Remember that the Trump Administration is continuing to prioritize cases like the hypothetical case of Carlos, in which the individual not only broke immigration law by entering the country illegally, but further committed criminal offenses thereafter. The majority of ICE arrests are of those who have criminal records, yet have been ignored by prior administrations. (The other arrests typically take place because criminal illegal aliens are living with other illegals who have not committed further criminal acts, so both groups get swept up in the same ICE raids.) The majority of Americans support the deportations of immigrants who hold criminal records, which is why it was a priority of the Trump Administration.

This Californian proposal makes victims of the innocent under the faux auspices of “compassion:”

• The Americans who have paid into the system will suffer instead of those who have committed numerous crimes.

• Legal immigrants will have their cases delayed due to the over-burdened immigration system.

• The immigration detention centers will suffer further overcrowding as unnecessary delays are placed on simple deportation cases.

• Delays in immigration processing will keep harmful immigrants in the country longer, posing a risk to the American people. An at-capacity system will start releasing immigrants back into communities because of lack of ability to hold them.

At its core, this is an intentional effort to prevent the rapid deportation of those who have no grounds to be in the United States, likely in the hopes of waiting until another presidency that returns to the status quo of ignoring the net effects of unchecked mass immigration.

Meanwhile, there is a very real human toll. It is easy to forget the people whose lives are upended by immigrant violence. The North Carolina man who was sodomized and tortured by two illegals in a home invasion in February has not “moved on” just because the news cycle did. It will be with him forever. Fifteen-year-old Miles Young was murdered by an illegal alien in March. He cannot move on, and neither can his family. So when people pontificate about the supposed compassion of keeping illegals in the country for longer, they tread on the memory of the victims who have suffered unnecessarily.

We can treat people humanely while recognizing what is just, enforcing borders and existing laws, and prioritizing the innocent. When we make idols of a criminal class, we make victims of the upright.

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The Triduum is upon us. These are the three days in which we walk with Christ through his darkest moments—those times that were so monstrous because of us. It’s also a time in which we see so clearly that He knows what it is to suffer in every way, not only in the more direct manner as upon the Cross, but in the preparation for that end.

The more common sufferings of life, like loneliness and betrayal, are those that we rarely compare to the pains that Christ endured, even though they too were among his burdens. When we experience them, it takes longer for us to look to Christ as someone who has suffered likewise. In that omission, we fail to see such things as crosses that we are called to bear. Yet, at this time of the year, the Church summons us to focus thereupon, and to be with Him in these very human sufferings.

When we experience these pangs, we forget how much more so He felt them while preparing for a torturous death: As he begged his dearest friends to stay awake with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane as he prayed and grieved. Even, perhaps worst of all, when He had his last meal with them before the Passion, while knowing how they would betray him—how they too would be responsible for the wounds He would bear. Yet he drew them closer, instituting the Eucharist and the Priesthood.

There’s a sadness in contemplating that degree of isolation, such that the trial that is ahead is truly one’s own. But it is also true in some sense for all of us, when examined honestly. Our closest companions betray, die, fade away, or even simply branch into different areas of their lives. From beginning to end, there is no certainty nor sure companion except God. He who was most isolated now comforts us in the midst of our aloneness. While we can experience warmth in the proximate union of friends as we endure trials, the internal battles can only be fought and endured alone. Moreover, the choices that will manifest in our Eternity are ours to make—alone.

There is a key difference between us and Him, of course. Unlike Him, we have not only been betrayed, but we have been traitors. We have not only suffered, but been the cause of suffering in others. We have earned suffering, but He had not.

     I saw the Son of God go by
     Crowned with the crown of thorn.
     "Was it not finished, Lord?" I said,
     "And all the anguish borne?"

     He turned on me His awful eyes:
     "Hast thou not understood?
     Lo! Every soul is Calvary,
     And every sin a rood."

         —Rachel Annand Taylor

This Triduum, as you reflect on suffering, isolation, and betrayal as one who can empathize with those pains, remember to also do so with the honest view of oneself as someone who has caused it, for therein we see our unworthiness of His gift.

Have a blessed Triduum.

