The Shadow of Death

by Bud Macfarlane
July 6, 2022

As for you, you were dead in your transgression and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the way of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.
- Saint Paul, Ephesians 2:1-2

Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of a world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the Mystical Body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ.
- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light (1978)

The Dark Cloud

My heart has been heavy because I've taken a spiritual journey through the valley of the shadow of death. On purpose. I know many other faithful Catholics who sense what I call "the dark cloud," although you may not be able to express precisely what is bothering you. If you are experiencing the dark cloud, it's because it is real. Ignoring it does not make it go away.

I decided to confront it and understand it.

For months I have been enduring a weary sadness I just can't seem to shake despite my naturally peaceful temperament. A cascading series of horrible events in the lives of my friends, relatives, or their children, including suicide, addiction, barbaric surgery, broken relationships, a sudden cancer death, and severe depression have added to my consternation.

The Fruit of Fasting

I am not personally depressed, however. My dark spiritual mood is surely connected to the daily fasting and other forms of self-denial I have undertaken for this entire year. The teachings of the saints assure us that fasting provides spiritual acuity. That is, fasting provides the ability to see things as they are.

I undertook extensive fasting for two reasons:

1. To do my part to bring forth a divine intervention to win the supernatural battle of "powers and principalities" now taking place over the fate of America.

2. To offer reparation for the conversion of your fallen-away children, grandchildren, relatives, and friends.

We all have loved ones drifting through life unaware of the eternal damnation they are risking. We understand we need to pray, receive the sacraments, and offer reparation for their salvation. If the Holy Spirit inspires you to undertake any kind of reparation, take solace knowing that I am with you. Someone is always suffering with you for their sake.

Before we get to what is really happening in the world, I invite you to join the Mantle of Mary project, which we began in 2020 with Father John Anthony Boughton, Vicar General of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. It features this prayer book:

Order Daily Prayers Book Only $1

Get it. Pray it. Distribute it. Begin with your closest friends and your relatives who understand. Expand your efforts into your social groups and parishes.

The Shadow of Death

What did I find on my journey? The Shadow of Death, who is Satan himself, a dark entity directing the course of human events, hidden comfortably inside a global machine called the Internet.

What follows may appear to be hopeless in terms of human solutions, but God is always ahead of us in history, ordering all things toward his Divine Will in the fullness of time. He has solutions. His mother outlined them at Fatima. He is assigning and unleashing angels. He is assigning us our individual roles.

For Further Reading
I have been warning and encouraging my readers about aspects of these dangers over the past few years, notably in my Cracks in the Devil's Dam and Beware the Mesh email messages.

There is No Stopping Pornography

Let's begin with pornography. Unfettered access to the most degrading and violent filth will remain available and will be compulsively used by the vast majority of children in America. Huge swaths of boys and adult men (and increasingly, large percentages of women), including sincere Christians, are already addicted.

Pornography is the real pandemic; it is getting worse. It degrades all relationships. I ruins marriages. It deforms little children before latency and teenagers. It twists the interior life of everyone who uses it. Its dominance will continue indefinitely.

Pornography is a financial leviathan. Its production and dissemination consist of a worldwide human trafficking network working in close union with the mainstream financial and tech-industrial complex, including transnational commercial banks, corporations, and computer industries. Trillions of dollars have snaked through its supply chain. Twitter, for example, which officially welcomes children after age thirteen, allows pornography to be posted.

Pornography is the large-scale commodification and financialization of human sexual desire disordered by original sin.

Tragically, there is virtually no political will to regulate pornography beyond perfunctory attempts to restrict images of minors. No major American political party openly acknowledges the problem. Few conservative political thinkers seem concerned about it. Religious institutions and churches rarely acknowledge the universal scope of this scourge. Wide-ranging pornography access for minors and adults is never going away without a nearly impossible-to-imagine transformation of global civilization.

The Real Issue: Nothing Will Stop It

Paradoxically, if the desire to do so did exist, as a practical political matter, the nearly complete abolition of pornography would be quite simple. Criminalizing and ending the dissemination of pornographic content through Internet Service Providers is not a technologically complex undertaking. Enforcement would be proportionally inexpensive and straightforward. Black markets would arise (as they do for all vices), but access and usage would dramatically decrease.

The real issue is that nothing effective has ever stood in the way, or truly stands in the way now, of Internet pornography’s planet-wide destructive path through human societies. While every Christian knows pornography is utterly evil and should be banned, very few Christians perceive the all-encompassing danger of social media, the evil one’s ultimate medium of destruction.

Let me show you why.

