The highly suspicious nature of the Second Vatican Council and the rise of Pope John XXIII was one of the central topics in that article. While my original article provided an overview of some of these points, I have since conducted additional research and expanded on these discoveries with a book entitled Vatican Coup: Blackmail and Espionage in the Catholic Church, published early this year.

Since the book is nearly 300 pages, I figured it would helpful to summarize some of the key facts on this substack, so that readers can more easily make others aware of this information. This first article will cover the hidden history of Vatican II, and in future articles we will examine the death of John Paul I, the papacy of John Paul II, and the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.

Key Fact #1: Israel’s Motive

To some extent, Israel’s motive for reversing the Catholic Church’s opposition to organized Jewry should be self-explanatory. While most are familiar with the historic hostility between the Church and Jewry, I would guess that far fewer are familiar with some of the more direct conflicts between the Church and the State of Israel in the years preceding Vatican II.

Dr. Amnon Ramon, a Senior Researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, details how the Catholic Church led the effort to deny Israel sovereignty over Jerusalem:

The most important act of the Holy See was drafting its own diplomatic corps, and that of the entire Catholic world to approve the resolution on internationalization of Jerusalem in the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1949.

The resolution on internationalization was approved, as is well known, by an exceptional coalition, including countries considered “Catholic,”the countries of the Communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, and the Arab and Muslim states. In the eyes of the leaders of Israel it was the Vatican that was the central factor in creating this “unholy” alliance.

On December 13, 1949, Ben-Gurion claimed in a Knesset debate that “the power of world Catholicism, which for very many years had not displayed the power it revealed on this occasion, [drafted] about 30 nations throughout the world, and it is evident that this resulted only from its pressure since there are states that changed their mind in the course of the day.” He predicted that the decision to make Jerusalem the capital “will be used as a weapon by the Vatican” because “they have an old account with the Jews for two thousand years.“

The words of Sharet and Ben-Gurion reflect the depth of historical residue felt by the Israeli leadership towards the Catholic Church and the Vatican. Many of the decision makers in Israel attributed to the Vatican nearly unlimited powers, and they seem to have brought this image from their Eastern European upbringing. The Vatican was considered in Israel a central force on the world scene, seeking – together with the United Nations, the Arab states and the entire international community – to make Israel give up its control over Jerusalem and withdraw from much of the territory it captured in the 1948 war.

In other words, Ben-Gurion saw the Church as leading the substantial international pressure against Israel at the time. The UN at the time only had 59 nations, so the Church’s ability to rally 30 of them meant that the Church could use more than half of the UN to squeeze Israel.

Although Israel regularly ignores UN resolutions today, this was not a trivial matter in 1949, when Israel had just been officially recognized and was heavily dependent on international support for its existence. The flipping of the Church’s position meant that the largest institutional opposition to Israel in the West disappeared.

Key Fact #2: John XXIII’s History with Israeli Officials

To try to rectify the dilemma with the Church, Ramon discusses how Israel dispatched a diplomat named Maurice Fisher to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pius XII.

Another initiative was the decision to dispatch to the Vatican in early 1957 Maurice Fisher, one of the notable early diplomats in the Israeli foreign service, who was well- versed in Christian affairs ever since his stint as an officer in the Free French army in Lebanon during World War II. On January 1957, Fisher departed, full of good will, for a six-week mission to Rome, in order to try to establish the first direct ties with the Vatican.

Fisher happened to have close ties with Cardinal Roncalli (future Pope John XXIII) stretching back more than ten years. At this time, Roncalli was not thought to be a serious contender for pope.

The first buds of change appeared only upon the death of Pius XII in October 1958. The election of the new pope, John XXIII, who was thought to be more favorably inclined towards the Jewish people and Israel and who had close ties with Maurice Fisher from their days of service together in Paris…

If Fisher was meeting with Roncalli during this visit, it would not be the first time that Roncalli had been used as Israel’s main emissary in the Vatican. Roncalli also met with Moshe Sneh and helped arrange a meeting between Sneh and the Vatican secretary of state. Moshe Sneh was a former commander for the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization that was engaging in large-scale terrorism against the British in Palestine. Per The Jerusalem Post:

In 1947, following a request from Father Alexandre Glasberg, Roncalli met Dr. Moshe Sneh. This story was told to me by former minister Yair Zaban, who served as personal assistant to Dr. Sneh in those days.

Moshe Shertok (Sharett) asked Sneh to go to the Vatican and convince its leaders not to interfere in the stance of many Latin American countries (deeply influenced by the Church) that otherwise were inclined to vote for the partition of Palestine in the UN, thus paving the way for the establishment of the Jewish state.

Roncalli succeeded in arranging a meeting for Dr. Sneh in Rome with then-secretary of state Domenico Tardini. Roncalli even traveled to Rome to be close to the scene.

Key Fact #3: John XXIII’s History with Israeli Intelligence

Roncalli’s history with Israel was even more extensive and suspicious than his history with its diplomats. During WWII, Roncalli was in Istanbul, and he worked with Zionist agents to organize the immigration of Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. Slate magazine summarizes:

That was where Hirschmann came to rely on Roncalli. In a series of exchanges that summer, the War Refugee Board – working alongside the Jewish Agency, a network of underground agents tied to the Jewish authorities in Palestine – made arrangements to transfer packets of immigration certificates to Roncalli, who then forwarded them via church networks to Jewish communities in Hungary.

One of the main Zionist agents behind this effort was Teddy Kollek. Kollek was appointed as the deputy head of intelligence for Jewish Agency in 1942 and served throughout the war. It would be difficult to find a figure more deeply embedded in Israeli espionage efforts than Kollek, who was described by Haaretz as one of the “founders of the Israeli intelligence community.” The same article discusses how Kollek also helped establish formal connections between the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. Kollek would later reflect on how he “commiserated” with Roncalli.

Chaim Barlas, the chief Jewish delegate from Palestine, wrote that Roncalli cried when told about what was happening to Jews. He said, ”I am going to fast and to pray for the people and our people”. Teddy Kollek, a delegate from Palestine in Istanbul during the darkest years of the Holocaust who for three decades was mayor of Jerusalem recalled : ”He commiserated together with us. He wasn’t able to do very much. But what he could, he did”.

Key Fact #4: Cardinal Spellman Conquers the Vatican

Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York from 1939-1967, became one of the most powerful and influential members of the Church in the time shortly before Vatican II. Spellman was the leading Catholic representative of the nation that provided more donations to the Vatican than the next twelve combined, and he was well aware of the power this afforded him. John Cooney’s biography of Spellman, entitled The American Pope, documents how even Pope Pius XII became powerless in the face of Spellman’s financial heft:1

In Rome churchmen frantically wondered what had gone wrong. How could a mission that was expected to be upgraded wind up being demolished? They blamed Spellman. Suddenly, it became clear that the Cardinal hadn’t pushed the cause dynamically. Knowing Spellman, the Pope understood the American had some hidden motive for sitting on his hands, and Pius was furious. What further infuriated the Pope was that there was little he could do to strike back. What became clear to him was how much he relied upon Spellman for just about everything – money, political influence, the anti-Communist crusade – even the floor waxers used at the Vatican came from Spellman. Everywhere Pius looked, Spellman was the axle around which many Church wheels spun.

Unfortunately for the Church, Cardinal Spellman was a practicing homosexual who was almost certainly being blackmailed. Cooney reports how “Numerous priests and others interviewed took his homosexuality for granted.”2 Two of the men Cooney interviewed even claimed to have had sexual intercourse with Spellman.

Spellman did not make much effort to hide his illicit activities. One of Spellman’s friends for more than 25 years was Lewis Rosenstiel, a man who was Epstein before Epstein. According to Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Rosenstiel, her husband hosted parties including boy prostitutes, and set up hidden microphones around his apartment during these parties, for the sake of obtaining priceless blackmail.3 Famed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was subjected to this blackmail, and it was at Rosenstiel’s place that Hoover met Cardinal Spellman.4

Susan Rosenstiel’s testimony under oath was considered credible and praised by the former chief counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and committee investigator William Gallinaro, and critical aspects of her testimony were later backed up by another two witnesses who had not heard Rosenstiel’s story.5 Shockingly, Mrs. Rosenstiel also claimed that Roy Cohn, a frequent guest at the parties and a fellow blackmail merchant, would openly take pleasure in telling her about the sexual proclivities of Cardinal Spellman.6

The question of whether Spellman was subject to blackmail seems beyond doubt, the only question would be who ended up holding the blackmail.

Since Hoover was at Rosenstiel’s parties7 and was also blackmailed, it’s logical to assume that whoever had blackmail on Hoover probably had blackmail on Spellman as well. There are two people who we know had blackmail on Hoover. There’s the Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky8 and the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Angleton.9

Lansky was a friend of Rosenstiel and an Israeli partisan, helping to illegally smuggle weapons to Zionist militants. Interestingly, it was Teddy Kollek who was helping to organize the smuggling of weapons from Jewish gangsters like Lansky.

James Angleton was someone who was so close to Mossad that he was widely suspected of being co-opted and completely loyal to them. Angleton’s biographer, Tom Mangold, stated: “I would like to place on the record, however, that Angleton’s closest professional friends overseas, then and subsequently, came from the Mossad and that he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.”10

Given that Spellman’s blackmail was likely held by two Israeli loyalists, it should be unsurprising that Spellman would frequently deploy his influence in service of Israel. When Israel needed the support of Latin American countries to be accepted into the United Nations, Spellman conducted a bonanza of phone calls to Latin American officials and delegates, asking all of them to support Israel. Spellman had extensive connections with the Latin American U.N. Delegates through his position in the Church and given that these nations made up roughly a third of the U.N., his support may have well been decisive in helping Israel clear the required two-thirds threshold. Future Israeli U.N. Ambassador Moshe Tov reported that Latin American cardinals had a sudden change of heart and began to look favorably on the Israeli cause.11

Key Fact #5: John XXIII’s History with Cardinal Spellman

Cardinal Roncalli was an obscure figure and it seems hard to believe that he rose to the papacy without any powerful supporters or allies within the Vatican. Given that Spellman dutifully served Israel and Roncalli was deeply entwined with Israeli intelligence, it seems that Spellman would be the logical one to suspect as Roncalli’s benefactor.

It turns out that these suspicions are very well supported. Spellman knew Roncalli stretching back to the 1920’s when they were together in Rome.12 Shockingly, Spellman was even sending money to Roncalli for unclear reasons. Vatican journalist and Oxford Professor Peter Hebblethwaite stated in his book, John XXIII: Pope of the Council, that Spellman was in fact an old friend of Roncalli’s, and that Spellman “kept Roncalli supplied with Mass stipends during the depression years.“13

Spellman ended up involved in Roncalli’s efforts to evacuate Jews from Europe during WWII. While in Istanbul, Chaim Barlas brought a report to Roncalli claiming the mass killing of Jews was occurring. Then “two days later, Cardinal Francis Spellman passed through Istanbul on his way home to New York. Roncalli instructed Barlas to write a letter describing the desperate situation, which he would give to Spellman… Roncalli prepared Spellman for the shocking news and arranged a meeting with Barlas.“

Spellman’s fingerprints appear all over Roncalli’s career. Not only was he sending him money in the 30’s, but he seems to have been involved in Roncalli’s “big break.” This occurred due to a conflict between Charles de Gaulle and Pius XII, where Pius XII chose Spellman to negotiate with de Gaulle. After the conflict, Pius XII decided to punish de Gaulle by devaluing the position of ambassador to Paris, which had traditionally been an elite appointment. He did this by appointing Roncalli to this position, someone who Pius XII and Spellman both found to be ridiculous.14 It seems more likely that this idea came from the mind of Spellman rather than Pius XII, and this elite position became the springboard for Roncalli’s career.

Istanbul wasn’t the last time Spellman and Roncalli saw each other. There’s indication that Spellman was prepared quite early to push Roncalli as a candidate for the papacy. In February 1954, Pius XII came down with a dangerous illness which appeared to put him on the verge of death. Robert A. Ventresca, author of Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII, notes that

…in February 1954, the pope fell gravely ill. Muench recorded in his diary that those with access to the papal court were preparing for Pacelli’s imminent death. The pope was said to be in a fragile state. Weeks without solid food had left the gaunt Pacelli emaciated. Discreetly, Muench prepared the draft of an obituary for the news agencies.15

Just three months later, Spellman met Roncalli again for the first time in years. This was in Venice for the feast of the Ascension.16 Pius XII would end up recovering and survived until 1958, but it is certainly interesting timing that Spellman and Roncalli chose to meet at a time when the next papal conclave appeared to be imminent.

Key Fact #6: James Angleton Penetrates the Vatican

Earlier we discussed how CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton had acquired damaging photos of J. Edgar Hoover, and likely Cardinal Spellman as well. We also discussed how Angleton was an Israeli loyalist, and a Wall Street Journal article published shortly after his death illustrates that:

• “Mr. Angleton, who died of cancer May 11 at age 69, almost single-handedly ran the Israeli account” at the CIA until 1974.”

• “During his many years on the job, Mr. Angleton was instrumental in dramatically strengthening U.S.- Israeli intelligence cooperation in a host of areas.”

• “Mr. Angleton’s counterparts at the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service, were deeply disappointed when Mr. Angleton retired, and suspected that Mr. Angleton’s extraordinarily close connection to the Mossad was one reason Mr. Colby wanted him out.”

• “But even after retiring, Mr. Angleton retained his personal ties to some of Israel’s best intelligence agents. They often visited him at his suburban Virginia home and dined with him at local Chinese restaurants. ”

Angleton’s influence in the Vatican wasn’t just limited to Cardinal Spellman, however. Angleton was head of the OSS in Rome after WWII. Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas reports how Angleton claimed he was welcomed into the Vatican “with open arms,” and it states he was “given full access to the Vatican’s unparalleled information gathering service through Italy.”17 Information assessed by the Vatican was immediately passed to Angleton,18 and he held control over America’s intelligence relationship with the Vatican even into the 1960’s.19

According to former CIA station chief William Eveland, Angleton also arranged an intelligence exchange agreement with the Israeli Mossad.20 This agreement gave Angleton access to Israel’s considerable intelligence on the Arab States, which the CIA came to rely on, as well as intelligence from the many new immigrants that had come to Israel from the USSR. It can be presumed that in exchange for this valuable information, Israel was allowed access to the intelligence at Angleton’s disposal. One unfortunate mistake by Pius XII therefore essentially gave the Israeli Mossad access to the Vatican’s entire intelligence apparatus.

John XXIII and Angleton also happened to work with some of the exact same Jewish spies. As an example, Angleton also worked with the Jewish underground during WWII, and one of his contacts there was Teddy Kollek, who became a “close personal friend.”21

Remarkably, the signs of Angleton’s influence do not end there. Pope Paul VI, then Cardinal Montini, was in fact Angleton’s first direct source in the Vatican, and their relationship went back to the spring of 1945. According to Cloak and Gown by Yale Professor Robin Winks, Angleton in 1945 “had been cultivating his source directly within the Vatican – later identified as Giovanni Battista Montini, then a Bishop and under secretary of state at the Vatican and later Pope Paul VI.”22

The Washington Post editor Jefferson Morley expanded on this in his 2017 book The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton. He describes how well-placed Americans in Italy were quietly discussing how “young Jim Angleton had great sources in the Vatican. Some went so far as to say he was meeting on a weekly basis with Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the Vatican’s undersecretary of state for Italian affairs.”

Whether the meetings were as frequent as weekly or not, they were definitely regular, and Morley highlights an example of the close relationship between the two. According to Officer William Gowen, shortly after the war, US officials were looking for a number of Croatians who were believed to be carrying stolen goods. After some investigating, Gowen and others came to believe that Montini was sheltering them at a seminary nearby the Vatican. Montini complained to Angleton though, and soon after an order came in from one of Angleton’s allies at the US embassy which commanded the investigators to stand down.23

Key Fact #7: Spellman and Paul VI

Cardinal Spellman was deeply involved behind the scenes in the elevation of Cardinal Montini to pope. This was a puzzling move, considering Montini was disliked by both Spellman himself and the CIA (with whom Spellman had close contact)24 for being insufficiently anti-communist. Nevertheless, Spellman committed both his own vote and that of his protégé McIntyre, resulting in Spellman heading up a united front for the American cardinals, given that the rest were already supportive of Montini. Cooney describes the situation:

When Spellman approached Montini the candidate was in a receptive mood. When the Cardinal emerged from a closed-door meeting with the candidate, they had reached some sort of agreement… In Spellman, Montini knew he was actually getting two votes. McIntyre was bound to vote the way his mentor told him.25

The Big Picture

It has become somewhat well-known recently that Israel and James Angleton were likely behind the assassination of President Kennedy. It has also become well-known that Israel uses blackmail to infiltrate institutions of power. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find Israel behind the elevation of John XXIII and Paul VI, who forced through the Second Vatican Council, and reversed the Church’s long standing antipathy towards the Israeli state.

It looks like Mossad founder Teddy Kollek and his friend James Angleton acquired blackmail on Cardinal Spellman. They then used Spellman’s influence to push their ally Roncalli into the Papal Throne, and then pushed Montini in after him. Holding the papacy for 20 years allowed Kollek and Angleton to conjure up Vatican II and neutralize any potential threat from the Vatican towards the State of Israel.

Archived Links

Roncalli and Sneh

Roncalli Working With Jewish Agency

Kollek in Istanbul

Roncalli and Kollek

Hoover and Angleton

Kollek and Lansky

I never saw La La Land when it first came out. It didn’t seem like a movie I would find appealing, and I had never been especially fond of musicals. Musicals at the time were represented by low-quality propaganda like Hamilton, and I was furious that Vice President Pence went to see Hamilton and allowed himself to be berated by the cast in the process. I probably mentally filed La La Land into a similar box, and I was only vaguely aware of it due to strange mishap at the Academy Awards, where the film appeared to win Best Picture but then the entire cast and crew were ordered off the stage and it turned out that a movie about black homosexuals had won instead.

Although I sympathized with those behind La La Land after that cringe-worthy incident, I still never made the effort to watch it. Occasionally though, I would see Nick Fuentes praise the film, and I always assumed this was just an example of his eccentricity. In one particularly emphatic recent clip, he castigated a hater of the movie, describing them as a gym-shorts wearing philistine who belonged at Buffalo Wild Wings.

This clip finally persuaded me to give it a chance, and I was very pleasantly surprised. I’d say it was probably the best film I’ve seen from the past ten or maybe even twenty years. Part of the reason it was so good is that it’s simultaneously lofty and idealistic, while also being realistic.

In La La Land, Damien Chazelle portrays what should be a storybook romance. Two dreamers, Sebastian and Mia, meet in the City of Angels and bond over their shared aspirations. At the same time though, they also struggle to balance their goals and their relationship. I thought that the authenticity of their relationship and its difficulties provided many insights into modern culture and society.

It would probably be inaccurate to call La La Land “right-wing art” though, as one of the commenters on that clip did.

Neither the actors, the characters they’re portraying, nor Chazelle himself seem to be especially politically active. If they have any strong political opinions, they probably lean liberal given their surroundings. If Sebastian and Mia were real, they probably would as well.

Isle Groyper is on to something though. In certain ways, La La Land does appear somewhat right-wing, but it’s probably not because anyone involved in its production was right-wing. It appears right-wing because the people who made it are genuine artists, and therefore have enough integrity to depict modern relationships as they are, rather than through the lens of low-effort wish fulfillment that is so often seen in Hollywood. When it comes to relationships, reality may just have a right-wing bias.

What this bias is though is not something that would generally be recognized as right-wing. Marriages among conservatives aren’t all that much less likely to fail than those among liberals, and it’s clear that modern conservatives suffer from many of the same problems that Sebastian and Mia do in La La Land. I suspect the reason for this is that Sebastian and Mia’s story reflects the consequences of the sexual revolution in many ways, and most modern conservatives have participated in that revolution as well. As with the struggle against interracial marriage and gay marriage, conservatives long ago waved the white flag in the battle over sexual morality.

La La Land is the story of Mia and Sebastian, but their story only covers a year or two of their lives. Most of Mia’s life will be spent with her unnamed husband, who is apparently completely unaware that he’s only participating in her epilogue. The ending of the movie, where Mia dreams of what her life could have been with Sebastian, shows that her husband has been emotionally cuckolded. It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where he could also end up being literally cuckolded.

Obviously, the film isn’t about Mia’s relationship with her eventual husband. This isn’t a problem with the film, but it is a problem with our culture. One can only imagine how many married Mia’s there are in our country, where the movie of their lives stars a man entirely different from the one they’re married to. Does anyone imagine that would be conducive to marital stability?

Everyone was hoping that Mia and Sebastian would get married while watching the film. It’s clear at the end that Mia herself would have preferred this outcome, and it seems that her dream is an empty one without Sebastian in it. Chazelle chose to make the viewer feel this pain and think about it too, rather than gratifying our desires.

This is a tragic ending in many ways for Mia, who is fictional, but it’s also something that countless real people deal with as well. The fact that people form such strong bonds with those who are not their eventual spouse has led to many experiencing such bittersweet endings in their lives, frequently punctuated with a divorce. We should ask ourselves how this situation could have been prevented when we’re thinking about what kind of relationships our society should encourage.

Contrary to what some have said, Sebastian and Mia clearly did not love each other so much that they let each other go, so that the other person could fulfill their dreams. They had already split up before Mia was given her opportunity. Even after they reconcile, their relationship is still ambiguous. The point of the idealized clip show at the end is to illustrate that things needed to be different throughout their entire relationship.

The running tension throughout their relationship comes from the fact that the relationship is subordinate to their other priorities. When they have their fight about whether they will jointly leave for Boise or not, there is no expectation that they have to remain together. There’s the option of them both going to Boise and the option of them both staying in Los Angeles, but there’s also the tempting third option of separating. Since there’s an available exit door, their bond is fragile, and there is no necessity for them to compromise or find a solution.

What is the end result of this arrangement? A bond that should have been eternal is now severed because of temporary concerns. The bond remains imprinted on Mia and Sebastian forever, leading to regrets once the temporary concerns have passed. It also implants them with an invisible time bomb, ready to destroy any future relationship they may have, as they maintain a dual loyalty between their current spouse and the memory of their past love.

The best way to guarantee that this doesn’t happen is to ensure that the bond is either formed with no possible exit door or that it’s not formed at all. If the two people don’t feel strongly enough about each other to make a lifetime commitment, then nothing of value is lost from the bond being aborted, and they should refrain from sexual relations so that they don’t get anymore deeply involved with each other.

If they do feel strongly enough about each other to make a lifetime commitment, then they should get married and the legal and social consequences of divorce will help minimize the possibility of the bond being broken.

If Mia and Sebastian had been unable to have sexual relations before marriage, then they most likely would have gotten married, since they obviously felt very strongly for each other. If they had gotten married, then their relationship would have come first and they probably could have figured out a compromise with the Boise situation. This would have prevented the severing of a deep and beautiful relationship, and also protected Mia’s nameless husband from marrying into a trap.

In La La Land, Damien Chazelle depicts a romance that is sadly left at “it could have been.” Richard Linklater took a similar but somewhat different path though more than two decades earlier, examining the relationship that does stick. In Before Sunrise (1995), Linklater examines the epitome of a fairy-tale romance, and then revisits it 9 years later in Before Sunset, and then revisits it again after another 9 years in Before Midnight.

As with our protagonists in La La Land, Jesse and Céline in the Before trilogy bear the marks of their time. Jesse had come to Europe for the sake of meeting up with his girlfriend in Madrid, only to find out that she had developed some “friendships” with the local men. With his spirit broken, Jesse decides to ride Europe’s rails for a couple weeks to reflect and then to catch a cheap flight out of Vienna. Céline is also coming off a failed relationship, where she became obsessed with a deadbeat who broke up with her. Following this, she insinuated to her therapist that she may kill him. Céline leaves her native France to study in Vienna, and it’s on the train to Vienna that she meets Jesse.

Linklater is known for making films about disillusioned youth, and is thus skilled at capturing the feelings of the generation that was too young to live through the sexual revolution, but is living in a world where it’s normalized.

Céline’s parents were radicals, enthusiastic participants in France’s May ‘68 protests. According to Céline, they have a happy marriage and are supportive of her, perhaps overly so. In a form of measured rebellion, Céline puts on the appearance of a cynic, and doubts whether people can be happy with each other in the long term. She does retain her parents feminist views though.

However, as she opens up to Jesse, Céline remarks with a hint of bitterness that she sometimes has paranoid thoughts that feminism was invented by men so as to make it easier to use women sexually. Near the end of the film, Céline reveals that her cynical comments about lasting love are insincere, and that she really dreams of love and thinks that everything one does in life is a way to be loved more. She believes that she would love someone more the longer that she knew them, rather than less.

Jesse’s parents are divorced, although one gets the impression that they’re more conservative. Jesse’s mother revealed, in a fight with his father, that his father didn’t want him, and was angry when he learned she was pregnant. Because of this, Jesse believes that his life is wholly his own, and that he’s living even though he isn’t meant to be. Jesse frequently deploys lofty and romantic rhetoric about life, but candid moments tend to reveal that he’s the opposite of Céline, and is a cynic masquerading as a romantic. Jesse ridicules a street poet and a fortune teller as obvious charlatans, and he divulges near the end of the film that he has little interest in love, but instead wants to be known for excellence in something.

So, we have two people here, a man who has been pushed into cynicism by the divorce of his parents, and a woman who feels the need to mimic the rebelliousness and feminism of her parents, despite feeling natural opposition to it in many ways. Both of them have parents who have ill-equipped them for finding love, but they manage to do so anyway.

At the end of the film, they are on the verge of sleeping with each other, but Céline tells Jesse that she doesn’t want to because she knows she’ll never see him again. She says that if she sleeps with him, she’ll wonder who else he’s with and miss him, possibly forever. This passing thought is banished though, and she embraces him. The next morning, Jesse has to return to America and the two plan to meet at the same train station six months later.

After a 9 year hiatus, Linklater released a sequel, Before Sunset. It begins with the melancholy reveal that Jesse and Céline never reunited, because Céline felt it was more important to attend her grandmother’s funeral than to meet up when they had planned. Since they didn’t exchange contact information due to high-minded romanticism, they both disappeared into the void for each other, and have had a series of disappointing relationships with others since.

Céline’s feelings at the end of the first film have proven prescient, and she slowly reveals that she has not gotten over Jesse and vice-a-versa. In a moment of frustration, she reveals that she feels damaged and unable to fully recover every time a relationship of hers ends. She ends up missing even the most mundane things about a person after sleeping with them.

While it would be pleasing to think that Jesse and Céline have lost their ability to form other relationships because their own love is so transcendent, it’s unfortunately clear that the damage hasn’t been all in one direction. The other relationships that were formed and then broken have inflicted damage upon Jesse and Céline’s relationship as well. It’s obvious that Céline’s excuse of her grandmother’s funeral was not a satisfying one. It’s also obvious that Jesse feels that way, although he never says so explicitly, and it appears that Céline is aware of that as well. One is left wondering if there may be a deeper reason why Céline left Jesse alone at the train station.

In the third installment, Before Midnight, it becomes even clearer that there is disruption in their bond, and there are accusations of infidelity on both sides.

Without the broader societal context that we’ll discuss later in this article, it might seem confusing that such a lofty, almost metaphysically ideal love could suffer from such a lack of commitment in many ways. However, we may see Jesse and Céline as victims of a Cartesian-esque love, where soulmates attempt to bond without any regard for the extensive bodily damage that they’ve both incurred through the promiscuity of their time.

At one point in history, romantic love was hardly considered when forming marriages. It was believed that two people could be held together by biological necessity even if they never had an especially soulful bond. The version of marriage that is promoted today is almost the opposite, Cartesian in the sense that the people have been divorced from their bodies, and only the soul bond is considered important. If they’ve been in bed with one or ten or a hundred other people beforehand, we’re told it makes no difference since that’s a matter of the body and not the soul.

Of course, as Catholics we tend to favor Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of the unity of the body and the soul. The soul should not have to battle against biological damage like it does with Jesse and Céline, people are far better off if the soul can work in synthesis with the body.

For a parallel look on modern relationships, there is Atomised by Michel Houellebecq. If Linklater is portraying a world where soul bonds struggle against promiscuity, Houellebecq is portraying a world where promiscuity has smothered those bonds out altogether.

Houellebecq strips the veneer off of modern “dating” and portrays it as little more than a marketplace. The sexual market is a series of ruthless and frequently disgusting transactions.

On 14 December 1967 the government passed the Neuwirth Act on contraception at its first reading. Although not yet paid for by social security, the pill would now be freely available in pharmacies. It was this which offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution, which until then had been reserved for professionals, artists and senior management—and some small businessmen. It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.

The story follows two brothers, whose mother abandoned them for a hippie commune. They represent two archetypes that have resulted from this new sexual paradigm. As with owning a small business, one better be ready to compete constantly to remain viable in the marketplace, the only other option is to leave the marketplace altogether. Bruno has chosen the former path, whereas Michel has chosen the latter. Today, we would probably recognize Bruno as psychologically similar to an incel and Michel as a volcel. Bruno is a single-mindedly obsessed sexual hedonist, although he frequently fails in his pursuits, whereas Michel has no interest in it at all.

Many found Atomised to be appalling when it was first released, both cynical and sickeningly graphic. What Atomised highlights though is the impossibility of melding love with transaction.

At one point in the story, Bruno finds what finally seems like love in his highly sexualized world. He meets a woman named Christiane and they seem to be forming a genuine relationship that Bruno has never had in the past. But she has an accident and becomes paralyzed from the waist down. He offers to have her move in with him but he hesitates when she asks if he’s sure. He doesn’t call her and she commits suicide a few days later.

Bruno and Christiane represent the extreme end of promiscuity, whereas Sebastian/Mia and Jesse/Céline are on the “normal” end. The ominous cloud that hangs over those latter relationships though is that they lie on the road to Bruno.

La La Land, the Before trilogy, and Atomised give us three different looks into the consequences of the sexual revolution. There’s the soulmates who can never be, the soulmates who are but struggle in spite of it, and there’s the people who may no longer even be capable of romantic love.

The Real Divorce Rate

To bolster our case that the sexual revolution has destroyed relationships, we should probably examine the most obvious marker of a failed relationship: divorce. Before we dive into this topic, it’s probably useful to know how many people are actually getting divorced. There’s been talk recently about how the divorce rate has been declining, and the official statistics bear that out. An article on this topic concludes that around 40% of today’s marriages will end in divorce. This isn’t great, but it’s better than the 50% that we saw in the 70’s and 80’s.

However, this is misleading. The reason why is because the number of people getting married has declined as well, especially among the lower income and lesser educated. So, there’s fewer marriages ending in divorce, but this is mainly because the people who are most likely to get divorced are now refraining from marriage altogether. The remaining marriage pool leans towards the middle/upper classes who are more stable.

Detailed by year: https://www.infoplease.com/us/family-statistics/marriages-and-divorces-1900-2012
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/marriage-divorce/national-marriage-divorce-rates-00-23.pdf

A whopping 32% of 45-year old women and 42% of 35-year old women are now projected to have never been married by 2045. Once we factor in this enormous increase in women remaining unmarried throughout their child-bearing years, it’s quite likely that the portion of those who are in unstable unions has actually increased since the 70’s and 80’s.

Let’s use this information to try to craft an adjusted divorce rate, that gives us the percentage of women who end up without a lifelong partner.

The best way to account for the rise in unmarried women is by adding the percent of women who will remain unmarried at 40 to the percent of women getting divorced. To do so, I took the middle of the percentage of women who were still unmarried at 35 and 45 for a particular year and added that in for the year that they were 25. For example, 19% of 40 year old women were never married in 1995, and I added that to the divorce percentage for 1970.

The reason I did this is because 25 is a good age to approximate when a woman is making major life decisions, and therefore we can see how the environment of that time might have impacted whether she ended up married or not by 40.

For the remaining portion of women who did get married, I multiplied this by the divorce rate for that year and then added the result to the unmarried percentage that was already calculated. In total, this will give us a rough idea of what portion of young women at a given time ended up divorced or remained unmarried.

With that adjustment, here is the result:

As you can see, while there has been a substantial decline in the crude divorce rate, this effect vanishes after factoring in those who never marry. We in fact see that the adjusted rate is near a record high, having increased from around 55% in 1985 to around 60% by 2025.

In other words, a 25 year old woman looking for a lifelong spouse in 1910 was almost certain to find one. In 2025, she most likely will end up either divorced or unmarried.

The Cause of Rising Divorce

While the enormous rise in the divorce rate over the 20th century is universally acknowledged, the conventional narrative is that this doesn’t actually reflect any weakening in marital unions. What we are told instead is that many people in the past would have wanted to get divorced, but were unable to because of legal restrictions.

This legalistic argument doesn’t hold much water. It’s true that the passage of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970’s coincided with a major spike in the divorce rate, but as you can see from the graphs, divorce had been steadily increasing for nearly a century before 1970. The divorce rate had already more than quadrupled from 8% in 1900 to 33% before the beginning of the 70’s. Even though divorce cases in this time technically needed to prove “fault,” there were many ways for people to get around this.

Therefore, it’s very likely that the increase in the divorce rate does reflect a genuine weakening in marital unions. The 20th century was a time of upheaval, and there could have been many potential influences that drove the weakening. One of the most well known changes in relationships during this time though was the sexual revolution. As with divorce, premarital sex also gradually increased throughout the first half of the century, and then spiked shortly before a spike in the divorce rate followed.

As you can see, it was the upswing in premarital sex during the 60’s that preceded the plummeting marriage rates and surge in divorce that happened throughout the 70’s.

This measure of premarital sex may not be entirely perfect. It only measures whether a woman had premarital sex up until 19, and therefore the real number would be higher to account for those who did not have premarital sex until after 19, and this would greatly increase the percentage for later decades as the average marital age increased. Along with that, it also doesn’t capture the percent of women who had premarital sex, but only with their eventual spouse. Research shows that this is effectively the same as not having premarital sex at all. This would lower the number.

Let’s see if we can figure out the numbers for how many people had a nonspousal partner before marriage. To help with the aforementioned issues with Chart 5, Chart 6 shows us how many premarital partners women had for the decade that they were married in.

In this data, “1 partner” is presumed to be the woman’s eventual spouse.

This data helps us with 1975 onward, but it doesn’t go back as far as the first chart. However, the 1970’s had a similar marital age to earlier in the century, and half of the premarital sex in the 1970’s was only with the woman’s eventual spouse. We can presume that this ratio was similar before. Therefore, for the years before 1970, I divided the premarital rate in two to get an approximation for how many women had a nonspousal partner.

We should also factor in the nonspousal rates for men too, since research indicates that it predicts divorce for men the same as women. This is a little more difficult since we have less data, but we do know that around 27% of married men born before 1900 had a nonspousal partner and that this rose to 78% by the late 60’s. We can fill in the rest of the male numbers with approximations based on the trends for women.

Along with that, we should account for the fact that Chart 6 only looks at married women and doesn’t factor in women who never married. These will be counted as having had a nonspousal partner, given that’s it’s very rare for people to remain celibate past their 20’s. We will count these in the same way for the male data.

All together, I graphed this data to compare the trends in having had a nonspousal partner alongside the adjusted divorce rate.1

This methodology might not be perfect, but the general trend is unmistakable. A gradual increase throughout the first half of the 20th century, an enormous surge beginning in the early 60’s, and a leveling out later in the century. This ends up looking quite similar to our divorce chart, and graphing them together shows that:

It is true though that the rise in divorce after the 70’s is more muted than the rise in nonspousal partners. Most of the latter rise is a reflection of people marrying later, rather than a general increase in promiscuity. Older marriages tend to have lower divorce rates than younger ones, so it’s possible that this tailwind counteracted the headwind of having had a nonspousal partner.

It’s also possible that the damaging effect of nonspousal partners is reduced if spread out over a longer period of time. Someone who sleeps with three people at 19 and then gets married at 20 is probably going to be more damaged than someone who has slept with three people over ten years and then gets married at 28.

Another possibility is that there’s simply a ceiling on societal instability. Perhaps a portion of the population is stable enough, for genetic reasons or otherwise, that they can form stable unions regardless of the damage they’ve incurred.

Regardless though, the correlation is still clearly very significant. Obviously, not everyone who has sexual relations with more than one person is bound to end up divorced or unmarried. But if that were the case, the statistics wouldn’t look much different from what they actually are. This raises uncomfortable questions about whether many marriages are doomed before they even start.

A reasonable question though is whether what we’re seeing here is actually a result of causation or is just a coincidental correlation. Perhaps some hidden factor led to both a rise in promiscuity and a rise in divorce, without the promiscuity causing the divorces.

Various academics have asked exactly that question when examining the correlation between premarital sex and divorce. Prof. Jay Teachman conducted a study that accounted for many variables such as age, education, childhood conditions, race, religion, etc. He found that none of these factors could explain the correlation between having had a nonspousal partner and divorce. Having a nonspousal partner still more than doubled the odds of divorce.

A 2024 study from Prof. Nicholas Wolfinger examined a different data set, accounted for more variables, and came to the same conclusion:

Previous research pointed to a variety of individual and social variables to explain the relationship between premarital sex and divorce, including nontraditional views on sex and marriage, weaker religious attachments, and lower-quality family relationships (Kahn & London, 1991; Paik, 2011). We find no support for these explanations, and show that the effect of premarital sex remains highly significant after accounting for a wide range of individual and social differences between respondents.