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Let’s take a moment to consider three tiers of performance culture, in which people present a version of themselves to the broader public that is disparate from who they are. Contrary to what’s often claimed, the primary harm is not to those being deceived, but to the deceiver himself. As we move up toward tier three, we can see a much more modern phenomenon, in which one’s basic need for privacy is no longer even the cause of the behavior.

Tier One can even be healthy

We think we know who people are by an impressive job title. “English professor” gives us a view of the whole man, we believe. He’s studious, dresses well, intelligent, not into sports, very unlikely to be criminal, and so on. But the job title only tells us of his accomplishment. His true battles are hidden from us, and we can claim no right to know them. His guardedness with strangers and self-identification with his successes represents pretty healthy behavior.

Not only do we make sweeping assumptions based upon such small snippets of information, but that is generally how people wish to be understood. It is the fragment of their lives that they present to the broader world—not just because they find it defining, but because they wish it were. We all prefer to be identified by our successes rather than our totality, particularly by strangers. Another way of putting that is to say that we find the truth to be unsettling.

To some degree, this tier can represent a natural and healthy privacy, as opposed to sharing painful memories with strangers.

Tier Two is pride-induced self-harm

In a similar but more exaggerated vein, people on social media display a curated image of success. Whether they emphasize their supposed wealth via shots of their new purchases or simply exaggerated happiness through dramatic, energy-filled presentations on camera, they craft an image. Not only do they desire to share this more than the truth—it’s what people want to see. Boring or melancholic presentations don’t get views. Poverty doesn’t attract. Depression doesn’t inspire.

In fact, “influencer” is the top dream job of Generation Alpha, incorporating Youtubers, TikTok Creators, and online streamers, according to Fortune:

Gen Alpha’s Dream Jobs

1. YouTuber (32%)

2. TikTok creator (21%)

3. Doctor/nurse (20%)

4. Mobile app/video game developer (19%)

5. Entrepreneur (17%)

6. Artist (16%)

7. Sports athlete (15%)

8. Professional online streamer (15%)

9. Musician (14%)

10. Teacher (14%)

But the reality of those dreams is much darker. Each year, we have a new list of YouTubers who have taken their own lives. A recent study showed that some ten percent of content creators struggle with suicidal thoughts—twice that of the general population.

To act counter to the truth is self-erasing, and that takes a toll on the soul. Those who curate an image of themselves, and especially who do so all day long, must eventually acknowledge that it isn’t who they are. And often, that means recognizing that they are not who they consider to be the “ideal” person. Perhaps they’re not rich enough, or energetic enough, or their real friends don’t laugh at their jokes like online sycophants. Whatever the case, there’s a disconnect between outward portrayal and inward turmoil.

Don’t misunderstand—personal stories ought to remain personal, and we not have a “right” to the intimate history of another, especially a stranger. But what is not considered, especially by those perpetually doing so, is that presenting a chronically false view of oneself is destructive too.

Tier Three Has Self-Erased

Then there’s the next level of performance culture, in which a person only lives online, so he has no formed self to present. These people tend to be too socially inept to exist in Tier 2. They are a very modern product, because their mode of existence requires a certain level of industrialization and reliance on others.

This person only knows how to echo the opinions of a subculture. His own “personality,” to the degree that such is defined by interests and how one presents in a social setting, has not been defined. He hasn’t engaged in hobbies, quarreled and competed and laughed with human friends in the real world, or thereby learned the healthy boundaries of social contexts. He is isolated and is thus most vulnerable to the artificial socialization that can occur online.

These are the people found deep within gamer communities and immersed in Reddit, embodying the stereotype of the person who still lives in his parents’ basement well into his thirties. The problem isn’t that he is presenting a fake person online, but that his ability to engage with real people is so nebulous that there is no way for him to be fake—or real.

It’s easier for these people to get confused about the line between reality and the Internet world, thereby allowing themselves to be swept into, for example, perverse ideological movements masquerading as something moral. That is the story of how so many young people became “trans” after thousands of hours on Tumblr, Discord, and similar websites (while being described as detached loners by those who had occasion to see them in the flesh.) It’s likewise the environment wherein so many of our mass shooters are formed. One story after another describes those assailants as entirely disconnected from reality, and to some degree, from their own humanity.