Social Media Devours Humanity

When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these new technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people.
- Marshall McLuhan, 1967

Social media has proven to be fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, and it is becoming more addictive, more destructive, and more effective at both. It must be banished in a just society. The problem lies in how it works as a medium as well as the ideologies being carpet-bombed into the psyches of its users. Unlike pornography, the abolition of social media would be complex and nearly impossible to enforce.

As just one example of its effects, social media is the immediate cause of almost all the gender identity propaganda entering the souls of hundreds of millions of children all over the world, especially in western societies. Furthermore, gender confusion steals the possibility of becoming a parent from an increasing number of innocents through a combination of psychological abuse and “medical” intervention. Dramatically high suicide rates plague its victims.

Bear in mind that the users themselves, including children, produce most social media content. The ideas spread from person to person, in wave after wave of addicted neurological inputs piling up for hours each day, month after month, year after year, confusing and then radicalizing the vulnerable. And parents are the ones giving the phones to their children.

I know my next conclusion is difficult to grasp:

All social media interaction, even if the content is not evil, acclimates all users toward self-destruction.

Social Media Causes Mental Illness

Mental illness and suicide are rising dramatically by every statistical measure, especially in younger generations, and there are multiple, complex, and interrelated causes, yet the foundation is social media addiction. The correlation between the dramatic rise of mental illness and the advent of ubiquitous cellphone usage ten years ago (especially for children) is now well established.

The related pathologies initiate damaging consequences in the real world. For example, the anti-scientific imposition of masking for school children would have been impossible without the instant hysteria induced via social media. Now it’s too late. Masking has exacerbated the mental, academic, and developmental deterioration of tens of millions of children.

Multiply that example by hundreds of negative, false ideas seeping into and then manifesting in the “real world.” Elections are influenced. Psychological, informational, and economic warfare is implemented, leading inevitably to actual kinetic war. Virtually all forms of economic activity are impacted, as the entire world experienced during the lockdowns. Religious practice is suppressed. Employment is increasingly predicated upon conformity to social authoritarianism.

Your Misery is the Product

Modern media and especially social media (which frequently overlap) are literally designed to derive financial and political power from the fostering within its users the emotional states of:

-fear
-anger
-depression
-meaninglessness
-lack of joy
-confusion
-addiction

This is not an accident. Over a span approaching three decades, tech companies have invested trillions to weaponize a sophisticated understanding of dopamine brain receptor pathways, psychological control theory, and other physiological neural functions to foster addiction and neurosis.

In short, the media titans are drug dealers. They are addicting us on purpose.

It is common knowledge that tech companies derive their massive stock valuations from granularly-targeted advertising revenues as well as the sale of complex AI-refined personal information garnered from “free” services. This targeting and data packaging is vacuumed from the content, information, and deepest inner beliefs provided by the users. Many participants are even aware of the exchange. “You” are the product, as the cliché goes.

The more anxious, angry, and afraid you are, the more addicted you become. The more addicted you become, the more control they have over their product, which is you. Your misery is the foundation of their profits, political influence, and social agenda.

Social media eats you. And its appetite is ravenous.

If you doubt this, consider your own experience and the experience of everyone you know. The carefully designed addiction is real. No objective person can deny the negative psychological effects. You know it is extraordinarily difficult to break self-harming digital habits. It can seem impossible to even attempt to forgo "the drug". This tempts us to despair.

Most of its addicts are in denial—and do not try to scale back or quit their addictions.

This despair is a key characteristic of the dark cloud.

When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer’s moment . . . Just think: each person can instantly be tuned to a ‘new Christ’ and mistake him for the real Christ.
- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light (1978)

A Diabolical Medium

Globalization, which I call the Mesh, is a nearly instantaneous and interrelated logistical, informational, manufacturing, and financial mega-system. It consists of billions of people making countless trillions of decisions in real time. This mesh took thousands of years to develop, but began expanding dramatically during the industrial revolution. It did not fully manifest and interconnect worldwide before the Internet. Its “mind” is the insanely complex digital communication between persons, software, machines, and actual goods and and services in the real world.

What is not common knowledge is how the Mesh depends on metastasizing and monetizing human misery. Look again at that list. The system thrives by herding fearful, brainwashed humans into tribal “bubbles” encouraged to hate each other. It unleashes irrational animal drives. It sucks the human soul dry. It feeds off the present and future suffering of children.

It is the Beast.

It should be obvious that the medium is diabolical. But it isn’t obvious, is it? Satan benefits from remaining cloaked—the unseen ghost in the machine. The Internet is a mechanical, electrical husk containing an invisible spirit: the Shadow of Death. This is why otherwise sane people, including most devout Christians, despite having experienced the evil repercussions, dynamics, and effects, continue to use social media.