The connection that Wolfinger found was even stronger. Having had a nonspousal partner nearly tripled the odds of eventual divorce. Interestingly, Wolfinger also found that the effect increased as more partners were added. Those with 1-8 nonspousal partners had a 64% higher chance of divorce, but those with 9+ had a massive 220% higher chance of divorce.

Wolfinger states:

Taken together, these results suggest that the relationship between number of premarital partners and marital dissolution is nonlinear. They point rather to three tiers of divorce risk, with the lowest risk for those with no premarital, nonspousal partners, a modest increase for those with some, and a sharp increase for those with many. These results are more consistent with the notion that the effect of premarital sex on divorce becomes stronger, not weaker, as sexual partners accumulate.

The impact of casual sex therefore resembles many other addictions. Some of those who drink or smoke can do so in moderation, damaging their health but in a way that doesn’t become catastrophic. For those who lose control though, they can fall off an abyss that may be almost impossible to climb out of.

How Promiscuity Creates Divorce

Existing research strongly points to a causal link between promiscuity and divorce by ruling out other explanations for the correlation. However, little research has been done on the mechanics of how promiscuity causes divorce. Wolfinger mentions some of the existing theories:

Alternatively, the experience of premarital sex itself, especially with multiple partners, may contribute to the development of more permissive attitudes toward sex or a greater awareness of sexual alternatives, either of which may serve to undermine marital stability (Paik, 2011; Teachman, 2003).

Either of these explanations may have merit, but since the effect of promiscuity resembles an out of control addiction, I think it would be valuable to examine how other addictions do their damage.

A classic example is that of hard drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamine. It has long been known that drug addicts tend to have a crash after their drug expires, and then require a stronger dose the next time to get the same result. A recent study examined how this is because their dopamine receptors become gradually desensitized due to repeated overexposure.

Dopamine receptor desensitization occurs after repeated exposure to high dopamine levels. Receptors become less responsive to dopamine, requiring higher drug doses to produce the same effects. In response to desensitization, receptors like D2 are internalized, making signaling more difficult because fewer receptors remain on the plasma membrane [51, 52]. Consequently, D2 receptor function is inhibited, further impairing their autoreceptor activity.

While dopamine creates a feeling of pleasure, it’s oxytocin that enables pair-bonding. Oxytocin is released during sexual intercourse, childbirth, and breastfeeding. Biologically, this makes sense. One wants to bond with their child or someone who they may have a child with.

While this is well known, it’s less well known what the effect is of breaking one of these bonds, and how it may affect ones ability to form a new one. However, a study of Prairie voles was conducted to examine the brain chemistry behind depression after the loss of a loved one. Prairie voles were considered to be good test subjects since they are also monogamous and use oxytocin to pair-bond.

What the study found was that separation from a partner led to a crash in oxytocin that was difficult to recover from:

Finally, loss of a partner can be one of the most devastating experiences of a person’s lifetime and is associated with increased depression (Biondi and Picardi 1996; Watanabe et al. 2004; Zisook et al. 1994, 1997; Assareh et al. 2015). Prairie voles have been the first model organisms to provide insights into the neural mechanism associated with psychiatric phenotypes based on the loss of a partner. Our research has shown that partner loss increases CRF signaling in the brain, which leads to an impoverished oxytocin environment especially in the NAc; OTR in the NAc are reduced, as is the excitatory drive onto oxytocin neurons. Each of these processes reduces oxytocin tone, leading to an aversive state and eventually to passive coping behaviors reminiscent of bereavement. This system may play an adaptive role in the wild by serving to maintain pair bonds over a lifetime, but become maladaptive if reunion with the partner is not achievable.

Given that sexual intercourse creates an oxytocin glued pair-bond and that losing that bond probably creates an oxytocin crash, it should be unsurprising that “hookups” cause significant damage to mental health:

In addition to sexual regret, casual sex is associated with psychological distress, including anxiety and depression, as well as low self-esteem and reduced life satisfaction (Bersamin et al., 2014). Research specifically examining hooking up suggests that having engaged in a hookup (Fielder, Walsh, Carey, & Carey, 2014) and number of hookup partners (Grello, Welsh, & Harper, 2006) are related to greater symptoms of depression.

The question then is whether oxytocin receptors can be desensitized in the same way that dopamine receptors can. If a pair-bond is broken, will oxytocin production be inhibited the next time that pair bonding is attempted? Can these receptors be “fried” in the event that a large number of pair-bonds are formed and then broken?

More research into Prairie Voles suggests that the answer to both of these questions is likely, yes. In the wild, it is very rare for Prairie Voles to form a new pair-bond after the first one is broken, with less than 20% doing so. A study was conducted to see if this was an effect of having pair bonded in the past or for some other reason, such as a lack of available mates. The study concluded:

The results confirm field observations that availability of males is not a factor in the failure of female prairie voles to form a new pair following loss of their mate. This study concludes failure to form a new pair is associated with pair-bonding behavior.

It was especially obvious that a lack of males wasn’t the problem, because most of the widowed Prairie Voles continued to be sexually active, they just weren’t bonding with their new partners.

Those single females that do not acquire a new mate remain reproductive. They copulate with wandering males that do not move in with the female or share her home range.

This may be sounding familiar. In human society, a female engaging in this sort of behavior would historically be referred to as a whore. Once the female Prairie Vole loses her first pair-bond, her ability to form a new one appears significantly degraded and she essentially spends the rest of her life whoring.

The study doesn’t examine if this is related to a change in neurochemistry, but it’s obvious that Prairie Voles would not differ in abstract human values such as “attitudes towards sex” or “awareness of alternatives.” Since it’s the oxytocin that drives the Prairie Vole bonding in the first place, it seems very likely that its production is inhibited when they have intercourse with a new partner, explaining why they rarely form new bonds.

Of course, this all mirrors what we see in human beings, where the data shows that we struggle to form lasting bonds after having broken our first one. It shouldn’t be surprising that this problem grows worse the more times this is done, resembling a drug addiction. Given that oxytocin is frequently called the “love hormone,” it’s in the realm of possibility that those who are promiscuous could become biologically incapable of love. Various internet browsers have frequently pointed out that the promiscuous tend to get a glazed over look that resembles a “thousand yard stare.”

Whether these people could be rehabilitated, like a drug addict, is an open question.

A Grand Bargain with Feminists

Now we can feel relatively confident that having nonspousal partners is a primary cause of divorce, possibly the leading cause. The question is though, how do we stop it?

Christian conservatives have undertaken efforts for years to promote abstinence-only sexual education in schools so as to reduce premarital sex. These efforts have proven to be a dismal failure though, both ineffective and subject to general ridicule.

I suspect the primary reason for this is because these groups are generally hesitant to focus on the marriage-destroying impact of premarital sex, most likely because this would be seen as an attack on the married parents of many of their students. If little Billy were to come home and say “Mr. Smith told me that your marriage is doomed to fail!” then Mr. Smith would soon find himself in some hot water.

So, right-wing Christians have generally limited their focus to the fact that abstinence is the only guaranteed way to avoid STD’s and teen pregnancy.

The only problem with this argument is that common forms of contraception can reduce the risk of both of these things to near-zero. Liberal parents can therefore counter with saying that schools shouldn’t pretend that teenagers won’t have sex, and should instead just teach “safe-sex,” using these forms of contraception.

Christians have essentially no rebuttal to this, and so are usually forced to resort to a purely moral/religious argument against premarital sex. This is naturally unpersuasive to the vast majority of Americans who are unfortunately non-religious or lax in their religion. On top of that, this religious argument is frequently packaged with an insistence on teaching Young Earth Creationism, creating the perception that opponents of premarital sex are just motivated by blind dogmatism.

Let’s say we were to educate teenagers about the dangers to their future relationships coming from premarital sex. Would such a campaign actually be able to reduce such an alluring and addictive behavior?

History says it would. One example is the extremely effective campaign against smoking. At one point, roughly 50% of Americans smoked cigarettes. That number has now dwindled to around 10%, despite the highly addictive properties of nicotine. The effectiveness of this campaign can probably be credited to the coordinated, multi-step effort that originated from the highest levels of the federal government. A useful chart shows the various events along the way.

It appears that this was a multi-step process, roughly laid out below.

1. Surgeon General reports the damaging effects of smoking, beginning a government led-effort against smoking.

2. Advertisements for smoking are banned.

3. Cigarette tax doubled.

4. Tobacco banned nationwide for under-18’s.

5. Tobacco companies sued for tobacco related healthcare expenses.

Given this history, I would propose a similar campaign to reduce premarital sex, something along these lines:

Step 1: Use the Department of Education to implement mandatory, nationwide reform to sexual education programs, focused on the content discussed in this article.

Step 2: Ban positive depictions of premarital sex in the media. Return to the Hays Code, and apply it to social media and the internet as well.

Step 3: Raise the cost of contraception. This is especially important. See the chart below:

As of right now, contraception is frequently covered by insurers. Without insurance, contraception would cost between $600-800 per year, about half what it now costs to smoke for a year.

Banning insurers from covering contraception for the unmarried would be the first action. Then, the taxes should be increased to the extent that it drives the cost of contraception at least to that of smoking.

Finally, those getting divorced should be allowed to sue contraception manufacturers to recover their legal fees. These companies would be forced to raise prices to cover the cost of the payouts. This would have the extra benefit of linking divorce with premarital sex in the public consciousness.

Step 4: A rolling-age ban on contraception. Start with banning it for those under 21, then increase it to 22 the next year, then 23 etc. New Zealand recently implemented this for smoking.

This would all be a good start, but there is one potential problem. That would be the inevitable backlash from unmarried women and feminist organizations that would result from restricting contraception. To some extent, they may have a fair point. If unmarried people have sexual relations and it results in a pregnancy, the burden of that will disproportionately fall on the woman. Although she can sue for child support, the father is frequently impoverished and therefore around 30% of the mothers are paid nothing and 54% do not get the full amount.

Questions of fairness aside, it is also very important to deter men since men are usually the initiator of relationships. In the past, if an unmarried man and woman engaged in sexual relations, the woman’s father or brother would sometimes try to kill the man. Obviously that’s not viable anymore, but we do need a similarly strong deterrent for men. Fortunately, the basis of that may already exist.

Feminists advocates have been notorious in recent years for targeting men engaged in normal sexual relations. Frequently, a woman will have casual sex with a man, regret it after, and then accuse the man of raping her. Given the natural ambiguity of premarital relations and the power of Title IX, these cases are frequently won by the woman, resulting in the total destruction of the man’s life.

In response to outraged men, feminists have said that men can avoid this danger by obtaining “affirmative consent.” In other words, the man must obtain consent from the woman that is so crystal-clear that there is no doubt whatsoever as to her consent. In practice, this would probably need to be in writing.

This onerous and bizarre regime has scared many men away from engaging in casual sex at all. However, if these strange requirements are looked at from a birds-eye view, feminists have inadvertently been pushing to rebuild traditional barriers against promiscuity, complete with documented approval analogous to a marriage contract before engaging in sexual relations.

I suspect the reason they’re doing this is because their body tells them that promiscuity is self-destructive, but the propaganda they’ve internalized won’t let them put any blame on sexual liberation itself. As such, they aimlessly lash out at the mostly innocent man who they slept with. Then, they push for cultural reforms that restrict promiscuity even though they believe they’re doing it to prevent “rape.”

As twisted as these women may be, perhaps the enemy of our enemy can be our friend. If our objective is to destroy premarital sex, then we should simply grant feminists complete control over it. Hence, once our campaign against promiscuity and contraception takes off, we should make the feminist casual sex regime even more tyrannical and byzantine, so that men eventually give up trying to initiate.

For example, we could say that we understand that promiscuity without contraception is more dangerous for women, and we’ll therefore take action to ensure that men give women a full understanding of what they’re getting into. We could codify “affirmative consent” into law and make it even more draconian. Make it so that if an unmarried man and woman engage in sexual relations, the man can be charged with some sort of technical rape unless he presents the woman with a contract to sign beforehand. Better yet, make it so the contract has to be presented a day or more in advance. Charge a major tax to access the contract as well. Promiscuity could be killed the way the government usually kills industries, by strangling it with regulation, taxes, and gender equity programs.

Some especially cynical women would certainly exploit this system, sleeping around without regard for the contract so as to accuse men of rape. To that we should say: Thank you for your services! These sirens would serve as our enforcement mechanism. Any ban on premarital sex that requires state enforcement would certainly meet with massive backlash. If unassuming young women are the ones pressing the charges though, then there would be no menacing fascists or theocrats for “normies” to point the finger at.

This would give the many bitter and misandrist activists in our country a productive outlet for their desires to hurt men. Instead of having to go through the difficult process of dismantling feminist activism and its organizations, they could simply be pushed to focus their efforts on something they were already doing in the first place, one that will make things better for everyone if it’s carried out correctly.

The Benefits of Reducing Divorce

Obviously, no one wants to get divorced. The benefits of bringing the divorce rate down are self-evident. However, we should also look at some of the tangential benefits that would come from reducing divorce, showing why this should be a top priority.

Our national debt crisis is one of our best known problems, and most of the problem is driven by spending on the elderly. Reducing divorce would alleviate this issue to some extent. If couples stay together, they can help each other in old age. If they don’t, that means more people will be forced into nursing homes, increasing strain on our public resources. Even though some of those people would have ended up in nursing homes anyway, twice the housing will be required for people living separately and more caretakers will be needed as they will not be able to care for both the man and woman simultaneously if they are living apart.

Even for younger couples, divorce puts a significant dent on their productive capacity. The family income of those who divorce is reduced by 40 to 45% if neither person remarries. Such a massive reduction in income means many of these people end up on government assistance when they would not have otherwise. This may partially explain the significant increase of those on welfare over the past few decades.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the state with the lowest divorce rate, Utah, is also ranked #1 in fiscal sustainability. This freeing up of public resources may also be part of why Utah ranks #3 in infrastructure quality and #4 in education quality.

As White Identitarians, we should keep in mind that reducing premarital sex would also reduce miscegenation. About 14% of births from White women (where the father’s race is known) are from a non-White father.

The “unknown” category is probably somewhat more non-White, so we could say maybe 15% of total births from White women are non-White. This is in contrast to marriages, where only 12% of White women are marrying someone of another race.

In other words, the miscegenation rate for out of wedlock births is decently higher than within wedlock, probably 30 or 40% higher.

This also doesn’t factor in how many Whites decided to marry-out because promiscuity crippled their romantic decision making capacity. Without premarital sex, it’s conceivable that the miscegenation rate could be driven below 10%.

Moving Forward

If you’ve read to this point, it should be clear that premarital sex is a public health catastrophe, one that is measurable in dollars and immeasurable in the broken hearts of couples and the damaged upbringings of children.

Whether intentionally or not, Damien Chazelle and Richard Linklater captured the tragedy of our times artistically. They illustrated how even fairy-tale romances are capable of collapse and possibly weaker even than arranged marriages that at least had a firm foundation.

We should not live in a world where arranged marriages have a better chance of success than soulmates. We should not live in a world where Mia and Sebastian are forever severed from each other and Jesse and Celine are on the ropes. It doesn’t have to be this way. This is a policy choice, emanating from toxic cultural institutions and an occupation regime that is indifferent to our national well-being.

When Mia and Sebastian sit down to watch the reel of what their life could have been, they sit in the place of all the men and women of our civilization. I imagine there is a grainy fantasy living in the minds of so many of our people as they lay in the cold husk of their reality. This will be our world as long as we continue to enable our regime to immiserate us through fanning the flames of vice. If you think that families can survive under this arrangement, then you’re living in la la land.

The latter side seemed to score a decisive victory when it was shown that the Protocols overlapped significantly with an obscure 1864 French work by Maurice Joly, surely proving that Tsarist operatives had ripped from this work for the sake of advancing their political objectives.

However, what was rarely considered was the possibility that the plagiarism was reversed, and that it was Joly who stole from an older and unpublished version of the Protocols. In my first article on this topic, I made the case that Honoré de Balzac wrote the Protocols during the tumult of the 1848 revolution in France. My analysis though was based entirely on Balzac’s Human Comedy, and so I thought it may be lucrative to do more research into some of Balzac’s more obscure works.

Shortly after starting, I discovered a couple of them that were assembled into a book together. The first was called Modern Government, published in 1833, and the second was an unpublished work called Essay on Power, and the introduction writer believes it was written around 1841. Modern Government didn’t provide too much of interest, but I did notice a couple additional parallels. In the first, the same analogy of the nation as a horse and the ruler as the rider is used:

Just imagine the ineptitude of the masses and yet continue to give them influence in the government! France once shook off her cavalier, or collapsed beneath him from exhaustion, refusing him to take a final step under her spur. With the Emperor dead, all his ideas are understood.

The Protocols:

It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears: the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old already weakened by liberalism.

Then, there’s the same idea of law being a disguise for force:

Grant the late Casimir Périer ten years of life, of power and of ministry, and you will find a petty Richelieu without purple, a low-level tyrant, but surrounded by his guard, his flatterers, a court, courtiers, an entire constitutional Late Empire disguised by a mask of legality.

The Protocols:

In the beginnings of the structure of society they were subjected to brutal and blind force; afterwards — to Law, which is the same force, only disguised.

More interesting though was the beginning of the Essay on Power. One of the most distinctive and strange aspects of the Protocols must be the fact that each section starts with a long list of short phrases:

Off the top of my head, I can’t recall ever having seen something like this in another book. Except, that is, until I read the Essay on Power:

The longest sentence in both is 8 words. The Essay on Power has 35 sentences with an average of 3.88 words per sentence. The Protocols has 27 sentences with an average of 3.44 words per sentence. If you’re curious, here’s those sentences in English:

The Spirit of Public Affairs.

Theory of Social Principles.

Moses. Confucius. Pythagoras. Socrates. Jesus Christ.

Political Grammar.

Political Principles.

On the Social Principle.

Elements of Politics.

On the Origins of Power.

On the Unity of Power.

Essay on Political Unity.

Treatise on Political Guarantees.

Analysis of Power.

Treatise on the Origins of Political Truth.

The Spirit of Power.

Elements of Social Logic.

On the Social Principle.

Elements of Politics.

Socialistics. Archeology. Elements. Political Positivity.

Discourse on the Nature of Power.

On Research.

The Spirit of the Family.

Treatise on Social Order.

Theory of Order.

Theory of the Family.

Essay on the Unity of the Principles of Order.

An Inquiry into the Origin of Power.

Essay on the Origin of Power.

On Order.

On Power.

Treatise on Comparative Politics.

Philosophy of Power.

Order and Power.

Essay on the Origin and Nature of Power.

Essay on Power.

An Examination of Social Powers.

I’d be genuinely curious if anyone could find a single other work that begins like this. In comment #83 on my original article, I also noted the similarity in layout of Balzac’s Physiology of Marriage, one of his few non-fictional (mostly) works, with the Protocols.

In comment #135, I asked ChatGPT for ten other French political non-fiction works from 1800-1850 and noted that none of those seemed to use this layout. After checking those same ten (actually nine) works again I didn’t see anything even remotely close to the strange opening of the Essay on Power and the Protocols.

In the commentary on this essay, the author attempts to figure out when the Essay on Power was written. Lovenjoul, who collected the manuscript, says it was written in 1848. The author disagrees though and puts forward some convincing evidence that it was actually probably written around 1841. One of the arguments he made stuck out to me though for other reasons:

As for the Revolution of 1848, it had, as we have just said, made a profound impression on Balzac’s mind, and it would be truly strange if nothing of it had been reflected in these notes to the Social Catechism, which are, on the contrary, remarkably serene, without the slightest allusion to the political turmoil that France was experiencing at that time. To what date, then, should we place the composition of these notes?

As the author says, the 1848 revolution made a profound impression on Balzac’s mind, so it would be strange for it to be so little reflected in this work. For the same reason, I find it strange that Balzac wrote almost nothing, that we know of, on the 1848 revolution that he experienced so intimately. Shortly after writing my first article, I discovered one of the few things that he did write on the revolution but never published, a short document called the Letter on Labor, which was discovered and published in the 20th century. In it, I noticed probably more parallels to the Protocols than in any of his other works on a per-word basis.

Balzac, in the Letter on Labor, begins with describing the press as the power behind the government and refers to the new power as a terrorist:

A newspaper, which helped create the Government, suddenly becomes a plagiarist of intimidation. It declares anyone who would propose a form of government other than the Republic a traitor to the country. This newspaper thus grants us the freedom to do whatever it pleases. After monarchical arbitrariness, we have terrorist arbitrariness.

The Protocols:

We must compel the governments of the goyim to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan, already approaching the desired consummation, by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called “Great Power” — the Press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands.

In a word, to sum up our system of keeping the governments of the goyim in Europe in check, we shall show our strength to one of them by terrorist attempts…

Balzac, Letter on Labor:

The words “organization of labor” mean a coalition of workers, and the word “worker” has only one translation: “manual laborer.” All other forms of work have been magically eliminated: intellectual work, managerial work, inventive work, the work of travelers, the work of scholars, and so on…

As soon as wages are doubled, the prices of consumer goods will follow suit…Therefore, the worker, with his ten hours of work and higher daily wage, will find himself in the same situation as before. He will eat and consume his entire wage. There will be no improvement in his condition…

At one point, all wages doubled due to the reduction in working hours; and, because of the increased cost per day’s work, production necessarily decreases…

In those few paragraphs, Balzac discusses the how the raising of wages will raise prices, resulting in no gain for workers, how this will undermine production, and how educated workers are being disenfranchised. Now, the Protocols:

We shall raise the rate of wages which, however, will not bring any advantage to the workers, for at the same time, we shall produce a rise in prices of the first necessaries of life, alleging that it arises from the decline of agriculture and cattle breeding: we shall further undermine artfully and deeply sources of production, by accustoming the workers to anarchy and to drunkenness and side by side therewith taking all measure to extirpate from the face of the earth all the educated forces of the GOYIM.

Balzac, Letter on Labor:

This is the last experiment; the State entered into it as a protector. Today, it rushes in as a doctor. Well, it is in the process of killing the patient.

The Protocols:

These institutions have divided up among themselves all the functions of government — administrative, legislative, executive, wherefore they have come to operate as do the organs in the human body. If we injure one part in the machinery of State, the State falls sick, like a human body, and will die.

Balzac, Letter on Labor:

The Provisional Government…requests at the same time time the consecration of the Republic to a National Assembly, in terms and with means which leave no doubt about the universal vote…
If the right holds the majority, if it has six hundred votes out of nine hundred, well, what will become of it in the face of a minority to which the February Revolution gives the right to call upon the masses for support?

The Protocols:

To secure this we must have everybody vote without distinction of classes and qualifications, in order to establish an absolute majority, which cannot be got from the educated propertied classes.

Balzac, Letter on Labor:

It is, finally, tyranny, in the name of a specious theory, false in application.

The Protocols:

We have fooled, bemused and corrupted the youth of the goyim by rearing them in principles and theories which are known to us to be false although it is by us that they have been inculcated.

The following isn’t really a parallel, but shows that Jews were on his mind during the revolution:

In the Middle Ages, did the most cruel tortures wrest two deniers from the Jews’ treasures? Louis XIV, in 1707, could he be given to Money? When, prostituting himself to Samuel Bernard, and imposing the vanity of this Jew…

At the end of the document, Balzac says that he’s planning to write another one with a focus on taxation, but it was never written or at least has never been found. I find it interesting that there’s a lot of discussion of niche tax issues in the Protocols, especially related to literature:

We turn to the periodical press. We shall impose on it, as on all printed matter, stamp taxes per sheet and deposits of caution-money, and books of less than 30 sheets will pay double… The tax will bring vapid literary ambitions within bounds and the liability to penalties will make literary men dependent upon us.

Purchase, receipt of money or inheritance will be subject to the payment of a stamp progressive tax. Any transfer of property, whether money or other, without evidence of payment of this tax which will be strictly registered by names, will render the former holder liable to pay interest on the tax from the moment of transfer of these sums up to the discovery of his evasion of declaration of the transfer... Just strike an estimate of how many times such taxes as these will cover the revenue of the goyim States.

Possibly, he threw what he had for the letter on tax into the Protocols.

While the evidence presented so far seems very suggestive, it would be nice if a computer analysis could add a more objective element. If our hypothesis is correct, we would probably expect Balzac’s Letter on Labor to most closely match the Protocols stylistically, given that he likely would have written the latter shortly afterwards.

Much work has been put into the field of stylometry due to its numerous practical applications, especially finding criminals on the basis of anonymous writings. It is also very important for historical studies though, such as finding out which plays should be attributed to Shakespeare or who wrote certain parts of the Federalist Papers.

Anyone who looks into stylometry will quickly find that the most widely used program is R-stylo, which has become the de facto standard. R-stylo was developed by Prof. Maciej Eder, a professor of linguistics at the Institute of Polish Language, and it has become the backbone of the Computational Stylistics Group.

One of the reasons that R-stylo is so popular is because it makes it so easy to run analyses of the most frequent words in a document corpus and then to compare the individual documents to each other. This method of comparing how often works use common words is currently the standard test for authorship attribution. It is considered especially effective because authors tend to select these common words unconsciously, meaning that their unique style tends to shine through regardless of changes in topic. In an article for The Irish Times, Dr. James O’Sullivan, a lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at University College Cork, and Rachel McCarthy, a student of his, used this method to seemingly confirm Emily Brontë as the writer of Wuthering Heights. Summary below:

That is precisely what our recent study, published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Oxford University Press), sets out to accomplish. Armed with stylometry we ask, who wrote Wuthering Heights? Stylometry is based on a simple premise: by counting the frequency of words in a text, you can form a profile of how an author writes, and then use that quantitative measure to forensically test things like authorship, influence, genre, or anything that might be related to how something is written. Using individual writing samples and some very clever tools developed by the Computational Stylistics Group, we algorithmically formed quantitative authorial fingerprints for each of the Brontë siblings, and then used those signatures to conduct a stylometric analysis of Wuthering Heights to see, statistically speaking, who is the novel’s most likely author. The same technique has been used to do authorship attribution tests of works by major literary figures like James Patterson, JK Rowling and Harper Lee.

There is the question though of how many of the most frequent words in a text corpus should be counted when performing this analysis. Using too few would not provide much differentiation, where as too many might start to include words that say more about the topic than the author’s style. This article in Programming Historian sheds some light on the matter:

No matter which stylometric method we use, the choice of n, the number of words to take into consideration, is something of a dark art. In the literature surveyed by Stamatatos1 scholars have suggested between 100 and 1,000 of the most common words; one project even used every word that appeared in the corpus at least twice. As a guideline, the larger the corpus, the larger the number of words that can be used as features without running the risk of giving undue importance to a word that occurs only a handful of times.

This range of 100-1000 is a nice sweet spot, and in a YouTube tutorial (14:55), Prof. Eder also recommends analyzing this range, preferably at intervals of 100.

In a comment on my last article on this topic, I asked ChatGPT for ten French political non-fiction works written between 1800 and 1850 for the sake of making a comparison with the Protocols. While the Protocols may technically be “fictional,” there is no dialogue, imagery, or any of the usual hallmarks of fiction, and so structurally it is much closer to non-fiction, especially political philosophy.

One of the links is duplicated, so there’s actually nine works in my comment. The works are:

Benjamin Constant - Principes de politique (1806)

Germaine de Stael - Considerations on the Main Events of the French Revolution (1815)*

Francois Guizot - General History of Civilization in Europe (1828)

Joseph de Maistre - Du Pape (1819)

Louis de Bonald - Analytical Essay on the Natural Laws of Social Order: or, On Power, the Minister, and the Subject in Society (1800)

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon - On the Reorganization of European Society (1814)

Charles Fourier - The New Industrial and Societal World (1829)

Pierre Leroux - Legality (1848)

Jean-Baptiste Say - Treatise on Political Economy (1803)

*I could only find part four online in the original French for this work, so that’s what I use.

I figured these nine works plus Balzac’s Letter on Labor, Modern Government, and Essay on Power would be a good starting point for building a body of works that could be compared to the Protocols. It would be nice if Balzac had written some lengthier non-fiction works for comparison, but even mostly non-fictional works such as The Physiology of Marriage and The Journalists frequently transition into fiction and therefore aren’t especially helpful for our purposes.

Pretty straightforward, right? Well, not exactly. For the Protocols, we have no copy of the French original, and so we are forced to use a translation, which may not perfectly represent the original style. I considered a few ways to best account for this. Running everything in English would obviously not be very satisfactory, given that we’d be comparing a French > Russian > English document to French > English documents. I considered running everything in French, but comparing original French to a French > Russian > French document also seemed unlikely to be effective.

Finally, I decided the best option would be to run an original Russian copy of the Protocols against Russian translations (via Google translate) of the other works from the original French. This would be French > Russian compared to French > Russian and it would also preserve the Protocols as close to the original as possible, avoiding a double layer of translation. Thankfully, Eder mentions in the video (5:10) that the program works for Cyrillic as well.

First, let’s test how well this French > Russian strategy works without including Balzac’s non-fiction yet. I asked ChatGPT to give me another work written by each of the first three authors on the list: Constant, de Stael, and Guizot, so that I could see how well it could match these works to the others by the same author.

I couldn’t find the exact work History of the English Revolution online in French, but I did find Guizot’s Why was the English Revolution Successful?: A Discourse on the History of the English Revolution (1850) that was published shortly afterwards. Constant’s Spirit Conquest was written eight years after his work on our original list, de Stael’s was written 17 years later, and Guizot’s 22 years later, so these works should not be too similar.

Let’s also beef our corpus up a bit more. I noticed that the original list skewed towards the first half of the 1800-1850 period, so I asked ChatGPT for an 1850’s work and threw in Alexis de Tocqueville — L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856). I also threw in Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) given its relevance to the Protocols. I then decided that I should include some authors who could be reasonable alternative candidates. In comment #272 of my original article, Ron Unz pointed out that the Protocols was probably inspired by the 1844 work Coningsby, so I asked ChatGPT for a list of ten political non-fiction works written between 1844 and 1860 from a right wing perspective.

This list only ended up providing four works to use, since two are translations from Spanish, two don’t actually specify a work, one is a repeat of Bonald, and Saint-Bonnet is on there twice. So, I added:

Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet — De la Restauration française : mémoire présenté au clergé et à l’aristocratie (1851)

Louis Veuillot — L’Illusion libérale (1848)

François-René de Chateaubriand — Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (vols. published 1848–1850)

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly — Du dandysme et de George Brummell (1845)

I also decided that some fiction should be included for comparison. I added Balzac’s Lost Illusions (part three, which was all I could find in the original French), Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, and Charles Rabou’s Le Capitaine Lambert. Rabou was hired by Madame Hanska to ghost write Balzac’s unfinished works after he died, so I figured he may be relevant too.

Before running this analysis, I did some minor cleanup of the documents, mainly removing prefaces or introductions that weren’t written by the author and other text not part of the works. All of the text files that I used in this analysis can be found here.

Now, let’s see if R-stylo can correctly match the two French > Russian works by Constant, de Stael, and Guizot together with each other. Eder recommends running a consensus tree analysis which averages the results of 100-1000 MFW (most frequent words) at intervals of 100. It then groups them together based on similarity and outputs a nice graph. Here’s the results:

Very impressive, three for three. We can also see that the fiction clusters together, it appears that the stylistic differences of fiction and non-fiction are unsurprisingly very significant. Also notice how none of these writers strongly match the Protocols.

Now, when I ran this same test with Balzac’s Letter on Labor, it easily matched the Protocols. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that the short length of the Letter on Labor is a major factor, and the consensus tree has a tendency to match together outliers even if they are not all that similar in the raw data. So, to get a more genuine result, it is better to dive into the raw data and to account for the length discrepancy.

To do that, R-stylo recommends that we “sample” each work. We can set it to take a random sample of each work that is the exact length of Balzac’s Letter on Labor, thereby equalizing the length for all works. Then, to get more exposure to the raw data, Eder recommends that we use the Principal Components Analysis graph (13:10).

We can’t run a consensus analysis with the PCA graph, so let’s run five tests at each of 100, 300, 500, 700 and 900 MFW. The Protocols is represented by the red dot, and I have overlain a target on to it. The neon green in the non-fiction cluster is Balzac’s Letter on Labor. This analysis was easiest to run with dots, and I’ll summarize the results at the end if you don’t want to look at 25 graphs, but I’ll also post one example that shows the titles and color-coding for all of them, if you’re curious:

Now, here’s the results

100 MFW:

300 MFW:

500 MFW:

700 MFW:

900 MFW:

There doesn’t seem to be a way in R-stylo to get a direct measurement of the distance, so as a work-around, I counted up how many times each work landed inside the target bubble. (Note: I define any that touch the edge of the bubble as “inside”). Here are the results of that:

Totals:

Balzac Labor: 19

Joly: 15

Fourier: 9

Leroux: 8

d’Aurevilly: 3

Guizot: 3

Guizot English: 2

de Maistre: 2

de Tocqueville: 1

If you did look through the graphs, you saw that the Letter on Labor was frequently right next to the Protocols, and almost always in the general vicinity. The final tally reflects that. It should probably be unsurprising that Joly comes in second place, given that he likely extensively plagiarized the Protocols. No one else is really all that close. It’s also interesting that none of our possible rivals, St. Bonnet, Veuillot, Chateaubriand or d’Aurevilly even register much at all.

To make this analysis more robust, another common test to run is character n-grams. 3-grams in the word “Protocols” would be “Pro”, “rot”, “oto”, “col”, “ols”. 4-grams would be “Prot”, “roto”, ”otoc”, “toco”, “ocol”, “cols”.

When Prof. Patrick Juola, a stylometry expert, ran tests to find out if J.K. Rowling was writing as Robert Galbraith, character 4-grams were one of the tests he used. He cited a paper by Prof. Efstathios Stamatatos which demonstrated the effectiveness of character 3-grams. Another study showed that they are especially effective in the 4-8 gram range, with 500-3000 MFC. There is no hard rule as to what n to use, or what MFC to use, so I decided to run five tests at 3,4,5 and 6 grams, all at 1500 MFC. Again, I equalized the length of all works to the number of character n-grams in the Letter on Labor.

Here are the results, and you can again skip these if you would like, I’ll summarize at the end.

3g:

4g (Note: I discovered that I accidentally forgot to run the fifth test for 4g):

5g:

6g:

Results:

Balzac Labor: 15

de Maistre: 15

Veuillot: 13

Fourier: 10

Leroux: 8

Joly: 5

St. Bonnet: 5

Constant Spirit: 3

de Tocqueville: 2

de Stael French: 2

de Stael: 1

Guizot: 1

Say: 1

Constant: 1

Comte: 1

Again, Balzac tops the list, although de Maistre surprisingly ties it up. Veuillot puts in a much stronger performance, whereas Joly is much weaker. Fourier and Leroux put in decent showings both times. Here is the total of totals for both the frequent words test and the character n-grams:

Balzac Labor: 34

Fourier: 21

Joly: 20

de Maistre: 17

Leroux: 16

Veuillot: 13

St. Bonnet: 5

Guizot: 4

d’Aurevilly: 3

Constant Spirit: 3

de Tocqueville: 3

Guizot English: 2

de Stael French: 2

de Stael: 1

Say: 1

Constant: 1

If anyone would like to recreate these tests, I will mention again that the text files used are here.

It is possible that with enough searching, one might be able to find some work that just by chance more closely matches the Protocols, but the conclusion seems pretty clear that Balzac’s Letter on Labor is more stylistically similar to the Protocols than all 25 of the works in this corpus, and therefore it is probably more similar than roughly 95% or more of French political works in the same period.

When writing my original article and noticing such significant overlap in the ideas and phrasing of the Protocols with Balzac’s work, I could only think of one plausible alternative to Balzac’s authorship. That would be the possibility that some sort of Balzac imitator or superfan had written the document and extensively borrowed ideas and phrases from Balzac’s work. I still considered this possibility to be unlikely, given that the document appears to have been written by an experienced writer, not an amateur imitator, and the document appears to have originated in elite circles, with Eugene Sue probably being one of the first to possess it. Also, the Letter on Labor and Essay on Power were never published, so the parallels there would have to just be a coincidence.

With this analysis showing that the very structure of the writing so closely matches Balzac’s Letter on Labor, I think the possibility of an imitator can be almost ruled out. Consider that Balzac wrote little serious non-fiction, with the short documents I’ve used here being among the few examples, and even two of these were unpublished. The 1848 Letter on Labor does not match the 1833 Modern Government or 1841 Essay on Power at all, probably suggesting that Balzac did not write non-fiction frequently enough to even develop a style that would stay consistent through the years. Balzac’s fiction, which accounts for probably 95+% of his work, also does not match the Protocols. It’s possible that there are some political articles from Balzac out there that would be closer to the Letter on Labor, but it makes absolutely no sense that an imitator would decide to copy the style of some of his obscure and infrequent articles rather than the renowned Human Comedy. Even if they did decide to do that for some reason, I don’t know if there would even be enough material for such a thing to be possible without the aid of a computer. Copying a writer’s style on such a structural level is surely much more difficult than just borrowing their ideas and phrasing.