Grasping for Reality

Each person does not solely have to decide how and what he presents to the world, for that has always been part of living in a community. The contemporary reality is more complicated. Internet usage is how people get jobs, learn what is happening in the world, and even become perceivably “normal” amongst their contemporaries. The public online display of one’s private life is expected more than ever, and the attempt to show an artificially positive framework is often just a desire for the privacy that was once the norm.

The problem is that our sense of what is healthy is being distorted by the perceived need to perform or even turn oneself into a commodity. We have elevated the selling of one’s thoughts, preferences, and opinions to a type of false leadership. What we need are true leaders. We need those who do not need to craft caricatures of themselves because they are well-formed and they embody the virtues. Good leaders inspire young and old alike and provide for societal orientation.

Those who are being “followed” in our modern non-culture make for poor stand-ins in a leaderless society. They cannot bear the burden of the position. Fame and attention can be crushing, as they have always been for people in positions of prestige. The problem is that such status was once earned, and is now the reward for ridiculous and pride-filled behavior.

A society without leaders is unsteered, which is why over half of its youth would seek fame rather than greatness. We are seeing the starvation of meaning and the precluding of healthy, honest, life-giving, in-person relationships. Great men have led by their magnanimity, not by being self-obsessed or by flaunting wealth and artificial happiness. They have frequently done so by speaking Truth into a world that finds it repulsive, at great personal cost.

Notice that as one advances through the tiers, he fails to lead, not only others, but his own life. It is the ceding of every personal decision to the whims of a fickle crowd. As such, it is the opposite of leadership, for the person self-erases into what the collective would create him to be. He becomes, in a way, soulless. Living apart from true socialization and denying one’s responsibility to cultivate community is a moral failure—the cost of which we can no longer afford.

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A video of a baby born at 24 weeks can be a surprisingly divisive post. Instead of the collective urge to protect the vulnerable, a large cross-section of the populace calls for such videos to be taken down, or seeks justification for killing the child. Just the sight of such a living child is interpreted as a condemnation of abortion, because it provides witness to the reality of the child’s humanity.

Hundreds of exchanges below such videos mirror this one:

“Your ethics are different than my ethics,” is often stated as if it ends the conversation. But if taken seriously, it dissolves the very concepts being discussed. If ethics are purely personal, then words like “murder,” “care,” and even “suffering” lose any stable meaning. If he is right, then there is no truth at all. There are multiple implicit assertions in his proclamation of relativistic morality.

For example, within such a statement, it is asserted that the definition of murder and the essence of suffering are merely opinions in which a person might take any, equally valid side. This manner of thought is common to our age, and it means that not only are we almost guaranteed to talk past each other, but that we are supposed to applaud our having done so. After all, it represents a victory for individualism if each person can invent and live by his own moral code and assert it as best for him. How we could sustain a society on this concept remains unexplored.

By deciding that suffering gives us license to kill, he reduced Man into a mere product that we can terminate when it fails to perform as we desire. It is villainous to look at vulnerable people not as persons to care for but as problems to be solved. All of this is encompassed under the supposed umbrella of “ethics.”

The poster implicitly asserted that there is no reason to live apart from pleasure and the pursuit thereof—that there is no value in suffering or inherent dignity in being human. It’s an attitude that provides little counterweight to the nature of life—each of which is marked by pain and toil. We all experience loss, sickness, and suffering. Thus, it seems unsubstantiated for a person to profess the belief in a purely hedonistic meaning to life, based upon the reality that he continues to live in a world that has and will bring him pain. If our lives are not disposable, then neither are the lives of the vulnerable.

If you look at a video of a struggling infant and your first impulse is to kill him, something is awry. For too many people, what is happening is not as clear as is declared. The suffering of a child being helped in his weakness is not the real cause of alarm. The issue is that the sight of such a child plagues the consciences of those who can no longer deny the humanity of a child born 24 weeks into development.

As medical advances grow, it is inevitable that we will be able to save struggling babies at earlier and earlier ages. We will, as a society, have to come face-to-face with the reality of the children who were previously dehumanized and denied. We will have to look into their eyes. It has been said that it is easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled, but how much easier is it to convince a man to dehumanize as “clumps of cells” than to later convince him that he has applauded murder?