And the resulting human torment, multiplied by billions worldwide, is disintegrating the already weakened bonds holding together our families, friendships, parishes, communities, nations, and coalitions of nations.

Few of us have not witnessed the negative effects in the lives of family members and friends. Suicide, deep depression, hopelessness, lack of meaning, religious indifference, disconnection, sexual abnormality, inability to find spouses. . .

Planned for Centuries

Through the gradual acceptance of materialistic philosophical systems, especially in elite hierarchies that supersede national borders, this disintegration of human community has been carefully orchestrated by Lucifer himself for centuries.

Again, my friends, these are deeply discouraging developments. I accept these because they are our reality. I accept the resulting dark cloud that accompanies it so I can do my small part to participate in Our Lady’s triumph over these evils.

You and I are the Church Militant. In that context, I am seeking spiritual targets. Our prayers, reception of Holy Communion, and fasts, aimed at the weakest links in the hardened defenses of the diabolical system, help God unleash his angels (and us) to pound the evil spirits, systems, trends, and powers into oblivion.

I hope you now agree (or at least are open to accepting) that social media is not merely a somewhat harmful new medium that will sort itself out in the long run. Rather, it is the primary means Satan is using to annihilate what is left of Christian civilization. If this is true, social media must be cast out of all human societies.

What should you do?

Where You Begin

It’s not enough to intellectually accept the diabolical nature of social media—you must also change your personal habits. For instance, if you use Facebook to keep in touch with loved ones, I suggest you consider other means, such as making phone calls and texting or emailing your photos and updates. (I know some Christians who do not use cellphones, or, use cellphone that can only make phone calls and receive written texts.)

Invest in the means and lifestyle scheduling required to visit your loved ones in person.

Regardless, all use of the Internet, due to its adverse neuro-physiological effects, is fraught with danger. As with fire, electricity, opioid pain medication, or even vehicles and chain saws, every interaction with it must be approached with sober prudential caution.

You must remove social media from your personal life now, and otherwise limit it in your professional life to whatever degree is possible. If your interior reaction to this advice is fear, anxiety denial, and repulsion, this is an indication that you need to take a sober assessment of your own dependency. I suggest considering your use of social media the same way the addict thinks of alcohol or heroin.

Heroin is an addictive drug. Alcohol can be an addictive drug for a small percentage of the populace, and despite being heavily regulated, it still causes massive harm to countless families. Yet these substances are not a worldwide medium of communication. Social media is, and it prospers by leveraging unseen, powerful brain drugs.

Pioneer Digital Native

I do not use any social media, despite embracing the Internet in 1996 as a medium of evangelization mere months after its debut. I practically invented the Catholic email newsletter in 1996 (before most people had email). In fact, we launched the first and largest Catholic “chat rooms” in the world, a project we had to shut down because it became morally and spiritually toxic.

I remember my lack of surprise when MySpace, the precursor to Facebook which predated smart phones, became the biggest social media platform in a matter of months, followed by its rapid descent into a pedophelic hunting ground. Subsequent platforms learned from MySpace to better hide their demonic character.

There are few living Catholics who have spent the many thousands of hours I have, over the span of decades, immersed in the complex, ever-evolving medium of the Internet. I applied myself to understanding and mastering it. With the help of many talented coworkers, I have conceived, designed, composed, and edited thousands of webpages.

I have always guided my apostolate to provide “tools for evangelization” that are used in the real world. And I do acknowledge the good that online video evangelists such as Father Mike Schmitz, for instance, do to influence souls. And yet . . .

I do not regret my private and professional decision to spurn social media as fundamentally evil. I studiously avoid drawing others into it because I know I will have to answer to God for the damage to souls my decisions may cause, even indirectly.

Mockery of Christ’s Mystical Body

Even if you remove the dark cloud of social media from your own life, it will continue to grow unabated in the lives of your loved ones and in the general culture. It will continue to compromise Christian leaders, entrepreneurs, and organizations which naïvely embrace it while blithely ignoring its well-established ontological contradictions.

The latest iterations, including the now-dominant TicTok (owned by the Chinese Communist Party) are perfecting the use of addiction to financialize human suffering. Rapidly-growing, completely immersive “virtual realities” will be putridly more addictive.

Our Lord advised us to judge the tree by its fruit. After a quarter of a century, what is the fruit of social media? Hundreds of millions of confused, vulnerable, and brainwashed children planet-wide. A billion or more pornography addicts. Corruption of our governmental, election, and judicial systems. Relentless authoritarian propaganda and censorship. Mass psychosis. The denial of Truth itself.

Death.

Death of the soul. Death of families. Death of the cultures of love we once knew.