I’d like to end with a little change in my speculation. In my first article I speculated that Balzac gave the document to Dumas as a way of encouraging him to leave the Freemasons. I now think it’s more likely that he gave the document to Victor Hugo shortly before he died. Hugo recalls that they had a political argument:

This was the same room in which I had come to see him a month previously. He was then cheerful, full of hope, having no doubt of his recovery, showing his swelled limb, and laughing. We had a long conversation and a political dispute. He called me his demagogue. He was a Legitimist. He said to me, “ How have you so quietly renounced the title of Peer of France, the best after that of King of France ? “ He also said, “ I have the house of M. de Beaujon without the garden, but with the seat in the little church at the corner of the street. A door in my staircase opens into this church, — one turn of the key and I can hear Mass. I think more of the seat than of the garden.” When I was about to leave him he conducted me to this staircase with difficulty, and showed me the door, and then he called out to his wife, “ Mind you show Hugo all my pictures.”

I speculate that he may have realized he’d never be able to publish the document, and therefore decided he’d give it to Hugo as a last argument to leave in favor of Royalism behind him. From Hugo, it went to Sue.

It is frequently remarked on how Herman Melville died unappreciated and in obscurity, a major contrast with the renown that Moby Dick would achieve after his death. However, if it’s true that Balzac wrote the Protocols, I think it would be a far more remarkable story that an unpublished work of such a legendary writer would end up becoming his most famous, and in some ways define the 20th century without anyone even being aware that he wrote it.

I was flabbergasted, mostly because the choice of woman and the relationship itself had been kept entirely secret from me. One friend could not even tell me himself, he had to have another mutual friend break the news that the knot was going be tied in just three weeks.

It wasn’t long until I learned why this had been kept so secret, and why my friend had been so guarded about his personal life for the past two years. As a White man, he had chosen an Asian woman as his future spouse. Readers of this Substack will know that we are pro-White and strongly opposed to miscegenation. My friend was as well shortly before he met this woman, and he had even reprimanded his sister for a similar relationship. Without even my knowledge, an invisible wedge had been driven between us and was pushing apart a friendship that went back decades.

For my other friend, the problem was less ideological. He had simply chosen a normie who he knew I wouldn’t like. The effect was the same though, and I was kept in the dark until nearly the very end. It is easy for me to sympathize with their decisions not to let me know, as doing so would have meant facing the uncomfortable reality that we no longer aligned on fundamental values, and therefore would struggle to have a friendship as close as the one we shared before.

At a certain age, most people have probably gone through an experience similar to this many times. Along with losing old friends, it becomes ever more difficult to replenish their ranks. Making friends as an adult is notoriously hard. We’ve probably all experienced a moment where we believe that we’ve found a kindred spirit, only to have our hopes crushed when an irreconcilable difference is discovered. After leaving childhood, beliefs and lifestyles solidify and become far more consequential. A child may disagree with another but their lack of responsibility for anything means that it’s of little consequence. As an adult, these differences become much harder to ignore.

The difficulty is magnified much further if one chooses not to conform to the pervading “normie” culture in society. Most people can at least form superficial friendships with others if they both like FanDuel and boating. If one does not have interest in these societal glues, then even these “friendships” become difficult. The more one strives for the transcendental, the more one will be separated from others, as one begins to recognize the ways in which nearly every group and community falls short. Truth and great art do not conform themselves to any one ideology. In the Middle Ages, this may have led some to join a monastery.

In Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans, our hero of the modern age creates what he believes to be a modern solution. Lacking any strong religious faith, Des Esseintes creates the closest approximation to a transcendent ideal that he can within his own house, by filling it with his eccentric and particular taste in art and literature, and then shutting himself off from humanity as much as possible.

Ultimately, his experiment fails, and Des Esseintes is forced to rejoin the real world. Upon being faced with this reality, Des Esseintes breaks into rage and despair:

“Well, then, society, crash to ruin! Die, aged world!” cried Des Esseintes, angered by the ignominy of the spectacle he had evoked. This cry of hate broke the nightmare that oppressed him.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, “To think that all this is not a dream, to think that I am going to return into the cowardly and servile crowd of this century!” To console himself, he recalled the comforting maxims of Schopenhauer, and repeated to himself the sad axiom of Pascal: “The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon.” But the words resounded in his mind like sounds deprived of sense; his ennui disintegrated, lifting all significance from the words, all healing virtue, all effective and gentle vigor.

He came at last to perceive that the reasonings of pessimism availed little in comforting him, that impossible faith in a future life alone would pacify him.

An access of rage swept aside, like a hurricane, his attempts at resignation and indifference. He could no longer conceal the hideous truth—nothing was left, all was in ruins. The bourgeoisie were gormandizing on the solemn ruins of the Church which had become a place of rendez-vous, a mass of rubbish, soiled by petty puns and scandalous jests. Were the terrible God of Genesis and the Pale Christ of Golgotha not going to prove their existence by commanding the cataclysms of yore, by rekindling the flames that once consumed the sinful cities? Was this degradation to continue to flow and cover with its pestilence the old world planted with seeds of iniquities and shames?

The door was suddenly opened. Clean-shaved men appeared, bringing chests and carrying the furniture; then the door closed once more on the servant who was removing packages of books.

Des Esseintes sank into a chair.

“I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith.”

Against Nature mainly recounts Huysmans’ problems with the world, and provides little in the way of solutions. Huymans would later convert to Catholicism, and his future novels go into that more in-depth. Another author that Huymans admired, Barbey d’Aurevilly, read his work and concluded that Huymans’ diagnosis of society left with him with only two remedies:

In his review, Barbey d’Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling, “After Les Fleurs du mal, I told Baudelaire, ‘it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross.’ Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross.

While I have not yet read Huymans’ later works and cannot yet comment on his solutions, I’d like to highlight some parts of the book that show the difficulties that the longing soul of Des Esseintes experiences while trying to fix his problems through sheer material ingenuity.

Early in the book, Des Esseintes describes how he will only enjoy his sanctuary at night, while sleeping during the day. The point of this is so that he can revel in the particular pleasure of being active at night and feeling that the world is dead and tired around him. The reason that this is so pleasurable is probably because of the feeling that the world around him is no longer capable of holding him down, enfeebled by its own fatigue. Des Esseintes wants to escape from the burdens of the world, but ends up discovering entirely new and more abstract problems.

In this, he parallels one of his observations about his age. The society of the time (1890’s France) does everything it can to alleviate physical suffering, but at the same time has invented new horrors like universal conscription, where men are plucked from their homes, subjected to grueling conditions, and commanded to legally kill others. Whatever one thinks of the morality of war in general, having the average person go through this trial inevitably acts as a stimulant for immorality. Reduced physical suffering and amplified moral suffering creates a sort of contradiction, and a major theme of the book seems to be how attempting to eliminate suffering in one area tends to leads to new sufferings in another area.

Another example of this is the nature of prostitution. With utilitarianism and commercialism being the dominant forces of the age, men naturally yearn for more sentimentality and love in their relations with women to make up for this. Hence, the old and official brothels disappeared and in their place rose the tavern and its wenches. Men did not directly pay these women for their “services,” they wined and dined them, with the illusion of a chase and a need to “win” them. These foolish men did not realize though that they were spending far more money for an ultimately inferior product, with the women selling themselves no differently from the prostitutes of the past. The efficiency of modern society meant the rise of “idiotic sentimentality” in other areas such as this.

Des Esseintes laments that there is even a cosmic balance to the nature of suffering. He observes that the rich are really no happier than the poor, and have the same passions, worries, and paltry pleasures. He attributes this to the fact that one who suffers more develops a greater resilience to suffering, and so a minor pleasure is magnified by contrast, evening things out. In the same way, one who suffers little has no resilience, and therefore minor sufferings are amplified to an extent that the scale balances for them as well. This inversion becomes especially pronounced for a sanguine soul, for whom the petty vexations of life weigh upon to such an extent that they would even prefer a great tragedy.

Despite criticizing modernity for contradicting itself in this way, Des Esseintes becomes a very similar sort of contradiction. He withdraws from society and therefore removes the many irritants that cause him suffering every day, but his isolated and artificial lifestyle leads to a significant decline in his physical and mental state. Des Esseintes consoles himself with the work of Shopenhauer, convincing himself that suffering is inescapable. The pessimist philosophy does little though to satisfy his resentment at a world that seems rigged against the human race.

More than anything, Des Esseintes is frustrated by the fact that reality does not meet his very high standards and the transcendent ideal that they strive for. Even actual experiences are considered to be far inferior to his imagination, and he believes that even pleasurable experiences only seem that way with hindsight. As such, he nearly perfectly recreates the experience of a sea voyage in one of his rooms, without all of the bother of actually going on one. His entire lifestyle is an attempt to create a quasi-monastic life, without all of the discipline that goes into being a real monk.

Des Esseintes ponders how this escapism is natural when a man of talent is forced to live in a time that is dull and stupid, and reflects on how artists yearn for other ages, times where they imagine they would have been more in accord. This thought is tempting, but it contradicts Des Esseintes’ own observations on how sufferings replace sufferings. These past times can be similar to the experiences that only seem pleasurable with hindsight. Artists highlight the virtues of these times because of how much they want reality to meet their ideal. Seeing this ideal in a time that actually happened makes it seem like a possible reality. This art can be helpful in inspiring man to strive for an ideal, but it rarely reflects the whole reality of the time.

That being said, there is an argument to be made that there were greater immaterial virtues in the past, perhaps because the greater physical suffering of the past reduced moral and spiritual suffering. Des Esseintes becomes an ironic example of this, as his house includes paintings of his Gallic knight ancestors. Surrounded by physical suffering, these knights probably embraced an ideal of chivalry and piety that is little reflected in Des Esseintes. Des Esseintes, with no physical suffering himself and little in his society, is misanthropic and totally disconnected from God, both in his lapse from the Church and in his disdain for nature and mankind. He might imagine himself to have been more in accord with the Middle Ages, but he is doing little to strive for those virtues that make the era so appealing.

In the origins of Des Esseintes’ problem are the seeds of its solution. He attributes his love of eccentric creativity and aesthetics to his religious education, which fostered his aspirations towards a higher ideal. Despite being secular, Des Esseintes reads plenty of religious literature, and tells himself that he only has this attraction to the Church because of the great art and literature that it preserved, especially with old latin poems that Des Esseintes is especially fond of. What Des Esseintes does not yet realize though is that the superiority of his artistic taste can only be superior at all because it is more closely approaching something perfect and divine. Thomas Aquinas realized this as well, and he used it as a proof for God:

The fourth proof arises from the degrees that are found in things. For there is found a greater and a less degree of goodness, truth, nobility, and the like. But more or less are terms spoken of various things as they approach in diverse ways toward something that is the greatest, just as in the case of hotter (more hot) that approaches nearer the greatest heat. There exists therefore something that is the truest, best, and most noble, and in consequence, the greatest being.

Without a perfect target to approach, there would be no way to objectively define one work of art as superior to another.

Des Esseintes ends the novel in a state of extreme frustration and despondency, as he is thrust back into the disappointing world around him. He won’t find his perfect ideal in this world, nor will he find comfort in giving in to the baseness around him. Facing some form of suffering is unavoidable, and running away from the failures of the world will not solve Des Esseintes’ problems. The torments he faces are somewhat different from those of the chevaliers, but suffering is suffering and the courage and devotion of those chevaliers can be employed to respond to any form of it. If Des Esseintes can weave his love of beauty and creativity together with a better understanding of why they are valuable, he may be able to forge the armor that will allow him to withstand the spiritual batterings he will receive upon his return to the Babylon on the Seine.

He then told me that Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed. I was floored and started asking him rapid-fire questions for details. After learning that the assassin had killed Kirk with a single shot from 200 yards away and had even escaped, my first thought was that it must have been a professional. My second thought was that it was the Israeli Mossad.

After all, I had heard chatter on social media recently about Kirk feuding with many of his Jewish donors, primarily over the fact that he had platformed Tucker Carlson and Carlson had declared that Epstein was working for Mossad. Facing the fact that his base was turning on Israel from under him, but also needing to retain donor support, Charlie Kirk seemed to hope that he could play both sides and tried to explain to his donors that he was helping them through managing the conversation. Unfortunately, Israel does not like their minions to play both sides, and it is easy to see why they may have killed him for this perceived betrayal.

Shortly afterwards, Max Blumenthal released a more detailed exposé outlining how Kirk had felt intimidated by his pro-Israel donors shortly before his death and had even rejected an offer from Netanyahu that would have boxed him into a more pro-Israel position. This, along with the highly professional appearance of the killing, the conspicuously planted evidence that seemed designed to frame a leftist, and other inconsistencies in the official narrative seemed to paint a very clear picture of Israeli culpability.

There was just one problem I could not figure out. Charlie Kirk had spent his entire career defending Israel and continued to do so (at least publicly) up until the very end. An article from Joseph Correro outlines this quite well. Given his transactional nature and dependence on Jewish donors, a complete flip to being anti-Israel seems that it would have been very unlikely. Andrew Anglin notes that Kirk was pretty much the only major media personality with appeal among the youth who would defend Israel at all:

Charlie Kirk was one of the single most fiendish men working in American cultural manipulation. His evil acts go far beyond being literally the only non-Jew under 50 promoting the super-hardline Zionist narratives like “there are no starving Gazans, it’s a staged hoax” and “Israel has never targeted civilians.” Like, literally no one says that sort of stuff anymore, and hasn’t in like a year, and he was out there just reading Netanyahu press releases as fact every single day.

An article from Ambrose Kane also makes the point that Israel rarely assassinates media figures:

Although it’s true that the Israeli government has little qualms about assassinating people they see as a threat, Mossad does not go around killing controversial public figures in the U.S. who criticize them in the way that some think. How many social media influencers do you know that have been direct targets for death by Israel? Many of these same influencers have been ardent critics of Israeli policies and even of the Jewish people themselves – yet they have not been taken out by a sniper! The most strident anti-Semites to have walked the earth and who have published books savagely criticizing Jews have not, to my knowledge, been murdered by Mossad operatives. Even the British historian, David Irving, was never assassinated by the Mossad, although he did suffer greatly in other ways because of what he wrote. A string of Holocaust deniers has been imprisoned over the years (mostly in Europe), including scholars and authors who have published books critical of the Holocaust narrative. Yet I have not known any of them to have been murdered by professional hitmen.

With Kirk dead, a power vacuum has opened up for who will lead the conservative youth in America. Most of his followers will probably go to either Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes, all of whom are far more anti-Israel than Kirk was. Fuentes has already gained nearly 200k Twitter followers and many right-wing figures, such as Steve Bannon, seem to think he is now the de facto leader of right wing youth. Surely it would be better for Israel to have a fence-straddler who could be worked with like Kirk than to leave his millions of followers to be scooped up by other voices that are militantly hostile to them.

This is what I call the “replacement problem” in the Israel-killed Kirk theory. There is simply no replacement with Kirk’s level of clout among young conservatives who can step in to fill his role. Anglin later suggests that Nick Fuentes could bury his previous beliefs and take over Kirk’s role. However, Fuentes has continued to strongly attack Israel and has refuted the idea that his beliefs have changed in any respect. Assuming that Fuentes remains Fuentes, the replacement problem seems to pose a major issue for the theory.

This situation has led to a significant divide on social media. One group starts with the hard evidence, reasonably concludes that Israel killed Kirk, and sees the other side as absurd. The other group starts with the replacement problem, reasonably concludes that Israel did not kill Kirk, and also sees the other side as absurd. This has led to much hostility between the sides, which breaks my heart! Both sides include many people who have contributed to the betterment of our country.

This divide might not be as irreconcilable as it appears though. While monitoring this conversation, a simple third possibility struck me.

If we look at the evidence, it is notable that Bill Ackman seems to be very directly involved in almost all of it. Much attention has been paid to how Tucker Carlson declared Epstein was working for Mossad at Kirk’s event, but Carlson also strongly insulted Ackman on a personal level, saying “How do you come to a place where some of the least impressive, most useless people who have no actual skills become billionaires… How did Bill Ackman get $9 billion? A pretty impressive guy? I know him. No.”

Blumenthal’s article notes many other examples of how specifically Ackman was irate at Kirk’s behavior:

The mockery by Carlson was particularly galling for Ackman. One day after TPUSA’s conference, Ackman staged a 4,000 word Twitter/X meltdown defending his financial acumen, while insisting that he earned his vast fortune because, “I inherited good genes.”

…

The billionaire also took issue with Carlson’s contention that he had been part of convicted sex offender and late Zionist financier Jeffrey Epstein’s “constellation of people.” Yet Carlson’s remarks were grounded in fact.

…

But the meeting went off the rails when Ackman personally confronted Kirk about his views on Israel. The public face of UK Lawyers for Israel, Natasha Hausdorff, joined in the argument, and began “screaming” at Kirk, according to the attendee.

When his hosts presented him with a detailed list of every offense he supposedly committed against Israel, Kirk was “horrified,” said one person. Ackman also allegedly demanded Kirk rescind his invitation for Tucker Carlson to speak at his upcoming America Fest 2025 in December.

Many have pointed out how suspicious it is that shortly after Kirk’s killing, Ackman offered a million dollars to whoever could help find the killer. It was the father of the apparent killer who turned him in and it seems he will get the money. So, Ackman feuds with Kirk, Kirk gets killed, and then Ackman pays a million dollars to the father of the killer.

The apparent killer, Robinson, very much seems to be a patsy. Generally, there would be no need for a patsy to escape. However, if Ackman needed this scheme to have a plausibly deniable way to pay Robinson or his father, then his escape would be necessary.

Ackman’s fingerprints are all over this, and the side who argues in favor of the theory reasonably points to this as a connection to Israel. However, I would posit the simple question: Is there any reason Ackman could not have just acted alone?

After all, Ackman has a history of organizing violent behavior. Blumenthal notes:

In May 2024, the Washington Post revealed Ackman as a leading member of a Whatsapp group of 50 ultra-wealthy Zionists coordinating counterinsurgency-style actions against student anti-genocide protesters at Columbia University.

Ron Unz notes:

Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History described her outrage as the nearby police stood aside and did nothing while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, with 200 of the victims then arrested. According to local journalists, the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.

To carry out this assassination, the only two things Ackman would need would be an assassin and a patsy. As a man worth nearly $10 billion dollars, finding an assassin would probably be trivial. Finding someone to take the blame might be a little more challenging, but the mob was always able to find patsies when they would conduct hits. I see no reason why an intelligence agency would be necessary in finding a patsy, especially if one has Ackman’s limitless resources and connections.

Ackman being infuriated at the personal attacks that Kirk had allowed from Carlson and Kirk’s apparent spurning of him at the meeting would explain why he might have acted emotionally, neglecting the bigger picture, while probably convincing himself that he was doing this for Israel. A single loose cannon like Ackman would be far more likely to act irrationally than Mossad, which always considers the bigger picture and long-term.

To use a bad pun, it is possible that Ackman may have orchestrated shooting Charlie Kirk in the neck, while also shooting his own cause in the foot.

Now, one might say that we could easily achieve this by reading someone who lived in Spain with and without Franco, or Italy with and without Mussolini. There are millions of people who experienced fascism and liberalism, as well as many who experienced communism and liberalism.

The problem with this is that fascism and communism cannot really be called the purest or best examples of illiberalism. Fascism was hardly a well though out ideology in itself, and it generally only arose as a desperate way of trying to block the rise of communism. In many ways, fascism resembled a military junta, a government existing primarily to ward off the threat of something else. This can be seen most clearly with Franco, who was a general and handed his power back to the king upon his death, who quickly liberalized the country. Fascism never really had the idea of long term succession in mind.

Communism, on the other hand, was mainly focused on Marxist economic ideology, with the authoritarianism being a mostly unintentional byproduct, and communist states historically went to great lengths to deny their authoritarianism, frequently calling their states “Democratic Republics.”

Therefore, any study of illiberalism should probably focus on the form of it that actually showed and intended for long term staying power, and that is of course monarchy and aristocracy. The list of countries that experienced a clean break from authoritarian monarchy and into liberalism is smaller than might be imagined. Places such as England and Scandinavia experienced a more gradual transition, whereas much of the rest of Europe rapidly transitioned into fascism or communism.

France therefore ends up being one of our best case studies, with a quick transformation from the Ancien Régime into the relatively liberal period of the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. Being the first and the largest European state to make such a swift break from monarchy, it also became a center of intellectual discussion on the topic.

One of the best illiberal minds in France of this time was the writer Honoré de Balzac. Unlike other conservative voices such as Burke, Balzac was a committed Royalist and did not just view the monarchy as a better alternative to violent revolution or something that should exist within a constitutional framework. While Balzac did not himself live under the Ancien Régime, he lived among its remnants and participated in the fight over whether it should be restored.

Balzac’s criticism’s of liberalism were unique. Whereas most illiberal thinkers opposed liberalism because they saw it as leading to chaos and instability, Balzac predicted the exact opposite. He believed that authoritarianism was the natural government for man, and so he foresaw that any period of liberal chaos would inevitably lead to a new authoritarianism, except one that was hidden, secret and evil, rather than open, overt and noble.

Balzac’s prediction ended up being the more prescient one. Superficially, one may look at our current government in America as chaotic, with constant feuding between Republicans and Democrats. For those who have looked deeper though, it is clear that there is remarkable unity on most issues of consequence, and absolute unanimity when it comes to subservience to organized Jewry and the State of Israel. When our congress gives the Israeli Prime Minister 58 standing ovations, it’s clear that we are living under the exact hidden despotism that Balzac predicted.

As I discussed in my last article, Balzac was likely the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, possibly the most precise and devastating diagnosis of the issues with modern liberal democracy that has ever been written. This should be unsurprising, as Balzac was a realist, known for his ability to depict every part of society so well that even communists admired him for not letting his reactionary ideology tinge his social panorama with bias. Therefore, we will be examining the Protocols in-depth in this article, highlighting Balzac’s analysis of major problems and proposing some solutions that can address these issues without an impossible return to the monarchy and landed aristocracy of old.

Theme 1

The first issue we will examine is the nature of liberal democracy itself, probably the most significant theme in the Protocols. One of the key observations in the Protocols is the naivete of political freedom:

Political freedom is an idea but not a fact. This idea one must know how to apply whenever it appears necessary with this bait of an idea to attract the masses of the people to one’s party for the purpose of crushing another who is in authority. This task is rendered easier if the opponent has himself been infected with the idea of freedom, so-called liberalism, and, for the sake of an idea, is willing to yield some of his power. It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears: the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old already weakened by liberalism.

…is it possible for the masses of the people calmly and without petty jealousies to form judgments, to deal with the affairs of the country, which cannot be mixed up with personal interests? Can they defend themselves from an external foe? It is unthinkable, for a plan broken up into as many parts as there are heads in the mob, loses all homogeneity, and thereby becomes unintelligible and impossible of execution…

Nature abhors a vacuum, and a society cannot exist without leadership. Ultimately, someone is going to be in charge. In theory, this is “the people” in a democratic society. However, since the masses have very little experience, knowledge, or interest in serious politics, then society inevitably ends up controlled by whoever is most skilled at manipulating them. Balzac notes that this fact is largely understood by political actors, who only appeal to the masses for the sake of damaging their political rivals, not because they actually intend to carry out the impossible task of handing power to the masses. This can be most obviously seen in the nature of debates on free speech. It has been widely remarked on how the communist revolutionaries in Russia constantly attacked the Tsar for his suppression of speech, before proceeding to do the exact same thing themselves once in power.

Once we acknowledge that the idea of a society run by the people is simply a fantasy, then the question becomes: who do we want to have in power? Right now, it is Jewry that has picked up the slackened reins of our government, riding our nation like it’s a chariot. This is clearly undesirable, but if they are removed from power then someone will have to take their place. In Nazi Germany and Putin’s Russia, the overthrow of Jewry resulted in a single, all-powerful dictator coming in to replace them. While this may work as long as the dictator is alive, the fascist problem of succession again rears its head, and it is likely that the successor will not be as bold, competent, or idealistic as the initial revolutionary leader, and will also lack the legitimacy that came from being the one to end the hard times. As such, the revolutionary regime could quickly become a tin-pot dictatorship.

If rule by the people is not possible and rule by one man is dangerous and unstable, then the remaining possibility is rule by a minority, commonly known as aristocracy. Ideally we would want our aristocrats to be the “philosopher kings” described by Plato, the best of the best of our society. Since political power technically runs through the minds of the people in America, our current aristocracy is unfortunately mostly the media and business elite, who have the money and mass influence to manipulate them. The problem therefore lies in our selection mechanism. Instead of mass elections, we will need a better way to pick our elite, which we will discuss later in the article.

On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy of the goyim we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money. The qualifications for this aristocracy we have established in wealth, which is dependent upon us, and in knowledge, for which our learned elders provide the motive force.

Theme 2

The next problem with liberal democracy is the way that the open, unrestricted and competitive political system selects for those who are the least moral and most machiavellian, willing to use any tactics necessary to climb from the streets to the highest halls of power.

The political has nothing in common with the moral. The ruler who is governed by the moral is not a skilled politician, and is therefore unstable on his throne. He who wishes to rule must have resource both to cunning and to make-believe. Great national qualities, like frankness and honesty, are vices in politics, for they bring down rulers from their thrones more effectively and more certainly than the most powerful enemy. Such qualities must be the attributes of the kingdoms of the goyim, but we must in no wise be guided by them…

Only force conquers in political affairs, especially if it be concealed in the talents essential to statesmen. Violence must be the principle, and cunning and make-believe the rule for governments which do not want to lay down their crowns at the feet of agents of some new power. This evil is the one and only means to attain the end, the good. Therefore we must not stop at bribery, deceit and treachery when they should serve towards the attainment of our end.

Some may say that competition produces the best, but that’s only if the game requires virtue to win. If we selected our leaders with a game of blackjack then card-counters would become our kings. Selecting our leaders with a game of politics that is open to all means that the masters of bribery, deceit and treachery take power. Anyone who is skilled with creating media hit pieces against their enemies or who has the tact and resources to bribe or blackmail others will become powerful in our society. If power was restricted to a narrower set of people who have gone through a vetting process to ensure virtue, then the careers of these kinds of opportunists would be over before they started.

As for our elected representatives, it is simply those who are most willing to sell themselves to these skilled and powerful interests who rise in our system. These interests exploit a natural desire in men that Balzac refers to at the beginning of the Protocols:

It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good… Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could, and rare indeed are the men who would not be willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their own welfare.

If, by chance, someone slips through this process who is not a player of the political game, such as Donald Trump, they are quickly rendered completely impotent through their lack of understanding.

members of the mob, upstarts from the people even though they should be as a genius for wisdom, yet having no understanding of the political, cannot come forward as leaders of the mob without bringing the whole nation to ruin. Only one trained from childhood for independent rule can have understanding of the words that can be made up of the political alphabet.

Ideally, we want to change the method for selecting our elites from a game of scheming to a clear and orderly evaluation of virtue and competence.

Theme 3

[Anarchy] leads inevitably to despotism — not any longer legal and overt, and therefore responsible despotism, but to unseen and secretly hidden, yet nevertheless sensibly felt despotism in the hands of some secret organization or other, whose acts are the more unscrupulous inasmuch as it works behind a screen…

Of all the issues with liberal democracy, possibly the worst is the impunity it bestows upon those in power. Since it appears that our elected representatives are the ones in power, they are the ones who are punished when things are going wrong in the form of losing an election. However, the real sources of power with money and media influence are typically also in control of the victorious politician. Therefore, there is simply no bottom to how bad our country can become, because conditions that would cause a revolution in a dictatorship will only lead to a veneer of change in a liberal democracy. This impunity also encourages ever more reckless and destructive behavior from those hidden figures who actually pull the levers.

Eventually, the hidden force may grow so strong that it decides to take the mask off, and then you find yourself living under despotism with none of the checks and balances that may exist in an openly authoritarian system.

Our power in the present tottering condition of all forms of power will be more invisible than any other, because it will remain invisible until the moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning can any longer undermine it.

In the aftermath of October 7th, Jewry took action to purge three Ivy League Presidents, multiple members of congress, and mass arrest students all across the country. In the UK, 12,000 people a year are arrested for online speech. This is compared to just 1,000 people who are in prison for speech related reasons in the openly authoritarian Russia. It is sure that if President Putin took similar action to what Jewry has done recently, the outcry would be enormous, and he would either be forced to back down or the people would be able to form countermeasures given that they would have an accurate understanding of the power they were dealing with. The hidden nature of power in our system allows it to act with far more breadth and with far less constraint then may otherwise be possible.

Imagine that one single leader had been in charge of America from 1960 until today. In that period, our population has become by far the most unhealthy in the world, our cities have become nearly uninhabitable thanks to crime and poor infrastructure, we have had multiple disastrous foreign wars, our economy is saddled with record levels of debt, censorship has become ubiquitous, and our culture has become consumed with smut, promiscuity, and messaging hostile to the majority of the population. Almost everyone on both sides perceives high levels of corruption and incompetence in all of our leading institutions. If that leader had been up for election every four years, he never would have made it past the 1970’s. Instead, no change occurs, since we just keep replacing one failed leader with another cog in the same system.

In addition, this façade ensures that we spend our resources training our politicians for leadership even though they will never really be governing. For those with actual power, they receive no training in responsibility or altruism. It is essential that those in power in our society are open and transparent about their power, so that they can be properly trained and cannot act without consequence or regulation.

From the premier-dictators of the present day the goyim peoples suffer patiently and bear such abuses as for the least of them they would have beheaded twenty kings.

Theme 4

Liberalism produced Constitutional States, which took the place of what was the only safeguard of the goyim, namely, Despotism; and a constitution, as you well know, is nothing else but a school of discords, misunderstandings, quarrels, disagreements, fruitless party agitations, party whims –in a word, a school of everything that serves to destroy the personality of State activity. The tribune of the “talkeries” has, no less effectively than the Press, condemned the rulers to inactivity and impotence, and thereby rendered them useless and superfluous, for which reason indeed they have been in many countries deposed.

Partisanship has become a defining aspect of modern democratic governance. The naturally tribal nature of groups in society has produced a leadership that is also divided and tribal. Decisions are rarely made for the good of the whole country, but rather for what will appease the impulses and desires of the group that the politician finds himself representing. This has in large part made it impossible to carry out any reforms from congress. On top of that, when there are bipartisan politicians, they are usually representing interest groups that have a foothold in both parties.

This paralysis of the government may be a benefit in a society that is functioning well and simply needs the government to stay out of the way, such as 19th century America. For a society that is broken and desperately in need of repair, it is woefully insufficient.

Theme 5

Our triumph has been rendered easier by the fact that in our relations with the men whom we wanted we have always worked upon the most sensitive chords of the human mind, upon the cash account, upon the cupidity, upon the insatiability for material needs of man: and each one of these human weaknesses, taken alone, is sufficient to paralyze initiative, for it hands over the will of men to the disposition of him who has bought their activities.

Liberal Democracy prizes itself on uplifting representatives of “the people.” See Marco Rubio bragging about his parents being a “dishwasher and a maid.” The problem with this is that these people who have lived in want will be incredibly tempted when someone shows up with a pallet full of cash in exchange for political favors. Even the wealthy in our modern society are forced to compete constantly to maintain their wealth, and will be susceptible to the same influences. For the old nobility who had their wealth baked into law, having had it for centuries and expecting their descendants to have it in perpetuity, any sort of bribery would probably be much less effective.

Power will always be surrounded by those who want to buy a share of it, and so political power naturally becomes a path to enrichment for bright and ambitious young people today. So long as this is possible, corruption will be unstoppable.

Theme 6

…in nature there is no equality, cannot be freedom; that Nature herself has established inequality of minds, of characters, and capacities, just as immutably as she has established subordination to her laws.

It is remarkable that for all the talk on the left of trusting experts, there has been no extension of this principle to the electoral system, which they have always wanted to be as expansive as possible. Literacy tests were considered abhorrent, so were any other basic restrictions on democracy. The fact that nearly half the population chooses not to vote is considered outrageous, and liberals have advocated for mandatory voter registration and online voting, so that these people who are so uninterested or uninformed about politics that they don’t even bother to vote can be forced to participate in selecting the leaders of our nation. If there is something wrong with your car, you see a mechanic, but if you’re performing the all-important task of choosing a leader, then democracy enthusiasts want the decision to be made by those who care least about the outcome!

Most agree that we should consult experts when we have a problem, and we should logically apply that principle to leader selection as well. The fact that we give someone who is mentally disabled or a career criminal the same say in choosing our leader as genuine experts in governance should be seen as a major flaw in our system, not a commendation. One may see the masses as a check on the power of the expert class, but their lack of independent thought means that they usually just end up controlled by a more corrupt and unscrupulous faction of the expert class itself. The fact that most people lack the time and interest to make these decisions responsibly enables the poor and incompetent behavior that we discussed in our leaders above.

In all ages the peoples of the world, equally with individuals, have accepted words for deeds, for they are content with a show and rarely pause to note, in the public arena, whether promises are followed by performance.

Solutions

Before we get into solutions to these dilemma, it will be helpful to sort the above discussion into some simple axioms:

1. There will always be a person or group of people who govern society.

2. That group will never be the people as a whole, who do not act independently.

3. The group should be selected based on a process that will result in the most virtuous and competent rising to the top.

4. Their power should be clear, defined, and not subject to external influence so as to ensure accountability for governance in our society.

5. There should be some sort of checks and balances on their power.

6. They should make decisions based on the what would be best for the country as a whole, rather than for narrow partisan interest.

7. They should be immune from bribery, explicit or implicit.

8. They should be the most well informed and knowledgeable people in our society.

If looked at in a vacuum, I think almost everyone would agree these axioms are true. However, we simply accept as part of the process that our own system will exist in defiance to them. Some governments, such as the Chinese government, have attempted to use similar principles and had major success in many areas, but their excessive authoritarianism and disregard for axiom #5 has largely scared off Western admirers. Balancing power and preventing tyranny are always the main challenges of an illiberal system. I believe it is possible to have a hierarchical system that also respects the rights of citizens to criticize their leaders, encourages debate on important issues, and prevents the concentration of power into the hands of one man, political party, or institution.

To craft our system, the first thing to be done is to identify the centers of power in society. This is not as easy as it was in the Middle Ages, when there was a mostly direct correlation between land wealth and power. In the modern era, we will certainly have to account for the mass media, the universities, social media, and certain private corporations. This major oversight of our founders likely came from the fact that they lived before these institutions became so powerful, and therefore did not recognize the need to keep them in check.

Most of our traditional media is organized into a small handful of companies, and so the leaders of these companies should certainly be recognized as major wielders of power. The same is true with our major social media companies, who control what we can say on the internet. Even putting these leadership positions up to public elections would be preferable to what we have now, where narrow private interests can influence us without any acknowledgment that it is occurring.

The administrators of our elite universities would also be on the list, given that they shape the minds of our incoming elite. For private corporations, the situation would be more ambiguous. One would not want to arbitrarily seize large corporations, as this would deter investment. Given that these companies primarily exert influence through using their money to lobby the government, it may be better to attack the role of money in politics rather than to attack the money itself.

Once these institutions are removed from the hands of special interests, they should also be kept safe from the hands of the government. It is an extreme temptation for any state to simply use the media to regurgitate its propaganda. One finds it hard to imagine the Chinese media ever seriously criticizing Xi Jinping or the CCP, even if such criticism were warranted. Therefore, I suggest that each of these institutions should function mostly autonomously, modeled on how the Federal Reserve functions. It has been recognized how important it is to have our central bank free from both private and presidential influence, so that our economic policy is objective and not determined by the interest of the president’s reelection campaign or by the personal profits of a cabal. This same respect should be given to the media and universities, which are at least as critical, if not more so. While the administrators of these institutions should come from a central government, the central government should have no role in their functioning or decision making outside of that. Some ways in which the independence of the Federal Reserve is ensured are the following:

-14 year terms for governors, so that they are separate from fleeting political winds.

-Cannot be removed due to policy disagreements, only for misconduct or criminal activity.

-A clear and unbiased objective. In the Fed’s case, this is maximum employment and stable prices. For the media, it should be avoiding lies and especially lies of omission, the most common way that our current media lies.

-Not dependent on congress for funding.

-Operations are not affected by congressional legislation or presidential executive order.

Similar rules should apply to any other institutions that are designated as centers of power. We want to have a clear understanding of who is running these institutions and the gravity of the power they wield, while also ensuring that the people chosen to run them are altruistic, moral and free to be independent in their decision making.

After identifying the centers of power, the next task will be to pick the people that will be running them. Instead of the dogfight for hidden positions of power that we have now, I would suggest that we should establish separate universities explicitly designed for preparing people to rule and channeling them into those positions, or perhaps our Ivy League schools could simply be converted into this. For deciding who gets into them, the best method would probably be Ron Unz’s idea for Ivy League schools of a lottery among our highest achieving students. The lottery system would eliminate many of the excesses that can result from an overly competitive environment, such as those discussed in Theme 2. These schools would train people not for private employment, but exclusively for their roles as public servants, while emphasizing the enormous responsibility they have as such.