There’s an irony in the fact that the technological advancement that is alleged to lead us away from the ‘darkness’ of religion and the rigidity of absolute morality is eventually going to show the reality of the evil of abortion. The question is no longer whether we will see. It is whether we will admit what we see, and what that says about us.

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Do you yearn for the quiet? Not for the absence of people talking, but the absence of all noise? Perhaps it’s a bit antiquarian, but I think there’s something within us that can find absence to be healing.

What if the refrigerator stopped making its familiar whir, the AC unit span down, and every reminder of city and industry paused? If the cell phone was not there as an addiction to reach for, and every screen with their harsh blue lights would fade to black. If we could be truly at peace—not in a mythical way either, but in the manner that most people have experienced life throughout the vastness of human history.

Indulge in what feels like a guilty pleasure. Turn the phones off, light a candle or even an oil lamp, and travel back in time, not because history was perfect or because we don’t appreciate modern conveniences, but because we have souls. Sometimes, they need a break. We need to live as if we have them.

By candlelight, read something for pure pleasure, not for utility. Or pick up a real pen and write on physical paper, or simply sit before the flame and pray. Be connected with God in the silence, when you might at last hear Him.

It’s not just that our society is frenetic, but that it’s loud. It is demanding of our productivity, of our output for someone else’s ears. Even the time that people spend on social media, which they think of as pleasure, is merely the output of one’s opinions, tastes, or most sarcastic inner monologue for the entertainment of others.

The perceived need to be available, to everyone at every minute, demotes us from people with lives and loves to mere performers at the whim of the collective. The part that haunts is that there is no off switch. There is no hour wherein it is expected that people would think, or be at peace, or pray. We are wrapped in the frenzy of task-doing and task-preparation and availability for task-planning until bed when large swaths of the population toss and turn with frantic worry about tomorrow.

So if we are to live with the acknowledgement that we have souls, then intentionality is required. In a stroke of irony, we must plan for the peace. We must decide on the hour in which to light the candle. Take off the smart watch, turn off the phone or relocate it to another room, and get away from all electronics. Relearn what it is to feel and to think without being fed constant input—without being entertained. After all, we are both oppressor and oppressed in the culture of continual input, always creating and demanding more creation.

For those unfamiliar with the stillness, it can be jarring, as there’s an urge to reach for something to entertain us externally. It can feel physically uncomfortable. And therein we learn the vice that helps us to fill the noise: perhaps it’s the TV remote, where one can press a button and stare blankly, or maybe it’s the motion toward the computer so we can stare at YouTube in a similar manner. But if you sit with the silence, then contemplate that this would have been part of the typical experience prior to the Industrial Revolution. Born to a different time, what would your hobbies have been? What would you have read? Perhaps you would have prayed more, or loved better. Perhaps you would have written lengthy letters to family members across the country. Is it mere idealism to assert that you might have been more at peace?

It is not true that what is old is necessarily better, but it is the case that many of the goods of antiquity are still goods, and are worth reclaiming, if only from time to time. Before moving on to the next distraction, try lighting the candle.

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As the conflict in the Middle East swells to encompass more of the globe, largely on the basis of historic alliances, it feels somewhat similar to the opening act of World War I. This is not to suggest that we all must rush into hysteria (not that it would be productive if we did), but rather that parallels can make for interesting thought experiments.

For example, imagine if you were living through the opening of World War I and further, that you knew the devastation that would be wrought over the next few years… what would you do differently?

As an ordinary member of society with no role of power, you may find that the answer is eerily close to nothing. What’s more unsettling still is the way life’s ordinary woes would continue unabated, even as men were maimed in the trenches.

You would still need to deal with mundane sicknesses, predictable deaths, ordinary accidents, family feuds, and even workplace rivalries. It would seem so preposterous in some sense. How could your work colleague be mired in envy while her son is fighting in one of the deadliest wars the world has known? And yet, people do not cease to be human in wartime.

So while we think of the years of both World Wars as being defined by the warfare, they were also times in which ordinary people had to make routine decisions about how to live.

Knowing the devastation and the widespread cultural change that took place thereafter, would you counsel a young man in that era to go to college and thus plan a life? How about have a child? Because alongside the negative, ordinary toil that people had to endure, they also had to find ways to choose the good. Baptisms, weddings, graduations, births, and ordinary but not trivial moments of laughter took place. People chose to live, even amongst uncertainty and loss. Life could not and would not wait for them. They would continue to age whether they chose to exercise their sense of agency or not. The years would pass.

