‘Plot Twists in the Geopolitical Culture Wars’

 

Truth is stranger than fiction, as they say.

It is also stranger than the narratives found in most mainstream news stories.

Let’s look first at the Ukraine, the paragon of democratic goodness (or so we’re told).  The fair-haired child of most of the West just gutted its anticorruption offices, amongst other problematic actions:

‘[Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán’s critique comes amid growing concern across Europe about democratic backsliding in Ukraine.

‘Just days earlier, the parliament in Kyiv adopted a law placing two key anti-corruption institutions—the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO)—under the direct supervision of the Prosecutor General, a presidential appointee.

‘Critics say this move effectively strips the agencies of their independence, a violation of one of the EU’s central accession criteria.

‘European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos said the law would derail the accession process.

‘Despite this, the bill was approved by the Ukrainian parliament, triggering mass protests in Kyiv and other cities.

‘Beyond the anti-corruption law, Ukraine has also drawn criticism for failing to hold general elections in 2024 as constitutionally required. The war was cited as justification, but critics argue that democratic life should continue, even under martial conditions.

‘Further concerns have arisen over forced military conscription. Numerous reports suggest that Ukrainian authorities have employed aggressive methods to recruit soldiers. A Hungarian-Ukrainian dual citizen, József Sebestyén, was recently beaten to death by recruiters, fuelling Budapest’s anger’ (Zoltán Kottász, ‘Rule of Lawfare: Brussels Ignores Ukraine’s Violations While Punishing Member States,’ europeanconservative.com).

Then there is angelic Ukraine’s proposal to decriminalize pornography to fund its war effort.

Why are we supporting this regime again?  Oh yeah, because the US and other Western governments overthrew her elected government in 2014 precisely to start a war with ‘our adversary’ Russia.

And what has that supposed enemy been up to lately?  All kinds of grisly, grimy, dark things, we’re sure – terrible, horrible things like . . . banning satansim:

‘The Russian Supreme Court recognized the “International Satanism Movement” as an extremist organization and banned its activities in Russia on Wednesday.

‘The decision went into effect immediately, but can be appealed within a month, reports RBC.

‘The Court’s exact reasoning is as yet unknown, as the session took place behind closed doors and the case materials haven’t been publicly disclosed. His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia previously made public calls to ban Satanism.

‘The Prosecutor General’s office, commenting on the decision, stated that the participants of the movement publicly call for extremism and the “destruction of churches.”

‘“The followers of the movement adhere to the general principles of Satanism, use common symbols and attributes, and perform occult rituals. The conceptual basis consists of publications that are recognized as extremist materials. The movement is closely associated with manifestations of radical nationalism and neo-Nazism. Along with ritual murders, participants commit other crimes, including those against minors,” the statement said.

‘The same judge, Oleg Nefedov, recognized the international LGBT movement as extreme and banned its activities in Russia in 2023.

‘ . . . According to the expert, marketplaces will have to withdraw products containing symbols of Satanism from sale. These include earrings with inverted crosses, medallions with a Baphomet and a pentagram, various pendants with inscriptions in Latin glorifying Satan, and more’ (‘Russian Supreme Court bans Satanism,’ orthochristian.com).

This is a good point to turn our focus to our corner of the world here in the States, for we have a pronounced satanism problem here.  For instance, there are literally thousands of Christian martyrs and other saints from all of Church history that we could honor every day of every month of the year, yet we choose not to.  But that veneration that mankind naturally wants to give to exemplary men and women will go somewhere, and unfortunately it goes at times to people like the recently reposed Ozzy Osborne, whose heavy metal version of rock-n-roll was full of demonic allusions.  It is stunning how our media organizations like the Associated Press write in praise of him, as though his music career were a positive thing for the US and the rest of the world:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/07/garlington-plot-twists-in-the-geopolitical-culture-wars/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘A False Martyr and a True Martyr’

 

The project of Americanism is heretical.  It had its birth in the transference of the ability to confer salvation from a religious body, Christ’s Church, to a political body, the United States.  This spiritual disease was initially limited to the New England colonies, but it gradually spread elsewhere, eventually infecting all the colonies/States as a result of various events:  the Great Awakening, the French and Indian War, the War for Independence from Great Britain, the War between the States, WWII, etc.

Because the political body of the US has replaced the Church, we must not expect to find saints in the usual Christian sense of that word – holy men and women and children who are overflowing with God’s Grace.  Instead, the ‘saints’ of the US will be those who either exemplify the worldly, post-Christian, American ideals of liberty and success or who sacrificed in some way to uphold the salvific political system of the States (or both).