To ensure that these schools do not attract the corrupt and sociopathic, it should be required that those in these administrative positions be required to give up the possibility of significant wealth. An asset limit of say, $5 million, should be imposed on these people, as well as their children and spouses. This will also prevent the kind of loophole corruption that we have seen with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson funneling money through their wives, or Joe Biden funneling money through his son, or the Clinton’s doing so through their foundation. It will also prevent those like Jared Kushner from nepotistically profiting off of government service.

Giving up wealth will also solve one of the main flaws of the Ancien Regime, the feeling it evoked among the lower classes that those in power were using that power to enrich themselves.

By themselves, these reforms would drastically improve our governance. However, I believe a few more reforms could also improve the decision making of even our best and brightest. The tendency among people to fall into group think and succumb to peer pressure is one of the largest flaws in decision making that exists with human beings. Even tenured professors, who cannot be fired and should in theory be among our brightest, frequently embraced or bowed to the “woke” wave due to this fear of being ostracized. Among intelligent idealists, there is always the possibility of an irrational ideological movement sweeping through and totally detaching a portion of them from reality, with this portion then bullying the rest into the same way of thinking. In the past, this also happened with Marxism and Boasian anthropology.

During the age of wokeness, one of the only areas where the ideology was seriously pushed back on was anonymous online message boards. Those who are anonymous can point out flaws in ideas without fear of blacklisting or social shaming, and can also call attention to unpopular but important truths. Therefore, while it should be public knowledge who our leaders are, most of their discussions should happen anonymously.

To make use of the modern age, our highest council of leaders and the independent institutions should utilize an exclusive and anonymous online forum. Members could post a topic, and if the topic has enough support it should trigger a written debate between a representative from each side of the issue. If the one arguing for a change in policy is voted the winner of the debate, then the issue should be put to a vote. The policy suggestion, debating, and voting on the winner of the debate should all be anonymous so that peer pressure does not factor in and each idea can be argued in its purest sense, even if some of the arguments are controversial. This will ensure our leaders are operating with the best possible information. However, the final vote that actually decides whether the policy will go through or not should be public, so that our leaders cannot make decisions without accountability if the policy turns out to be foolish.

Contrary to popular belief, most of those in our elite are not actively malicious or dishonest. If they believe something that is wrong, it is most likely because they have not been exposed to the strongest arguments from the other side, as the people putting forward these arguments are viciously attacked, ostracized, censored, or denied a platform for putting forward what they have to say. If this system were in place, it is very unlikely that our American Pravda could have ever been as effective as it is.

While this council should be mostly comprised of those who have made it through our training schools, it would be wise to also include representatives from every swath of society, although they would not have voting power, only the ability to propose topics. Sometimes important ideas can come from the most unexpected places and it is important for stability that everyone feels they have some representation. The decisions would ultimately be made by our assigned leaders, but every part of society would have the opportunity to raise their concerns.

Should there be a “president” in this system? Yes, it would be wise to have one member of the council be elected by the council as their leader. However, this person should be more of a first among equals, as giving them too much power would increase the possibility of tyranny or corruption given that one man is more fallible than a council of people.

Also, to prevent stagnation, members of the council should serve perhaps ten year terms, and when they are not on the council they could work in a non-decision making role in the state bureaucracy. While graduates of the training schools should automatically receive a role in the state, they should probably not be allowed on the council until they are older.

Ultimately, I do not believe that this would require drastic changes in our system. Our current senators, most of whom are highly corrupt, could simply be replaced by a lottery among experienced civil servants who graduated from these schools and the Senate could become the council. Eliminating senate elections and allowing anonymous discussion would remove pressure from donors, media moguls, and even their own peers so that they could make the best decisions possible. This would not be that dramatic of a change since senators were not chosen with a public election until 1913. The House of Representatives could remain, but in the purely advisory capacity that we discussed above. Eliminating the need for House approval of legislation would be the only change required. The Senate would then elect a President with limited powers and also appoint graduates to administrate the independent institutions of the media, social media, universities, and other sectors deemed too powerful to leave unregulated. The independence of these institutions would ensure that there are checks and balances on the power of the Senate. If any senator engaged in misconduct or criminal activity, the independent media would quickly discover it and he could be removed by a vote of his fellow senators.

Depending on what the situation allows for, the system could be designed in a more or less democratic way. If eliminating presidential elections invited a backlash from the people, we could instead allow a democratic presidential election but only out of a handful of candidates from the Senate that have passed a vote of approval from the Senate. All political funding for the candidates would come from the Senate and the media institution would be responsible for accurately reporting on their backgrounds. Outside influence would be extremely minimal and the restricted nature of the candidates would render the result essentially the same as if the Senate itself were selecting the president, but the mere fact of allowing voting in the election would likely satisfy the people. Additionally, requiring that the senators are baptized Christians could act as another anchor against unhinged ideologies, but the possibility of implementing that restriction would depend on the political climate at the time.

Among everything, the reliability of the media is possibly the most important factor in the functioning of this system. It is in our current system as well, and the media’s failings can probably be pointed to as the main reason for the failings of our country. Hence, in our next article we will discuss the media and the Protocols depiction of it more in-depth.

When Lucien arrives in Paris to pursue his dream, this fascinating human drama quickly morphed into something that was unexpected but also conjured an inkling of familiarity in the back of my mind. As the title betokens, Lucien’s view of Paris as a haven for artists was soon crushed, and a world of corruption unfolded before him. With his money running out, Lucien decides to take up the power of the journalistic pen to alleviate his woes, much to the dismay of his more noble-minded friends.

What follows is possibly one of the earliest exposé’s on the shocking and disturbing power of the press, a force which was still in its infancy when Balzac published Lost Illusions between 1837 and 1843. Lucien is quickly seduced by this band of literary criminals as they coordinate to extort payments, destroy careers, and manipulate public opinion for their own gain.

As I made my way through the book, a few running themes stood out. Balzac’s paints an extremely conspiratorial view of Parisian society at the time, with nearly everything happening in the public eye having some ulterior motive behind it. This is reflected in quotes such as the following:

“There is a world behind the scenes in the theatre of literature. The public in front sees unexpected or well-deserved success, and applauds; the public does not see the preparations, ugly as they always are, the painted supers, the claqueurs hired to applaud, the stage carpenters, and all that lies behind the scenes. You are still among the audience. Abdicate, there is still time, before you set your foot on the lowest step of the throne for which so many ambitious spirits are contending, and do not sell your honor, as I do, for a livelihood."

-

“You do not seem to me to be strong in history. History is of two kinds--there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events --a scandalous chronicle.”

-

“Whenever the press makes vehement onslaughts upon some one in power, you may be sure that there is some refusal to do a service behind it.”

The next would be the foreboding rise of a nearly omnipotent press. Lucien’s friends make or break the careers of young novelists and actresses, and begin to be treated like gods by those at their mercy. In multiple discussions, journalists predict that France will soon be ruled by the press:

"The influence and power of the press is only dawning," said Finot. "Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow. In ten years' time, everything will be brought into publicity. The light of thought will be turned on all subjects, and----"

"The blight of thought will be over it all," corrected Blondet.

-

"When Blucher and Sacken arrived on the heights of Montmartre in 1814 (pardon me, gentlemen, for recalling a day unfortunate for France), Sacken (a rough brute), remarked, 'Now we will set Paris alight!' --'Take very good care that you don't,' said Blucher. 'France will die of that, nothing else can kill her,' and he waved his hand over the glowing, seething city, that lay like a huge canker in the valley of the Seine.--There are no journalists in our country, thank Heaven!" [character is German]

-

"Blondet is right," said Claude Vignon. "Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It will take the credit of all creations of the brain; the harm that it does is done anonymously. We, for instance--I, Claude Vignon; you,Blondet; you, Lousteau; and you, Finot--we are all Platos, Aristides, and Catos, Plutarch's men, in short; we are all immaculate; we may wash our hands of all iniquity. Napoleon's sublime aphorism, suggested by his study of the Convention, 'No one individual is responsible for a crime committed collectively,' sums up the whole significance of a phenomenon, moral or immoral, whichever you please. However shamefully a newspaper may behave, the disgrace attaches to no one person."

-

"Napoleon did wisely when he muzzled the press. I would wager that the Opposition papers would batter down a government of their own setting up, just as they are battering the present government, if any demand was refused. The more they have, the more they will want in the way of concessions. The parvenu journalist will be succeeded by the starveling hack. There is no salve for this sore. It is a kind of corruption which grows more and more obtrusive and malignant; the wider it spreads, the more patiently it will be endured, until the day comes when newspapers shall so increase and multiply in the earth that confusion will be the result--a second Babel. We, all of us, such as we are, have reason to know that crowned kings are less ungrateful than kings of our profession; that the most sordid man of business is not so mercenary nor so keen in speculation; that our brains are consumed to furnish their daily supply of poisonous trash.”

-

“In these ways the pernicious influence of the press will be increased, while the most odious form of journalism will receive sanction. Insult and personalities will become a recognized privilege of the press; newspapers have taken this tone in the subscribers' interests; and when both sides have recourse to the same weapons, the standard is set and the general tone of journalism taken for granted. When the evil is developed to its fullest extent, restrictive laws will be followed by prohibitions; there will be a return of the censorship of the press imposed after the assassination of the Duc de Berri, and repealed since the opening of the Chambers.”

The critiques of the press became quite in-depth, including a significant discussion of the journalist’s most potent weapon, blackmail. One of Lucien’s friends, after falling on hard times, describes to Lucien his plan for a little chantage:

"What is 'chantage'?" asked Lucien.

"It is an English invention recently imported. A 'chanteur' is a man who can manage to put a paragraph in the papers--never an editor nor a responsible man, for they are not supposed to know anything about it, and there is always a Giroudeau or a Philippe Bridau to be found. A bravo of this stamp finds up somebody who has his own reasons for not wanting to be talked about. Plenty of people have a few peccadilloes, or some more or less original sin, upon their consciences; there are plenty of fortunes made in ways that would not bear looking into; sometimes a man has kept the letter of the law, and sometimes he has not; and in either case, there is a tidbit of tattle for the inquirer, as, for instance, that tale of Fouche's police surrounding the spies of the Prefect of Police, who, not being in the secret of the fabrication of forged English banknotes, were just about to pounce on the clandestine printers employed by the Minister, or there is the story of Prince Galathionne's diamonds, the Maubreuile affair, or the Pombreton will case. The 'chanteur' gets possession of some compromising letter, asks for an interview; and if the man that made the money does not buy silence, the 'chanteur' draws a picture of the press ready to take the matter up and unravel his private affairs. The rich man is frightened, he comes down with the money, and the trick succeeds.”

-

"'Chantage' seems to mean your money or your life?"

"It is better than that," said Lousteau; "it is your money or your character. A short time ago the proprietor of a minor newspaper was refused credit. The day before yesterday it was announced in his columns that a gold repeater set with diamonds belonging to a certain notability had found its way in a curious fashion into the hands of a private soldier in the Guards; the story promised to the readers might have come from the Arabian Nights. The notability lost no time in asking that editor to dine with him; the editor was distinctly a gainer by the transaction, and contemporary history has lost an anecdote. Whenever the press makes vehement onslaughts upon some one in power, you may be sure that there is some refusal to do a service behind it. Blackmailing with regard to private life is the terror of the richest Englishman, and a great source of wealth to the press in England, which is infinitely more corrupt than ours. We are children in comparison! In England they will pay five or six thousand francs for a compromising letter to sell again."

Also, a similar role played by money. Lucien is dismayed when he discovers that positive reviews for books and plays are frequently dependent on how much money the producer has been willing to shell out to the newspapers. Therefore, many of Paris’s icons simply bribed their way to the top:

"This so much desired reputation is nearly always crowned prostitution. Yes; the poorest kind of literature is the hapless creature freezing at the street corner; second-rate literature is the kept-mistress picked out of the brothels of journalism, and I am her bully; lastly, there is lucky literature, the flaunting, insolent courtesan who has a house of her own and pays taxes, who receives great lords, treating or ill-treating them as she pleases, who has liveried servants and a carriage, and can afford to keep greedy creditors waiting.“

-

“It is difficult to keep illusions on any subject in Paris,” answered Lucien as they turned in at his door. “There is a tax upon everything — everything has its price, and anything can be made to order — even success.”

Finally, a sprinkle of antisemitism:

Suppose that in a large banking-house a bill for a thousand francs is daily protested on an average, then the banker receives twenty-eight francs a day by the grace of God and the constitution of the banking system, that all powerful invention due to the Jewish intellect of the Middle Ages, which after six centuries still controls monarchs and peoples.

-

“In your intercourse with men, in short, be grasping and mean as a Jew; all that the Jew does for money, you must do for power.”

-

“The Jews have monopolized the gold of the world; they compose Robert the Devil, act Phedre, sing William Tell, give commissions for pictures and build palaces, write Reisebilder and wonderful verse; they are more powerful than ever, their religion is accepted, they have lent money to the Holy Father himself!”

As I digested this filthy but likely accurate picture of the media and elite society in Restoration France, I could think of only one other work that seemed to rival its prescience: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Under the conventional narrative stating that the Protocols were published at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lost Illusions would predate it by at least 60 years. However, the article American Pravda: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Ron Unz discusses an analysis by Nicholas Kollerstrom that suggests the Protocols were actually most likely produced in France before 1864.

Although I was doubtful about many of Kollerstrom’s views, some of the points he made seemed extremely telling. According to the conventional narrative, the Protocols were concocted as a work of antisemitic propaganda in the early years of the twentieth century, yet it makes absolutely no mention of Zionism, which seems an astonishing omission given the controversial nature of that high-profile movement. Therefore, Kollerstrom plausibly argued that the document must have been written before Theodore Herzl had launched that movement in the 1890s, although very minor elements such as the mention of “Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzscheism” may have been later added. He also noted that sworn testimony had established that the original copy of the Protocols was in French before being translated into Russian and distributed in that country.

As the Wikipedia entry demonstrated, the Protocols undeniably shared quite a number of passages with an obscure book published in 1864 by Maurice Joly, a French Jew whose satirical work was sharply critical of Napoleon III and therefore quickly suppressed by the latter’s government. So according to the standard narrative, the Czarist secret police or whatever other antisemitic group produced the Protocols had plagiarized Joly’s book.

But Kollerstrom considered this highly implausible since the latter work had nothing to do with Jews or antisemitism and any copies would have been extremely difficult to obtain decades later when the document was allegedly produced. Joly had been a Paris member of various Masonic lodges, so Kollerstrom persuasively argued that it was far more likely that his own book had borrowed elements from the Protocols, a document that must have been already available in his own political circles.

Although Kollerstrom disagrees, Unz and critics of the Protocols note that their style and presentation make it seem very unlikely that they are a legitimate recording of a speech from an elite Jew. Having read through them myself, I would agree with that analysis, and it seems overwhelmingly likely that they were instead written by a French Royalist, given that they seem to repeatedly illustrate the necessity of monarchy, aristocracy, the Church, and others aspects of reactionary ideology, through showing how this nefarious Jew is exploiting the decline of those institutions.

While the writer was likely a right-wing Royalist, he also was likely very familiar with and had access to elite Jewish/Masonic circles. As Kollestrom stated, Joly’s possession of the document and its absence from the general public indicates that it was probably floating almost exclusively around Masonic circles before its appearance in Russia, and therefore the writer probably distributed it in these circles originally.

Other pieces of textual evidence from the Protocols indicate that the writer was a literary man, rather than say, a politician. The writer seems to have been involved in literary gatherings and the press, and conveys that Masonic signals are being used in these areas:

Under the title of central department of the press we shall institute literary gatherings at which our agents will without attracting attention issue the orders and watchwords of the day…

-

Even nowadays, already, to take only the French press, there are forms which reveal masonic solidarity in acting on the watchword…

In describing recruits to Masonry, the writer ascribes a special focus to literary men:

The class of people who most willingly enter into secret societies are those who live by their wits, careerists, and in general people, mostly light-minded, with whom we shall have no difficulty in dealing and in using to wind up the mechanism of the machine devised by us.

-

Our agents will be taken from the higher as well as the lower ranks of society, from among the administrative class who spend their time in amusements, editors, printers and publishers, booksellers…

-

Finally, these quotes shows a preoccupation with literature:

In countries known as progressive and enlightened we have created a senseless, filthy, abominable literature.

-

The tax will bring vapid literary ambitions within bounds and the liability to penalties will make literary men dependent upon us. And if there should be any found who are desirous of writing against us, they will not find any person eager to print their productions.

Aside from this, assuming the Protocols are fictional, writing a speech where one must put oneself into the mind of a fictional character is something that a literary man would feel most comfortable with, and the document includes examples of literary flair such as:

Like the Indian idol Vishnu they will have a hundred hands, and every one of them will have a finger on any one of the public opinions as required. When a pulse quickens these hands will lead opinion in the direction of our aims, for an excited patient loses all power of judgment and easily yields to suggestion.

To have access to Masonic circles that were elite enough that the document would not leak to the public for at least 40 years, it seems likely that the writer was relatively prominent. Among 19th century French fiction writers, right-wingers seem to have been fairly rare, with Dumas, Hugo, Sue, Stendahl, Flaubert and Zola all leaning liberal.

Balzac was an exception, he was “a self-proclaimed reactionary, a monarchist who wanted to restore all the hereditary rights of the aristocracy and a Roman Catholic.” His ideology can be summed up nicely in the following quote:

But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery, subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore. May we not have overthrown noble tyrants devoted to their country’s good, to create the tyranny of selfish interests? Shall power lurk in secret places, instead of radiating from its natural source?

-Scenes from Country Life (or Sons of the Soil)

Given that both supporters and critics of the Protocols generally believe it was written after 1890, it’s not surprising that no one seems to have considered the possibility of Balzac’s authorship, but it is more surprising that there also appears to not even be any discussion of influence from Lost Illusions on the Protocols, despite enormous thematic overlap.

Italian writer Umberto Eco discuses the origin of the Protocols in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, holding the conventional view that they were plagiarized from Joly. Eco also notes though that there seems to be inspiration from Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novel Joseph Balsamo as well as a section of Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of the People, which was written in the mid-1850’s. Dumas’ novel includes a speech by a member of the Illuminati which has very little thematic or stylistic overlap with the Protocols other than it being a plot for world domination. Sue’s novel includes a letter from a Jesuit outlining a plot for world domination, and this one seems to have more similarities, almost seeming like the Protocols from the reverse perspective. However, this text is far shallower, with almost no discussion of the press, blackmail, or many other strategies outlined in the Protocols. The bulk of the text consists of the Jesuit outlining his plan to massacre the opposition, install a Jesuit friendly monarch, and conduct various geopolitical schemes to suppress opposition from other nations.

It seems unlikely that this banal strawman of the Jesuit’s would inspire anyone to feel the need to write a rebuttal in the form of the Protocols, so I think it’s more likely that, like Joly, Sue was familiar with the Protocols and perhaps decided to write this part of his work as a halfhearted liberal rebuttal. Balzac and Sue were acquainted throughout their lives, generally having a “frenemy” relationship.

Along with access, the writer of the Protocols clearly had significant first hand knowledge of Jewish and Masonic groups, with Unz noting that it represents “a reasonably accurate description of the strategies and tactics employed by various conspiratorial movements, often heavily Jewish ones, in seeking to achieve their objective of obtaining political power.” Balzac’s relations with high level Jews and Masons isn’t something we just have to speculate about given his prominence. In fact, according to his biography by Graham Robb, Balzac’s father was a Freemason. His father’s activities may have inspired Balzac in writing The History of the Thirteen, a story focusing on “the activities of a rich, powerful, sinister and unscrupulous secret society in nineteenth-century France.”

Even more notable though is Balzac’s relationship with Baron James Mayer de Rothschild, with Robb’s book reporting that they had a “friendship“1 and discussing a few of their encounters. This ”friendship“ seems to have been an uneasy one though. An article from The Occidental Observer summarizes the treatment that de Rothschild received in Balzac’s fiction:

Balzac modelled his Jewish financier, Nucingen, who appears in more of his novels than any other character, on Baron James Meyer de Rothschild, whom he knew personally. Balzac told his future wife in 1844 that James, “the high baron of financial feudalism,” was “Nucingen to the last detail and worse.”[20] Nucingen is Balzac’s personification of Jewish money power and the social and political corruption attendant on the misuse of that power. In Splendors and Sorrows of Courtesans (1838–47), Balzac, with Nucingen (and thus Baron James) in mind, declared that “all rapidly accumulated wealth is either the result of luck or discovery, or the result of legalized theft.”[21] Nucingen is “the wiliest of all the rogues in The Human Comedy: a banker who can engineer a liquidation of his own assets, or plan an investment portfolio on a client’s behalf, simply and solely to further his own ends—enriching himself but bankrupting others by what is tantamount to legalized crime.”[22]

The article also notes explicit examples from Balzac’s work of Jewish conspiratorial behavior, such as the Jewish art dealer, Magus:

Magus uses Jewish ethnic networks to assiduously track every masterwork in Europe: “Magus had his own map of Europe with every masterpiece marked on it, and at every relevant spot he had co-religionists who kept their eyes open on his behalf in return for a commission—but the reward was meagre for the amount of vigilance entailed!” Balzac likens the monomania of Magus to the desires of kings: Magus is proud of his power to buy the finest canvases which he hoards in his mansion, thus depriving the gentile community of its great works of art.

Balzac also mentioned two elements that feature prominently in the Protocols, the Jewish tendency to dehumanize Gentiles and their tendency towards despotic government:

In personal appearance Remonencq was short and thin; his little eyes were set in his head in porcine fashion; a Jew’s slyness and concentrated greed looked out of those dull blue circles, though in his case the false humility that masks the Hebrew’s unfathomed contempt for the Gentile was lacking.

-Cousin Pons

-

Mahomet certainly derived from the Hebrews the idea of a despotic government…

-Philisophical Studies

The Bolshevik Revolution is widely credited with propelling the Protocols to stardom, given how eerily similar the events of that revolution seemed to be with the scenario described in the Protocols. This similarity is probably more than just a coincidence though. If the Protocols do date to France pre-1864, it seems highly likely that they were based on the 1848 revolution in France, which brought to power the exact kind of despotic, left-wing government that the Protocols discusses.

Balzac lived through this revolution first hand, and had even predicted beforehand that Europe was “on the brink of political catastrophes.“2 Robb’s book makes known some of Balzac’s thoughts during this harrowing experience. The first thing Balzac noted was the immediate anarchy:

On the 23rd, ‘seeing that there were strange goings-on, I changed my clothes and went out. The whole of our faubourg was barricaded, the streets abandoned to the rabble and they were smashing those beautiful lanterns and building barricades. The patience of the troops was sublime!’* When the Government collapsed, he wrote again to Eveline: ‘As far as we’re concerned, here are the results. — Anarchy. 3

The Protocols discusses a similar situation:

The mob is a savage and displays its savagery at every opportunity. The moment the mob seizes freedom in its hands it quickly turns to anarchy, which in itself is the highest degree of savagery.

As the Protocols lays out, this period of anarchy was followed by a period of despotism, which Balzac himself predicted:

In June 1848, the counter-revolution occurred when Balzac had said it would three months before. The provisional government had failed to ease the hunger and unemployment that swept it into power, and after six days of street-fighting a workers’ revolt was savagely repressed by those civilized bourgeois Balzac had always known would be forced by their own policies to act as barbarians. Thousands were shot, imprisoned or deported, the army gained control and in the elections the following December, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor, became President.4

It’s hard not to see the Protocols as describing the same event:

When we have accomplished our coup d’etat we shall say then to the various peoples: “Everything has gone terribly badly, all have been worn out with sufferings. We are destroying the causes of your torment — nationalities, frontiers, differences of coinages. You are at liberty, of course, to pronounce sentence upon us, but can it possibly be a just one if it is confirmed by you before you make any trial of what we are offering you.”

Then will the mob exalt us and bear us up in their hands in a unanimous triumph of hopes and expectations. Voting, which we have made the instrument will set us on the throne of the world by teaching even the very smallest units of members of the human race to vote by means of meetings and agreements by groups, will then have served its purposes and will play its part then for the last time by a unanimity of desire to make close acquaintance with us before condemning us.

Balzac and the Protocols also shared alarm over the rise of communism. From Robb’s book:

Outside the palace in the Rue Fortunée, events were taking an ominous turn: ‘You can’t imagine how much ground communism has gained — a doctrine that consists in overturning everything, sharing everything, even produce and commodities, among all men considered as brothers.”5

From the Protocols:

We appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression when we propose to him to enter the ranks of our fighting forces — Socialists, Anarchists, Communists — to whom we always give support in accordance with an alleged brotherly rule (of the solidarity of all humanity) of our social masonry.

To provide further evidence for the idea that Balzac may have written the Protocols amidst the turmoil of 1848, I’m going to go through the document itself and point out the many instances of overlap in theme and phrasing between what it says and Balzac’s work, especially Lost Illusions.

Note: All Balzac quotes can be found in this digital copy of the complete Human Comedy. I also used this copy of Lost Illusions.

Protocol I:

It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization, and not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could, and rare indeed are the men who would not be willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their own welfare.

This is essentially the stylistic structure of Lost Illusions, as it provides the perspective of nearly every character and shows how they act primarily in their own self-interest, with the objective of gaining power over their own situation.

The Protocols:

Without an absolute despotism there can be no existence for civilization which is carried on not by the masses but by their guide, whosoever that person may be…

…the destruction of the privileges, or in other words of the very existence of the aristocracy of the goyim, that class which was the only defense peoples and countries had against us. On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy of the goyim we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money.

Balzac, Scenes From County Life:

But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery, subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore. May we not have overthrown noble tyrants devoted to their country’s good, to create the tyranny of selfish interests? Shall power lurk in secret places, instead of radiating from its natural source?

The Protocols:

Political freedom is an idea but not a fact.

Balzac, The Duchess of De Langeais:

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

The Protocols:

Every resolution of a crowd depends upon a chance or packed majority…

Balzac in Lost Illusions, describing how the reception of actresses is entirely determined by whether they have paid for fake applause with claqueurs:

“Braulard makes, perhaps, thirty thousand francs every year in this way, and he has his claqueurs besides, another industry. Florine and Coralie pay tribute to him; if they did not, there would be no applause when they come on or go off."

The Protocols:

The political has nothing in common with the moral. The ruler who is governed by the moral is not a skilled politician, and is therefore unstable on his throne. He who wishes to rule must have resource both to cunning and to make-believe.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“So in France systems political and moral have started from one point and reached another diametrically opposed; and men have expressed one kind of opinion and acted on another. There has been no consistency in national policy, nor in the conduct of individuals. You cannot be said to have any morality left. Success is the supreme justification of all actions whatsoever. The fact in itself is nothing; the impression that it makes upon others is everything.”

-

“The craft is vile, but I live by it, and so do scores of others. Do not imagine that things are any better in public life. There is corruption everywhere in both regions; every man is corrupt or corrupts others.”

Protocol II:

The goyim are not guided by practical use of unprejudiced historical observation, but by theoretical routine without any critical regard for consequent results… It is with this object in view that we are constantly, by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories.

Balzac, Lost Illusions and Scenes From Country Life:

“The captious critic, trying his best to find fault, has been obliged to invent theories for that purpose, and has drawn a distinction between two kinds of literature — ’the literature of ideas and the literature of imagery,’ as he calls them.”

-

If a nation is in its dotage, if it has been corrupted to the core by philosophism and the spirit of discussion, it is on the high-road to despotism, from which no form of free government will save it.

The Protocols:

Through the Press we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade:

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“the harm that it does is done anonymously…However shamefully a newspaper may behave, the disgrace attaches to no one person."

The Protocols:

thanks to the Press we have got the gold in our hands…

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“The Jews have monopolized the gold of the world…”

Protocol III

The constitution scales of these days will shortly break down, for we have established them with a certain lack of accurate balance in order that they may oscillate incessantly until they wear through the pivot on which they turn.

Balzac, The Ball at Sceaux:

He preached the expensive doctrines of constitutional government, and lent all his weight to encourage the political see-saw which enabled his master to rule France in the midst of storms.

Protocol IV

Every republic passes through several stages. The first of these is comprised in the early days of mad raging by the blind mob, tossed hither and thither, right and left: the second is demagogy, from which is born anarchy, and that leads inevitably to despotism…

Balzac, Philosophical Studies:

“Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.”

The Protocols:

that leads inevitably to despotism — not any longer legal and overt, and therefore responsible despotism, but to unseen and secretly hidden…

Balzac, Scenes from Country Life:

But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery, subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore… Shall power lurk in secret places, instead of radiating from its natural source?

The Protocols:

Their only guide is gain, that is Gold, which they will erect into a veritable cult, for the sake of those material delights which it can give.

Balzac, Philosophical Studies and Lost Illusions:

…it will perhaps receive some thoughtful attention from minds capable of recognizing the real plague-spots of our civilization, a civilization which since 1815 as been moved by the spirit of gain rather than by principles of honor.

-

“You of this generation in France worship the golden calf…”

Protocol V

All the wheels of the machinery of all States go by the force of the engine, which is in our hands, and that engine of the machinery of States is Gold.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“It is difficult to keep illusions on any subject in Paris,” answered Lucien as they turned in at his door. “There is a tax upon everything — everything has its price, and anything can be made to order — even success.”

The Protocols:

The principal object of our directorate consists in this: to debilitate the public mind by criticism; to lead it away from serious reflections calculated to arouse resistance; to distract the forces of the mind towards a sham fight of empty eloquence.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“Actresses will pay you likewise for praise, but the wiser among them pay for criticism. To be passed over in silence is what they dread the most; and the very best thing of all, from their point of view, is criticism which draws down a reply; it is far more effectual than bald praise, forgotten as soon as read, and it costs more in consequence. Celebrity, my dear fellow, is based upon controversy.”

The Protocols:

In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the GOYIM lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to the public to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“It is a kind of corruption which grows more and more obtrusive and malignant; the wider it spreads, the more patiently it will be endured, until the day comes when newspapers shall so increase and multiply in the earth that confusion will be the result--a second Babel.”

The Protocols:

There is nothing more dangerous than personal initiative; if it has genius behind it, such initiative can do more than can be done by million, of people among whom we have sown discord.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

But in this particular art or craft, as in all others, you shall find a thousand mediocrities for one man of genius.

-

Men of genius, according to her doctrine, had neither brothers nor sisters nor father nor mother; the great tasks laid upon them required that they should sacrifice everything that they might grow to their full stature.

-

“There is the stamp of genius on your forehead," d'Arthez continued, enveloping Lucien by a glance; "but unless you have within you the will of genius…“

This should be examined more in-depth. The concept of genius was a major interest of Balzac, especially in Lost Illusions. Upon reading the Protocols, I noticed the concept came up many times there as well, being mentioned 15 times. I decided to run a simple analysis to compare how often the word “genius” was used in the Protocols versus Lost Illusions and the most famous novels of Balzac’s contemporaries, Dumas, Flabert, Sue, Hugo and Stendahl. I found the texts online via Gutenberg, copy and pasted them into a word counter to get the word count, and then used ctrl-F to see how many times “genius” was used. Then I divided that by the word count to get the rate of use and this was the result:

As you can see, Lost Illusions and the Protocols come in roughly similar, more than double the next closest and around 10x as much as the average. The only one somewhat close was The Red and the Black by Stendahl, but this appears to be an outlier and I included Stendahl’s next most popular work (according to Goodreads), The Charterhouse of Parma, to illustrate that. I believe this analysis understates the similarity though. Lost Illusions is divided into three parts and it is the first part that lays most of the thematic foundation. I included Part I alone to show that it is a near exact match. If we graph this while removing the outlier and the whole of Lost Illusions, the comparison becomes even more stark:

The Protocols:

The science of political economy invented by our learned elders has for long past been giving royal prestige to capital.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

…then the banker receives twenty-eight francs a day by the grace of God and the constitution of the banking system, that all powerful invention due to the Jewish intellect of the Middle Ages, which after six centuries still controls monarchs and peoples.

Protocol VI

To complete the ruin of the industry of the goyim we shall bring to the assistance of speculation the luxury which we have developed among the goyim, that greedy demand for luxury which is swallowing up everything.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

And besides all this, he was reveling in his first taste of luxury; he had fallen under the spell.

-

He saw besides that his so-called friends were leading the same life, earning money easily by writing publishers' prospectuses and articles paid for by speculators; all of them lived beyond their incomes, none of them thought seriously of the future.

Protocol XII

We shall deal with the press in the following way: What is the part played by the press today? It serves to excite and inflame those passions which are needed for our purpose or else it serves selfish ends of parties. It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious, and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

"Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay.”

The Protocols:

It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious, and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves. We shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“When the evil is developed to its fullest extent, restrictive laws will be followed by prohibitions; there will be a return of the censorship of the press imposed after the assassination of the Duc de Berri, and repealed since the opening of the Chambers.”

The Protocols:

We shall reckon them as pamphlets in order, on the one hand, to reduce the number of magazines, which are the worst form of printed poison…

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“You are the proprietor of one of those poison shops.” [referring to newspapers]

-

“…our brains are consumed to furnish their daily supply of poisonous trash.” [referring to newspapers]

The Protocols:

By discussing and controverting, but always superficially, without touching the essence of the matter, our organs will carry on a sham fight fusillade with the official newspapers solely for the purpose of giving occasion for us to express ourselves more fully than could well be done from the outset in official announcements, whenever, of course, that is to our advantage.

Balzac, Lost Illusions. In this passage, they are discussing how it is beneficial to an actress to have a raging debate ongoing about her performance:

"You don't understand it in the least," said Martainville; "if she plays for three months amid a cross-fire of criticism, she will make thirty thousand francs when she goes on tour in the provinces at the end of the season.“

The Protocols:

Not one journalist will venture to betray this secret, for not one of them is ever admitted to practice literature unless his whole past has some disgraceful sore or other…These sores would be immediately revealed. So long as they remain the secret of a few the prestige of the journalist attracts the majority of the country — the mob follow after him with enthusiasm.

-

In order that our scheme may produce this result we shall arrange elections in favour of such presidents as have in their past some dark, undiscovered stain, some “Panama” or other — then they will be trustworthy agents for the accomplishment of our plans out of fear of revelations and from the natural desire of everyone who has attained power, namely, the retention of the privileges, advantages and honour connected with the office of president.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

The 'chanteur' gets possession of some compromising letter, asks for an interview; and if the man that made the money does not buy silence, the 'chanteur' draws a picture of the press ready to take the matter up and unravel his private affairs. The rich man is frightened, he comes down with the money, and the trick succeeds.

The Protocols:

Our calculations are especially extended to the provinces. It is indispensable for us to inflame there those hopes and impulses with which we could at any moment fall upon the capital, and we shall represent to the capitals that these expressions are the independent hopes and impulses of the provinces. Naturally, the source of them will be always one and the same — ours. What we need is that, until such time as we are in the plenitude of power, the capitals should find themselves stifled by the provincial opinion of the nation, i.e., of a majority arranged by our agentur.

After reading the Protocols for the first time, the previous passage which depicts cities subjugated by the provinces was somewhat puzzling to me. After all, the urban poor (the “proletariat”) played a far larger role in the French Revolution of 1789 than the peasantry. They would continue to be the primary source of revolutionary activity all the way up until the Bolshevik Revolution. The Protocols uses the word “proletariat” four times, but in none of those references is it suggested that any revolution may be coming from the proletariat. This somewhat odd view may be explained by Balzac’s personal expectation of an agrarian revolution, as reported in Robb’s book:

Reformist groups had reorganized, and the workers of Paris, some of whom were hard at work on Balzac’s new home, were preparing to reconquer the republic that had been won and lost in 1830.

From his pink-walled study in the Ukraine, surrounded by wheat- fields, Balzac saw things differently. For him, peasants, not the urban proletariat, were the revolutionary threat. With one foot firmly planted in the ancien régime, he had portrayed the species in Les Paysans as an economic termite — a view with which Proudhon agreed* — sly, greedy, idle, sullen, promiscuous and stupid, seething with negative energy, sitting unprofitably on little parcels of land they had stolen from the great estates that should now be restored to their former integrity.

…

Balzac’s prognosis of an agrarian revolution was entirely wrong, which is interesting since the largest gap in his panorama of French society is the urban proletariat, to which he seemed oblivious or indifferent.6

Protocol XV

…they thirst for the emotion of success and applause, of which we are remarkably generous. And the reason why we give them this success is to make use of the high conceit of themselves to which it gives birth… You cannot imagine to what extent the wisest of the goyim can be brought to a state of unconscious naivete in the presence of this condition of high conceit of themselves, and at the same time how easy it is to take the heart out of them by the slightest ill-success, though it be nothing more than the stoppage of the applause they had, and to reduce them to a slavish submission for the sake of winning a renewal of success… These tigers in appearance have the souls of sheep and the wind blows freely through their heads.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

Coralie, to all appearance bold and wanton, as the part required, was in reality girlish and timid… Coralie suffered besides from another true woman's weakness--she needed success, born stage queen though she was. She could not confront an audience with which she was out of sympathy; she was nervous when she appeared on the stage, a cold reception paralyzed her. Each new part gave her the terrible sensations of a first appearance. Applause produced a sort of intoxication which gave her encouragement without flattering her vanity; at a murmur of dissatisfaction or before a silent house, she flagged; but a great audience following attentively, admiringly, willing to be pleased, electrified Coralie.