We are more in-tune with the news cycle than such people could dream of, even as they sat glued to a radio to hear updates on casualties and victories. We hear various perspectives from commentators, see footage of wartime devastation almost as it happens, and get bombarded by headlines throughout every hour, if we choose not to look away. Whether it’s a war or just the typical array of news snippets from around the world, some people find themselves so addicted to what’s happening that they forget to live themselves. Glued to a screen, they live only through the misery of others. It’s a terrible secession from joy.

Imagine if those who lived during the time of the World Wars had just stopped. If they had put a halt on every gathering, every ambition, not because of real obstacles but merely because they were too distrusting of tomorrow and too addicted to the stream of updates.

A secondary travesty would exist in that they lost things through surrender and self-erasure even while the men of the battlefield fought for victory. The events that punctuate life would have been skipped over, such that people would be living an elongated death.

Regardless of whether this becomes a larger war, we would do well not to neglect the battles that are before us as individuals. Those decisions made in the home and the family demand their own courage, and they build generations. They forge the civilization that men are willing to defend.

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Lent is now upon us, and if you’ve been to Mass recently, you probably heard some variation of, “thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” I cannot accurately speculate about what you think of during that time, but I don’t tend to focus on my own mortality, but on those whom I have already lost.

I am drawn to think of our lives as a shared journey, and one that we hope might conclude in a mutual destination. Some of our dearest friends have already departed from us. They have become that dust to which we aspire with cautious resignation. We will likely lose more still. Thus, returning to dust, which you might have last heard referenced at a graveside service, is a wound that never fully closes until we join them.

Sometimes, we can understand the last act only by reflection on the first. So we might better understand our loved ones and where they might be, by pondering their creation. For God to truly be God, for Him to create from nothing, everything that He creates must necessarily reflect Him. He did not fashion us with materials that he found from another creator, so all that we are (and our loved ones were) is indicative of Him in some way. All the Good that we can choose not only leads back to Him, but reflects Him. It mirrors Him. Just as the creations of every painter, sculptor, writer, and composer each reflect a facet of his soul, so too can people, as creations, reflect different aspects of their Creator.

Therefore, each individual can, in cooperating with God’s grace, reflect His light into the world, as they were supposed to. Those whom we have lost remind us not only of their good, but of the Goodness to whom they pointed. The best of who they were, to us and to the greater world around them, was a light that we might follow to get to the Creator who made them. In God’s mercy, it is in whose company they now share.

Potentially, as we shift to think about our own loves, souls, and deaths, we might hope that we could be remembered the same way. If only we too could be good in such a manner that people could think of us and understand our Maker better—they might love God better. Imagine if we could point the way Home, with the way we live, and the way we love.

Alas, perhaps the thought pains you as it does me, as we recognize that we are not yet who we should be. If the thought, and the failure, makes your eyes water too, take solace in another Lent in which to make those changes that will lead us to the right Destination, and point the way for others. The ashes might take on an extended meaning if we accept this season as an obligation to burn away those parts of ourselves that we know should not exist, those fragments that dim the light we are supposed to be refracting.

Godspeed on your journey. Have a blessed Lent.

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After the most recent tragic school shooting, there is a clamoring to discover the why, as perhaps we have done since the late 1990s, when these events first began happening.

The most recent shooting at Tumbler Ridge secondary school in British Columbia was enacted by a trans shooter. It’s a dynamic that we have seen repeated over the past few years. Before that, the shooters were merely described as socially inept loners.

And so we now ask: was it the trans ideology that warped his brain, the illegal drug use, the drugs that he was prescribed for depression, the content he watched, the Reddit subculture that he lived in, or something else?

Perhaps the answer can simply be a singular yes. After all, these are all indications of a loss of the good. Said differently, someone who has embraced all of these subcultures has separated himself from any connection to reality. His “friends” are depersonified in the world of the Internet. Unlike real friends, they can carefully curate the image that they put forth of themselves. His drug use and experimentation served to further sever him from his locality. Eventually, the adoption of transgenderism caused him to deny even the reality of himself.

