Orthodox Reflections

By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland.  His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.

From the Right, the Trump regime is contributing to the construction of the gulag by criminalizing wrongthink about the Jews.  As Michael Hoffman points out in a recent essay, the communists in Russia did precisely the same thing shortly after they took power (bolding not added):

Donald Trump is the last person most Americans would consider to be a Communist. However, consider these facts from history:

The first Soviet Bolshevik secret police bureau was the Cheka (Чрезвычайная комиссия —”Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution”). It was established December 20, after the October Revolution of 1917. It was the precursor to Soviet secret police agencies such as the GPU, NKVD, and KGB.

One of the first orders imposed by the Bolsheviks for enforcement by Cheka was a decree against anti-Semitism. On July 27, 1918, the Soviet dictatorship, under Vladimir Lenin, issued a directive making anti-Semitism a criminal offense.

Many tens of thousands of Russians were arrested and imprisoned in the Gulag for this thought crime, including hundreds of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church.

As we speak, the US FedGov’s Antisemitism Task Force is fanning out across the States to intimidate anyone who would dare speak out against the atrocities being committed by Netanyahu & Co in Old Israel.  David DeCamp reporting:

The US Department of Justice said Thursday that its recently created “Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism” will be heading to four US cities as part of the Trump administration’s broad crackdown on college protests critical of Israel.

The DOJ said the task force, led by attorney Leo Terrell, will be visiting the leadership of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles to discuss “their responses to incidents of antisemitism at schools and on college campuses in their cities over the last two years.”

Never you mind that there were actual Jews who participated in the protests in question:

While the pro-Palestine protests that swept college campuses have been labeled “antisemitic,” many Jewish students and organizations have participated.

Already, one legal US resident has been jailed by the Trump regime for the ‘crime’ of speaking out against the Israeli war in Gaza:

Civil liberties groups have sounded the alarm about the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protests, including the effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder arrested by ICE over the weekend for his role in protests at Columbia. Khalil has not been accused of a crime, and the administration is trying to deport him by claiming he’s been involved in activities “contrary to US foreign policy.”

Khalil has been accused of being “pro-Hamas,” a label that the administration hasn’t defined and appears to apply to all critics of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The White House alleged Khalil was involved in distributing “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers,” but hasn’t offered evidence for the claim.

The threats coming from the Trump DOJ are chilling:

The administration does not just want to target foreigners, as Terrel has said he wants to put “Hamas supporters” in jail and that federal hate crime indictments would be coming soon. “You see all these disorderly demonstrations, supporting Hamas and trying to intimidate Jews? We are going to put these people in jail — not for 24 hours, but for years,” he told Israeli media last month.

To echo the thinking of others out there, it is ironic that the Right, which has railed for years about the injustice of so-called ‘hate crimes’ charges, is now engaging in the same tactic vis-à-vis their amorphous definition of ‘antisemitism’.

Such is the pure and righteous MAGA Right.

But the Leftists are no better.  From Raw Egg Nationalist:

. . . I was reporting on YouTuber “Vaush”—real name Anthony Kochinski—and some things he’s been saying about Donald Trump and his supporters, specifically about what needs to be done to them if America is to be saved and the “artifice”—“edifice”?—of democracy is to be maintained.

I can’t say I keep up with Vaush. I see posts and clips of him on Twitter, always making an arse of himself, and sometimes when I venture onto 4Chan, which I do less and less regularly these days now I don’t live in my mother’s basement.

Vaush calls himself a “libertarian socialist.” He’s also a self-confessed “pansexual.” He’s heavily overweight and has a beard to disguise his lack of chin. He famously defended the consumption of child porn with the absurd non sequitur that “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” and also revealed live on stream a folder stuffed to the brim with “loli porn.” That’s pornographic drawings of children if you don’t know—and you really shouldn’t. It’s hard to take Vaush seriously, at least under normal circumstances.

But circumstances are changing, and even the rantings of a fat dork who looks at pornographic drawings of children now have the potential to be something quite serious indeed.

In a recent video, Vaush issued a call to arms against the Trump administration and against ordinary Trump supporters. He describes MAGA voters as a “plague to this country” and suggests that life imprisonment would be “generous” for members of the Trump admin.

What he really wanted to say was that they should be put to death, and he comes within a hair’s breadth of saying that, by invoking, with a very knowing wink, the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II.

Vaush says there must be a process of “de-MAGA-fication” and that this must involve purges at every level of society. It won’t just be members of the Trump administration or Republican politicians who are barred from holding office ever again: Johnny MAGAhat must be punished too.

We’re not told exactly how poor Johnny must suffer for his despicable choice at the ballot box, but we can guess. The language is the familiar language of extermination we hear whenever communists speak about their opponents. MAGA voters, says Vaush, are “a plague to this country,” “a disease,” “criminals.” Voting for Donald Trump makes you “evil.”