-

“Believe me, Lucien's horror of privation is so great, the savor of banquets, the incense of success is so sweet in his nostrils, his self-love has grown so much in Mme. de Bargeton's boudoir, that he will do anything desperate sooner than fall back…”

The Protocols:

In general, our judges will be elected by us only from among those who thoroughly understand that the part they have to play is to punish and apply laws and not to dream about the manifestations of liberalism at the expense of the educationary scheme of the State, as the goyim in these days imagine it to be… The young generation of judges will be trained in certain views regarding the inadmissibility of any abuses that might disturb the established order of our subjects among themselves.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

"The enemies of social order, beholding this contrast, take occasion to yap at justice, and wax wroth in the name of the people, because, forsooth, burglars and fowl-stealers are sent to the hulks, while a man who brings whole families to ruin by a fraudulent bankruptcy is let off with a few months' imprisonment. But these hypocrites know quite well that the judge who passes sentence on the thief is maintaining the barrier set between the poor and the rich, and that if that barrier were overturned, social chaos would ensue…”

The Protocols:

We have set them on the hobby-horse of an idea about the absorption of individuality by the symbolic unit of collectivism.

Balzac, Lost Illusions

“Because, in these days, society by degrees has usurped so many rights over the individual, that the individual is compelled to act in self-defence.”

Protocol XVII

…In our hundred hands will be, one in each, the springs of the machinery of social life.

-

…which will restore the regular course of the machinery of the national life… (Protocol I)

(The Protocols uses this machinery metaphor quite a few additional times to refer to the State)

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“I did not see the social machinery at work; so I had to learn to see it by bumping against the wheels and bruising myself against the shafts, and chains.”

-

The whole machinery of modern society is so infinitely more complex than in ancient times…

-

…he had seen the seamy side of life, the consciences of men involved in the machinery of Paris, the mechanism of it all.

-

perhaps, passion may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations and languors and melting phrases;

-

So, strange coincidence! while Lucien was drawn into the great machinery of journalism,

-

a minute description of some part of the machinery of banking will be as interesting as any chapter of foreign travel.

-

In the absence of recognized machinery, therefore, the arrest of a debtor is a problem presenting no small difficulty;

Balzac, Father Goriot and Philisophical Studies:

Even now it was clear to him that, once involved in this intricate social machinery, he must attach himself to a spoke of the wheel that was to turn and raise his fortunes;

-

perfect this essential portion of the social machinery?

In the six books by Balzac’s contemporaries that I examined in the section on genius, I counted only three instances where “machinery” was used metaphorically, and in no instances was it used to refer to society as a whole. Meanwhile, Balzac uses “machinery” as a metaphor seven times in Lost Illusions alone, and three of those times it is used as a metaphor for society. It’s also used as a metaphor for journalism, banking, law enforcement, and human anatomy.

Protocol XX

A loan is — an issue of government bills of exchange containing a percentage obligation commensurate to the sum of the loan capital. If the loan bears a charge of 5 per cent, then in twenty years the State vainly pays away in interest a sum equal to the loan borrowed, in forty years it is paying a double sum, in sixty — treble, and all the while the debt remains an unpaid debt.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

Suppose that in a large banking-house a bill for a thousand francs is daily protested on an average, then the banker receives twenty-eight francs a day… In other words, a thousand francs would bring such a house twenty-eight francs per day, or ten thousand two hundred and twenty francs per annum. Triple the average of protests, and consequently of expenses, and you shall derive an income of thirty thousand francs per annum, interest upon purely fictitious capital.

Lost Illusions contains a quite extensive discussion on the intricacies of banking, probably because Balzac himself was frequently in debt. Balzac closes this discussion by describing it as “manifold atrocities lurking beneath the formidable word ‘legal.’”

Protocol XXI

States announce that such a loan is to be concluded and open subscriptions for their own bills of exchange, that is, for their interest-bearing paper. That they may be within the reach of all the price is determined at from a hundred to a thousand; and a discount is made for the earliest subscribers. Next day by artificial means the price of them goes up, the alleged reason being that everyone is rushing to buy them… But when the comedy is played out there emerges the fact that a debit and an exceedingly burdensome debit has been created. For the payment of interest it becomes necessary to have recource to new loans, which do not swallow up but only add to the capital debt.

Balzac, The Firm of Nucigen:

“But if you look at banking in that light,” broke in Couture, “no sort of business would be possible. More than one bona fide banker, backed up by a bona fide government, has induced the hardest-headed men on ‘Change to take up stock which is bound to fall within a given time. You have seen better than that. Have you not seen stock created with the concurrence of a government to pay the interest upon older stock, so as to keep things going and tide over the difficulty? These operations were more or less like Nucingen’s settlements.”

Different people may find different examples to be more or less convincing. Personally, I found the similarities regarding a rural revolution, the extensive focus on genius, the use of “poison” to describe newspapers, the consistent use of the “machinery” metaphor for society, and people being chained to the need for applause and success to be the most striking. The Balzac quotes about how the Jews monopolized the world’s gold, are more powerful than ever, and invented an ancient banking system which today controls monarchs and peoples also stuck out to me.

If Balzac did write the Protocols, there are still a few unanswered questions. It should be somewhat obvious why he would write it anonymously, given the enormous persecution he surely would have faced if he released it under his own name. It’s less obvious though why he did not release it into the public, instead choosing to give it to one or multiple elite Masons. My guess would be that he did not want the public to mistake it as genuine, and he did not write it in a more clearly fictional style because his style would have been quickly recognized in that case. It’s also possible that he never completed whatever his plan for the work may have been, given that he died two years after the beginning of the 1848 revolution.

To add to this picture, my guess would be that Balzac primarily wrote the document because he was hoping to persuade some of his friends who were in the Masons to stop being involved in that organization. The Protocols includes numerous references to the Masons, where they are portrayed primarily as being useful idiots of the Jews who will soon dispose of them:

In this way we shall proceed with those GOY masons who know too much; such of these as we may for some reason spare will be kept in constant fear of exile.

-

Meantime, however, until we come into our kingdom, we shall act in the contrary way: we shall create and multiply free masonic lodges in all the countries of the world, absorb into them all who may become or who are prominent in public activity, for in these lodges we shall find our principal intelligence office and means of influence.

-

We execute masons in such wise that none save the brotherhood can ever have a suspicion of it, not even the victims themselves of our death sentence, they all die when required as if from a normal kind of illness

To be more specific, I would speculate that Balzac gave the document to Dumas originally. Dumas was a Mason and also served as a pallbearer at Balzac’s funeral. Dumas probably then gave a copy to Sue at some point and Sue used it to write his own version about the Jesuits. The document continued to circulate throughout Masonic circles until it ended up in the hands of Joly, who plagiarized it, and then the rest is history.

As far as I know, very few people are aware that the Protocols dates to pre-1864 France, probably around 1848, and therefore there have been little to no serious investigations as to who actually wrote it. I am writing this article to put forward a candidate, and I would invite any readers to see if they can find anyone more plausible. I imagine the list of talented writers from this era who were antisemitic Royalists but also connected with elite Jews and Masons is a very small one. If we narrow this down to writers who also had an in-depth knowledge of the press, blackmail, and banking, I am skeptical that there exists anyone other than Honoré de Balzac.

If this is true, discussion of whether the document is “authentic” or not would be missing the point. Is the Grand Inquisitor “authentic”? The Protocols would be a masterwork of political philosophy from one of our greatest writers who based it on first hand information. In that sense, it probably has more value than if it were actually the recording of a speech delivered by an unhinged Jewish activist.

There is perhaps one more grand irony in this whole saga. Balzac’s depiction of class struggle made him a noted favorite writer of prominent communists, with Engels declaring him his favorite, Marx referencing him in Das Kapital, and Trotsky famously bothering other Bolsheviks by reading Balzac novels during meetings of the Politboro. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, one of their first acts was to mandate the death penalty for anyone caught with a copy of the Protocols. One can see the gallows humor in the idea of a bored Trotsky reading Balzac shortly after giving the order to execute those who were also reading Balzac, completely unaware that his beloved author was silently condemning him from beyond the grave.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxdfy9&view=1up&seq=302&skin=2021&q1=vous%20verrez%20cher

272

THE MYSTERIES OF THE PEOPLE. [Year 1851 to 1860.]

Father Rothaan, General of the Holy Society of Jesus, to the Reverend Father Rodin. Dear and Reverend Father,

We thank you for the important communications contained in the last memorandum you sent us on the affairs of our holy society, for the details you give us on the descendants of the Lebrenn and Rennepont families. We ask you to continue your research, while, for our part, we gather information to ensure whether, in 1832, our holy society was not the dupe of a deception by the Jew Samuel, who allegedly burned in your presence false debt securities from the Rennepont inheritance to deceive you, while the genuine ones were safe. Please conduct the most meticulous research in this regard and gather the most precise information. We believe that the heirs of the Jew Samuel now live in New York; for it is of the greatest importance for us to get our hands on this immense inheritance, which has already escaped us twice. We have read with great care, studied with great attention the part of your memoir concerning our august son Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, and despite the somewhat harsh judgment, we believe, that you have made of him, the submission and devotion that he has shown to this day to the orders of the holy society of Jesus, make us conceive the greatest hopes for the future and fill our hearts with the greatest joy; also, we have not forgotten that it is to you, reverend father, that we owe the affiliation of Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to our holy society; that it was you who discovered the precious qualities with which he is endowed, during the retreat you made to Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1832, to cure yourself completely of the poisoning of which you were about to be a victim; for it was at that time that you brought the prince to Switzerland and had him affiliated to our order; It is therefore to you, Reverend Father, that we owe in part the precious advantages we have derived from

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte; your intelligent and enlightened zeal has been of the greatest use to us in this circumstance; we recommend that you redouble your solicitude, activity and devotion today, for the circumstances become more important and more serious every day. It is especially now that your advice and direction are of the greatest, most indispensable use to the spirit of the prince, to continue to guide him in the pious path he has followed with so much success until now, to the greater glory of God and of our holy mother the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church; It will still be to your intelligence, your devotion, your zeal, and the happy influence you exercise over the mind of the President of the Republic that we will owe the achievement of our goal of universal domination, pursued for several centuries through all difficulties and obstacles by our holy society. Since the ninth of Thermidor, we have been seeking a man who, by his name, his position, his popularity, his character, his spirit, and above all his submission and devotion to our order, could serve it effectively and place at its disposal the sovereign power with which we would vest it; To succeed in our projects, we needed to find

a prince with a popular name, whose prestige could easily command the confidence of the masses, but none of the heads of power who succeeded one another in France from the Directory until 1824 seemed to offer the conditions we demanded of them;

Charles X, who was later chosen by us for his devotion and sincere attachment to our holy society, unfortunately failed in the pious mission he had undertaken,

the disastrous revolution of 1830 came to postpone our hopes;

it was a few years later that, on your advice, we set our eyes on Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who was affiliated with us in

4834, we knew his ambition, his stubbornness, his Corsican perseverance; we knew that for him, as for us, the end justifies the means. The skillful and far-sighted manner in which he got rid of his elder brother in 1831, at Forli, during the Romagna uprising, in anticipation of the imperial inheritance he wanted to reserve for himself alone, gave us a high idea of the inflexibility of his will, the inexorability of his means, his profound contempt for blood ties and for human life, eminent qualities that alone ensure success. Since then,

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte has completely justified our hopes,

he has openly repudiated ancient doctrines which he had used

as a deceptive mask to attract the sympathy of the revolutionaries he needed at the time; he has broken off his demagogic connections with Young Italy, of whose machinations

he kept us informed for a long time; thanks to our advice,

he has always conspired against the government of Louis-Philippe,

which has done us so much harm; Then, with the fall of this government of atheists, whose most influential advisor, Mr. Guizot, was a heretic, a Huguenot, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, always following our wise advice, our salutary inspirations, presented himself in 1848 to the voters of several French departments as a sincere, devoted, and grateful republican, to whom the February Revolution had reopened the doors of France; finally, through our powerful influence on the masses and the popularity attached to his name, we ensured his triumph in the presidential elections of December 10, 1848. Since then, new pledges of devotion have confirmed the good opinion we had of him; It is thanks to his goodwill that we were able to obtain the support of the French army to destroy the Roman Republic, drive out Mazzini and his supporters, imprison or shoot 40,000 demagogues, and restore our Holy Father the Pope to the papal throne; it is to him that we owe the order and tranquility that allow us to resume our work, briefly interrupted by the revolutions of 4. A thick veil has always covered the mysterious end of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's elder brother; the gravest suspicions have always weighed on the latter. His brother was not wounded in combat, he succumbed quickly to an unknown illness. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte alone assisted him in his final moments. Several historians have accused him of having poisoned his brother out of ambition, to become Napoleon I's heir in his place.

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4830 and 1848; it is thanks to him and the prestige of his name that we

have executive power in France, that we are more

powerful there than we have ever been, that every day we

see our power grow and increase, and that soon, I

hope, we will see our projects realized, our dearest hope fulfilled; and that we will achieve our goal: universal domination. But, for this, we must continue our work, continue to work in the Lord's vineyard, not stop on such a beautiful path, and definitively consolidate the power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, avoiding the elections of May 1852, which would inevitably give the majority to our most mortal enemies, the socialists, the revolutionaries, the philosophers, the atheists, to all those infamous reasoners who proclaim the sovereignty of reason, free inquiry, religious, political, and social liberty, who place science above faith, law above religion and the law, and the sovereignty of the people above the sovereignty of God. We must therefore, if we do not want to see our holy society proscribed and our holy mother the Church persecuted, continue our work with renewed courage, without respite or peace. Among all the liberticidal measures that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, at our suggestion, perfidiously advised and had adopted by the majority of the Legislative Assembly that he wants to destroy, one of the most skillful, without doubt, is the odious law of May 31; by mutilating universal suffrage through this law, the National Assembly has completely discredited itself in the minds of the people and completely depopularized itself; it has thus provided Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte with a most dangerous weapon against it, with the aid of which it will be easy for him to overthrow it. Also, to gain popularity, the President of the Republic, in his last message, dated November 4, proposed to the Assembly the repeal of this law, while recommending that his followers vote against its repeal, and that his ministry weakly defend the bill he was presenting so that it would be rejected; for he wanted to have the full benefit of his proposed repeal in public opinion, which he unfortunately still needs, and for the law of May 31 to be maintained by the majority of the Assembly, which would further depopularize itself by refusing to repeal this odious law, which he hopes to later use against the Assembly to dissolve it. It will therefore be necessary, after having seduced the army with favors, promises, decorations, dreams of glory, etc.: 1. Repeal the law of May 31 and restore the suffrage

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universal; onlookers will shout bravo; 2. Dissolve by force

the Legislative Assembly, which will be easy, since it has completely lost its way and become unpopular through the numerous liberticidal measures it has adopted, the most compromising of which is certainly the law of May 31; 3. Arrest, under the pretext of

conspiracy against the security of the State, the representatives of the people

and senior army officers whose influence could be

formidable; 4. Also arrest and imprison men

of action and influence, former leaders of clubs, secret societies,

of barricades, in Paris and in the departments; 5. Decree a state of siege in Paris and in the departments that offer resistance; 6. Dissolve the Council of State composed of men hostile to the president; 7. Summon the people to their assembly to extend the powers of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte for ten years, by having them vote YES OR NO, thus not leaving the choice of another president; this vote must be held within a very short time, in order to take advantage of the salutary terror inspired by the coup d'état and the favorable impression that the restoration of universal suffrage will inevitably produce; 8. Terrify the intelligent part of the people and the bourgeoisie by the organized massacre of all those who dare to protest, even if only by their presence or their cries against the coup d'état; 9th

Shoot without trial those caught with weapons in hand or building barricades; 10th

Sentence to death, to the galleys, or to prison, by courts-martial, those fortunate enough to have escaped the shooting; 11th

Skillfully take advantage of this favorable opportunity to arrest throughout France those

known for their republican opinions, whether or not they resisted the coup d'état; 12th

Transport without trial, by category, those individuals deemed the most dangerous, to Cayenne, Lambessa, throughout French Africa, or expel them abroad; as for the less dangerous, intern them in the departments under police surveillance; 13th

Immediately suppress all freedoms: freedom of the press, of the public forum, of assembly, of association, etc. The suppression of religious freedom will be reserved for later; 14° Have all printing presses occupied by the police and armed forces, seal all printing presses; prohibit, under penalty of death, the printing or publication of any writings, newspapers, or proclamations hostile to the coup d'état; 45° Confine all troops to their barracks, have them occupy houses at the corners of all streets, churches,

bell towers and public buildings, encourage their zeal with promises of advancement, high pay; with generous distributions of wine, brandy, and tobacco; 16° Give their command in chief to a corrupt man, well paid and already compromised in advance so that he cannot back down, and make him the most seductive promises in the future, act in the same way with all the officers, not sparing gold and promises; 16° And, to anticipate everything, in the event of vigorous resistance or

a defeat, which is unlikely, withdraw the army to

the forts and from there bombard the capital, cover it with iron and fire,

reduce it to ashes, destroy this refuge of revolutionaries, leave

not a stone upon a stone, thus bringing about the triumph of our holy

mother, the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, and restoring order

on the ruins of modern Babylon.

>> Once the bulk of the work is done: the irreconcilable enemies

of order, the Church, and power, the defenders of the republic and the constitution exterminated or imprisoned, we have

everything approved by universal suffrage; The good, honest people of the countryside, so enthusiastic about imperial glories, fascinated

by the name of Napoleon, faithful to the voice of his venerable priests,

guided by them, by the courageous gendarmes, those zealous defenders

of order, advised by all good people, subject to the influence

of a salutary fear, will place in the ballot box the favorable ballots

distributed to them by the mayors, the rural policemen, and all the friends of order. As for the people of the cities, disorganized by the absence of their friends and leaders, killed, imprisoned, or proscribed, without orders, without advice, without any influence other than that exercised on them by the authorities and the clergy, and under the favorable impression of fear and terror, they will be forced to deposit in the ballot box, under the eye of the administration, which can easily control them, the ballots of approval that will have been given to them; if in some localities, despite all precautions, the ballot seemed to leave something to be desired, it would be necessary to employ the ultimate means; 4 The ultimate means is the substitution of ballot boxes; We have ballot boxes similar to those in which we vote, we prepare them in advance by putting

inside a sufficient number of favorable ballots and a few negative ballots for the sake of appearances, we affix seals on them and after the vote we skillfully substitute these ballot boxes thus prepared for the real ones and the trick is done; or we use ballot boxes with false bottoms.

By means of which we are certain of obtaining an overwhelming majority

in favor of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte; that we have the nation's elected official proclaimed with six or eight million votes, with a ten-year extension of his presidential power; then, a little later, when the ten-year presidency is well established and we can safely suppress even the name of the republic, which until then has been retained for form's sake, we will, still

by means of this good universal suffrage, proclaim the hereditary empire with ten or twelve million votes; we will thus consolidate and ensure for the future the power of our elected official, we will found a dynasty that will owe us everything, we will establish on strong and broad foundations the sovereign power of the throne and the altar, we will definitively consolidate the reign of order and of our holy mother the Church; It will then be time, according to the august words of the Prince-President, "for the wicked to tremble and the good to be reassured." The people, freed forever, we hope at least, from the fatal influence of the revolutionaries, those eternal enemies of the throne and the altar; freed from the odious yoke of demagogy, will be able to profit fully from all the benefits of a strong and powerful power, supported by religion, by faith, and inspired by our holy society; they will preserve the most precious of liberty's conquests, universal suffrage, which, well directed, with wisdom and prudence, is the most powerful support, the most useful means of a strong power. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte will be both the people's chosen one and the envoy of Providence, Emperor of the French by the grace of God and the national will; His government will be a blessing from heaven and a wish of the people, vox populi, vox Dei! The prestige of his name serves us admirably in this work of social reconstruction and regeneration of the faith; the necessary means that we are very reluctantly obliged to recommend to achieve this sacred goal will soon be forgotten before the grandeur of the result and the sanctity of the purpose; and our holy mother the Church, who, in the most difficult and critical circumstances, has always known how to spread a beneficial balm on the wounds that she has often been forced to inflict despite herself, will know how to heal the wounds she has inflicted, covering them with the mantle of Christian charity, by pouring out upon them the treasures of her indulgence and the graces of her love and mercy! » She will know how to admit to repentance all those who wish to abjure

their pernicious opinions; she will grant them the graces of her

indulgence and mercy. Is it not written that "whatever she forgives will be forgiven; whatever she pardons will be pardoned?" But as for those who persist in their impenitence, they will have no forgiveness to hope for, "there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

>> Thanks to the execution of the wise and energetic measures we advise him to take, Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte will be the Lord's anointed, he will reign by the grace of God and the national will; we will intone for him the same Te Deum as for the absolute monarchy, the constitutional monarchy, or the republic, except for a slight change in the fac regem.

>> So much for the present! >> As for the future, we will always pursue our goal without peace or truce, by instructing new generations in our holy company, which will lead them in the way of the Lord, inspire in them from an early age the love of God, respect for religion, the deepest veneration for His holy ministers, and the most absolute obedience to emperors and kings, God's chosen ones on earth, and the most complete submission to our holy father the pope, the representative of Almighty God. >> Our holy society will instill in them from an early age a deep hatred, an invincible repugnance for the spirit of discussion and free examination, and a holy horror for philosophers, free thinkers, reformers, Protestants, Huguenots, unbelievers, atheists, Freemasons, liberals, radicals, revolutionaries, republicans, socialists; for their actions, their doctrines, and their writings; for religious reform, philosophy, and revolution.

>> It will preach to them continence, abstinence, poverty, contempt for wealth, resignation; She will tell them: "that the kingdom of heaven is not of this world," - "that the earth is a place of exile, a valley of mourning, tears, and misery," - "that it is easier to make a camel pass through the eye of a needle than to make a rich man enter heaven." And she will thus destroy the ideas so harmful, so pernicious, and above all so dangerous, of universal well-being, of the emancipation of workers, of the abolition of the proletariat, of pauperism, of misery, and of exploitation, with which the socialists, those minions of Satan, have seduced the people, especially since the February Revolution, and for which they fought in June 1848. By all these means, by thus making the good princes triumph,

principles, sound doctrines, our holy society will reestablish the reign of Christian charity, faith, love of God, and order; Public tranquility and prosperity will be restored, power will be consolidated, it will become strong and lasting; our holy mother the Church will see her prosperity, her wealth, and her influence increase every day, and, consequently, security will be reborn everywhere; we will see that private wealth grows at the same time as public wealth. The bourgeoisie, the bosses, the industrialists, the merchants, the lenders, the bankers, the stockbrokers, all the privileged people who live and speculate on the labor of the proletarians, will also see their wealth increase every day and their business prosper; They will therefore all be directly interested in supporting

an order of things that is so profitable to them and in defending the government that will have courageously inaugurated this era of prosperity that socialists outrageously call the reign of the exploitation of man by man. The profits taken by employers from workers, by capital from labor, under the names

of rents or interest, are, however, ultimately only the just reward, the equitable remuneration, and the legal privilege of the most intelligent, the most economical, the most moral part of the people; of

those who nourish and cultivate industry, commerce, and labor.

Poverty, which revolutionaries attribute to the vices of society and to privileges, is only the just punishment inflicted on sins and one of the trials through which God makes humanity pass in order to punish and purify it; It is relieved by Christian charity, that divine grace, source of benefits and gratitude, which binds the beneficiary to his benefactor by the noblest and sweetest of all feelings, gratitude, and thus establishes the dominion of generous people and assures them the obedience of the unfortunate people they have obliged; charity therefore serves as a moderator of bad passions, of the vices engendered by suffering and misery; it consoles and softens the unfortunate and the poor who, without it, would always be ready to rebel and revolt. Let us all bow before the admirable wisdom of Providence, which, in Christian charity, has placed a check on a benefit; and a chain on an act of love! >>> To cement the new power even more indissoluble, to extend its roots more deeply among the people, so that the work of the Lord that we wish to make triumph may be indestructible, it is not enough to submit the poor to the rich through charity and gratitude and to inspire in them

early feelings of self-denial and Christian submission; it is still necessary to interest the common people more directly,

in a purely pecuniary manner, in the maintenance of the power that we will have established, and for this, it will be necessary to give more development,

a greater extension to speculation; to create a mass of negotiable representative values, to make them accessible to the common people; to initiate the latter into the mysteries of the backstage, to stock market speculations; to introduce them to the path of stock-market speculation; to make them

buy coupons for annuities and loans at a premium; to make them

speculate, to play on the rise or fall; in such a way as to make them

invest their savings and to interest them directly, materially in the maintenance of the government and to oblige them to support the State,

to vote for it, to defend their pecuniary interests, to ensure the

value and payment of their securities and their debts to the State. By this means, the love of income will replace the love of liberty.

>> The Orleans dynasty, which has allied itself with heresy and has shown itself too much of an enemy of the clergy by protecting the university against the Holy Society of Jesus, by founding and developing secular primary education to the detriment of the brothers of Christian doctrine, must be punished by the confiscation of its immense assets, the majority of which will be given to the Church to be used in pious works, for the religious instruction of the new generation, or to endow congregations and relieve old soldiers.

>> These are the principal measures that must be taken by our beloved brother Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to ensure the triumph of ORDER within France.

>>> Let us now turn our attention to the exterior; for, let us not forget, what we want to establish is universal authority in dogma and in the State; it is the most absolute triumph of Catholicism in the broadest sense of the word. But there exists a powerful obstacle to the accomplishment of our projects; there is in Europe a heretical race, persevering, courageous, strong, proud, living off commerce and industry; which, by its spirit of adventure and enterprise, its skill and courage, has conquered the empire of the seas; whose formidable fleets sail the oceans from pole to pole; which holds in its hands the keys to the straits and the scepter of the seas, and which reigns supreme over the Indies and over immense colonies in America, Oceania and in all parts of the globe, where it numbers its subjects by the hundreds of millions. Now, as long as this formidable power, as long as this

powerful obstacle, as long as England remains standing we will never be able to completely realize our projects and achieve our goal; but, as it is a strong and formidable nation, we must first manage it, even flatter it, make advances and concessions to it, and seek to isolate it in Europe before attacking it; it is therefore necessary to create alliances with the new power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, to have it accepted by the European monarchies, and to do this, to revise the treaties of 1815 and erase the article that forever excludes the Bonaparte family from the throne of France, as incompatible with the peace of Europe; the plan is simple and the means are easy. The Emperor Nicholas of Russia, who will certainly not understand the importance and scope of the work we wish to accomplish, will want to take advantage of the establishment of the new power in France to carry out his plans for conquest in the East and continue the execution of Peter I's will; England, which will, as always, view Russia's aggrandizement with jealousy, will ask nothing better than to ally itself with France to maintain the European balance, the independence of Turkey, and the protection of Eastern Christians; Piedmont could even be drawn into this crusade, this time in favor of the Turks and the Christians of Mohammed and Christ, against schismatic Russia; If the latter persists in its plans, which we have every reason to hope based on our information, it will be infallibly defeated, because Austria, on which it believes it can count, because of the important service it rendered in Hungary in 1848, by reestablishing the authority of the Hapsburgs over that unfortunate country, Austria, we say, is prepared to maintain the strictest neutrality to ensure its influence in the Danubian Principalities and its authority in Italy; it will leave Russia isolated and left to its own resources; now, Russia alone will not be able to resist the united forces of France, England, and Piedmont; it will succumb; then we will impose peace on it in a congress where, thanks to the victory, we will dictate the conditions; The first will be the acceptance of the imperial dynasty of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte on the throne of France, as a condition of order and security in Europe, and the removal of the article in the 1815 treaties that excludes the Bonaparte family from the throne of France; the second condition will be the protection of the Christians of the East, a sure means of intervening later to our advantage in Constantinople, Jerusalem, or Egypt, under this specious pretext. But first, it will be necessary, through generosity and

of courtesy, we must conciliate Russian sympathies in order to obtain

later the alliance of this power; if Czar Nicholas refuses,

we will reserve for him the fate of Paul I; his son Alexander, whom we

have skillfully sounded out, has the best dispositions towards

France; moreover, his youth and inexperience will serve us well; we will also have to skillfully exploit the discontent that Austria's neutrality, during the Eastern War,

will have caused at the court of St. Petersburg, to excite Russian resentment,

so that later, when Austria needs its support,

Russia will return the favor and leave it also alone, isolated; Tell

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte that his entire foreign policy must consist of forming alliances and isolating the enemies he will have to fight, that he should not forget the most important of Machiavelli's maxims: "Divide and rule."

" Once assured of Russia's alliance, or simply its neutrality, he will push Piedmont further and further along the path of attacks and incitement that he is pursuing against Austria, so as to bring about a rupture between these two powers; King Victor Emmanuel has an adventurous and chivalrous spirit, he dreams of the royalty of all Italy; His minister, M. de Cavour, a skillful and dangerous man, sworn enemy of Rome, the clergy, and our holy religion, still encourages and excites the ambitious ambitions of his sovereign, to whom he has promised the kingship of the Peninsula; he pursues with devouring activity the goal he has set for himself: to drive Austria from Italy, to restore this beautiful country to itself, and to destroy the temporal power of our Holy Father the Pope; such is the impious, execrable project pursued by our most formidable enemies, Victor Emmanuel, and his prime minister; to accomplish their perfidious designs, they will naturally seek support in France; this is why it will be easy to draw them first into the East against Russia, by promising them our alliance against Austria. Sure of our support to drive out the Austrians, Piedmont will no longer have peace until it has engaged in a struggle with what it calls the oppressors of Italy; it will then be offered a secret treaty in which it will promise France, in exchange for its support against Austria, to cede Savoy and Nice, and despite the reluctance that the King of Sardinia will certainly feel to cede Savoy, which is the cradle of his family, he will consent in the hope of becoming King of Italy. The possession of Savoy is essential for the realization of our projects, because it will give us the main passages through the Alps and

the keys to Italy. Once Louis Bonaparte is firmly established on the Alps, he will also be able to claim the left bank of the Rhine; he will demand these two strategic positions as the former limits of France under the Revolution and its natural borders.

>>> Once Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte has obtained from Piedmont the promise of the cession of Savoy, he will vigorously support him with his arms against Austria, which, despite the valor of its troops, the size of its army, and the positions it occupies in Italy, will not be able to resist, isolated in an enemy country, against the united forces of France and Piedmont and against the permanent threats of insurrections in its rear, in the Tyrol, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, etc. It will be defeated; It is then that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte will be able to play a role

triplely useful to our future projects: 1° To conciliate the sympathies of Austria, an eminently Catholic power, after

having defeated it by generously negotiating peace with it; by

seducing it, with advantageous conditions, as he will have already

done with Russia; 2° To ensure in a given time his decisive influence

in Italy for the benefit of our holy society, by the creation

of separate kingdoms in the center and south of the Peninsula, for

his cousins, Murat and Napoleon Bonaparte, sons of the former King Jerome; by these means we will maintain the age-old divisions of Italy

which alone constitute its weakness and our strength; Austria and the Bourbons of Naples being today powerless to maintain themselves any longer

in Italy and to perpetuate its division; 3. Crush the revolution, lower and subordinate Piedmont by subjecting it to a kind of suzerainty, treating it as a vassal, opposing its expansion by all means, and always keeping it at its discretion; first by the army occupying Rome and by the one that will have been there to help it against Austria, and then by the conquest of Savoy, which, by giving us the Alpine passes, will allow us to constantly threaten it and keep it in absolute dependence; in this position, Piedmont will no longer be formidable. >> To achieve this triple result, it will be enough to win two or three battles against Austria, while taking care to make England, which will still be our ally, act strongly against Prussia and the German Confederation, so that they remain neutral and do not come to Austria's aid; for this, we will promise to localize the war in Italy and threaten all of Europe with revolution.

in the event that Germany intervenes. With the help of the Italian patriots, the volunteers, and Piedmont, who will be promised a free Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic, Austria will necessarily succumb; then, at the first opportunity, peace will be negotiated with Austria, without consulting Victor Emmanuel or M. de Cavour, advantageous conditions will be offered to secure its goodwill; Venice, Peschiera, Mantua, Verona, etc. will be left to it, only Lombardy will be ceded to it, which will be returned to Victor Emmanuel to compensate him for Savoy and Nice; Austria will be promised to convene a conference between itself, Piedmont, and France to sign and ratify the peace treaty; We will give her a glimpse of the formation of an Italian confederation into which she will enter, guaranteeing her the preservation of the remainder of her possessions in Italy; we will promise our Holy Father the Pope the presidency of this confederation, of which all the Italian states will be part, so that Piedmont, the only liberal government on the Peninsula, will be completely neutralized by the majority of its confederates, all Austrians and Catholics; by this means, the power of the Pope will become powerful and strong and his moral influence will grow considerably, and the power of Austria in Italy will be incontestable.

" By means of all these promises, which we will reserve the right to elude depending on the circumstances, we will succeed in securing Austria's goodwill in the future; we will even promise to leave her Lombardy and Milan if she wants to allow Louis Bonaparte to seize the Rhine provinces. Victor Emmanuel will undoubtedly be hurt by such a procedure and such an arrangement, but he will be given a part of Lombardy as compensation to console him. M. de Cavour, seeing himself outwitted, will be forced to withdraw; the Italian patriots and revolutionaries will cry treason, but the French army in Italy will silence them; if the petty sovereigns of the center, of Parma, Modena, or Tuscany, were to lose their crowns, their rights would be reserved for the future and their provinces would be made into a separate state placed under the patronage of France, to ensure its decisive influence over the affairs of Italy and perpetuate its division; it will be necessary above all to strive to oppose all kinds of obstacles to the unification of Italy under the scepter of Victor Emmanuel; this is a great danger to be averted. Victor Emmanuel was only to be a temporary instrument that would later be broken during a second Italian campaign, which would take place when France held the Alps and the Rhine,

and whose aim will be to make Italy an annex of France,

the King of Piedmont will then be sacrificed like so many others who must successively suffer the same fate; Italy must be absorbed, as well as Switzerland and a large part of Europe, and

sacrificed in the very near future, as Austria will be

later, as well as Prussia, Germany, England, etc.

But, to begin with, we must be content to divide them.

>> Austria will not forgive Germany and Prussia for

having abandoned her during the Italian War; we will still have to skillfully exploit this enmity, because it will serve to carry out our

projects on the Rhine; Since the inaction of all of Germany will have allowed us to carry out our projects on the Alps, we will promise Prussia to allow it to expand in Germany and we will offer England some commercial advantages while Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte seizes the Rhine line, and will continue to show the greatest consideration for Russia, supporting it more than ever in the hope of the accomplishment of its projects in the East, which it will be promised to share after the subjugation of England. The latter will eventually guess our projects and will understand part of the plan followed by Emperor Napoleon III, for we can already give him this title today, so certain are we of the success of our enterprise; but it will matter little then if heretic Albion finally realizes that our plans are directed against it, that what we want to bring down is its colossal power, its liberties, which are a permanent obstacle, hitherto invincible, to the accomplishment of our projects; then the empire will be in a position formidable enough to defy it; moreover, England will from then on be isolated in Europe; estranged with Russia since the Eastern War, where it will have fought against it; with Austria since the Italian War, since it will have prevented Germany from coming to its aid; it will therefore have no other hope than in Prussia, whose alliance it will covet to find a foothold on the continent against its formidable and former ally Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte; but Prussia and the small states of the

German Confederation are, like all confederate states,

difficult to move, they always lack one thing indispensable for action, unity; divisions can be skillfully created between the various states of the German Confederation, their rivalries maintained in such a way as to neutralize their forces; one must also not forget to secretly encourage and nurture

Prussia's ambitious projects for Germany and the confederation

Germanic nation that it would like to strongly establish under a democratic central power and thus form a vast and powerful confederation of all the German peoples so disunited under their current constitution, Prussia will therefore be promised help in reconstituting German nationality, and this will certainly be enough to make it abandon the English alliance and dispose it favorably in favor of France's plans on the Rhine, and it will thus allow the annexation to France of the provinces located on the left bank of this river to be accomplished.

> French Switzerland will also be seized to gain access to the Simplon road; passage through the Valais will first be requested for a French army, by virtue of the right that Piedmont had to cross this canton to reach Italy, a right that France will have held since the cession of Savoy; Once the French army is in Valais, it will occupy it definitively, as well as the cantons of Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel, Fribourg, etc., etc.

By means of the plan outlined above, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte will therefore succeed in extending France's borders to the Alps and the Rhine; in having Piedmont as an ally and almost as a vassal; in securing Russia's neutrality through promises or a few concessions in the East; in detaching Prussia from the English alliance by encouraging its policy of German unity; and in neutralizing Austria, through Piedmont and Italy, and through its old rivalry with Prussia. With the ground thus prepared and the positions taken by France, England will be alone in Europe, at the discretion of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who will have nothing left to do but consummate its ruin. >> It is unnecessary to elaborate here on all the means that must be employed to defeat and ruin England; to destroy its maritime power and annihilate its naval forces, and to go as far as London to overthrow its government, its constitution, its proud and heretical aristocracy, and ensure the empire of Catholicism on the ruins of modern Carthage; let it suffice for us to draw the attention of the President of the Republic to Cherbourg as the port where he can prepare his expedition well in advance, and to recommend that he foment an insurrection in the Indies, in order to weaken the power of England, for to strike it in India is to strike it in the heart; This will not be impossible, because our house in Pondicherry and our correspondent Josué Vandaël in Batavia, who sent us information on this subject, both assure us that the sepoys, native troops in the service of

vice of England in the Indies, can be driven to revolt under the most futile religious pretext; they partly profess Islam and are very fanatical; Russia could help France to stir up this rebellion, for it already has a foothold in Asia on the Amur River, and from there it could bribe an insurrection in the English Indies. It will also be necessary to have the island of Sardinia ceded to it by Piedmont, in order to more easily seize Malta by driving the English out, and thus become, without sharing, the masters of the Mediterranean. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez

should not be neglected either, because by joining the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the shortest and most direct route to India would be opened, which would be all the more useful for our projects

because of the position taken by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy, by

French Africa, and Egypt, which he would seize in the partition

of the Turkish empire, by the possession of the islands of Sardinia and Malta,

the Mediterranean would become a French lake and the key to India

would then be in his hands; he could continually threaten

England in its immense Asian colonies.