To take the point further, imagine how unusual it would be to find out that the shooter had a healthy hobby—such as if he was actively engaged in the local tennis club, or built robots with other kids his age, or was immersed in his local church group. We never hear that. If anything, we hear about how these young men left their former activities months or years before such atrocities.

None of this is to suggest that one cannot use the Internet in positive ways, of course—it allows this work to exist. But it cannot and must not be our only source of engagement with other human beings. Using only the Internet to fulfill our social needs is like trying to hydrate with alcohol. It feels similarly wet as you drink it, but it gradually poisons you and increases your need for real water.

Over the last few decades, we have become less social with our neighbors and communities. Those who come from broken or challenging homes experience that privation even more intensely. We get some sense of who we are (especially as adolescents) from our relationships with others. Our interlocutors become a mirror through which we can view ourselves. Godless echo chambers in the recesses of the Internet can reflect a distorted image.

So many young people decided that they were transgender after immersion in Reddit and Tumblr pseudo-communities, which provide affirmation and acknowledgement at the cost of denying oneself. Then, after taking these often irreversible steps, such victims struggle to feel whole and healthy. Some are missing body parts. Haunted by a sense that something is perpetually amiss, many take their own lives. Increasingly, some become monsters who take other people’s lives.

The teenage stage that we have begun to view as typical, in which a child develops no hobbies or social interests but isolates him/herself for hours every day is a conduit to personal misery and cultural degradation. Gen Zers are fond of using the phrase “touch grass” to admonish those who have lost touch with reality because they have spent such little time in it.

We cannot fix other people’s lives, but we can form a community and build a culture around us that reflects what we should aspire to. Healthy, thriving communities and groups attract people. They heal brokenness and provide a counterweight to the despair that descends upon the victims of modernity.

The Internet may distort, drugs may numb and confuse, and ideology may deceive, but none of these abolish the will. Evil remains a choice. If we want fewer such choices, we must form souls capable of resisting them.

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This essay was published in full at Crisis Magazine, and can be read freely there. The introduction follows:

Hillary Clinton has written an op-ed for The Atlantic, which is permeated with moral indignation. She decries MAGA’s War on Empathy and then engages in a one-woman war on Truth. It may remind readers of the older rhetoric of the political left, which they don’t use as much anymore, wherein they proclaim that those on the right are immoral monsters and those on the left are heroically trying to protect the victims and institute virtuous policies.

Hillary claims that the conservative movement is morally descending. Thus, she laments the lost era of Reagan’s optimism and cheery personality, but her entire essay stands in testament to his reminder that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Continue reading this article at Crisis Magazine.

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The news cycle seems dominated by two very different forms of ice at the moment, like a dose of providential wit.

When a large snowstorm (or any natural disaster) looms, it becomes clear to all, as individuals, how helpless and small we are. The grocery stores quickly empty, camping supplies disappear from shelves for miles, and then we all simply hope and wait. Most of the predictions are quickly invalidated, because despite our advancements, such a disruptive part of our lives is still largely an enigma at which we can only make educated guesses.

As people burrow in their homes, waiting for the storm to strike or miss them entirely, we are most connected with prior generations. Sure, we can stock up at grocery stores beforehand, but thereafter, it’s just about hope. We are powerless against the weather. There’s a surrender inherent in the process, in which each household yields to the reality that it has prepared as much as it can.

Transportation stops, power is lost or at least feared to be unreliable, and there we might see our similarities to the man of yesteryear, who we are too quick to dismiss as lesser for his technological inferiority. In a moment just as helpless, we stand beside him.

Contemporary culture is so eager to separate us from him that it invents a “modern man” who supposedly needs different things. It is at least implicitly asserted that he must have a different essence that requires new architecture, music, and liturgy. This “modern man” is a largely unknown and little understood beast, except that he can only be fed or entertained by that which is novel. The things of the past, that time of mediocrity (on this account), cannot possibly uplift the new man.

But it’s a lie. This falsehood causes us to fail to see what has been handed on to us by past generations, to understand the debt that we have to our posterity, and to be connected with other generations by our common destination. It is in that natural connectedness that we might be better prepared for storms of all varieties, and weather them with virtue. Simply by being aware of similar battles overcome by others throughout history, we are bolstered in our own resolve. When we are isolated by the posited notion of uniqueness in struggle and in nature, we are made unnecessarily vulnerable.