Like I said, Vaush is a sad guy, the sort of person who would be incapable of carrying out real violence himself, even if his life depended on it. But he has 500,000 subscribers on Youtube, more than 400 million views, and the things he’s saying are being said by plenty of other people besides him, including other streamers like Hasan Piker, retarded celebrities like Bill Burr, and also the leaders of protest groups and genuine murderous revolutionaries. The atmosphere is febrile. There’s a real chance of widespread left-wing violence in the coming months and years.

The recent Tesla protests—the vandalism and attacks on Tesla showrooms and Tesla cars wherever they’re found—are a clear sign of things to come, and so is the recent attempt on the life of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent by a transgender man called Ryan Michael English. . . .

The Vice President has been surrounded twice by angry Ukraine protesters. The first time, on a family skiing holiday in Vermont, wasn’t so bad, but the second time he ended up nose to nose with the protesters while exiting a convenience store near his home. He had his three-year-old child with him and handled the situation with remarkable poise, but he should never have been in that situation in the first place. Ukraine was the reason Ryan Routh wanted to assassinate the President, and if somebody with similar intentions had been able to get as close to the Vice President as those protesters got, I dread to think what might have happened.

Then yesterday, the President himself was whacked in the face with a microphone by a reporter. It doesn’t seem like much—a mishap, maybe—but remember how King Jong Un had his brother killed. The assassin carried a cloth dosed with the nerve agent VX and simply brushed it across his face as she passed him at a Malaysian airport. A mere waft—that was enough to kill. Don’t think it couldn’t happen.

From whatever angle one looks at it, the future looks dire for the peoples of the States.  Violent, oppressive, Revolutionary fervor is roiling both the pro-Zionist Right and the anti-MAGA Left.  Folks will soon be clamoring for an arbiter that is immune from these fallen human passions.  Who will it be?  In the long-run:  Antichrist.  In the short-run:  AI.  New York Times’s Kevin Roose states (both quotes that follow are from this essay):

I believe that over the past several years, A.I. systems have started surpassing humans in a number of domains — math, coding and medical diagnosis, just to name a few — and that they’re getting better every day.

I believe that very soon — probably in 2026 or 2027, but possibly as soon as this year — one or more A.I. companies will claim they’ve created an artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is usually defined as something like “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.”

I believe that when A.G.I. is announced, there will be debates over definitions and arguments about whether or not it counts as “real” A.G.I., but that these mostly won’t matter, because the broader point — that we are losing our monopoly on human-level intelligence, and transitioning to a world with very powerful A.I. systems in it — will be true.

Rod Dreher follows this with pertinent thoughts of his own:

Let me simply point out a claim I advance in Living In Wonder: that people will come to treat AI as a god. Excerpt:

It is clear that AI will be a machine that goes beyond the idol and becomes a portal of communication with what many people will treat as divinity. Neil McArthur, director of the University of Manitoba Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, foresees the arrival of AI religions. He says that generative AI (AI that can create new information) possesses qualities associated with divine beings:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.
               2.  It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.
               3. It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.
               4. It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.
               5. It is immortal.”

AI will be able to answer complex moral and philosophical questions. Many people will cease to read on the assumption that wisdom is nothing more than the accumulation of information and that asking AI is the most efficient, friction-free way to solve problems. The ways of thinking that established religious and philosophical traditions have taught us will disappear. Indeed, the creation and adoption of AI technology could happen only in a culture that had been cleared of any serious obstacle to its embrace.

If AI has been personally paired to individuals as “helpers” … the bespoke AI entities will know the hearts and minds of its supposed masters with superhuman levels of intimacy. Who, then, will be the true master?

This is an important point to get right: it does not matter if AI (AGI) is a mere machine; if it behaves with godlike powers, people will treat it as a god.

As we said, with both the Left and the Right in the US unable to act sanely and peacefully, it is likely that at some point a large enough part of the population will accept arbitration by a very rational-looking, very detached, very unemotional AI/AGI to sort things out and bring some semblance of order back to the States (a development predicted by Isaac Asimov in his short story ‘Franchise,’ written in 1955, available in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Volume 1, New York, Doubleday, 1990).  This will be the prelude to even more anti-human (i.e., pro-Satanic) atrocities in the future, as the demonically controlled ‘digital Ouija board’ gleefully orders the extermination of as many human beings as possible.  We are already getting a foretaste of this with AI’s suggestions that people commit suicide, which have sadly been acted upon.  May God have mercy on their souls.

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As if this were not enough, the latest statement of one of MAGA’s leaders, Elon Musk, gives us yet another reason to be concerned about the promotion of and advances with AI tech, Dr. Joseph Farrell writing:

Musk is in an interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson, and then comments about his new super-computer data processing center in Memphis… the one in Tennessee, not Egypt . . .