" It would also be easy to incite Catholic Ireland to revolt

against Protestant England, by promising it the support of

France, by sending it aid, and by preparing a raid

on its territory. In a word, nothing should be neglected to weaken England and prepare for the expedition that must absolutely be attempted against her. In France, the old national hatred, still very popular against England, will be resurrected; the people and the army will be made to believe that they want to avenge the defeat at Waterloo and the martyrdom of Saint Helena; there will then be only a cry of extermination against perfidious Albion. With England defeated and its power destroyed, Russia will be offered the division of Europe into two great empires, the Eastern Empire for the Czar and the Western Empire for Bonaparte. Germany would have the same destiny as England; war against the Prussians and the Austrians would be no less popular in France than war against the English; With the question of nationalities, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, the Danubian provinces, etc., would be raised, and, in this great conflagration of peoples, it would not be difficult for Bonaparte to conquer all of Germany and seize it under the pretext of freeing the peoples from the governments that oppress them. Louis Napoleon could thus push back the limits of his empire to the Niemen and the Pruth; all the other small states of Europe would be successively absorbed in the same way; while

Russia would seek to accomplish its projects in the East, France would lend it a hand to help it drive the Turks back into Asia and would take advantage of the situation to occupy Constantinople and seize Egypt, the Dardanelles, and the Bosphorus, in order to prevent Russia from entering the Mediterranean; it would be completely impossible for the latter power to fight against the colossal Western empire that would have just been formed; Bonaparte would pursue his work of conquest even in the empire of the czars, and, like his uncle, he would seize Moscow and further enlarge his empire as far as the Urals and the Caspian Sea by driving the czars into Siberia in Asiatic Russia; Master of the vast territory between the Atlantic Ocean, the North Seas, and the Caspian Sea, Spain would still have to be conquered in order to possess Gibraltar and thus hold the last key to the Mediterranean, which would become a French lake. Spain would first have been pushed into ruinous wars in Morocco and Portugal; once weakened by this double struggle and left alone and without support, it would be forced to submit to the stronger and suffer the fate common to the other European states. We mention Sweden and Norway only for the record, because once Europe was conquered, these two secondary states could not escape the general invasion. The rest of Switzerland would suffer the same fate, and all of Europe would form a single empire under Bonaparte's scepter, to which all the peoples of the world would become tributaries, and the idea of universal domination pursued for centuries by our holy society and dreamed of by Napoleon I would have triumphed; it would then be realized Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's favorite maxim: "To reign over France is to reign over Europe, and to reign over Europe is to reign over the world." »

>>> We could then firmly and definitively establish the absolute power of our holy mother, the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, by placing the throne of this great empire on the altar, and work effectively for the regeneration of the peoples of Europe and save from perdition and eternal damnation all heretics, schismatics, excommunicated persons, unbelievers, freethinkers, philosophers, Freemasons, liberals, radicals, revolutionaries, and socialist republicans. We could then recommence on a larger scale the holy work of salvation accomplished by Louis XIV, inspired by our venerable brother in Jesus, Father Lachaise, and Madame de Maintenon, of holy and pious memory; when the means of gentleness inst-

TOME CHII.

19

If, however, the charity and mercy of our Holy Mother the Church will not be enough, we will be, to our great regret, forced to use the secular arm, the sword, iron, and fire to accomplish the great mission we have received from God, to work tirelessly to save peoples from eternal damnation, and we repeat here, with deep conviction, convinced that we will soon see them fulfilled, the now famous words we spoke at the Chieri conference. "... Do you think that the ashes of the pyres are completely extinguished? That not the smallest ember remains to light a single torch! The fools! By calling us Jesuits, they believe they are covering us with shame! But the

Jesuits reserve for them censorship, a gag, and fire... and one

day they will be the masters of their masters.¹ Yes, one day

we will be the masters of our masters, and that day of justice and

atonement is approaching with the speed of lightning; may our

dear brother and beloved son, Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, seize the flaming sword, the exterminating sword that we offer him, and he will be the archangel charged with the execution of divine vengeance and social regeneration; may he strike down the guilty without pity, for as on the day of the last judgment, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth; the good, those who have walked in the way of the Lord, will rejoice, and the wicked, the impious, the profaners and blasphemers of his holy name will tremble; but it will be too late, because for the measure to be

salutary, for the hydra of evil not to be reborn, it will be necessary

to cut off all its heads at once and make disappear even the last trace of its accursed power; let us not forget that the revolution is the daughter of religious reformation, that both are

manifestations of the spirit of free examination, discussion and liberty, the enemy of faith; that John Huss, Wickleff, Hutten, Munzer, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, are the precursors of Danton, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Marat, Babeuf, Proudhon, Blanqui and Mazzini; that conservative Protestants, Anglicans, and Lutherans are just as much enemies of our holy mother the Catholic Church, of our holy father the Pope, and of our holy society as the most advanced socialists and the most hardened atheists; it will therefore be necessary to work for their conversion with the same zeal as for that of the revolutionaries; religious reformation must completely disappear. 4 Textual; the passages in quotation marks are always quotations reproduced word for word.

tre, just like the revolution, its followers, all the Reformed, Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, etc., etc., must recant, be converted, make amends and submit, just like the revolutionaries; otherwise we will be, with great regret, forced to use force to extirpate their heresy, destroy their fatal errors, by reestablishing the tribunal of the Most Holy Inquisition, which will work effectively to extinguish evil by converting, amending, punishing, or exterminating the guilty. All the books of the reformers, philosophers, and revolutionaries will be burned by the executioner's hand; their newspapers suppressed, their platforms and temples demolished,

their children baptized and raised in the Catholic faith, the exercise

or public or secret practice of any other faith will be punished

by death; presses and private printing presses will be destroyed,

the Church and the State alone will be able to print; the rights of assembly

and association will be abolished, except for the faithful who

will gather under their venerable curates and their holy bishops to

feed on the word of God; the sacred pulpit will replace the platform and the so-called evangelical pulpit of the reformed churches; the practice

of religious duties will become a holy obligation, a pious

duty from which no one will be able to shirk; Emperors and kings, those directors of nations, to whom God has given power and strength to guide them on the right path, will be placed so high in the admiration and adoration of the people that, after our holy father the Pope, they will be the most venerated representatives of God on earth. Public education will be given entirely to our most holy Society of Jesus, which will inculcate early in new generations the love of God, obedience to our holy religion, respect for its worthy ministers, the most absolute submission to the sovereigns of the earth, blessed and consecrated by them; contempt for riches, resignation to the evils and miseries with which God tests humanity. Not half a century will have passed before, through these salutary and effective measures, men will no longer be recognizable. They will have become as humble, as submissive, as pious, as they are now proud, rebellious, and impious.

>>Let Prince-President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte think about it.

We offer him the largest empire in the world, universal domination, if he wishes to ensure the triumph of our order; but let him hasten to accept, for time is pressing, the moment to act has come,

every day of delay is a danger, there is no longer any hesitation.

have. The Quaestors' proposal, which aims to give the President of the Legislative Assembly the right to directly request armed force; the bill on presidential responsibility, whose commission responsible for drafting it, out of fifteen members, includes fourteen who are enemies of the President of the Republic; must sufficiently make it clear to the latter that the Assembly wishes to take precautions against him and that it is high time to take a decisive stand.

>> Let the President also not forget that interpellations must be made in the Assembly on the Mediterranean liner affair and on the management of the gold bullion lottery; that these interpellations will lead to scandalous revelations about the bribes his advisors received, and about the embezzlement and misappropriation of funds from the gold bullion lottery of which he is accused; It is being asserted and loudly said in the corridors of the Assembly that a representative of the people has material proof

of these misdeeds and that he will produce them at the rostrum; that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte should not forget the scandals that preceded the fall

of Louis-Philippe and the fate of Teste and Pellaprat, which the Assembly reserves for him; for if he does not hurry with his coup d'état,

soon it will be too late, in eight days he will be in Vincennes and

in three months in Clairvaux; he must choose between the throne

and the galleys, between the purple and the jacket, between sovereign honors and infamous shame! >> We believe the Prince-President to be too intelligent to suppose him capable of hesitating for a single instant, and we are convinced that he will follow the wise and useful advice we give him and that he will continue to work with us "ad majorem Dei gloriam" according to the motto of our illustrious patron Saint Ignatius of Loyola, our master and his own.

• Receive, reverend priest, with our blessing, the best wishes we express for the success of your holy mission, which you will accomplish in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen!

" The General of the Order,

" ROOTHAAN."

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of Adam were building.

6 And he said: Behold, it is one people, and all have one tongue: and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them in deed.

7 Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another's speech.

8 And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city.

9 And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded: and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.

St. Thomas Aquinas and Biblical Principles of Race

Clearly different races and ethnic groups exist, and the Bible itself is a story of tribes. How should we act in response to this truth though? Modern conservatives tend to take the approach of being “colorblind” and attempt to ignore these differences as much as possible. It is important to remember though that race and ethnicity are not just “color”, they are the terms we use to refer to groups of people who have a genetic or “blood” connection, similar to a very large extended family.

For handling our blood relations, the Bible and St. Thomas are clear. Aquinas says that we ought to love those who are closer to us even above those who are better people, and he cites 1 Timothy 5:8:

"If any man have not care of his own and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel."

He goes on to say that our blood relations are those to whom we have the closest union of all. St. Thomas states that we "ought to love more specially those who are united to us by ties of blood...it is evident that the union arising from natural origin is prior to, and more stable than, all others, because it is something affecting the very substance, whereas other unions supervene and may cease altogether."

Preferentially caring for one’s own race isn’t just morally acceptable; it is a command. With his statement, Aquinas also pinpoints the inherent problem in multi-racial nations. Things might go fine for quite a long time, but because the union is not of natural substance, there is a perpetual risk that it may cease altogether. History is replete with examples of different peoples living together in harmony for centuries, but then unexpectedly erupting in a conflagration of ethnic violence.

If it seems that I am inferring too much here, St. Thomas also fortunately discusses this specific issue when he defends the everlasting wisdom and justness of the Mosaic Law. The Law commanded the Jews to accept certain foreigners slowly, whereas others were to be rejected altogether in defense of the common good:

"The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might attempt something hurtful to the people.

Blood relation was one of the most critical factors in the discernment process, as the Idumeans were acceptable on the grounds of being a cousin-people, whereas the complete absence of kin relations is a core reason for why the Amalekites were never to be admitted.

Hence it was that the Law prescribed in respect of certain nations that had close relations with the Jews (viz., the Egyptians among whom they were born and educated, and the Idumeans, the children of Esau, Jacob's brother), that they should be admitted to the fellowship of the people after the third generation; whereas others (with whom their relations had been hostile, such as the Ammonites and Moabites) were never to be admitted to citizenship; while the Amalekites, who were yet more hostile to them, and had no fellowship of kindred with them, were to be held as foes in perpetuity."

It should simply be common sense that foreigners with whom we are more closely related are those who are most likely to have our well being at heart. However, this is more than simply prudent, it follows from the previously discussed Biblical command to favor our blood that all human beings are naturally inclined towards. The Mosaic Law system of ethnic nationalism is wise, stable, and indispensable for forming human societies.

A common objection to this is that the Jews were the chosen people, and none of this need apply now that the covenant has expanded to all; i.e. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." However, Aquinas points out that the Old Testament contains a similar verse: “If any stranger be willing to dwell among you, and to keep the Phase of the Lord; all his males shall first be circumcised, and then shall he celebrate it according to the manner, and he shall be as that which is born in the land.” (Exodus 12:48)

How is it then that this verse is reconciled with the verses that exclude certain peoples from citizenship? Aquinas responds to the objection by pointing out that these verses are referring to spiritual unity, and that the laws regarding foreigners "excluded the men of no nation from the worship of God and from things pertaining to the welfare of the soul." The laws were intended to regulate "temporal matters concerning the public life of the people." This required some to be excluded from the nation, even if they kept the Phase of the Lord, for the reason given above. Every race could enter the covenant, but not every race could enter the nation.

The expansion of the covenant to the gentiles is therefore irrelevant, since these laws were never intended as religious restrictions on other peoples in the first place. As St. Thomas says, these racial laws were justly laid down by God to safeguard the nation from incompatible foreigners, even those who worshiped God, and these laws are as universally just as the Ten Commandments. They are a logical extension of the fourth commandment and other Biblical commands to favor our families. As with the Ten Commandments, these principles regarding favoring our race and race-centric nationhood are the word of the Lord, part of the law that was fulfilled by Jesus Christ, and are to be dismissed at our own peril.

Interracial Marriage

The racial precepts of the Mosaic Law are of course also applied when we consider interracial marriage. While many cite the example of Ruth the Moabite in defense of interracial marriage, Aquinas describes this as an exception, where a special dispensation was granted due to Ruth’s exceptional virtue.

Later in the Old Testament, the prophet Ezra condemns the Jews for breaking the aforementioned laws, especially through mixed marriages, and most especially the officials who encouraged them:

"They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them. And the leaders and officials have led the way in this unfaithfulness.” (Ezra 9:2)

In Tobit 4:13, interracial marriage is seen as an insult towards one's kindred:

Therefore, son, love your kindred. Do not act arrogantly toward any of them, the sons and daughters of your people, by refusing to take a wife for yourself from among them. For in arrogance there is ruin and great instability.

Why was interracial marriage damaging to the temporal life of the Jewish nation? We already established that racial groups do and should favor their own, and that they will sometimes conflict with each other. Interracial marriage fosters dual loyalty and undermines the cohesion of a people and its ability to remain united in the face of potential threats from competing peoples. The collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia have shown that territories with a strong and distinct ethnic identity tend to be the ones that are the most capable of resisting outside domination. Nations that lack this unity are vulnerable to be preyed upon by other nations, and the Book of Ezra and Nehemiah go on to describe the many toxic cultural influences that result from this racial mixing.

As a modern example, Jews in the 20th century United States were rivals with European-Americans for dominance over the American elite. Jewish organizations worked hard to overturn laws against interracial marriage in the American South as well as immigration restrictions, almost certainly aware of the damage this would do to the cohesion of their rivals.

This all raises a question. If interracial marriage is sinful, why does the Church allow it? And should it do so? I believe the answer to this question comes down to the natural ambiguity of defining extended family and race. The Bible makes clear which people are close enough to the Jews so as to be unproblematic, but this varies for different peoples, cultures, and time periods. The marriage of a European and an African clearly constitutes racial mixing, but what about a Scotsman and an English woman? Or a European and someone who is 10% African? Explicitly attempting to enforce a ban on interracial marriage would bring the Church into many complex cultural and political dilemmas that are not really its responsiblity.

A useful analogy is the age of consent. In the Church, it is technically licit for a 14 year old girl to marry a 50 year old man, and there were many times in history where this was acceptable. However, I doubt anyone in our culture would consider that moral, and I doubt the Church has any issues with age of consent laws imposed by the state that require a girl to be 18. Similar to marrying the very young, laws regarding interracial marriage are highly entwined with the temporal situation and are therefore probably more of an issue of the state which is responsible for safeguarding the common good. However, I do believe it would be wise for a future papacy to reemphasize the Biblical principles that we have covered, and to especially condemn officials who have encouraged this.

As a final concern, we should consider what the logical end point is of large scale racial-mixing and why God created separate peoples through the destruction of the Tower of Babel.

"Behold, it is one people, and all have one tongue: and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them in deed."

In the same way that a unified race is more able to rebel against an empire, a unified humanity is more able to rebel against God. Fundamentally, a unified humanity is an evil thing. Given that most nation states are based around ethnic groups, a humanity that becomes one race is one that is much more likely to bring about the sort of one world government that the anti-Christ will take advantage of.

There is also an element of respecting Gods creation here. I think everyone would acknowledge that we should preserve the natural environment, biodiversity, and endangered species to the extent that we are able. If all birds mixed into one generic pigeon-esque bird, everyone would see that as a great tragedy for the natural world. Why would this principle not also apply to different peoples, especially given that man is Gods greatest creation?

"By preserving natural environments, by protecting endangered species... we exhibit respect for creation and reverence for the Creator."

-USCCB

Racial Superiority

Condemnations of "racism" frequently fail to define the term and conflate the natural racial in-group preference that we discussed above with a strawman argument that says any discussion of this implies the existence of a "master race" or the superiority of one race over others. While this is mostly irrelevant for handling our modern issues, it is useful to examine the concept given its outsized presence in our discourse.

When discussing individuals, no one has any problem with saying that one individual has a natural advantage over another in a certain field. Someone who is left-handed is going to be a naturally superior baseball pitcher to someone who is right handed, if all else is equal. The same goes for a basketball player who is 7 feet tall, compared to one who is 5 feet tall.

In this same respect, some racial groups have advantages over others in various ways. People with dark skin are superior at avoiding skin cancer, but inferior at absorbing Vitamin D. The East Asian epicanthic eye fold gives them an advantage at reducing snow blindness. Tibetans have larger lung capacities which makes them superior at high altitudes etc. These examples of racial superiority and inferiority are uncontroversial, but rage tends to appear when you point out that these differences also apply to the brain. It is undisputed that European and East Asian populations score well above African populations on IQ tests, and the evidence is substantial that this is heavily genetic and therefore immutable. Does the importance of intellectual capacity mean that some races can be called superior to others?

Not necessarily. Ultimately, the most important thing for a person is to make it to heaven, and it's not the case that more intelligent populations are more devout. High intelligence can give someone a greater understanding of God, but it can also give someone the capacity to adopt complex but immoral ideas that may lead them astray, such as Marxism or Liberalism. So it's probably wrong to suggest that one race is generally "superior" to another, but it's simply denying the truth to suggest that races don't have superiority over each other in some specific areas.

Racism in Heaven

While protecting our race is important in this world, the same as protecting our family, it's worth asking if any of this will matter in heaven? Aquinas answers that it will, although to a lesser extent because no one will need protection in heaven. Our love for those who are better will be stronger in heaven, but "it will however be possible in heaven for a man to love in several ways one who is connected with him, since the causes of virtuous love will not be banished from the mind of the blessed."

Therefore, if we are to define "racism" as a preference for ones own race, then there will still be some degree of "racism" in heaven. The fact that in Marian apparitions, Our Lady tends to appear as the race of the people she's appearing to supports this idea of divine approval for racial in-group preference.

Solutions

In the first section of this article, we established a few principles. The first is that we are morally required to preferentially care for those who are closer to us in blood, and so we have an obligation to protect our race. We also established that God barred the Jews from admitting distant races, either as citizens or in marriage. Aquinas clarifies that these laws were not related to the Jews status as the chosen people or to the religions of these distant races, but were implemented to protect the people from those who may not have the common good at heart, due in large part to the lack of a blood connection.

With that in mind, legal immigration policy is simple. Immigration should return to the pre-1965 status quo in America, where only racially European immigrants are admitted. To do otherwise would be to make our children into a vulnerable minority in their own nation, which would be a gravely sinful abdication of our duty as well as a disgrace to our ancestors. For industries that genuinely need migrant labor, only temporary worker visas should be utilized. Illegal migrants should obviously be deported without exception.

There is the question though of how to morally handle “refugees” or other migrants who claim to be in distress and present themselves for admission at the Southern border. The first thing we should ask ourselves is if we can let these people in without damaging the common good of our own nation and threatening our families, after considering the previously discussed principles. In the case of Ukrainian refugees, the answer would probably be yes if not for the fact that they’ll most likely support a foolish policy towards Russia. In the case of Central American economic migrants, the answer is almost certainly no.

While most migrants are in no actual distress, there are situations where there is a war, famine, or another temporary disaster in their home country. In these cases we should assist in ensuring that they have a safe area to stay in a neighboring ethnically compatible nation or within their own nation, which would allow us to help vastly more people than providing them with expensive American housing and services.

A similar principle should be applied when considering international adoption. The average child costs $250,000 to raise in the United States, where as a child in Africa can be fed from birth until adulthood for just $2000. The cost of providing one African child with SUV's and a McMansion in America could save the life of roughly a thousand African children in Africa. If one’s intention is purely humanitarian, international adoption is a grossly negligent way of going about it.

Along with that, those in the media who have promoted interracial relationships should be arrested, and these relationships should never appear in media, advertising, or entertainment, in line with the "Hays Code" that was enforced in Hollywood until 1968. States should also be allowed to reimpose laws against new interracial marriages, heeding the warning of Ezra.

These policies will prevent the situation from getting worse, but we still need to figure out how to handle the racial diversity that our country already has. Freedom of association would solve most of this problem. People who do not want to live in our current society need to be allowed to separate and form autonomous communities that are allowed to be racially exclusive. Remigration should also be encouraged.

When considering race, as with any moral topic, it is important to look outside our own time. Some of the things I am suggesting and prescribing may seem radial, but they were completely normal for almost all of human history up until roughly the 1960’s, when America’s government was hijacked by a racial minority with a vested interest in pushing “anti-racism.” Many say that banning abortion and contraception are extreme and reactionary, but we know that such policies are based on eternal principles and are a requirement for us to pursue. To those used to living among error, normalcy can be percieved as extreme. Race is an extension of the family and all attacks on race as a concept and organizing principle should be seen as attacks on the family and therefore the Catholic faith. As with many things, St. Thomas can guide us out of this darkness as well.

In closing, here's a quote from Pope Pius XII:

“The Church readily approves of, and follows with her maternal blessing, all regulations and practical efforts that, in the spirit of wisdom and moderation, lead to the evolution and increase of the potentialities and powers which spring from the hidden sources of life of each race. She does, however, lay down one provision, namely, that these regulations and efforts must not clash with the duties incumbent on all men in virtue of the common origin and destiny of all mankind.” (Pope Pius XII, Summi pontificatus).

The Role of the Expanse

The ethereal nature of the expanse has always had a philosophical allure. From God speaking to Moses amidst the desert of Sinai, to Captain Ahab's desperate deicidal hunt in the waves, man best comprehends his own smallness when surrounded by unending vastness. The space programs of the 20th century grew out of the same desire in man that sent monks and mystics deep into the desert in times past. Unlike those ascetics though, the astronauts and researchers of this era did not consciously believe themselves to be seeking God, and they preferred to see space as a bountiful final frontier rather than arid nothingness. The irony though is that the value of the expanse lies in its emptiness, and the fact that man can use that isolation to eliminate sensory distraction and dive deep into his own consciousness.

If the scientists were actually seeking physical wonders, they’d have been better off staying at home. Throughout the film, the contrast is emphasized between what the researchers expect space to be and the reality that Earth is where this complexity is to be found. The interstellar space of Tarkovsky's film is not the colorful and breathless expanse of Star Trek. The spaceship itself is claustrophobic and dilapidated, providing none of the warmth or beauty found in an average spring day back near Kris's home.

Tarkovsky doesn't simply glorify nature though, he understands that the depth of the world includes evil and ugliness as well. A murky swamp or an insect consuming a dying apple convey the incredible intricacy and conflict contained within the tiny ecosystems of a few square feet of Kris's backyard. Kris is generally indifferent to all of this and is instead fascinated by the vacuum of space. The nature of Kris's choice is emphasized by his lengthy, uniform, gray journey on a Japanese highway. Tarkovsky uses the sublimity of Bach during both this highway scene and another scene of underwater leaves peacefully swaying in the sunlight. In the natural scene, the music harmonizes with the leaves and reveals a common spiritual core, whereas the music along the highway seems more melancholic, as if it is being left behind.

Man’s Depths

Since the scientists aren’t consciously seeking self-knowledge in the expanse of space, Solaris uses their subconscious to show them the error in their choice of frontier. Solaris drives the scientists to despair through showing them the lack of value that they've placed on the human relationships in their life. Human consciousness is a frontier of depth, not breadth, that dwarfs both nature and space. The fact that the minds of these empirical scientists are so easily conquered by the manifested ghosts of their pasts shows that even a sliver of human consciousness contains greater value than the 90 billion light years of matter between one edge of the universe and the other.

Placing breadth over human depth and attempting to look for metaphysical truth in the physical aspect of the frontier is like thinking that you can know a sphere if you just draw a large enough circle. For the ascetics of the past, the frontier served a subordinate role, as they used the isolation to assist their consciousness. They knew there was no desert cave containing a literal treasure chest of profound truth, and there is no alien planet containing it either.

While we are all somewhat familiar with our own mental frontiers, exploring new ones can be done by binding ourselves to another consciousness through love. Solaris makes Kris recognize this by creating a representation of Kris's dead wife, Hari, from the recesses of his mind. In real life, Kris and Hari's relationship was dysfunctional, likely because neither of them recognized the value of their relationship. Solaris, on the other hand, is able to extract the part of Kris's psyche that is in touch with the truly meaningful and put him face to face with it in the form of Hari. The artificial Hari exists as an example of what Kris subconsciously wanted from his marriage to Hari, and what he potentially could've had if he had prioritized it over his scientific research. The effect on Kris is so strong that even though he is aware that this Hari is not the real one, he sees more value in this replication than in the pinnacle of human scientific achievement, space exploration.

Despite the efforts of Solaris, the other scientists remain blind to metaphysical reality. In Tarkovsky's book, Sculpting in Time, he provides his thoughts on the inadequacy of science compared to human artistic expression for finding truth:

"Artistic creation demands of the artist that he 'perish utterly', in the full, tragic sense of those words. And so, if art carries within it a hieroglyphic of absolute truth, this will always be an image of the world, made manifest in the work once and for all time. And if cold, positivistic, scientific cognition of the world is like the ascent of an unending staircase, its artistic counterpoint suggests an endless system of spheres, each one perfect and contained within itself. One may complement or contradict another, but in no circumstances can they cancel each other out; on the contrary, they enrich one another, and accumulate to form an all-embracing sphere that grows out into infinity. These poetic revelations, each one valid and eternal, are evidence of man's capacity to recognize in whose image and likeness he is made, and to voice this recognition.

As the scientists struggle to understand the physical make-up of the "visitors", Hari emotionally states that she is only sure of her love for Kris. As a manifestation from Kris's consciousness, Hari's statement can be seen as reflecting Kris's own realization on the blindness of science to metaphysical reality. When the gravity shuts off on the space station, Kris and Hari calmly float above the ground, as if having detached themselves from materiality.

The Embrace of Solaris

In the character of Hari we have a tripartite being. Hari is a reconstruction of the original Hari, but the reconstruction is based on Kris's memories and consciousness. Hari was also created by Solaris though, and so she simultaneously represents the minds of the original Hari, Kris, and Solaris itself. There's no contradiction in this multiple nature of Hari though. Solaris is a God-like entity, one that yearns for us to correct our mistakes and to draw us into a deeper union with itself. Our minds are wired on their deepest level to seek God, and the love between a husband and wife is a reflection of God's love for us. This fusion of a God like-being, Kris's subconscious, and a phantasmic idealization of Hari's love for Kris ends up appearing as more of a singular being than a split one, because their essences are so fundamentally united.

Tarkovsky's use of art symbolizes the metaphysical pull of man back towards this unity with God as represented by Hari. The space station includes the work of Cervantes, a writer that represents the transition from the spirituality of the Middle Ages into the coldness of the modern era. Don Quixote is a man who's head still exists in the world of knights and ladies, but who's body is stuck in the rising mercantile epoch. Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow symbolizes humanity coming back empty-handed from its frigid hunt for meaning in the material, but the hunters are greeted with the warmth of the hearth in the same way that the scientists find the warmth of Solaris.

A character remarks at one point in the film that space travel has created in the travelers a love for humanity that could not have otherwise existed, because you cannot love something without the possibility of losing it. This is really the only philosophical value that can be provided by space travel, and a humanity that cannot find satisfaction with what it has on Earth is one that will perpetually live in the hell of Tantalus, always grasping for meaning that it cannot reach. Tarkovsky’s film provides a reminder that even man’s greatest achievements cannot provide the wonder of nature, the depth of our souls, or the spiritual peace of unity with God.

A Brief Summary of the Carthaginian Theory

For those who have not read the article, the Carthaginian theory perfectly solves a strange puzzle with regard to modern Jewish origins. Unz summarizes the puzzle as follows:

"Most mainstream experts seemed to quietly concede that Sand was correct in arguing that by the time of the Roman Empire the overwhelming majority of the Jews living along the shores of the Mediterranean were probably of convert stock, having little ancestry from the Israelites of Palestine. Yet the genetic evidence painted a very different picture for the major subsequent Jewish populations.

As mentioned, the Ashkenazi Jews seem to derive from Middle Eastern males who took European wives in the centuries after the Fall of Rome. Meanwhile, the Sephardic Jews of Muslim Spain are also of Middle Eastern ancestry, and they were the wealthiest and most numerous component of Jewry throughout much of the Middle Ages prior to their 1492 expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella. So, if only a small fraction of Jews had roots in Palestine, it appears quite odd that these would have become the progenitors of both the Sephardic and male Ashkenazi lines. Genetic evidence seems to conflict with strong literary and historical evidence."

These seemingly contradictory bodies of evidence are brought together by the Carthaginian hypothesis. The Carthaginians/Phoenicians were a Canaanite people, closely related to the Judeans, and so the difference between the two would not be picked up by our insufficiently precise genetic testing. Carthage also had a massive empire of roughly four million people, and so it would've provided an ample source of converts around the Mediterranean. After the destruction of Carthage by Rome, the defeated and stateless Carthaginians would've found the religion of their devout cousins very attractive, given that it prophesized a messiah that would save their people. The Carthaginians were also known for being excellent merchants and urban-dwellers, similar to modern day Jews, but quite different from the peasants of Judea. As we will examine below, this theory would also connect modern Jews with the Canaanite ancestors of the Carthaginians.

People of the Book?

“And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”

-Genesis 9:25

The Bible uses the term "Canaanite" to refer to the indigenous pagan tribes in the land of Canaan (modern day Israel and Lebanon). The story of the Canaanites begins with their namesake, Canaan. The Bible describes how Canaan's father, Ham, witnesses Noah naked and tells his brothers about it, rather than helping cover Noah up. As punishment, Noah curses Canaan in Genesis 9:25. Canaan's descendants settle in the land of Canaan, and they are condemned for practicing incest, homosexuality, bestiality, and child sacrifice (Leviticus 18). God eventually commands the Israelites to remove them from the southern portion of the land (modern day Israel). While some are under the impression that the Canaanites were completely annihilated, the Bible states in Judges 3 1:4 that the Canaanites in the north (modern day Lebanon) were allowed to survive so as to test future Israelites in battle.

While the Bible describes the people of this land as Canaanites, the Greeks had a different name for them: Phoenicians. Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians as a colony in the 9th century BC,2 roughly three centuries after modern scholars believe the Canaanite displacement at the hands of the Israelites occurred. However, there is little reason to think these Phoenicians/Carthaginians were anything other than the direct descendants of the Biblical Canaanites. Ephraim Stern, chairman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology, stated that the Phoenicians were the descendants of the Biblical-era Canaanites, some of whom were forced out of Palestine by the Israelites around 1200 BC.3 Already, an incredible irony presents itself. Modern scholars subtly acknowledge that the vast majority of Roman Jews never left Palestine, meaning that modern Palestinians are the closest descendants of the ancient Israelites. Others have already pointed out how ironic it is that the entire Zionist project justifies itself off the claim that they are the descendants of the Israelites, but in reality, they are expelling the actual descendants of the Israelites from the holy land.

The Carthaginian theory further deepens this already remarkable irony. Zionist settlers are not just a foreign entity attacking the true Israelites, but are actually the descendants of the people that were cursed and explicitly ordered for removal from the land by God, according to scriptures that religious Zionists themselves believe in. They do have a connection to the holy land, it's just not the one they want. From a Christian perspective, the story of modern Zionism is the story of a bitter people attempting to reverse God's judgment upon them without Christ, and who have been allowed to exist so as to test Israelites in combat. This ends up remaining true theologically, in the sense that Christians are the new Israelites and Christian societies have been seized by Jewish organizations, and it's also become true again literally, in the sense that Israelite descendants are now physically in combat with Canaanite descendants in the holy land.

Defining Modern Judaism

It is commonly believed that modern day Jews are followers of the Old Testament, only differentiated from Christians by their rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. The Hebrew scriptures seem to clearly point to Jesus as the Messiah, leaving Christians frustrated for centuries over the Jewish refusal to accept this. However, the scholarship of Prof. Israel Shahak has shown that the modern Jewish religion includes a wide variety of strange, seemingly pagan practices. Many have accused them of general devil worship, but Canaanite origins could provide greater clarity as to the essence of their beliefs. As we covered earlier, the Canaanites in the Bible engaged in a host of disturbing pagan practices, including child sacrifice. One might be tempted to think that three thousand years is too long for any link to remain; perhaps the migration to Carthage resulted in significant change to the Canaanite culture, or perhaps the destruction of Carthage and mass conversion to Judaism resulted in an overhaul of their religious practices. However, the historical record shows that this is not the case. Despite the distance between Carthage and Phoenicia, the Phoenician Carthaginians retained an unsevered connection with their native religion, and this included the practice of child sacrifice. For many years it was doubted that the Carthaginians actually sacrificed children, but recent findings have provided overwhelming evidence that they did.4 An article in Haaretz provides a useful summary:

"Though they dispersed throughout the western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians remained united by their religious practices. For centuries, Carthage sent a delegation to Tyre each year to sacrifice at the temple of the city-god Melqart. In Carthage itself, the chief deities were the divine couple Baal-Hammon, meaning “Lord of the Brazier,” and Tanit, identified with Astarte. The most notorious characteristic of Phoenician religion was the practice of child sacrifice. The area around the western Mediterranean (Carthage, Western Sicily, Southern Sardinia) is littered with burials of sacrificed children, but in truth, the practice was commonplace in the Phoenician cities all over the Levant. Diodorus Siculus reports that in 310 B.C.E., during an attack on the city, the Carthaginians sacrificed over 200 children of noble birth to appease Baal-Hammon."5

The scholarship of Prof. Ariel Toaff shows that this practice also did not end with the destruction of Carthage, and that European Jews practiced child sacrifice well into the Middle Ages. The existence of Carthaginian child sacrifice strongly supports the accounts of Canaanite child sacrifice in the Bible, as well as Prof. Toaff's research, and shows a significant link between Rabbinic Judaism and Canaanite paganism.

Another intriguing continuity is the role of Saturn in Jewish culture. The historian Eusebius records that the Phoenician supreme deity, El, was deified as the star Saturn. The Romans also linked Saturn with the Carthaginian supreme deity, Baal-Hammon, possibly reinforced by the fact that Saturn ate his children in Roman mythology. Roman and Medieval Jewish sources attest that at least some form of Saturn/Baal-Hammon worship remained even after the Carthaginians mass converted to Judaism. Shlomo Sela, a professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at Bar Ilan University, analyzed the works of Abraham ibn Ezra, a prominent Medieval Jewish commentator, who wrote a lengthy work attempting to defend the link between the Jews and Saturn. Sela wrote that this link is "historically vouched for in almost all the sources which have been presented above to demonstrate the persistence of the Saturn-Jewish connection from antiquity till the Middle Ages. Thus, both Tacitus and St. Augustine asserted that the Jews made the Sabbath their rest day in order to honor or worship Saturn."6

Lest anyone think that this was just Roman or Christian propaganda, Sela also states: "That Jewish society of the Talmudic period recognized the same association is shown by the fact that the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 156a) refers to Saturn as Shabbetai, i.e., the star of Shabbat (Saturday)."7 Ibn Ezra himself did not deny that the Shabbat (Sabbath) was related to Saturn, but defended it by saying that Jews rested to protect themselves from Saturn's malignant influence, which was supposedly strongest on that day. The Jewish newspaper, Forward, also admits the link, but claims that the Jews named Saturn after the Sabbath simply because the Romans believed the Jews were resting in honor of Saturn.8

Both of these explanations raise serious questions. The Old Testament clearly and repeatedly states that God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy, and that it's to be dedicated only to God (Exodus 20:8-11). If devout Jews rest for Saturn, even if we are to believe that it’s to protect themselves from Saturn, this would be religiously errant at the very least. Along with that, one would think that pious Jews would be deeply offended by the Roman accusation that they dedicated the Sabbath to a malicious pagan deity and would strenuously resist such a connection given the severe scriptural warnings against idol worship. Instead, they appear to have had no problem with naming Saturn "the Sabbath star", casting doubt on the idea that the Romans were wrong about this. Given that Jews have resisted conversion to Christianity for two-thousand years under enormous pressure, and that they even use a different mathematical plus sign because ours looks too much like a cross, a misnomer here would seem like quite the oversight.