What fed and sustained the souls of past generations can nourish ours today, if only we stop pretending that technological advancement is akin to interior growth; a civilization without virtue scarcely deserves the name. Our access to technology does not make us morally superior, and we are not interiorly nourished in ways disparate from those of history. Knowing that, we ought to seek out and protect the art and liturgy that sustained the men of antiquity, for our souls are not so different.

After the storm ceases and the snow on the ground shines its reflective light, there’s a kind of unmatched peace that can only exist at the end of a fulfilled hope. That’s what our forebears felt too.

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I read Lauren Southern’s book, This is Not Real Life, with much interest. In it, she chronicles the behind-the-scenes experiences that she had in the populist right movement. Those who have been watching from the outside world should be familiar with the characters: Ezra Levant, Milo Yiannopoulos, Caolan Robertson and George Llewelyn-John, Tommy Robinson, and even Andrew Tate.

I love memoirs and autobiographies, but I’ve often been mindful of the warning that if you don’t dislike the author by the end of one, then it wasn’t honest. I never developed a dislike of Lauren in reading her book, but it’s clear that she did. Her pages bleed with regret at how she handled both small and large events in her history.

Somehow, her past seems more like our past than a merely solitary adventure. The Right, to use a broad term, has been through a series of identity crises over the past 20 years—phases, if you will, as it tries to define itself by something other than the rejection of the latest propulsion toward lunacy.

We cheered when Milo went on the Dangerous Faggot Tour, warning about the perils of Islam and the need to defend the West while wearing a tight black leather outfit and bragging about his homosexual exploits. Should we? Or perhaps you remember when Gavin McInnes shoved an object up his rectum on camera in between lectures about the family unit, presumably for view counts. It didn’t seem to hurt his brand. It wasn’t merely that these figures behaved grotesquely; it was that we rewarded them for it.

Broadly, what happened throughout the populist right on camera was shadowed off-camera by even worse exploits. “Conservatism” had become a money-making brand, and it was much more interested in being outrageous (in a different way from the Left) than it was about being good.

In many ways, Lauren’s exposé therefore shouldn’t surprise us. But what it does show is the level of impact on those media figures themselves. They are affected physiologically and psychologically by the rapid pace of fame in the modern world. The effect of having a video reach 2 million views overnight, with tens of thousands of comments from strangers, will forever be unknown to most of us. But it’s not healthy, and we certainly were not made for that kind of adulation (or even criticism). Thus, anyone who meaningfully enters that world gets addicted to adrenaline and dopamine, and they chase the same audience recognition with every new production. They lose themselves in the entertainment, and they become a type of product that the populace demands more of. Because they are dehumanized as commodities, audience members become livid when the product doesn’t act as expected, such as when J.K. Rowling released books in a different genre (even though she used a pseudonym).

As members of the mob act like deranged puppeteers and the performer is reduced to a commodity who is addicted to the attention, few stop to wonder what is conservative about it all. Or even, what’s human about it?

Politics on the right has settled down a little, perhaps because so many of its heroes have been sullied, or simply because of who the President is this term. Whatever the reason, we would do well to take the quieter season to reflect on what makes a movement good, rather than merely entertaining. If behind the scenes, there are deviant parties with rampant drug use, the end result can only be dire. An outcome will reflect its production.

In more recent years, performers have been rewarded for making the most outrageous statements, regardless of truth or decency. Tucker Carlson has given a platform to Andrew Tate (after he was credibly accused of rape and human trafficking) and Nick Fuentes (after he said that rape wasn’t a big deal and defended a variety of dictators). Before the next political fever unfolds, we ought to consider what we encourage, and the cost of reducing people into spectacles before watching their predictable implosion.

If we can center our dreams for a civilization on Christ—not as a token, slogan, or figurehead, but as a person, then perhaps we can build a civilization that prizes those He came to redeem.

Lauren’s sins and regrets are not unique, but the twins of repentance and forgiveness make our faith stand apart. It’s something that sounds good on paper, especially when it applies to us, but hurts in practice, when it’s time for us to forgive as we’ve been forgiven. Without this ethos, this centering on Christ, we will merely switch out one deranged, morally unscrupulous group for another, such that we fail even in victory.