Open your eyes. The dark cloud you feel is real. Emanating from it is the hum of a subliminal, atonal cacophonic symphony of anti-life. It is literally in your hand. It follows you everywhere. It wants to control you. It wants to drive you insane. It wants you to despair.

It has burrowed into the hearts and minds of the people you love the most, dragging away victim after victim.

And it is not going away. It is expanding. It is a dragon, its name is Legion, and it must be confronted. Saint Michael’s sword must be thrust deep into its soft, scaly underbelly until it is cast into the abyss.

At this juncture, although there are practical personal steps and political actions that we are all obliged to enthusiastically take as citizens, and which must never be abandoned, our ultimate hope is in the power of God. His grace. His sacraments. His precious blood. His direct intervention.

You must fight. Your weapons are fasting and prayer. Your personal willingness to suffer, die, and rise with Christ is the hope for the entire world.

The New Tower of Babel

What has been outlined above is the result of thousands of years of technological and ideological development, fueled by generations of human sin (including our own sin). By influencing those who wittingly or unwittingly serve him, Satan has constructed a Mesh which envelops our planet. This possessed machine is the evil one’s caustic reaction to the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Jesus.

Short of worldwide economic collapse, widespread nuclear war, or a massive natural disaster (imagine a huge comet striking the Atlantic Ocean and destroying the coasts of Europe, America, and eastern Africa), the Mesh will not be dismantled by the human powers that be, because the Mesh is the powers that be.

The Mesh speaks a single language, consisting of two digital words, zero and one. It is a modern Tower of Babel, worldwide this time around. When the Almighty saw the original tower, He asserted, "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Genesis 6:11)

This is what our global elites believe: nothing they plan to do is impossible.

As with the original tower, God will destroy it. His Mystical Body, established by Jesus, is the divine worldwide reality against which the new Tower is rebelling. The Mystical Body is everywhere any baptized Christian is. It includes us, the angels, the countless souls in heaven, and it is indefectible in its divine character.

The modern tower will be destroyed and scattered, but only by the Hand of God assisted by those of us who participate in His divine plan.

So, brothers and sisters, fast with me and with so many others. The pope and the bishops of the world consecrated Russia to Immaculate Mary, a harbinger of the triumph of the Immaculate Mary, as she promised at Fatima. In the meantime, our fasts and prayers chisel away at the mortar between the tower’s foundation stones.

Pray with me, and with so many others, every day. Launch salvo after salvo of exorcism prayers into the dragon!

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The Power of the Oldest Generation

Some demons can only be driven out by prayer and fasting. This is how Jesus did it. If you are already praying, then good: you are a seasoned soldier of Our Lady's cohort. Join us.

For once, your age doesn't matter. To the contrary, the older the better! If you are between seventy and one-hundred years old, I know you can pray, offer up your existing sufferings, and fast (or otherwise deny yourself).

I've always felt a kinship with you. You remain the greatest Catholic generation, survivors of depressions, the sexual revolution, cultural implosion, heartbreak, and wars. You have always believed and lived what I have always believed and lived.

You are the most powerful human cohort in America. Pick up your cross, one more time, and climb Calvary with the rest of us. Our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren’s futures require your sacrifice.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
G.K. Chesteron

For More Research

I believe there are several voices crying out in the wilderness who understand that civilization itself is at stake. They know how badly the good guys are losing. I leave it to them and others to “make the case” you have already accepted deep in your bones.

One is Rod Dreher at the American Conservative. He gets it and posts daily. Pray for him; he has a good heart and suffers much. I love him and pray for him, although I have never met him.

Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire articulates how social media, pornography, and sexual confusion is destroying our children.

Matt Walsh Podcast

Matt Walsh on Dreher's Podcast

Another fearless voice is Timothy Gordon. And I could supply a dozen more trustworthy analysts from financial and political realms.

My talent is to paint in broad strokes. These other, more talented thinkers, provide more depth and detail.

Spiritually, I myself am inspired by my brilliant father, Bud Sr., who just turned 89. He has fasted and prayed for decades. I follow his example and warmly invite others to join me, and trust you to set an example and invite others to join us.

So begin. Pray. Fast. Do both badly if you have to.

Fight.

Do not lose your nerve.

Fight, brother. Fight, sister.

Christ joins us into one body. Billions of souls are at stake. Our Lady’s promised triumph is assured. We fight. God wins.

So fight.

We also boast in our afflictions, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance proven character, and proven character hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Romans 5:1-6

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Bud Macfarlane, founder of CatholiCity.com and the Mary Foundation, is the author of three bestselling Catholic novels, available free of charge from Saint Jude Media. You can comment on his articles here.