God bless you. I’d like to begin by apologizing for the absurd number of hyperlinks in this article; it’s become almost a Choose Your Own Adventure book of ramifying tangents, but I’m afraid it couldn’t be helped. And now I’d like to apologize in a different sense: that of apologetics, or arguing in favor of a strongly held belief. (The relevant verb might actually be apologeticize, but that just sounds silly.) What I am arguing in favor of is my personal belief that very small and seemingly insignificant—or, yes, even ridiculous—bubbles on the frothy surface of pop culture can be objectively true and meaningful indicators of larger and even largest movements within the depths of the Zeitgeist, the Collective Unconscious, the psychospiritual Internet into which our species has been plugged since before the recording of history.
In a recent article, I made as cool and rational a defense as I could of my—well, not quite my logical conviction, but my extremely strong hunch—that some of the things happening in Woke culture, and specifically its insidious assimilation of beloved intellectual properties like Star Wars, Dr. Who, and He-Man, are directly connected to the bizarre and troublesome things happening in the Vatican these days (and specifically the apparent assault upon the Traditional Latin Mass). Why do I keep harping on this He-Man/Motu Proprio connection? Well, for me, autism does not manifest in so useful a form as understanding basic math, or knowing what to do with money other than buying Twix bars. But it does (apparently) give me a weird insight into some of the labyrinthine twists of popular culture. After all, there is some precedent for serious thinkers reading the entrails of pop culture to augur the movements of larger intellectual trends; philosopher and historian Remi Brogue, for example, draws a direct parallel from the morality of the TV show Sex in the City to the destructive forces unleashed by science in the Manhattan Project, as Robert Royal discusses in this article. And my one absolutely unerring, indispensable tool in ferreting out skulduggery is this: A = A.
Pretty basic, you might well say. I’ll do you one better: it’s not merely basic, but the fundamental base, the ultimate rock-bottom firmament, of all reason, wisdom, and imagination. When you state the Law of Identity, you literally speak the Name of God. How does He identify Himself to Moses? “I Am Who Am” (Exodus 3:14). We’re all here—existence itself is able to exist—because, at the end of the day, God is God.
And, as I’ve argued before, the number one dead giveaway that any given thinker is (openly or implicitly) anti-Catholic is this: their logic will always turn out to be based on the premise that A does not equal A. Let me give an example. Perhaps the one and only good thing accomplished by the Third Reich is that, ever since the 1940s, all humankind has been able to agree on one standard of evil. We sure as heck quibble over what might be good, and how to attain it, but everyone from the Bible-thumpingest right-wing arch-conservative to the most ultra-liberal lunatic in California can at least agree that the Nazis Were Bad. Right?
Well. Stay with me, because this is a deep dive into a rabbit hole. Remember I mentioned the assimilation of Dr. Who by Woke culture? Catholics aren’t the only people who dislike it, and that’s for a perfectly simple and obvious reason: Woke ideology produces crap art. A fellow on YouTube called Jay Exci made a five-hour video (which I won’t provide a link to because I don’t want to consume over half your working day) analyzing the New Who’s artistic failures in extreme detail, and one of the many points he touched on was a moment in the episode “Spyfall,” when the new female Doctor finds his/her old nemesis the Master working with Nazis during the Third Reich. Jay Exci (along with many others, including The Guardian in this article) points out that the Doctor’s defeat of the Master in this episode is ethically problematic. You see, the current incarnation of the Master happens to be a person of color, but the Nazis perceive him as a perfect Aryan because of a Time Lord gadget called a perception filter, which—well, does what its name says. But after the Doctor has already defeated the Master, as a parting shot, she disables his perception filter and says, “Now they’ll see the real you,” quite clearly implying that the Nazis, being Nazis and all, will probably punish the Master even more severely because he’s a person of color. This has been called Dr. Who’s “weaponizing” the Master’s own race against him. Kind of the opposite of politically correct, you might think.
But! Because, in attacking (or, at any rate, critiquing) Woke-era Dr. Who, Jay Exci appeared to have allied himself too overtly with suspiciously conservative ideology, many scions of the Left rallied to defend New Who by attacking Jay Exci in turn. One fellow, for example, argues that because there was an “Indian Legion” within the Waffen-SS, comprised mainly of Indian servicemen taken as POWs, it is therefore absurd to think that the Nazis would treat a dark-skinned prisoner more harshly than any other. Peter Lewerin, the author of this article, concludes, “There has been some outrage over this episode: it would seem that [Dr. Who writer] Chris Chibnall overestimated the audience’s education here.” By Jove, the Nazis weren’t racist after all!
Oh yes, and “overestimated the audience’s education”?! I spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grade obsessed with World War II, reading absolute scads of books that were (though I say it who shouldn’t—see again, autism) well above my grade level, and I had never in my life heard of the Indian Legion until I stumbled across this particular Internet debate two days ago. Even if it were remotely reasonable to assume that the average viewer would immediately know such a specific piece of WWII history (and I’d love to know if Chris Chibnall had ever heard of the Indian Legion before Leweris’ article came along), that still doesn’t translate to a safe assumption that any given German soldier would automatically treat a dark-skinned prisoner with respect.
You see what I mean about pulling that thread? I just can’t help it. I follow the trail of logic and it leads in a loop, a self-devouring circumnavigation of the globe, like the Midgard Serpent of Nordic myth. The liberal mindset is ultimately willing to defend even the bloody Nazis in order to attack its enemy. And who, when all is said and done, is that enemy?
If you take the reality of Spiritual Warfare seriously, you may well have heard of Fr. Chad Ripperger. He’s a devout priest, theologian, and apologist for the Faith—and he is also a practicing exorcist. According to Fr. Ripperger, based on encounters with victims of demonic attack from every walk of life, the deceptions of the Devil always boil down to one thing in the end: anything but God. The enemies of the Faith will endorse unfettered transgendered multi-generational pansexuality at one moment, and fall back on defending Nazism the next, if that is what it takes to make God look bad. And as usual, Chesterton already said all this a long time ago, if we’d only been listening:
“There are no Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals; there are no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world; and there are its enemies. Its enemies are ready to be for violence or against violence, for liberty or against liberty, for representation or against representation; and even for peace or against peace.” - The Well and the Shallows, G.K. Chesterton (God rest his soul, and may he pray for us all!).
So there you have it. Do I seriously, intelligently believe that the subversion of a children’s cartoon show is directly connected to the current (apparent) Papal assault on the Traditional Latin Mass? Well—yeah. I do. We’ve all heard of the Butterfly Effect. It’s really true: everything is connected, everything eventually touches everything else. And as I’ve also said before, if there is any such thing as Providence at all, then by definition, ultimately, there can’t be such a thing as coincidence. Either nothing matters, or absolutely everything does.
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