The most exalted of that pantheon of new-style gods and goddesses is President Abraham Lincoln, who is the martyr par excellence of Americanism.  The comparisons of Lincoln to Christ are not few in number:

“If you see a parallelism,” one reverend defended, “you cannot say the preacher makes it. If it exists, God made it.” (Another claimed that the assassination of Lincoln was “without parallel in all the annals of earthly history!” but quickly added, “excepting Him…who was the only begotten of God…and hence not to be brought into comparison with mere man. Excepting only the God-man our Savior, there has never been so sad a death!”

 

Despite disagreements over the degree to which explicit parallels between Lincoln and Christ could be made, both blacks and whites used the same biblical language to construct their image of Lincoln. Lincoln was often implicitly compared to Christ, quickly earning the title of “Martyr-President.” In many cases the two martyrdoms were simply juxtaposed and the audience was left to draw its own conclusions. “Jesus may, by wicked hands, be crucified, but His cause lives. That is a part of God’s plan. Abraham Lincoln has fallen a martyr…But whilst our hearts are bleeding, our hopes are not crushed.”

 

 . . . “In all future history his name will stand beside that of Washington. If he was the father of his country, under God, Abraham Lincoln was its savior” (Source).

Because Lincoln is Christ, America is also the Church:

But not all analogies were between Lincoln and Christ. The day after Lincoln’s death, a Philadelphia newspaper editorialized, “The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. So the blood of the noble martyr to the cause of freedom will be the seed to the great blessing of this nation.” Here the central analogy was not between Christ and Lincoln, but between Christ’s church and Lincoln’s nation (Ibid.).

And Lincoln isn’t merely analogous to or equal to Christ; he perfects the work of Christ:

Reverend Henry Bellows of New York City informed his congregation that “Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader . . . dying on the anniversary of our Lord’s great sacrifice, a mighty sacrifice himself for the sins of a whole people.” In Philadelphia, minister Phillips Brooks assured his flock that, “If there were one day on which one could rejoice to echo the martyrdom of Christ, it would be that on which the martyrdom was perfected” (Ibid.).

But this is not all.  Lincoln is also the Holy Prophet Moses, leading the peoples of the States to the Promised Land of political/economic utopia:

Many extended this characterization of Lincoln as Moses and applied it to the country as well. “We have passed the Red Sea and the wilderness, and have had unmistakable pledges that we shall occupy that land of Union, Liberty, and Peace which flows with milk and honey.” What the author envisioned was not the America which then existed, but rather the America promised by the potential of Lincoln’s leadership. Lincoln was “the Moses of our American Israel” who was supposedly “called of God to lead us throught the great and terrible wilderness of strife, to the promised land of unity, peace, and concord.”

 

Lincoln, however, was killed at the threshold of that new country as Moses was not allowed to pass into the promised land. He was “our Moses, who, under God, has lead us through the wilderness,” and who was struck down “in full view of the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey.” Lincoln had stood on the precipice. He had ensured the future of his people yet been unable share in them (Ibid.).

For those who have studied a little actual history, these claims that Lincoln ushered in some new era of ‘unity, peace, and concord’, that he ‘saved the union’, etc., are easily seen for what they are:  a pile of rubbish.  He is rather the Apollyon of the original political agreement between the States.  A recent Southern Agrarian writer, Tom Landess, explains:

This Union did not come about accidentally. Lincoln created it out of his own imagination and then invented a rhetoric to justify it, a grammar that has been used ever since that time. You must realize that before the War Between the States, virtually all Americans be­lieved that the nation was a loosely connected alliance of political states, each with a sovereign will of its own and a right to resist the power of central government, which, since the beginning of the Re­public, was regarded as the ultimate enemy.

 

“Keep it small, keep it diversified” was the view of federal author­ity held by the Founding Fathers; but Lincoln believed—and said in the Gettysburg Address—that the Founding Fathers were wrong, that they had imperfectly conceived the nation at the outset and that he, Abraham Lincoln, had a responsibility to refound it, to bring about a “new birth.” What he meant by this “new birth” was the emergence of a strong, centralized government which had the will and the power to impose a certain conformity on its membership.

 

If you want to know where the idea of Big Government came from in this country, it came from Lincoln.