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Psst. If you enjoyed this, you can read more of my book reviews.

You’ve surely heard the quip, “Make a plan, God laughs.” We do it anyway, of course, for we cannot simply drift, which must be the opposite of the attempt to follow a plan. Yet, if we look back upon our lives, we can see how many times our expectations failed to materialize, and we were derailed by the unforeseen.

When I was an adolescent at my grandmother’s house, a repairman from the government came to fix the gas meter. I followed him around and watched him work, out of a mix of curiosity and boredom. He asked me the only question anyone knows to ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A lawyer,” I grinned.

“Then don’t aim to be a lawyer now. Aim to be anything else. Nobody ever becomes what they wanted to be as a kid.”

He seemed to believe that we could achieve our dreams by failing to name them. But that only tempers disappointment. It hurts less to miss a target that you didn’t aim for.

Most of us try not only to plot our next move, but every move thereafter. We struggle over the plans of our lives like we’re sitting over a chess board, guessing at our opponent’s moves when we make ours. But there’s a difference: in chess, that works. There are limited options each turn. You have only one opponent, and if you’ve played against him before, you might even know how his personality influences his playing style and the choices he makes.

Life isn’t like that. We can’t see all of the potential moves, or even the pieces that are on the board. We don’t own the board, nor can we guess at its breadth. More importantly, we don’t have to.

In chess, there is no God. In the real world, we are given the graces to handle the battles of today, but not the imaginary ones of tomorrow. We find God with us in the present, not in the mythical futures that we can create. Our attempts to plot the future can make us forget that God will be in the hereafter too — not yet, but when we arrive.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “I don’t think I could go through that” — know that it’s because they didn’t have to. It wasn’t their cross to bear. But had it been, they would have been granted the graces they needed. That doesn’t mean that life never feels impossibly difficult, but it does mean that we’re not alone, and therefore that it’s not impossible at all.

I remember when I broke both my arms in a car accident a few years ago, people seemed befuddled anytime I smiled. I would never choose that experience, and there were frustrations and griefs galore, but there were some true joys too. I learned a new way to pray during those months, and I discovered people who would show up for me in my weakest moments. I wrote about it in more detail for National Catholic Register, but the point is that we cannot see from the outside of a dark situation what light is within it.

When we wrestle against potential futures that seem impossible to face, we invent godless chessboards that provide cause for constant turmoil and never peace, because there’s always another possibility to contemplate. And despite all of it, what we think will happen will most likely be wrong.

In all of it, cooperation with grace is a choice, and a choice that we make in the present. We co-operate by choosing to do the right thing when something else is easier. And sometimes, simply by choosing to see and focus on the good even when brokenness and pain are louder. Regardless, there’s no darkness that His light can’t reach.

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This essay was published at Crisis Magazine and can be read in full there, at no cost. (FYI: This article will be of most interest to Catholics.)

One of the measures of the success of a diocese is the number of its seminarians because they reflect a spiritual ecology. If young people are not willing to give their lives in service to God when they hear the call, then either they are not listening for it or their environment represents an obstacle. But how ought we respond when a diocese actively sabotages what was working?

The vocations initiative in the Diocese of Charlotte has been thriving for well over a decade. Under the former bishop (Bishop Jugis), dozens of young men entered the minor seminary that was built in Belmont, North Carolina. The young men who entered provided their stories in publicly available videos or via miniature biographies in the diocesan newspaper. Each young man explained how he heard the call to the priesthood, when he knew, what his family was like, etc.

Keep reading at Crisis Magazine (freely).

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This article was published in full at Catholic World Report. It may be found in full (freely) there. The introduction follows:

There is a growing ideological trend that seeks to deprive those broadly considered as being “on the right” of any and all rights, through dehumanization and the systematic exclusion from key institutions.

Most of us expect such an attitude among young college students, who have limited life experience and have not yet met the human beings with whom they disagree and about whose lives they are so cavalier. But this ideological malice is far more pervasive than that. No longer seen as extreme, we live among those who maintain a sort of nonchalant malevolence. Those who have redefined speech as violence need little help in the justification of retribution against their enemies.

I lived this reality in a small way when I was made a victim of a minor crime in an American city.

Keep reading (freely) at Catholic World Report.

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