Along with the historical evidence, Prof. Shahak also pointed out something interesting in his book Jewish History, Jewish-Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years:

"Perhaps the most sacred Jewish formula, 'Hear 0 Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one', recited several times each day by every pious Jew, can at the present time mean two contrary things. It can mean that the Lord is indeed 'one'; but it can also mean that a certain stage in the union of the male and female deities has been reached or is being promoted by the proper recitation of this formula."

After having read this initially, I was baffled, and wondered how such an odd belief could have ended up in modern Judaism. With the Carthaginian context though, it makes perfect sense, as the Carthaginians worshipped a divine couple, the male Baal-Hammon and the female Tanit, as mentioned above.

Assuming that the Carthaginian theory is true, the evidence suggests that the modern Jewish religion is a sort of hybrid between genuine Torah Judaism and Canaanite paganism. This should be unsurprising, as the Phoenicians were a proud people with an empire that had lasted a millennium, and they were probably reluctant to totally shirk their own religion in favor of one coming from their impoverished peasant cousins. This also foreshadowed their eventual refusal to accept the Christianity that the rest of the Roman Empire (even Judea) adopted, with the bitter memories of Roman conquest further entrenching their obstinance.

The Pharisees and the Star of Remphan

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are."

-Matthew 23:15

By the time of Christ's conflict with the Pharisees almost two centuries after the destruction of Carthage, the bulk of the Carthaginian conversions had likely already happened. The impact of this on Jerusalem was probably substantial, especially given the influence that modern Jewish populations tend to exert over urban areas. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that converts became “increasingly numerous in Palestine” during this period, and there were many who “observed one or more Jewish practices without being fully converted.”9

The prominence of the Pharisees may itself have been an example of this impact, as they were defined in large part by their rejection of Greek influence and their eager overseas proselytizing,10 so their movement would’ve been closely linked with Carthaginian converts who resented the domination of the Greco-Roman civilization. Prof. Shahak pointed out how modern Judaism is fixated on rituals, sometimes without regard to whether God or Satan is being worshipped. This obsession with ritual over substance is also something Jesus condemned the Pharisees for, and it could be evidence that they compromised with their new allies. One can easily imagine how the Pharisees may have started off with good intentions in their mission to convert the Carthaginian masses, but found them more stubborn than hoped. Tempted by the wealth and power that these potential new converts could bring them, the Pharisees essentially made a Faustian bargain with the Carthaginians, downplaying differences of theology and emphasizing areas of less controversy, such as superficial rituals and the coming of a messiah. As a result, Carthaginian Saturnism gradually infected the Pharisees, and this new syncretic religion blinded them to the Messiah that would not revive the empire.

A tragic fall in this fashion would really just be a rhyming of history, as the Old Testament includes many stories of the Israelites being negatively influenced by surrounding pagans. St. Stephen appears to allude to this in his speech to the Sanhedrin (Acts 7), where he compares their actions to those of disobedient Israelites in the Old Testament, including some who decided to worship Moloch and Remphan over God:

"Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon."

-Acts 7:43

Remphan (or Rephan) is the Egyptian name for Saturn.11 Stephen is referencing Amos 5:26 when he refers to the star of Remphan:

"But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves."

-Amos 5:26

Chiun is the Hebrew name for Saturn, and the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary on this verse states that Saturn was probably represented with a star symbol: "Probably there was a figure of a star on the head of the image of the idol, to represent the planet Saturn; hence "images" correspond to "star" in the parallel clause."12 It seems quite possible that Carthaginian influence led to a revival in the usage of this star of Saturn symbol, and is what led Stephen to refer to this specific verse. When asking ourselves what this star symbol may have looked like, there is of course one very obvious candidate: the Star of David.

Not many Christians seem to be aware of this, but there is no mention in the Old Testament of any sort of "star" of David, a star symbol for David, or anything else that could plausibly link David with the modern Jewish symbol.13 Theories for the origin of the Star of David are vague and varied, but the Jewish Virtual Library’s page on the topic interestingly says that "The oldest undisputed example is on a seal from the seventh century B.C.E. found in Sidon."14 Sidon was a major Canaanite/Phoenician city, and the 7th century BC is just a century after the prophet Amos is said to have lived.15

The page also states that Arab and Jewish sources referred to the hexagram as "the seal of Solomon" and that this connects the symbol with early "Judeo-Christian" magic such as the first-century16 magical work The Testament of Solomon. In this non-canonical work, God gives Solomon a ring engraved with a pentagram that allows him to control demons, and the story ends with Solomon worshipping Moloch and Remphan in exchange for sex. This seems to be the earliest documentary source for the Star of David, which happens to be from the time Stephen lived and happens to also link the symbol with Saturn/Remphan. Were Amos and Stephen speaking of the Star of David when they condemned this star of Saturn symbol? We may never be able to confirm this, but given that the oldest example of the Star of David is from around the time of Amos, in a major city of Saturn worshippers, and its first documented appearances also associate it with Saturn in the time of Stephen, this seems highly likely. It also seems highly likely that Carthaginian pagan influence played a role in the Jewish corruption that led to Christ's crucifixion, as Canaanite influence did with the spurning of Amos.

What I will engage in now will be pure speculation, and it might seem outlandish, but I do think it logically follows from Christian belief. If you're a Christian, you believe that God spoke to and revealed many things to the Israelites in the Old Testament, and you also believe that Satan is real and does engage with humanity at least occasionally. Keeping that in mind, the Jewish Virtual Library states a revealing motive behind the widespread usage of the Star of David: "The prime motive behind the wide diffusion of the sign in the 19th century was the desire to imitate Christianity. The Jews looked for a striking and simple sign which would "symbolize" Judaism in the same way as the cross symbolizes Christianity." Christians have long seen the sun as a natural symbol of God, and if God created a natural symbol of Satan, Saturn would be a logical choice. Saturn is the most distant planet from the sun that the ancients were aware of, and is also quite literally chained by its rings. In 1981, the Voyager mission made the remarkable discovery of a giant hexagonal storm on Saturn's north pole, something the ancients could not possibly have been aware of, which makes it very coincidental that a hexagram ended up representing Saturn.

In Greek mythology, Saturn was also chained by Jupiter,17 another coincidence given that the ancients were also unaware of Saturn's rings. Did Satan reveal aspects of Saturn to entice the Canaanites to idolatry? Did he then revive the symbol they created, so he could counter the cross after Christ's resurrection? Of course this is purely speculatory, but this is a series of coincidences that I think is worth pondering for any believing Christian.

Far from being a simple origin story of the Jewish people, the Carthaginian theory recontextualizes thousands of years of Christian-Jewish relations and Biblical history. Zionists would find themselves the villains of their own story, and the past three millennia would look like a continuous tale of combat between the people of God and a wicked Saturnian cult. Instead of a principled commitment to the Hebrew scriptures that Rabbinic Jews claim is their reason for rejecting Christ, the real reason would look more like pagan corruption, combined with an undying grudge against Rome and its Church, which stole their empire from them in the same way that the Israelites banished them from their homeland. Rome succeeding the Israelites in this fashion would prefigure the Roman Church as the new Israel. Instead of joining the new Israel, Jews still seek the old one, completely unaware that it was never even theirs. Perhaps, with better knowledge of their origins, they could finally find the humility to end their wandering in the wilderness.

Man is tied to materiality, and he will often become distracted by his senses, falling into a passive, even slothful, existence.  It takes effort to transcend the pull of materiality, but the rewards for seeking a higher purpose are immense.  Living a meaningful life in pursuit of Truth is its own reward in this world and the next.  This is why martyrdom is so inspiring.  When one gives one's life, never counting it too much to lose for the sa​ke of a belief (still better if one is Catholic and has the benefit of actual Truth and Faith!), it inspires others to follow a cause thought worthy of such a sacrifice.  The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, as Tertullian said.  

Stemming from a similar indulgence and imbalance as those who live solely for material gain is a contingent who seek stability through self-mastery, divorced from any moral values (for example, eating a certain diet, running marathons, thinking/meditating in a certain manner).  This gradually becomes a selfish pursuit and a source of comfort for those with no other compass in a tumultuous world, the same as overeating, scrolling on social media, or watching sports.  People who follow this disciplined lifestyle tend to look only to themselves, idolizing their self-control, and making it a false god like a modern day Stoic. Marcus Aurelius said in his Meditations:  "Suppose that men kill thee, cut thee in pieces, curse thee, what can these do to prevent the mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, just?"  While this could sound praiseworthy, sentiments like this essentially miss the mark.  The point is not to persevere in suffering for the sake of proving we can withstand anything while having peace of mind, like some kind of strength training contest, it is rather endured with the belief that Socrates stated:  "No harm can come to a good man whether in this world or the next."  We can believe this in the context of God rewarding the just in heaven no matter what they undergo in life; and we can also trust in God's assistance through all circumstances.  

God certainly doesn't work through our strengths or self-control alone.  In fact, it is often when we feel weakest that we learn most.  As St. Matthew wrote, "Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy body and soul in hell."  It is only from a place of self-surrender that we can find Christ in our sufferings, when we are empty of everything, even the will to endure, and we call on Christ. Our willingness to trust Him is what He waits for. 

When a man sacrifices for a cause others can see if he truly believes in that cause, as with the martyrs to a great degree and even in avenues of daily life, like testing if a politician be trustworthy; but man still wants Christ to descend from the Cross and lead us on a road to God based solely on worldly acclaim and power.  Instead, we should simply follow His enduring example through this paradox of suffering:  "For if we died with Christ, we also live with him."  The Cross is the culmination and consummation of Christ's life and His reason for coming into the world, saving us from our sins and opening the gates of Heaven.  Paul calls us to imitate Him, "I have been crucified with Christ so it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me."  The purpose of suffering is to accept it for the highest purpose--because we love. We prove our love by going through something difficult for the sake of something transcendent and spiritual.  Suffering within love is innate since to love is to fear losing the beloved.  It is like a spouse who looks at the beloved, seeing the affect of time, and knows with fresh conviction that true love is sacrificial.  That's why it's romanticized to grow old with your spouse and to commit to suffering with each other, staying united through whatever may come to pass in life for the sake of love.  I often struggle to see beauty in suffering, but I realize that it is precisely in that suffering that love is tried and found true, lasting, and beautiful--think of Our Lord on the Cross!  

Even in art one can see the impact of being bound by one's time while transcending it and offering an element of self for the sake of creativity.  The art of the Renaissance is creative and imitates reality while adding to it and interpreting creation through the lens of the artist.  The artist creates subjectively and in imitation of God in his place in time, like a servant of the Holy Spirit.  Conversely, the realist religious art often seen today is so close to reality that it leaves no room for the artist to be creative or to add their touch, while Modern Art is like an experiment in gratuitous suffering, making one suffer and grovel in it without any hope of the Creator or representing reality faithfully.  Like Modern art, blind suffering is the fate of modern man when divorced from God.  

Mass of the Ages, Episode 3, includes a perfect example of the suffering Artist, God Himself, who sees how His Church is marred by those who do not morn the loss of a Catholic past:  near the beginning of the episode, clips of repurposed churches are shown, as well as churches on fire, statues of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, and the saints are destroyed throughout the U.S. and the world.  Suddenly and gently one hears the song "Lulla, Lully, Lullay" by Philip Stopford.  It is a relatively new piece based on the Coventry Carol.  The context of the lyrics is a mother singing to her child during the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.  It pierces to the heart by means of lullaby.  How God must weep for His children, especially in our day, who know not what they do...    

We must put on the armor of God, fearless in the face of loss of self, which is true bravery.  Every day we ought to ask ourselves these startling questions, "Am I ready to die today, to go before God?  Can I die to myself today?  Can I offer my sufferings to Him?"  I used to be incredulous when hearing the stories of saints:  how can they have offered so much, and how can I ever hope to offer my life like that?  Well, it simply is what we owe God to right the scales of our own time and what people from the beginning of time have owed God. In our own disgusting society we need to be motivated by faith, hope, and love.  Love covers a multitude of sins.  It makes small things great.  When we love God, we don't count costs, or if we cannot help but see them, they're in their proper place.  It is a joyful thing to give Him something Who gave all of Himself for us.  We must trust Him to take our self-offering and perfect it in His love. We will find our feeble efforts have an unexpectedly impactful outcome at times when all we can do is thank God for finding us in our brokenness. Seeing how He stoops to our lowliness can only humble us the more since we know all our suffering is not only worth it but has immense rewards. Life's aim is to try, simply and wholly, to offer Christ our all, every moment and every breath. Yes, there truly is a shadow of Divine Love in our daily  encounter with sufferings, which in themselves can often feel too heavy to bear. I recall a priest saying in a homily once that the words "His yoke is easy and His burden is light" are often misinterpreted, but the meaning behind them is profound: Our Lord's yoke is perfectly suited to our abilities and capacity.  If we ask Him to aid us in bearing it He will never forsake us.  In daily life, endurance is key, as well as bearing down and getting through it for the sake of Christ. 

Chesterton in his "The Man Who Was Thursday" shows how the characters suffer, not understanding why, while trying to uncover a ring of anarchists.  They have been deceived by appearances.  When the cause is revealed, it is as if it were all a prank; and yet the affair is seen for what it is:  confusing, painful, mysterious, wonderful, and the characters know perhaps a little better the reason behind their adventure.  Such will our experience be, I suspect, when the shadows fall away, and we see Christ's beloved Face.   

Internet memes tend to be naturally ephemeral, a sort of mass inside joke based on pop culture or recent phenomena. Something funny happens in the world, memes rise to spread the humor, and then they rapidly disappear, to be replaced by memes based on the next amusing spectacle. It's therefore quite odd that such a large bulk of the internet's memes are based on a children's show from 20 years ago, SpongeBob SquarePants. SpongeBob is technically still airing, being milked for every last cent in a way that would make Mr. Krabs proud, but the vast majority of these memes are coming from the first three seasons, which aired from 1999-2003, and continued to dominate reruns until roughly 2006. It's probably not a coincidence that SpongeBob's run coincided with the beginning of Generation Z in 1997, and the show tends to mark a dividing line between the sarcastic irony of the Millennials and the post-irony of the Zoomers. To understand the culture and outlook of the Zoomers, it is essential to understand the show that they loved the most, and why it continues to resonate with them well into adulthood.

Generational Struggle

With the impact of the Great Recession, the economy returned to its historical norm. There has been much argument about whether younger generations today have a lower standard of material living than those of the Baby Boomer generation, with disagreements over comparing house prices and prices of other goods. However, the simplest way to measure that there has been an actual decline is through examining the percentage of young adults living with their parents, compared to the percent married or cohabitating. This is a good metric since almost every young adult has the basic goal of moving out of their parents house and finding a long-term romantic partner. The number capable of doing this skyrocketed during the post-war boom of 1945-1973, but then gradually declined, and finally sank back to the historical norm by 2014. Recent statistics show it has only gotten worse since then. On top of that, Millennials and members of Generation Z lack the extended family support and moral values that buffered pre-war generations, with single-parenthood having tripled since 1960. This hard landing created a cynicism in Millenials, that ended up being expressed in the bitter sarcasm that came to define their humor. Left-wing comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rose to immense popularity among Millenials, and they spent most of their shows mocking the Republicans that Millenials blamed for their ills.

For Generation Z, social dysfunction was not something surprisingly foisted on them by an economic calamity, but something they simply took for granted. Given that the point of humor is to relax someone in a tense situation, the bitter Millenial humor was clearly unhealthy and just pushed them into a further spiral of despair. Gen Z developed a better coping mechanism: Not seeing their lives as a tragedy, but as a comedy. For this coping mechanism to be effective, a genuine enjoyment of life’s absurdity became necessary. As such, the bitter irony of the Millenials transitioned into the post-irony of the Zoomers, and it became unclear what was being mocked and what was earnestly embraced. While Millenials bemoaned and mocked the clownish appearance and behavior of Donald Trump, segments of Zoomers embraced him as an amusing avatar of societal despair. Spongebob happened to be perfectly suited to this style of humor, as it was defined by absurdity, and its memes became the language of the generation.

Most shows are criticized when their characters come to be defined by one trait, and they devolve into making fun of stupidity, greed, pride or envy. SpongeBob, on the other hand, embraced this from the very beginning, so much so that theories have arisen about how the characters represent the seven deadly sins (Patrick is Sloth, Plankton is Envy, Mr. Krabs is Greed, Squidward is Wrath, Sandy is Pride, Gary is Gluttony, SpongeBob is Lust). It seems quite unlikely that Hillenburg intended these cartoon characters to represent the seven deadly sins, but this theory does touch on the underlying post-ironic humor of the show. Many of the characters actions in the show would be downright disturbing in any other context, and many parents were nonplussed when attempting to watch it. Mr. Krabs is not simply greedy, he would literally sell SpongeBob for 62 cents and then regret it because he could have gotten more. Sandy isn't just prideful, she would rip SpongeBob in half for insulting her home state of Texas. Patrick isn't only dumb, he is incapable of recognizing his own parents. Taking a normal human flaw and then entwining it with a character’s personality so deeply that it becomes macabre, and then having that be the source of the humor in a children’s show, made many in older generations quite uncomfortable. They were used to shows where it was clear that a character had some minor foibles and the amusement came from them interacting with normal people, whereas the world of SpongeBob revolved around these flaws to such an extent that Bikini Bottom itself seemed like a grand, cosmic joke. For Zoomers though, this simply reflected the way they had learned to deal with the world around them, a world where the parents of their friends had developed such degenerate and dysfunctional lives that it bordered on the comedic itself. As Zoomers grew up, the moral framework of society further unraveled, leaving people more a slave to their vices than ever. These vices were no longer a petty thing that viewers could casually laugh at some dumb TV dad engaging in, they had become a disturbing part of our own reality, and could only be laughed at through finding a genuine amusement in the ridiculousness of humanity. In one episode, Plankton switches lives with Mr. Krabs. He expects this new life to be wonderful, but it's actually filled with misery and struggle. When asked if something is funny, Plankton misinterprets the question as asking about his entire new life and replies "In a cosmic sort of way, yes." In a cosmic way, there is something funny about how individuals have become so consumed by their favorite vices, that they have created a world that resembles Bikini Bottom, and what better way to cope with that than with the memories of Bikini Bottom?

Hollow Institutions

SpongeBob further unsettled the Boomers as it revealed the absurdity in their sacred cows of school and work. The Krusty Krab is not a respectable, hard-working, small business; it serves low quality fast food, even off the floor, and has a fanatically money-grubbing owner who mistreats his employees. One of its workers, Squidward, is a bitter cynic who believes he's failed at life because he works there. The other, Spongebob, further emphasizes the low nature of the Krusty Krab by contrast, as we laugh at his naive exuberance for his job. A similar situation exists at Spongebob's "boating school", where his jaded teacher attempts to pass him by any means necessary, even allowing him to cheat, just so she can finally get rid of him. In the post-war era that emphasized individual success, many boomers based their identities on their career or education. The show brings these institutions back down to Earth, and creates humor out of the contrast between their reputations and their actual functioning. Millennials reflect Squidward, filled with resentment over their inability to make these institutions fulfilling, whereas SpongeBob loves his job to such an extent that it would seem ironic if any normal person were doing it, but with SpongeBob it has now become earnest. More than just a usual criticism of the work-first mindset, SpongeBob's disordered attitude holds a hyperbolic mirror up to what Boomers themselves have lived like. In one episode, Spongebob tells his imprisoned teacher that she's forgotten what it's like to not be in prison. It then cuts to a fish sitting in traffic, a cubicle, and at home in a loveless marriage. This isn't framed as social commentary, it's intended to be innocent humor. However, behind this jovial attitude, a cry for help from entire generations is revealed.

Lasting Comedy

Comedy is frequently a product of its time, reflecting the unique methods of destressing taken by each generation. Will the absurdist humor of SpongeBob survive into the future? Time will tell, but the stamp that it's made on its generation will continue to impact their actions and worldview. The post-ironic mindset meshes well with the mind of one who only fears God, as the struggles of the world can simply be laughed off, because they are inconsequential in the divine scheme of things. In a cosmic sense, we're all living in a pineapple under the sea.

The Perennial Nature of God in Creation

The world of Urth is one of decay, depravity, and darkness. Human society is almost unrecognizable from what we know today, and immorality pollutes the lifeblood of what remains. Wolfe doesn't portray this immorality as having been recently infused into the society, in the jarring way that it appears to Christians today. So much time has passed that the immorality has become an essential part of society, taken for granted as much as the color of the sky. As Catholics, we tend to see societies built on immorality as ones that cannot stand for long, as they have set themselves up in opposition to natural law. While this may be true for cultures that retain a youthful vigor, the culture amid the dying sun is one that has resigned itself to its fate, and has accepted depravity in the way that an elderly person may learn to accept a terminal illness. Wolfe plays with the idea of moral and cultural relativism by immersing us in the mind of Severian, a torturer, who has internalized the morality of the world around him. The surreal and disorienting nature of this world is furthered by the fact that the culture is based on a series of poorly reflected collective memories; critical history exists as more of a mythologized haze than as actual truth. However, unlike the culture he lives in, Severian's memory is perfect. Perhaps because of this, he is able to cut through the haze of his time, and discover the transcendent, eternal truths that underlie our universe. The book opens with Severian saying "It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future." Given the cyclical nature of the material world that the book explores, and the well-known rhyming of history, it is theoretically possible that a perfect understanding of the past would give one a perfect understanding of the future. To have this timeless understanding would make one like God, which is likely one reason why Severian is chosen to bring the New Sun.

Throughout this book, Severian slowly realizes which things are truly undying, which will survive no matter how many thousands of years have passed, and no matter how much society has been transformed. His journey begins when he implicitly recognizes the immorality of institutional torture and performs an act of mercy to one of his clients. Severian is eventually drawn to a sort of remnant of the Catholic Church, surviving in the form of wandering nuns called the Pelerines. Severian comes to possess a relic of the Conciliator, a Christ-esque figure of the distant past. Despite the fact that the relic apparently bestows Severian with supernatural powers, he still recognizes that it belongs to these Pelerines to safeguard, in much the same way that the Church safeguards the magisterium. Early in his journey, Severian also follows a group of materialist rebels working for demonic creatures, but even they hunger for the Eucharist in the depraved, perverse form of consuming the flesh of their own comrade. With the use of the Alzabo drug, they are able to acquire the memories of that deceased comrade, a woman named Thecla who Severian had been infatuated with during his time as a torturer. For others, Thecla survives only in a temporary and vaguely hallucinogenic fashion, but due to Severian's perfect memory, Thecla becomes a permanent part of his psyche. He then learns the depths of the woman he had been entranced by, and discovers that she has many unsavory qualities. Severian's perfect memory allows him to approximate the depth and timelessness of God, and in the classic way that God brings good out of evil, this perverted Eucharist allows him to approach the breadth of God, in the way that God has a perfect, limitless understanding of human beings.

It's frequently said that "God is dead" in modern, Western society. In the world of the dying sun, most people act as if God was never alive at all. God exists in the form of a nebulous folk religion that references the "Pancreator" and has developed a cult around the belief that the Conciliator will come again and bring a New Sun. The book explores how these reflections show the existence of the real thing. Space travel is possible in this world because of a method of light refraction, where the created reflection necessitates the existence of a thing for it to reflect, bringing an entity into being. Wolfe shows how crude reflections, such as the many sun gods of primitive societies, can only exist if they are reflecting something truly present. Despite the seeming distance of God in this society, one that literally lives in darkness, Severian eventually has an epiphany where he realizes that the "Pancreator" has not abandoned the world to wallow in a gnostic wasteland, but is present throughout all of His creation, and the many reflections of God that exist in even this fallen world, provide testament to His eternal presence.

Symbolic Theology

"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life - they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic."

Even when it appears God has forsaken the world, He makes his presence known through natural symbols. St. John Cassian, and most other early Christians, believed that scripture should be interpreted in four ways; literally, allegorically, anagogically (spiritually), and tropologically (morally). “The one Jerusalem can be understood in

four different ways, in the historical sense as the city of the Jews, in allegory as the Church of Christ, in anagoge as the heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all’ (Gal 4:26), in the tropological sense as the human soul.” The Book of the New Sun can also be understood in these four ways, and Wolfe implies that reality itself should be viewed through this lens as well. At one point in The Shadow of the Torturer, Severian witnesses a miracle. The tent of the Pelerines rises up and flies above the city of Nessus. In attempting to explain this to his companion, Dorcas, Severian describes these multiple meanings and how the third meaning "is the transsubstantial meaning. Since all objects have their ultimate Origin in the Pancreator, and all were set in motion by him, so all must express his will - which is the higher reality." An old woman later describes the skepticism of her grandson-in-law: "When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool—it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He can't see the Hand in nature." While the young man might be right that the literal reason the tent flew was because of this hot-air effect (there was a fire in the tent), he misses that God set up creation and the laws of the universe in a way that would create these sorts of events to inspire us towards Him.

Sam Harris, a prominent atheist, recently mocked religion by pointing out that we've been to space and found no heaven there. Aside from the general stupidity of this comment (not even in the Middle Ages did people think heaven was physically in the sky or nearby space), Harris gives little thought to the fact that God designed the beauty and vastness of the sky for the sake of showing us that there was something grander above our everyday existence. While the sky might literally contain little more than water vapor, in a spiritual sense it really is heaven. The prominence of the sun in almost all mythologies also shows how God wanted there to be one, great, life-giving entity to sustain us for the sake of showing us that there is one loving God. For the ancient Hebrews though, God was associated with the sky. The thundering might of the sky was an appropriate way to view the Father without the mercy of the Son. Of course, the Father and Son are the same God, but to our perception, believing in the Father without the Son is like having a thundering sky without a coming sun. The sun is dying on Urth because an advanced civilization implanted a black hole into it long ago, and while this is the literal reason for the dying sun, a much more significant meaning is conveyed regarding how this society has turned away from God and morality. To illustrate this further, the moon has been terraformed and is now forested. The moon represents the Church, as it's only illuminated through reflecting the sun, and this symbolizes the fact that in this world, the Church has been dismantled and scarred by human error in the same way the moon has.

The Holy Spirit is represented through water, and is referred to as the "Increate" on Urth. Severian describes how he can feel the presence of the Increate while standing next to a river, and his epiphany on the presence of God ultimately comes on the beach of an ocean. The endless nature of the ocean, the way that water can hold up even the greatest cargo ship despite its penetrability, the ability of water to descend into the deepest crevices, and its necessity for sustaining life all point to it as having been created to represent the Holy Spirit, and while the people of Urth may have forgotten the significance of the Holy Spirit, it can still deeply move Severian through its symbol in our world, water. Long trying to return his powerful rose-thorn relic to the Pelerines, Severian comes to realize on the beach that it has no inherent power at all. However, God created the rose to represent the Virgin Mary, and so this relic actually has immense power, and its symbolism ultimately brings Severian to God.

Theodicy and the Second Coming

Vodalus is a rebel dedicated to returning society to the high technology of the past, but when his life is actually threatened, Vodalus does not use his advanced plasma pistol, he pulls out a simple sword. Despite how hard we may try, we cannot truly transcend our own time in this world, we are stuck in the material cycle of growth and decay unless we can unite ourselves with the timelessness of God. As Severian witnesses Vodalus's act of hypocrisy, he remarks: "That we can only be what we are remains our unforgivable sin." Our inability to transcend our own natures is one of the reasons why we need a redeemer like Christ in the first place. With the Conciliator relegated to a hazy legend of the distant past, it appears that Urth is damned to an existence in sin that cannot be forgiven, with demonic creatures manipulating the Vodalus's of the world who believe they can break out themselves. However, as we discussed earlier, Severian himself comes to realize that this is not the case, and his story serves as an examination of how we can escape through the mercy of God, but also through the justice of God. Wolfe once made a comment on the intricate relationship between mercy and justice:

"It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a "humble carpenter" that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few even have seemed to have noticed that although Christ was a "humble carpenter," the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip."

When Christ came the first time, He came as one who was tortured. When He comes the second time, He will come as an executioner, to sentence those who insist on wickedness to damnation. Like the existence of evil, this can be hard for people to reconcile with the merciful and loving nature of God. Wolfe examines this by having Severian take on the role of a Second Coming figure, with his position as an executioner and torturer. Severian eventually realizes the immorality of the purely punitive torture that he has been exacting, but the role of torturous suffering in bringing about a greater good is undiminished. The glory of the New Sun and the rejuvenation of humanity that comes with it would be impossible without people knowing what it's like to live without the grand light of the sun. The work itself is deeply infused with this idea, as there is a consistent contrast between the grotesque, decrepit, brutal nature of Urth, and the exquisite beauty that Wolfe highlights in the world through simple moments like Severian's starlit climb in the mountains or his unshod, transcendent walk on the beach. These moments are made all the more meaningful to a Severian who grew up desensitized to cruelty and depravity, who lived in a world where God appeared absent. Such simplicity could only inspire such profundity through its role in making someone realize the presence of God, and that moment of realization is only possible in a world that is so inundated with suffering, it appears God is no longer present at all.

At one point Severian muses that light is merely the shadow of God, despite this seeming paradoxical. After all, a shadow does indicate an actual thing, that has been projected due to its interaction with light. In this same way, light itself is a projection of God, that is interacting with the material world. Wolfe likely inserted this thought to show that a shadow should not always be seen as a bad thing. While torture and suffering appear so terrible to us, they are really just the shadow of goodness. Suffering interacts with humanity to bring about a good "shadow" that could not otherwise exist. The redemption that Severian brings to humanity is the shadow of the torturer, and it could only be brought about through the suffering of the world.

A Thousand Ages in Thy Sight

The Book of the New Sun provides us with a reminder that progress is fallacious, the nature of materiality is a cycle of life and death. This cycle applies to our cultures and civilizations as well, and in Wolfe's world it even applies to the universe itself. At one point, Severian's mentor demonstrates to him how the most primitive form of government, attachment to the person of the monarch, is actually the highest, because it reflects our attachment to the "Divine Entity." We cannot let a desire for advancement push us away from the fundamental truths that God weaved into creation. Everything has been set up to inspire us towards Him, from our inherent desires for morality and a higher power, to the very nature of the natural world that we live in. No matter how corrupted and incoherent our world becomes, the fabric of creation will always give us a window into God's presence with us. Along with that, the suffering we experience is there to give us the push towards everlasting truth that we frequently need. For those looking to rise above the baseness around them, Severian will prove to be a sympathetic guide, during this journey to bring the New Sun.

It was a blistering day in May when I saw Trump in person for the first time, shortly after his primary victory. Politicians regularly make obligatory visits to the provincials during election years, but only with Trump did it feel like the man actually wanted to be there. Trump never looked uncomfortable surrounded by the crowds of neo-serfs that the American people had become, he only looked uncomfortable if forced in front of a teleprompter, the sanctuary of your average politician. While liberals laughed seeing how the Republican party had self-destructed, the beating heart of the system recoiled in fear as its controlled opposition party was hijacked by the people. In the dark recesses of the Capitol, one thing was on their mind: The total destruction of Donald Trump.

Big Data

In the shadow of the 2016 election was the data revolution. Popularized by the film Moneyball, big data had come to revolutionize nearly every field, bringing every craft down to an objective science. Clinton's campaign was a pioneer in this, whereas Trump's campaign would have been considered shoestring even 50 years prior. Nate Silver, a prominent data analyst, repeatedly wrote articles throughout the primary season explaining why Trump had no chance of winning. After being forced to face his failure, Silver ended up giving Trump a better chance of winning than most for the General, but his analysis of polls didn't even take into account how Clinton had built a behemoth of a campaign, that functioned as a well-oiled machine to identify Hillary-leaning voters and get them out to vote. This strategy was made especially easy since Hillary did not need to convince new voters, she merely needed to hold three rust-belt states that had been won by Democrats every election since 1988. Of all the reasons Trump's victory was shocking, this defeat of big data may be one of the most underrated, and it sends a message to man that there are some things that cannot be quantified. In a brief encounter with a prosthetic-armed man, Trump tapped him on the cheek, so he could feel the human touch. This connection Trump had with the people, as opposed to Hillary's cold disdain (exemplified by the "Basket of Deplorables" comment) was something no amount of money could buy and no algorithm could put a number on. Eventually, it sowed the seeds of Clinton's demise.

Big Meme

With the rise of the internet, it could be said that the system started leaking. After decades of carefully controlled media, the system suddenly became exposed to a tsunami of mockery and attacks. While Clinton had the entirety of the legacy media on her side and an enormous internet marketing team, all of that was outweighed by a small, organic group of disaffected young people, who generated unending amounts of free content for their "God Emperor." Alarmed by this odd movement, Hillary Clinton gave an unhinged speech denouncing their racist and antisemitic memes, and the Clinton campaign followed this up with a surreal denunciation of Pepe the Frog. In the depths of the internet, these browsers began to be represented by an imaginary deity "kek" that was said to bless 4chan posts with repeating digits in their assigned number. When the long-awaited post of nine repeating 7's happened to say "Trump will win," the sureness of Trump's election came to assume a prophetic nature. Growing up in a secular society, it's likely that they were almost all unaware of the trueness of the Catholic faith. Similar to many other phenomena in our society, this devotion to kek and “meme magic” reflected a deep yearning to serve a higher power in a post-Christian world. Would the Holy Spirit speak through a "shitpost" on a message board? It's hard to say, but this group's fanatic devotion to the truth, to tearing down the idols of modernity, and their recognition of something deeply sick in our society, formed the antecedent of the Catholic-centered America First movement, which may one day correct the errors of our time. Like attempting to hold the air in a leaky hot-air balloon, repressing the truth can only be done for so long, and eventually, the dysfunction of a regime based on falsity will be dragged back down to earth by the gravity of its own incompetence. In an election decided by just 70,000 people in the rust belt, this haphazard collection of adolescents, autists, and basement dwelling NEET's may well have been responsible for successfully lobbing a human hand grenade into the imperial capital from their self-proclaimed "cesspool of the internet," 4chan's /pol/ board. While a wall of censorship has now been erected to suppress this force, that didn't make it go away, and the shadow of this truth that they merely scratched still lurks over this regime. As reddit, one of the largest and most liberal sites on the internet, became flooded by Trump victory memes on November 9th, I remember thinking that if this force was properly harnessed, there would be nothing in the world that could stop it.

Midnight in America

While Trump's persona was a major part of his appeal, his ideological message was equally important. Trump's political instincts were unmatched, and somehow he realized that all of our "culture wars" and fights over "socialism" were really just a show, that decisions were made at the top regardless of what the people thought, and that the main issue was the corruption of our elite. Instead of ranting about socialism, an irrelevant boogeyman designed to keep conservatives focused on lowering taxes for the wealthy, Trump brought the word "Globalist" into America's lexicon, to refer to a disloyal and self-serving elite, willing to sell the nation out for their international interests. While Trump never "named the Jew," he implicitly nailed the issue with remarkable accuracy, and sometimes nailed it more explicitly, such as when the last ad of his campaign pointed to Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros as enemies of the American people. The issues he focused on, mass immigration, outsourcing, foreign wars, were considered radioactive by Republicans before, precisely because they struck at the heart of this grand corruption. His forceful assertion that "there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they knew there were none!" sent a shiver down the spine of our Zionist-occupied national security state. It was expected that bleeding heart liberals would criticize the Iraq war, simply from a general pacifism, but for the leader of the Zionist vessel GOP to claim that the Iraq war was a disaster because it was strategically disastrous for American interests, and that the government lied to get us in there, brought Trump very close to the target of what is going on in this country. Nate Silver's analytics site, FiveThirtyEight, reported how Jewish money was now going 95% to Clinton, up from 71% to Obama in the 2012 election.

Aside from policy positions, Trump set a tone that no one else had. Republican politicians loved to endlessly repeat Ronald Reagan's quote that it was "morning in America." This was inaccurate in 1980, and it managed to be vastly more out-of-touch in 2016. This mindless optimism served the GOP elite well, it pacified their voters and prevented any serious revolt against the system. It also sold them the lie that the nation’s problems could be fixed by just voting for more Republicans. At Trump's convention speech, he spoke of a formerly great nation that had now been gutted into a decayed husk of its former self. The press unanimously panned Trump's speech as "dark." For them, it really was "morning in America." For everyone else, in the post-industrial wastelands of Ohio, to the heroin riddled streets of Appalachia, to the migrant swamped towns of Arizona, even the twilight of America had long passed, and in the future loomed a long midnight.

The Tape

It's unclear how long the Washington Post had been sitting on the Access Hollywood Tape, a 2006 recording of Trump making various lewd comments about women. This tape was perhaps the reason that the system did not work as hard to crush Trump in 2016 as they potentially could have (such as by attempting to jail him as they are now.) The Washington Post was lying on the silver bullet to bring the Trump candidacy and the fledgling nationalist revolt he started to an ignominious end, sending a message to any future rebels afterwards, that they would be disgraced and destroyed just like Trump. The tape was deployed on October 7th, just three days before the second debate, and right at the beginning of early voting. Republican leaders, fearful of their own voters, but eager to knife Trump in the back, finally found the opportunity they had been waiting for. Desperate to show their loyalty to a system that would be vengeful following Trump's defeat, they fell like dominoes into sanctimonious disavowals of their own nominee. Panicked RNC Chairman, Reince Priebus, confronted Trump and told him that if he didn't drop out right then, he would lose in the biggest landslide in American history.