 

In addition to a strong central government, the Founding Fathers also feared a chief executive who exercised absolute power. The tyrant was the ultimate villain in an increasingly diversified political order, and we must remember that, as a matter of strategy, the Dec­laration of Independence denounced the sins of George III rather than those of his duly elected Parliament despite the fact that the poor king was considerably less responsible than the people’s repre­sentatives. Indeed, it was only later, in 1861, that Abraham Lincoln finally became the imperial ruler that Thomas Jefferson denounced in the body of the Declaration (Source).

Another Southern writer adds,

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/a-false-martyr-and-a-true-martyr/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Entergy and Bayer: An Anti-MAHA Duo’

 

The following was related to me by an acquaintance in Northeast Louisiana quite recently:  Imagine arriving home at night and being greeted by the choking fumes of a mystery chemical agent.  Over the next few days, the source of the fumes is revealed:  Large swaths of the grass and other plants in this person’s yard begin to die.  Someone had sprayed a large amount of herbicide on this residential property without any prior warning.  That someone was Entergy, spraying, ostensibly, to keep vegetation from growing and threatening power lines.

Perhaps such spraying doesn’t sound unreasonable to some, but in this case there were no vines nor other plants that were even remotely jeopardizing the power lines.  It was a totally irresponsible action on Entergy’s part, not only because it wasted their workers’ time, energy, and resources, but because it exposed people, animals, plants, insects, etc., to a copious and unnecessary amount of toxic chemicals.

After learning of this situation, we did a little digging.  Others have complained about Entergy doing the same thing in their yards.  A report from Little Rock, Arkansas, from 2020 is nearly identical to what happened to the property owner in NE Louisiana in 2025:

‘Concern is sprouting in Little Rock’s Oak Forest community where neighbors say Entergy crews over-sprayed herbicide killing hundreds of trees and plants.

‘Neighbors brought their concern to the Arkansas Department of Agriculture’s Plant Board, which is now investigating.

‘State and local laws allow utility crews to spray herbicide along power lines to prevent trees and plants from growing into the equipment.  Utilities aren’t required to tell anyone in the area unless crews have to go on someone’s property.

‘Entergy says in this case the work was done in alleys so neighbors were not notified.

‘“All this spray was around me and I didn’t know,” said Gary Iverson, who lives in Oak Forrest.

‘Iverson says he never knew the herbicide was going to be sprayed and he believes it put his safety on the line.

‘“There’s no excuse for it,” Iverson said. “They come through here in two minutes and kill everything that takes years to grow.”

‘Entergy contractors sprayed the herbicide at the end of July, and within a few days, most alleys in the neighborhood were full of dead trees and brush.

‘Iverson says his backyard was in the path and his dogs were outside and at risk because he never got a warning.

‘“They were barking at the fence,” Iverson said. “At the time they were down here barking they were down here spraying. My dogs, they were covered in the spray and they had a waxy film on them.”

‘Iverson calls what happened in his neighborhood overkill.

‘“The power line is 30 feet up on the other side of the alley,” he said.

‘He pointed out multiple spots he says the herbicide reached that are too close for comfort.

‘“Right here my neighbor has a swimming pool where his kids come out to play. It’s right next to the back fence where all the trees have been sprayed,” he added’ (Susan El Khoury, ‘FOX16 Investigates: Community says Entergy crews over-sprayed herbicide, killing hundreds of trees and plants,’ fox16.com).

Mr Iverson was right to be concerned about the health of people and animals.  A fellow in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, reported in 2022 that one of his dogs died after Entergy sprayed their toxic brew on his property.

Entergy tries to green-wash their herbicide-spraying program, claiming with a straight face that it is actually better for the environment than mowing:

‘Through our low-volume, selective herbicide application program, we can responsibly target and clear invasive and tall-growing vegetation with precision. In turn, we mitigate disruption to native species and foster more hospitable habitats for local foliage and wildlife’ (Kaelen Delaune, ‘Entergy’s vegetation management program increases power reliability, improves wildlife habitats,’ entergy.com).

We’re not out to play Gotcha! with a corporation that we appreciate for providing Louisiana and other Southern States with electricity, but we have to call attention to this kind of egregious lying when we see it.  Spraying poisonous chemicals into the environment doesn’t ‘mitigate disruption to native species’ nor does it ‘foster more hospitable habitats for local foliage and wildlife.’  Far from it.

One mix that Entergy has been reported to use contains the following:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/07/garlington-entergy-and-bayer-an-anti-maha-duo/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!