 . . . the center i[s] to be connected to Twitter/X’s artificial intelligence program, Grok.

Needless to say I have some high octane, off-the-end-of-the-twig speculation about all of this, beginning with Musk’s comment to Jordan Peterson that perhaps this center is “where our new God will come from,” this, after having mentioned that the choice of the town had something to do with the capital of ancient Egypt. All of this coming from the man who, a few years ago, was raising warnings about artificial intelligence programs perhaps opening gateways, or transducing, “something” – some form of life very different than our own, and something very diabolical. And here we are again, only now the “something” might turn out to be “our new God.” This from someone who wants to put his “neuralink” into people’s brains. As usual, we’re being told about all the wonderful benefits this might have: the blind might see, the deaf might hear, the paralyzed might walk. Miracles of healing! Behold your new God. Or perhaps, just an old one, saying “behold, I can give you all the kingdoms of the earth…” But the price – worshipping that new god – was just too much to pay. But the dangers, apparently, were not enough to dissuade Mr. Musk: like all scientismists and technocrats, he’s got to do it lest someone else get a competitive edge. Better the devil be on our side, than someone else’s.

Mr. Musk is, in short, a transhumanist, a technocrat, who cannot distinguish between technological mimicry, and the real thing. Indeed, for him, there probably is no “real thing,” only the process of mimicry, an “anti-Christ” that is not so much anti as in the sense of against, but rather, anti in its other sense as “in the place of”… as a substitute for.

There is a way out of this hellscape we have gotten lost in.  One of Mr. Roose’s statements shows it:  ‘Indeed, the creation and adoption of AI technology could happen only in a culture that had been cleared of any serious obstacle to its embrace.’

The post-Schism West is precisely the force that ‘cleared’ much of the world (the US included) ‘of any serious obstacle to its embrace,’ for it is the Roman Catholic/Protestant/Enlightenment West that destroyed the notion of an actual, experiential union with the Holy Trinity.  Metropolitan Sebastianos of Atlanta writes:

St. Gregory Palamas is known for his defense of Hesychasm, a monastic practice of still, unceasing prayer which can allow a person to encounter the Uncreated Light of God: the same light that Moses witnessed in the Burning Bush, and the light the Disciples saw during our Lord’s Transfiguration. A priest named Barlaam incorrectly saw Hesychasm as a heresy, believing it spoke of a visible and invisible God. However, St. Gregory meant that while man could never truly experience God’s essence, hesychasts could experience God’s energies, and therefore, have true spiritual knowledge of God. It may seem that these distinctions are complex for the average Orthodox Christian living in the world, but simply, the legacy of St. Gregory Palamas shows us how God’s Grace comes only to those who seek it, through careful prayer and fasting.

Barlaam argued against the mystical Hesychasm, in favor of a more “rational” understanding of God’s energies, particularly by advocating the study of philosophy. The tragedy of Barlaam, is how he denied that anyone could experience God directly, suggesting that in the end, God is unknowable. To make such a claim, not only denies the reality that the Holy Spirit made wise Apostles out of fishermen, but it also does a great disservice even to our more recent ancestors: those Hellenes who lived, first under slavery, and then, through several wars; educated in secret, and sometimes having very little schooling. Many of our grandparents and great grandparents were not educated in earthly wisdom, but they held fast to what they knew about God, and it is thanks to their simple faith in Christ and His Church that we are Orthodox here in the United States of America.

In the post-Schism West, God is reduced to the level of an idea conceivable to the rational mind, the discursive reason, something that we think about but can never know first-hand, personally, while living in this world.  Religion has therefore become a Scholastic endeavor, a mental exercise, and, as the silent, uncommunicating God has been banished to the unknown heavens, the solutions to all problems must now also come from the rational human mind, rather than from the intervention of God either directly or indirectly, through prayer, the Holy Eucharist, holy angels, prophets, saints, monks, etc.

And if the rational human mind is viewed as such a wonderful and mighty problem-solver, how much more the hyper-rational mind of AI/AGI?

The Orthodox Church is the ladder out of this terrifying nightmare.  Only in the Orthodox Church can the discursive reason be put back in its proper place, subordinate to the nous, the eye of the heart, the knowing faculty par excellence.  Only in the Orthodox Church can man find God again, uniting with Him precisely in the nous, the God Who does not remain hidden in His unknowable essence, but Who in His limitless kindness makes Himself known to us in the unceasing outflow of His energies, in which mankind can participate, with which we may be united in reality (not merely metaphorically).  And via the healing that comes from that union, even the ‘wall of separation’ (Ephesians 2:14) between Right and Left in the States can be overcome and demolished.

The choice, as always, for the Yankees, for Dixie, for the Pacific Coast, and for all the rest, is authentic life in the Orthodox Church or the artificial imitation of life outside of her.  The difference with previous generations, however, is that in our age the consequences for choosing the latter are growing ever more destructive.