Trump had withstood many attacks throughout his campaign, but as he sunk to down double digits in the polls, and faced the prospect of having to publicly answer for himself in the impending debate, and then run the rest of his campaign against his own political party, it was probably appropriate of the media to finally declare Trump's campaign dead, as they had eagerly but falsely done so many times before. Reporters surrounded Trump Tower in Manhattan the next day, his declaration of withdrawal from the race was expected at any moment.

Instead, Trump declared war.

Hopes for a subjugated Trump at the second debate melted away as Trump's campaign rounded up Bill Clinton's sexual assault accusers, silenced by Hillary, and bought them front row seats. A bloodied but unbroken Trump started the debate tired and weary, but as if being charged with righteous rage, Trump gradually built up his energy as he declared that any military officer would've been court martialed for doing a tenth of what Hillary had, when she acid washed 30,000 emails, and that he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her after taking office. A shaken Clinton then stated that she was "awfully glad that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country."

"Because you'd be in jail." Trump responded.

What started as a mournful night for my friends and I, expecting to watch a de facto end of Trump's campaign, turned to jubilation as Trump answered the call of the moment in the only way that he could have, and dragged himself back into the race. After Trump's scorched Earth performance, Republicans cowered back into line, but Trump had not forgotten their treachery, and continued his war against both political parties.

"Disloyal R's are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary, they come at you from all sides. They don't know how to win - I will teach them!" - Trump tweeted.

Teach them he did.

November 8th, 2016

Days before the election, Trump elicited widespread mockery for his decision to spend so much time campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin, states where he had not led in a single poll all election cycle. Outraised three to one in big donors, Trump's campaign could not afford to compete with Clinton's on TV or with ground employees. Little changed from the early primary days, Trump relied on rallies. Thousands of people, many of which had never voted before, stood out in the cold and dark to watch Trump give his final rally of the election in Grand Rapids, Michigan. With such a large conventional disadvantage, Trump was forced to target these atypical states for a Republican, that no Republican had won since the 1980's. As the world’s most powerful people woke up at the dawn of the next morning, giddy to watch a satisfying and certain Trump defeat, they would soon discover that Trump was not a typical Republican.

Predictions for election night varied, but the consensus was that Hillary's chances of winning were around 85-90%. Some went further, the Huffington Post claimed that Hillary had a 99% chance of winning, and the Princeton Election Consortium claimed a similar number, with its head promising to eat a bug on live television if Trump even came close to winning. My friends were somber as I picked them up on the afternoon of election day. Despite Trump having fought to make the race at least mildly competitive following the Access Hollywood tape, his victory seemed impossible, and not just because of what the polls said. Generally, the system finds a way to win, regardless of what the numbers say, and Trump had both the system and the numbers against him. Early exit polls seemed to confirm Hillary's victory in key states, and Trump's memers on 4chan sunk into despair, anger, and finger-pointing.

Then the votes began to come in, first from safe red states such as Kentucky and Indiana. A hint of optimism arose in our living room as I noticed that Trump was running ten points ahead of Romney in most of these working-class counties. Concern flashed over the faces of the NBC anchors as their analyst noted that Hillary was not getting the expected results in Virginia. Florida, the largest swing state, was neck and neck. Our eyes were fixed to the computer screen as Florida flipped from red to blue and back again, over and over again. Increasingly nervous NBC anchor, Chuck Todd, insisted that at any moment, a wave of votes for Clinton could be expected to come in from liberal Broward County. After each commercial break, he would insist on this again, but the hypothetical wave was pushed further into the future. Clinton had bought half a million dollars of fireworks for her victory celebration, and planned an elaborate rain of "broken glass-ceiling" confetti (the glass-ceiling being the supposed invisible barrier blocking women and minorities from advancing in society). As the Florida results came in, dancing to Katy Perry was replaced with fingernail biting and anxious pacing among Hillary's supporters, waiting for NBC to return from commercial break. Finally, it did, and a despondent Chuck Todd appeared on screen, sighed deeply, and said that he just didn't think there were enough votes left in Broward County for Hillary to win. Tears began to flow at the Clinton campaign, and aides were spotted in the fetal position. Despite the crushing defeat in Florida, Trump still needed to crack the Democratic "Blue Wall" to win. While many in the mainstream thought Trump had a shot at Florida, the main obstacles to his election were Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, a wall of states, filled with union voters, that had not been red since 1988. Trump's repelling of college educated voters pushed traditional Republican states like Virginia and Colorado out of reach, so he needed to take at least one in the rust belt. Already awash with energy, our election watch party exploded as Pennsylvania suddenly flipped from blue to red. I'll never forget the look on the face of my friend, paralyzed with shock and excitement, after I shouted "PA is red! PA is red!"

4chan's /pol/ board, known as a center of anti-social, nihilistic, spiteful trolls, collapsed into an outpouring of mutual brotherly love. Disrespected, hated, and dismissed by society, they had joined the Trump Train as an avatar of vengeance, but unwittingly found themselves united in self-sacrificial love for the one man who gave them a voice. In that euphoria, they caught a glimpse of the genuine good that could not be achieved by bitter pranks or by giving in to the depraved society around them, but only by replicating that same selfless effort for something larger than both themselves and Trump. On that night, America First became inevitable.

The Beginning or the End?

Late Show host Stephen Colbert looked like a husk of a man after being told that Trump was on the doorstep of winning the election. "I can't put a happy face on that... and that's my job." he said solemnly. Mass misery followed from the left and our establishment on the morning of November 9th, along with soaring euphoria among Trumps supporters. Unfortunately, this dynamic did not last. Regime forces quickly took advantage of Trump's political ignorance and thoroughly co-opted his administration. Trump's presidency could not have ended in a more fitting way, when after being cheated and spat on one more time through a stolen election, Trump's disenfranchised voters stormed the US Capitol, in a valiant and yet hopeless last stand against the regime that had occupied their nation for nearly a century. It's not yet clear whether the Trump moment will be seen in the future as the beginning of a new renaissance, or as the last gasp of Western boldness, appropriately bookending a civilization that began with the Crusaders. Even if this story ends with our heroes jailed, there will always live the moment when the regime was defeated against all odds, by the sheer will of one man and his anonymous, forgotten supporters. If any victory emerges amidst the end of the Western story, its roots will be traced back to the spirit of 2016.

Trump's impulsive riposte triggered a roar from the crowd, shock in our news media, and the subtle trace of fear on Hillary Clinton's face. In context, it was a response to Clinton stating that she was "awfully glad that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country." However, to only discuss this immediate context would be akin to saying that Julius Caesar was crossing a river when he said, "the die is cast." It's technically true, but a colossal understatement. Unlike Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Trump likely did not recognize the depths of what he had said, and probably even forgot about it shortly after he said it. Those five words represented a long simmering and righteous anger boiling over in the American Heartland, recognizing that our "Sacred Democracy" had long ago began to resemble a brothel for international special interests. Beyond this immediate story of American decline, the corruption in our societal elite can be traced back centuries earlier, and is just one short story in a lengthy tome of civilizational decline. Contained within the story of the 2016 election is the story of our struggle in the past, present, and future.

After being told by my mother in the summer of 2015 that my brother had become a Trump supporter, my only response was a befuddled "Why?" It was widely believed that Trump was running as a marketing stunt, the idea of this guy going from saying "you're fired" on reality TV to sitting in the oval office sounded like the plot of an absurdist novella, not something that anyone would seriously waste their time supporting. Over time, however, I found myself sucked in, along with millions of others, into a wild and surreal ride that propelled a human meme into the seat of global power. In this article, I will recall and analyze some key moments in what is probably the most bizarre and significant story in modern history.

Jeb!

Like a deer casually strolling towards the highway, Jeb Bush could not have fathomed the danger he was approaching. Having come from political royalty, having spent years governing our 3rd largest state, and having raised a whopping $200 million dollars for his campaign, Jeb likely would've just laughed if told that he'd soon be repeatedly and publicly humiliated by an orange-skinned real estate developer. As a child of the system, Jeb had trained his entire life for the kind of safe, orderly "debating" that politicians had grown used to. Republican or Democrat, they all were controlled by the same people and so had little reason to prepare for anything more than respectful disagreements on tax policy. After the GOP elite successfully blamed Mitt Romney's defeat on an overly strict immigration policy, they migrated over to Jeb, who could be reliably counted on to throw Republican voters under the bus and support de-facto open borders. While Jeb may have prepared himself to be challenged on his loose immigration policies, he was likely not prepared for Trump's accusation that those policies were due to his wife being "a Mexican." Jeb chose his wife for the sake of pandering to Hispanics, and his campaign marketing scheme of selling guacamole bowls was for the same purpose. However, he was also unprepared for a member of Trump's online meme squad to buy one of his guac bowls, defecate in it, and then post it on Jeb's twitter account. After enduring repeated "stumpings" from Trump, and having earned his new moniker "Low Energy Jeb," one of Jeb's advisors came up with an ingenious idea, to beat Trump at his own game. Jeb came out swinging in the December CNN debate, but elicited laughter from the crowd as Trump sarcastically praised his "higher energy" and his new "tough guy” persona. A flustered Jeb again repeated his prepared line that Trump would not “insult his way to the presidency,” before having to witness the public end of his own career as Trump responded that he was polling at 42%, and Jeb at 3. He then had to spend the next year watching from his couch as Trump did, in fact, insult his way to the presidency.

I believe that Trump's enduring popularity began with Jeb, and the fact that Trump represented his antithesis. Like many politicians, Jeb had crafted an entire personality that was a lie, although the contrast was greater with him, as he ran on being a humble, relatable, everyman, despite being the brother and son of presidents. The voter enthusiasm for his ritual humiliation every debate night was the first sign of the popular appetite for an end to the phony politicians that come inherent in a democracy. There is something intrinsically repelling to people about the patricians pretending to be plebeians. While people do not have a problem with being ruled, they do want the dignity of not being treated as a dupe who is unaware of this fact. Trump, living in a gold-plated penthouse at the top of a skyscraper, and boasting about his own wealth and talent, paradoxically provided his downtrodden voters with the dignity so often denied to them in our political system.

"Only Rosie O'Donnell"

Fox News owner Roger Ailes and debate host Megyn Kelly had laid the perfect trap. In the very first question of the very first debate, Kelly sharply brought up Trump referring to women he didn't like as "slobs, dogs, pigs, and disgusting animals..." Any one of these comments resurfacing would've triggered a groveling apology from any other politician, but Trump simply interrupted Kelly with a smirk, raised a finger and stated, "Only Rosie O'Donnell." The hostile debate crowd couldn't help but laugh as they remembered the obnoxious TV host Trump had feuded with. This was simultaneously a genius comeback, and quite stupid, as it totally dodged the question. This represented a continuous pattern of Trump's campaign, his opponents would be left flabbergasted and as he played checkers while they played chess. Voters were sick of the carefully crafted responses, drafted by an army of consultants, that other Republicans would use to respond to controversy, ultimately and inevitably resulting in their surrender to the system. Trump, on the other hand, would respond with a series of verbal middle fingers. Unbeknownst to Trump, his constant scandals ensured his survival, as any threat to the system would've immediately faced much of the same attacks. Trump earned his Teflon reputation because he managed to inoculate the electorate to the point that another Trump scandal became almost a bore.

The War "Hero"

Trump's campaign was expected to quickly flounder after he showed that he didn't know how the game was played. The most obvious example of this was his ignorance of the cardinal rule of politics: Don't piss off the Israel Lobby. Trump noticed the obvious contradictions and failures of our foreign policy, but unlike those in the system, he was unaware that the source of this was and is powerful Zionists, and he made no effort to avoid pointing out many of these "Emperor has no clothes" moments. The first oddity he pointed out was the drooling adoration the system showed to John McCain, the patron saint of gentile Zionism. Trump brought up the obvious fact that John McCain was not a war hero simply because he was captured and tortured, and then said he liked the guys who didn't get captured. The outrage in the media was deafening, but I remember the father of a friend of mine, an everyday conservative, saying "Well, he's right." There was a large hole in the political market for someone willing to point out these glaring inconsistences, but only Trump had the courage to do it and the fortitude to withstand the backlash. Little did Trump know, McCain's crimes stretched far beyond simply not being a war hero. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Sydney Schanberg, wrote an expose on McCain showing that he not only collaborated with the North Vietnamese quicker and to a greater extent than known, but he was also instrumental in the government leaving behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam, and then covering it up. McCain's usefulness ensured this never received widespread coverage, despite Schanberg's reputation, and the system reacted like an immune system, comically bolstering McCain up to a greater extent than ever before. Due to the complete lack of accountability for Zionists, our system is full of these massive discrepancies. Trump horrified the GOP establishment by calling them out one by one, from the disastrous war in Iraq, to the militant hostility towards Vladimir Putin and Bashar Al-Assad, the only leaders fighting ISIS (The US "fight against ISIS" was actually a pretext for overthrowing Assad). The longer a system continues to be corrupt, the more opportunities arise for those willing to tell the truth.

Lyin' Ted, Little Marco, and Carl the Cuck

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were more capable politicians than Jeb Bush, but they still struggled with one problem. They were slaves, and Trump was not. Devoting your entire career to be being a slave leaves one incapable of being a leader. In most of politics, demonstrations of subservience serve as a career boost, as it signals to special interests that you can be their vessel. Quietly, but rapidly, the Republican voter base turned on the masters. They no longer wanted a slave; they wanted a king. Trump had an instinctual disgust for the pathetic and slavish, and repeatedly hammered this home to his base. Trump mocked Cruz for a sweaty picture he took in front of a butter cow while attempting to pander to rural voters, he imitated Rubio's repeated need of water in a speech, and he railed John Kasich for his sloppy eating habits. Trump did not ask anything of the system, he made demands. "Build the wall!" became his tagline. Trump did not respectfully allow the debate crowds to boo him, instead he called them out as the donors and special interests that they were. Rubio emphasized his background as the son of a dishwasher and a maid, Trump recalled how him father merely gave him a "small loan of a million dollars." On the left, they witnessed a similar phenomenon. Insurgent candidate Bernie Sanders mounted a strong challenge to Hillary Clinton, but every time Sanders got the chance to land an actual blow on Clinton, he balked. After finally being given a chance to discuss the clear incompetence and corruption demonstrated by Clinton in her email scandal, Sanders defended her instead, saying "we're all sick and tired of hearing about her damn emails." The episode represented the modern left in a microcosm, a group of people who desperately want to be rebels, but instead were appropriately branded with the "cuckold" descriptor, best exemplified by "Carl the Cuck" and "AIDS Skrillex," two particularly unhinged Sanders supporters. While Republican voters may have been reacting to immediate circumstances in their backing of Trump, they stumbled upon a far larger truth. A nation that attempts to remove strong leaders to protect individual freedom will soon find itself preyed upon by evil forces.

On March 15th, 2016, Trump crushed Rubio in Rubio's home state of Florida. The RNC had changed the rules before the primary to make Florida a winner-take-all state, hoping to boost Rubio's campaign. Instead, the state served as Trump's capstone and the last nail in the coffin of Rubio's ill-fated campaign.

On May 3rd, 2016, Trump crushed Cruz among Cruz's own support base, Evangelicals in Indiana. Shortly before the primary, frustrated by his impending defeat, Cruz collapsed into an embarrassing meltdown over Trump's suggestion that his father helped kill John F. Kennedy. The Chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus, sent out a despondent tweet stating that Donald Trump was the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

Part II

Sources of Power

A spat has broken out on X recently over whether the term "Globalist American Empire" or "Zionist Occupied Government" better describes the current American regime. Those who believe that Globalism, Liberalism, or "Wokeism" as opposed to Zionism is the dominate ideology of our elite point to how the majority of our Jewish elite is secular, liberal, and not especially supportive of Israel's extreme actions. While they admit that Jews tend to be more liberal, they believe that it's the shared liberal ideology that unites our elite, as opposed to Jewish identity. Zionists are seen as only being concerned with the niche issue of Israel, and exerting little influence on the rest of society outside of certain areas of foreign policy.

The problem with this line of thinking is that power is not defined by who controls "most" of society. Power is defined by the ability to achieve core objectives, and Zionists have acquired exactly the positions in our government necessary to do that. The so called "woke" may be able to use control of HR departments to terrorize low level employees at any company in the country, but power over these disenfranchised Trump supporters matters little compared to having the ability to terrorize national governments, representing untold resources. The power of a Roman Caesar came through his legions, and the legions of today are the military and financial means the United States uses to subdue its rivals. Power over America's Empire matters far more than power over the lives of everyday Americans. They also go hand in hand. National governments have access to more wealth than any private citizen or company, and they also recognize that appeasing those who control America's legions is incredibly important for their nation's security and prosperity. Thus, those who pull the levers of America's Empire rake in massive amounts of money in concealed bribes, usually through highly paid "jobs" going to family members (Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian gas company) or donations to "charities" (Saudi contributions to Clinton Foundation). Access to this flow of wealth can quickly enrichen those in control of foreign policy, this wealth can then be easily used to influence domestic politics. If Zionists do not occupy most domestic political positions, it's simply because they don't really care about transgender bathrooms or Dr. Seuss being cancelled. The best way to determine who's in charge is to see who gets their way when there's a conflict between the two sides. Recently, the "woke", black, female dean of Harvard (the most prestigious college in the world) was rapidly ousted simply for not cracking down hard enough on pro-Palestinian students. The tactics were familiar, financial threats, legal threats, and media attacks. So, when Zionists want their way in domestic politics, they get it. Zionist influence over our more critical foreign policy is far more apparent, as is clear from Joe Biden begging Israel to stop their brutal campaign in Gaza, which is severly detrimental to US relations with Muslim states. Israel told Biden to pound sand, and Biden won't even consider attempting to use ample US leverage to change Israel's behavior. While it's clear that influence over foreign policy is a larger source of power than influence over domestic policy, some may still claim that Zionist influence is limited to the Middle East. Let's analyze another example to see just how far this influence goes. One of the most irrational aspects of American foreign policy recently has been our fanatic hostility towards Russia.

Russia and Syria

Globalists have recognized since the Obama administration that China is the only real threat to US global hegemony, and can only really be defeated with an "encircling" coalition. Russia would be critical here due to its natural resources. China is not resource rich on its own, and without Russian energy, it would struggle to sustain a war against the West. With Russian energy, however, China's immense industrial capacity would likely sweep away a decaying US Navy. For this reason, Globalists prior to 2014 attempted to mend relations with Russia. Hillary Clinton theatrically pushed a giant red "reset" button with Russian Secretary of State Sergei Lavrov in 2012. Globalist Obama rightfully mocked Zionist Romney on the debate state for saying Russia was the top threat to our country. Even as late as 2021, Biden sought a "stable and predictable" relationship with Putin and lifted sanctions on the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. So how has this obvious strategy been so horribly derailed?

Despite the fact that most US government officials have desired a "pivot to China" for years, policy is not determined by the majority, it tends to be driven by the "intolerant minority". If 70% of government officials favor one policy, but are mostly apathetic about it, while 30% favor another policy, but are far more organized, willing to viciously attack any opposition, and dedicate 100% of their energy in this direction, they can easily overwhelm an apathetic majority.

Let's look at the timeline for the deterioration of our relationship with Russia. While most discussion focuses on the 2022 "Special Military Operation" in Ukraine, the war really began in 2014 when a US backed coup overthrew the pro-Russian government of Ukraine, leading to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Donbass rebellion. What else was going on in this time period? The Syrian civil war started in 2011 and Russia intervened to save Assad in 2015. Overthrowing Assad has been a long term objective of Israel, to secure its northern border. A dilemna arose for Zionists in our government, how to prevent Russia from intervening to save the reeling Assad? Bogging Russia down fighting an insurgency in Ukraine and hitting it with crippling sanctions would certainly prevent any distant military deployments. Many have pointed out how the US has no actual strategy for defeating Russia in Ukraine. Even in their fantasy scenario where Ukraine routs the Russian army on the battlefield, Russia would simply use nuclear weapons. This is because the goal wasn't defeating Russia, it was constraining it. Unfortunately for the Zionists, Putin outplayed them. He avoided a large scale war in Ukraine, only seizing Crimea, even though he could likely have seized the whole nation. Putin saved Assad and then waited until Syria was secure to solve the Ukraine problem. By the time it became clear that the Zionist strategy failed, it was too late to get off the collision course with Russia.

A Foolish Alliance

A natural question arises. Since Zionists probably don't care that much about American domestic policy, could we simply ally with them, allow them to control foreign policy, while we control domestic policy? Why this alliance cannot possibly function can be best seen by looking at the Cold War. Frustrated at opposition to Israel's war in 1967 on the left and the USSR's support of the Arab States in the 1973 war, a faction of left wing Jews defected from the Left and joined the Right, this was the origin of the Neoconservative movement. While conservatives were hostile to the USSR because it was atheistic and communist, Neocons were hostile to it because it was threatening Israel. These two sides naturally joined forces and landslide victories for Republicans resulted in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Both sides acheived their short term objective when the USSR collapsed in 1991. But what about their long term objectives? In this sense, the conservatives were totally routed. While they were obsessed with defeating communism overseas, they were blindsided as their own country was totally highjacked by left wing extremists and its culture became just as godless and even more immoral than the late USSR. Did the Zionist Neocons suffer a similar fate? No, actually quite the opposite. They seized total control of our foreign policy and went on a Middle Eastern shooting spree against Israel's enemies. Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan were neutralized and Syria was destabilized. They had little trouble launching a major proxy war against nuclear armed Russia. Why did this happen? Despite some disagreements, Zionists benefit immensely from the control that liberal Jews have over domestic society. Liberal Jews recognize that any criticism of Zionist Jewish influence could easily backfire on themselves, and so they use their money and media influence to suppress it. Zionists will not risk this protection by seriously challenging the power of liberal Jewry. They are also aware that while liberal Jews will occassionally balk at some of Israel's most barbaric actions, they're still far more sympathetic to the Jewish state than any gentile elite would be. The other issue is focus, given the tall task of removing an entrenched regime, all of our resources and energy must be focused on this task. Zionists, however, are primarily concerned with Israel and will drag our attention towards fighting wars on its behalf.

China

Given that Zionists have repeatedly undermined US efforts to confront China, and that Zionists are our enemy, does this mean we should support a hostile policy towards China? A coolheaded look shows that this would be incredibly foolhardy and misguided. Zionists are not friendly with China, they simply consider China to be a threat on the backburner relative to more immediate threats to Israel's security. US hegemony has been very beneficial to Israel, so Zionists will happily support aggression towards China, as long as it doesn't take priority over protecting Israel. Ultimately, our national problems are the fault of our own regime, not any foreign power. Fighting China to ensure another century of global domination for the Zionist regime that hates us would be the height of stupidity. Some have used the persecution of Christians in China as a reason for WWIII. To the extent that this is actually happening, and not simply US regime propoganda, China's motives for doing so should be examined. Most of these Christian churches have ties with the West, which is obviously very hostile to China at the moment. It seems a reasonable concern that CIA agents could infiltrate China through these churches. Given the fact that the ADL and Israel are known to have blackmail files on high level people all over our society, it's hard to believe that our churches have remained unscathed, especially given their historical role in "anti-semitism." Taking that into account, the best way to stop any persecution of Christians would be to deescalate tensions with China so that this is less of a concern for them, and to remove our current regime. It's also important to remember, that if we're looking at which group is most hostile towards Christianity, that group would indisputably be the Jews, who are also running our own country. Jews have a constant paranoia and bitterness over the "persecution" they've faced from Christians historically, as well as the fact that Christianity nullifies their religion. Ron Unz's article "On the Oddities of the Jewish Religion" describes how they consider Christians to be their mortal enemy, will mutter curses at churches, and Christ is repeatedly blasphemed in their Talmud.

If we're going to define an occupation as one nation removing the sovereignty of another through force, it seems indisputable that our country is under Zionist occupation, and that this describes our situation far better than "Globalist American Empire." Zionists have their hands on the highest levers of power in our society, and use that power to ensure that the managerial class of our country remains unable or unwilling to challenge them. Anyone who attempts to resist this arrangement is swiftly met with crushing financial penalties, media defamation, and legal attacks. This is different only superficially from the USSR rolling tanks into Budapest or Prague. Recognizing this occupation is paramount, otherwise, we will continue to exist as a defeated nation, impotently flailing at the henchmen of the real regime.

The error in this line of thinking can be seen simply by looking at the history of the Church. It has never been held that a Catholic must reject the obviousness of physical differences between races or the natural preference we have for our own blood relations (St. Thomas affirmed the opposite in fact). This belief is genuinely one from the modern-Judaic worldview that rose to prominence with the New Left of the 1960's. When it comes to the natural sciences, however, there is a long and fruitful relationship with the Church. The patron saint of science doesn't come from the 20th century, it's St. Albert the Great, the mentor of St. Thomas, who wrote extensively on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography and just about every field of study we would nowadays list under "science". He is credited with the discovery of arsenic and the photosensitivity of silver nitrate, which paved the way for photography. St. Thomas himself, in the very first question of the Summa, refers to the fact that both an astronomer and physicist can prove that the world is round. In his discussion of the creation story, St. Thomas repeatedly cites scientific discoveries to aid his analysis, which I will elaborate on later.

The main conflict seems to come from the fact that modernists consider science to be the only valid way to seek truth. Much has been written on how this is obviously false and that science is simply a means of understanding and appreciating God's creation. As St. Albert the Great says, "Every science and knowledge proceeds from God." To insist on simply taking the exact opposite view of whatever the left believes is how conservatives ended up worshipping the police after BLM, and is not an effective path to truth. So how should we reconcile science and faith? St. Thomas provides a guide when he quotes St. Augustine in saying that we should always hold scripture to be true, but it can be true in different ways, such as literally or metaphorically. We should not hold to an interpretation that can be proven false, both because it's false, but also because it makes believers looks ridiculous and hinders evangelization. Augustine expanded on this frustration during a commentary on Genesis:

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Augustine's words are remarkably prescient when considering the plan of Cass Sunstein, a high-level Obama official who in 2008 suggested that the government could combat the spread of conspiracies on the internet by infiltrating conspiracy websites and planting ridiculous theories to delegitimize and divert attention from the real ones. The swift arrival of Qanon after Pizzagate seems to be an example of this, and the rise of the Moon Landing Hoax theory, one of the few major ones that points no fingers at the Jews, is likely another. We should be wary of insisting that the Bible supports absurd theories that will have the effect on evangelization bemoaned by St. Augustine, and probably cheered by Sunstein.

On the Cosmos

"I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit..."

-John 5:15

This metaphorical language used by Jesus is one of many examples of metaphorical language used throughout the Bible. In the words of St. Thomas "It is befitting Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things." Taking a purely literal reading of Genesis is not something St. Thomas or St. Augustine did, and is primary associated with the heavily Jewish influenced Evangelical movement. Nonetheless, there is a strain of the America First movement that insists the firmament is referring to an impenetrable dome, stretched over a flat Earth. St. Thomas did not have access to satellites or space travel, but he did not need NASA to oppose this interpretation. In the Summa (1, Q68), St. Thomas analyzes the second day of creation, where it is written: "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters... And God called the firmament Heaven."

It is important to note that when people in Biblical times and the Middle Ages referred to "heaven", they were not always referring to the spiritual heaven where God resides. The Hebrew name for heaven is thought to be derived from a word meaning "on high." St. Thomas describes how there are multiple heavens (1, Q68, A4), one of which is the "empyrean heaven", the spiritual one that we think of, and another is the "starry heaven," a natural, material heaven, that we would call space. It is this starry heaven that St. Thomas points to as the firmament.

St. Thomas goes on to discuss the waters around the firmament, and he believes that the word "water" is being used by Moses metaphorically for the waters above, so that he can make himself understood by his scientifically ignorant audience. Water, in this case, is used to evoke the transparency of the actual substance. St. Thomas believed that the water above the firmament is the formless matter that Medieval’s believed was beyond the stars (this isn't far from our current view of what lies at the edge of or outside our universe), the water under the firmament is literal elemental water, and it becomes our atmosphere and the seas on the third day. The "firmness" of the firmament refers to a firm boundary, and something material rather than simply abstract. Augustine held a similar view, but favored the explanation that the firmament was among the clouds, and the firmness was referring to the density of air.

In either view, there's no reason to think that the firmament is something that we cannot penetrate in any way. However, just because we can travel into the firmament, doesn't necessarily mean we should. The Russian Cosmist movement of the USSR, and notable rocket scientists such as Werner Von Braun, saw space travel as a way to search for philosophical answers. Attempting to leave Earth to find meaning in life, when God has given it to us already, is the Faustian pinnacle of man's hubris. This isn't to say that space travel does not have value from a scientific standpoint, however.

It would not be until roughly 300 years after St. Thomas's death that the Catholic Cleric, Nicholas Copernicus, would present his theory of Heliocentrism. While Thomas was not familiar with the theory, he did present some hints as to what he might've thought of it. While discussing how it can be true that the sun and moon are called the "two great lights" when astronomers have proved that there are stars larger than the moon, St. Thomas quotes Chrysostom in saying "The two lights are called great, not so much with regard to their dimensions as to their influence and power. For though the stars be of greater bulk than the moon, yet the influence of the moon is more perceptible to the senses in this lower world. Moreover, as far as the senses are concerned, its apparent size is greater." In response to those in the Church who opposed Heliocentrism on the grounds that Joshua is recorded to have "stopped the sun," St. Thomas may have given the answer that the sun was stopped according to Joshua's perception, even if it was the Earth stopped in actuality. We still say "the sun rose" or "the sun set" to this day, despite believing in an immobile sun.

From a symbolic perspective, I believe Heliocentrism would have more value as well. The sun has long represented God, and it's quite poetic to think that from our perspective, God revolves around us, but in actuality, we revolve around God. This can also apply to the order of creation. It's been remarked before how the order of creation aligns almost exactly with our modern understanding. First comes light (big bang), then space and stars, water and planets, plants (simple organisms), the sun and moon, fish, birds, mammals, and finally humans. The only part of this that seems out of order is simple life coming before the sun. However, we now know that the sun was far less luminous to the Earth when life began, so much so that it seems Earth should have been frozen. So from the perspective of life on Earth, the sun did not exist yet.

I should add something about the half-serious/half-trolling claim that the Earth is flat. This is pretty self-evidently inaccurate just based on the fact that all of our navigational maps are based on the world being round, and ships and planes would run into massive number of issues if they were attempting to navigate a disc with globe-based maps. Anyone with even a sailboat and an odometer can verify that the distance between London and New York is roughly the same as between South Africa and Argentina, as our globe maps say. On the flat Earth map though, the Southern Hemisphere trip would be almost three times the distance because you'd be traveling around the edge of the disc, rather than the center (map below).

The fact that everyone in the Southern Hemisphere can look directly south and see the stars rotating around the South Pole poses a massive issue as well. South on a flat Earth would not be a single pole, but rather 360 degrees around the edge of the disc, so someone looking due south in Australia would be looking in an entirely different direction as someone looking due south in Argentina or South Africa.

The Ancient Greeks weren't even aware of the southern hemisphere, but still figured out the world was round based on basic phenomenon. Along with the impossibility, believing in this would reduce God's creation from an unfathomably vast universe into an oversized snow globe, that seems to function exactly as we'd expect a round earth to, but actually only appears that way due to a variety of convoluted mechanisms.

On Modern Science

Another major question is in regard to the motives of scientists. While we can assume that the Heliocentrism of the Catholic Clergyman, Copernicus, or the genetic science of the Augustinian Friar, Mendel, were not created for the purpose of attacking or undermining faith, this is less certain when it comes to modern theories. We can see with the Holocaust, that historical "fact" can certainly be manipulated for political reasons. Could the same happen with scientific theories? It certainly could, but we should not reflexively dismiss all modern science, lest we fall into the trap that Augustine warned of clinging to a theory that may one day be proven false.

Evaluating them critically is the best path forward. If scientists have put forward a lot of evidence for a theory, we have to evaluate the likelihood that it's all been faked in a grand conspiracy. That's not impossible, but if the conspiracy requires a large number of people to actively and continuously fake new discoveries, with no credible people calling them out on this, we should conclude that a conspiracy is unlikely. Compare this with Holocaust Denial. Questioning the Holocaust will result in your life being destroyed at minimum, in Europe you'll be jailed. Despite this, many credible people have publicly challenged the narrative. High level WWII military intelligence officers like John Beaty and Revilo Oliver, prominent historians such as David Irving, the top expert on gas chamber construction, Fred Leuchter, the list goes on. Questioning a major scientific theory will usually result in no more than mockery, so if no credible people have challenged it, that's a sign that it's likely true. On top of this, Holocaust "study" is largely based on a single fraudulent event, the "evidence" at the Nuremburg trials. If, say, Dinosaurs were fake, this would require fossil discoveries to be faked on a regular basis, all around the world, for the last century. Again, I suppose it's not impossible, but it would be unprecedented.

The most controversial modern theory is the Darwinian theory of evolution. Darwin himself was not an especially faithful man, and his proteges have frequently used the theory as a bludgeon against Christians. However, there is also considerable evidence for evolution, such as the development of anti-biotic resistant bacteria and pesticide resistant insects, as well as the fossil record showing that as we go further back in time, creatures get progressively more distant from the ones we know today. The method of carbon dating seems to confirm that the world is not, in fact, 6,000 years old. The subject of human evolution is even more controversial, but on an intuitive level, it does make sense that some human genetic traits would ensure a greater chance of survival in some environments as opposed to others. For example, the mountain-dwelling Tibetans have a larger lung capacity.

Pope Pius XII, when commenting on evolution, pointed out that there is a distinction between the creation of the soul, which is created by God instantaneously, and the body, which comes from pre-existing matter. The way in which that pre-existing matter developed into its current form would not seem to be important, which is why he did not forbid evolutionary research. Accepting evolution would raise a few questions regarding Genesis, however. I think we can take a nuanced position on some of the early stories in Genesis. We don't have to say that they are merely allegories that never happened at all, or that they provide a 100% accurate historical account. As St. Thomas says clearly in his analysis of Creation, Moses is speaking to ignorant people, and has to convey these truths in a way that they will understand. The first issue, as Darwin himself pointed out, is the brutality of the natural selection process. Wouldn't this contradict the idea of disharmony being introduced by original sin? Not necessarily, as Classical Theist discusses in his excellent video on evolution, Louis Bouyer points out how disharmony was actually introduced into the cosmos by the primordial fall of the angels.

So, who were Adam and Eve in this case? Even our current scientific narrative acknowledges that there was a massive, unexplained leap in the intelligence of proto-humans at some point, despite this providing little initial evolutionary advantage. It seems to fit quite well that prior to this leap, God inserted a "rational soul" into the embryos of two of these proto-humans. With their newfound reason, they were quickly tempted to sin and separated themselves from God, resulting in the chaotic and brutal human society that would follow. Some have claimed that this would take away the uniqueness of Mary as the Immaculate Conception, but there would still be a distinction since Mary was born without sin to sinful beings, whereas Adam and Eve would've been born to sinless sub-rational proto-humans.

Another thing to think about is the story of Noah and his children. Some of the concepts involved here correspond quite well with our current understanding, such as the idea of Noah having three children, one populating Europe, one Asia, and one Africa. Before it became anathema, racial science determined that there was three major races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid), located in Europe/West Asia, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Flood would also seem to correspond with the large rise in sea level that resulted at the end of the Ice Age.

How about the curse of Ham, whose descendants are in Africa? The current evolutionary theory has humans originating in Africa, this would seem to contradict the idea of Ham's descendants being cursed and changing as a result. If humans were originally Negroids, it would actually be the other races who changed. However, in Ron Unz's article analyzing the book "Erectus Walks Among Us", he shows how it would make far more sense that modern humans actually originated in Eurasia, and then a portion of them were pushed into Africa by the Ice Age. It makes little sense that humans would leave the hospitable African climate for the frigid Europe, and the cold winters of Eurasia would be more likely to provide the selective pressure necessary for the development of intelligence. These humans then interbred with the large population of proto-humans (Home Erectus) in Africa, resulting in the lower intelligence that we see in African populations today. This would essentially be the "Curse of Ham." This would make even more sense when looking at the Jews. Unz persuasively argues in another article that modern Jews are the descendants of Carthaginian Canaanites. In Genesis, despite Ham committing the crime, it was Canaan who was directly cursed. Canaan avoided the physical curse of Ham, and his descendants ended up settling the modern day semitic region instead of Africa. However, Canaan received a worse curse, a moral one, and his descendants were cursed to live in the evil of the Canaanite religion, the Carthaginian religion, and finally, the modern Judaic/Canaanite hybrid religion.

It has become an entrenched legend that Columbus' peers believed he would fall off the edge of the earth during his 1492 journey. St. Thomas's comments at the beginning of the Summa show this for the myth that it is, educated Europeans had known the Earth was round since Ancient Greek times. However, this didn't stop Protestants from using this myth in attacks against the supposed ignorance of the Catholic Church. In an era where the sons of Canaan have established an occupying regime on our nation, it is more important than ever to critically evaluate whether a theory is bringing us closer to the truth, or is the product of Sunstein or one of his co-ethnics.