In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I described the way profoundly corrupt institutions can learn to evade the consequences of the bad ideas and destructive policies they impose on the public — and even turn their “Chernobyl” events into opportunities to grab still more power and punish their critics. Not all of this is explicable by mere Original Sin: We see here, rather, the direct operation of principalities and powers, which is why St. Paul, almost 2,000 years ago, saw fit to warn us who we were fighting against.

It was the Enemy that taught our rulers to lie us into the Iraq War and destroy the Christian communities there, making room for ISIS. The Enemy next goaded our masters to craft deadly viruses in insecure labs in China (to evade American law). Then that same Enemy guided global elites when they made the insane decision to lock us and our kids at home, dump COVID patients in nursing homes, shutter our churches but not our casinos, force an untested, abortion-derived vaccine into our bodies, and open our 2020 election to massive vote fraud via mail-in and harvested ballots justified by the “pandemic.”

The Enemy told compromised spiritual leaders (Catholic and evangelical) to claim that Christians must take that dubious, immoral potion if they “loved their neighbor.” Faithful servants, they obeyed. They already have their reward.

Before keeping my promise to offer hopeful, useful ideas for fighting back in Part 4, there’s one more dark facet of the “antifragility of evil” we must look at. And we must face it squarely, without plunging into hysteria, undue paranoia, or despair.

Globalism Threatens to Make Our Masters Untouchable

For all of human history, however corrupt and powerful institutions might be, their power was localized. They faced firm borders and foreign enemies. However self-serving and unjust a given political or religious system was, it couldn’t hunt down all its critics. They could find support or at least refuge in foreign countries. They usually even were hobbled by internal opposition.

But the COVID panic showed us that these reassuring limits now barely exist. Only one country, Sweden, refused to imprison its citizens. The World Health Organization, backed by Western governments, successfully pressured virtually all social media to silence dissenters. The U.S. government bribed or threatened pharmacy chains to refuse to fill doctors’ prescriptions for effective COVID treatments in order to legally justify imposing an experimental vaccine. Eminent doctors (including my own cardiologist, Dr. Peter McCullough) and epidemiologists saw their credentials revoked and practices shuttered. Steve Bannon is still in prison for a fake procedural crime.

The Vatican and virtually all Protestant churches (with a few honorable exceptions) marched in lockstep with the world, the flesh, and the devil. As The Stream has reported before, Pope Francis is all-in for a global autocracy, in which he presumably hopes to serve as chaplain to a one-world religion in which Christ is just one of the gods in the pantheon.

I warned back in 2009, under a far better pope (Benedict XVI), of the dangers of baptizing globalism that seeks a single world state with monopoly powers:

Perhaps I am too Augustinian, but I cannot help deeply suspecting that any such state would by its very nature begin or (more likely) end as a tyranny. The very monopoly of its power, and the fact that there was not one square inch of the earth from which anyone could escape its clutches, would remove any check or balance from its bureaucrats. Its tax codes would be uniform, with no threat of “competition,” so they could rise astronomically high. Its laws could grow ever more draconian, since there is nowhere its citizens could flee. Its ideology, backed by all the coercive power of the ruling class of the planet, would – in the hands of the fallen men who administered it – quickly become a global religion.

If such a State (as I think it inevitable) decided to persecute the Church, there would be no exile we could seek – no Douai from which to send out Jesuits, no refuge from martyrdom. Indeed, as prophetic writers from Vladimir Soloviev to Robert Hugh Benson have warned, the man who steps forward as the architect of a world state is less likely to prove the humble servant of the truths taught by the Church than he is to be the Antichrist.

Crazy But True

The COVID panic served as a global dry run for the total control of information, the destruction of medical privacy, the subjugation of the churches, and the corruption of our elections, all done to us by a coordinated global elite, under threat from death by the virus our own government had colluded with Communist China to make.

This all sounds so crazy that I’m almost embarrassed recounting it. But these are just cold, hard facts.

We see before us an absolutely unprecedented consolidation of planetary power. The same elites that denied us the ivermectin prescribed by our doctors, who closed our churches, now demand open borders for military-age Muslim men all through Europe. And legally imposed transgender ideology. And legal abortion everywhere.

The “democratic West” we thought had emerged from the end of the Cold War turned out to be a Brave New World, with more than a touch of the thuggishness of Orwell’s 1984. The American Deep State has openly allied with the globalist, leftist Democratic Party, with the quiet support of many rich, influential Republicans. “Lone gunmen” no more plausible than Lee Harvey Oswald keep taking shots at Donald Trump, and our media treat these assassination attempts as less serious than the crass claims of a reporter who sexually stalked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Governments from the EU to Brazil to our own Federal Trade Commission coordinate attacks on Elon Musk simply because he permits free, legal, nonviolent and constitutionally protected speech on his platform, X. Spooks in Britain colluded with Obama appointees at the FBI to promote the Russia Collusion hoax. The president of our battered proxy Ukraine gets flown around at taxpayer expense to campaign for Kamala Harris, signing artillery shells he will soon fire at Russia, risking nuclear war to punish the one world power which (for all its flaws) is not complicit in the globalist program.

At this point we’re tempted to quote Theoden, who cried when he faced the vast, inhuman armies of Saruman: “What can men do against such reckless hate?”

In Part 4 I will search for answers.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.