The Week the Music Died

Posted on 2025-09-11
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Yesterday morning I saw the full video of Iryna Zarutska’s murder on the Charlotte train for the first time. Though not nearly as gruesome as I feared, it was one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever seen. The vicious man stabbed her in the neck from behind three or  four times in a raw frenzy. At first, she looks up in (literally) wounded bewilderment wondering what has happened. At this point she may have thought he had just hit her. Then she sees spots of blood on her slacks and realizes she is badly hurt. You can almost see the magnitude of the pain wave over her. She lifts her hands to her face in forlorn desolation, deeply despairing. Then she starts fading and tilts, almost gently, into her seat, from where she falls to the floor and her death.

I thought very hard about linking to the full video here, for I think we need to begin to look with cold clarity at what we have wrought, instead of forever looking away. But I can’t bring myself to do it just yet.

I was in a strategic discussion with a key colleague when word came that Charlie Kirk had been shot in Utah. We finished talking and I saw the distant video of the assassination. But then I saw a close-up video of it. After Kirk was hit, a geyser of blood gushed forth from the left side of his neck. I could not see how he could survive that, but I prayed that he might. It was not to be.

I have said that the power of evil is broken…and so it is. I think some have interpreted that to mean that the fight is over. Truth is, it has just begun. When evil’s power is broken it almost never slinks away quietly. It shrieks, lashes out, hisses, and fights until it is decimated, desperate to take all to perdition with it that it can. It will not be defeated until we take it seriously.

I think of the clouding over of men’s minds I spoke of in my last piece this week. It is a mystery when Scripture says that God “hardens” some men’s hearts. If God wills all men to salvation, why would He harden the hearts of some at particular times in salvation history? I don’t think God hardens the hearts of any whose hearts are not already hard – and the hardening He does adds a blindness so they cannot see the actual consequences of their own demonic fury. Though that would explain the hardening, it obviously causes things to get worse, in the short term, for the rest of us. But when this sort of madness comes over a culture, the more intense it gets the quicker it burns out, so it is a mercy of sorts – but a right hard one. The intentional clouding over of men’s minds is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. I see reporters on the left that I knew and respected 20 and 30 years ago – and almost all have succumbed to the madness. Same thing with some Democrat officials I used to sometimes collaborate with. There is a blindness and a rage there that was once uncharacteristic and I would never have anticipated..

I think of when I was a boy of 12 and the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, just 50 miles south of my far north suburban home. There was out of control rioting at that convention that did not start dying out until the late Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered his police to shoot to wound looters and shoot to kill arsonists. He was a Democrat – but those were in the days when Democrats and Republicans often offered serious, responsible men. Thirty-six people (that we know of) were murdered during the “mostly peaceful protests” of the “summer of love” in 2020. Was there any official, Democrat, Republican, or Independent willing to give such an order then to stop the mayhem? No. We are no longer a serious people.

I have been saying for well over a decade that we have entered Armageddon. It is NOT the same thing as the Apocalypse, which is the actual end. Armageddon is the final, decisive battle between good and evil which precedes the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart and the opening of the great era of peace. It is critically important for many reasons – but ultimately because it is literally our last chance. Once the era of peace begins, the next mass falling away from the faith will herald the Apocalypse.

I have told you several times of my encounter in July of 2000, when my angel, agitated with me, told me animatedly that, “You must tell them true and they must choose or perish.” I think this week, we have crossed into the final time of mercy for choosing. Leftist activists, media, and office holders have shown nakedly who they are. It has done for them what the invasion of Poland did for Adolf Hitler: revealed them for the demonically evil lunatics they are and removed all excuses for ordinary, honest people to have any truck with them – other then to fight, defeat, and then banish them from civil society altogether. Leftist activists have been cheering and making jokes about Kirk’s murder. I can’t think of a single time conservatives did something as disgusting as that. Leftist media has busied itself making excuses for the murderers – and, incredibly, intimating that either Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk, himself, is responsible for his murder. If you believe the media about a single thing after this display, you are probably irremediably stupid and vicious. Democratic officials who, just a couple of weeks ago, were cursing and condemning people for praying after the transgender murdered schoolchildren at a Mass in Minnesota, are now piously offering their “thoughts and prayers” for Kirk and his family. The skinsuit of piety is fooling no one any more. We heard what you really think of prayer just a few weeks ago. We all know that the neighborhood headquarters for vicious hate is probably at the house that has the “Hate has no home here” yard sign. I guess a headquarters is not the same as a home.

I mentioned in my last piece that being a serious student of history gives little comfort. All the great and terrible “isms” since the French Revolution have piously pretended to be for the people and to be of the highest moral virtue to justify their ongoing murderous rage at being contradicted. The French revolutionaries loved to opine about the rights of man and universal brotherhood as they gleefully sent men, women, and children – yes, children – to be murdered at the guillotine. Lenin was glad to execute anyone who contradicted him, leading to Stalin’s cheerful assurance that you had to break some eggs to make an omelette. Hitler spent a decade before the holocaust explaining why the Jews were responsible for every ill Germany suffered – and self-righteously proclaimed everything he did was for the noble, German people. In Rwanda, the Hutus spent years smearing and sliming the Tutsis before breaking out in genocidal rage, hacking Tutsi neighbors to death. In America, leftists have been smearing conservatives as fascists, racists, and various types of “phobes” for almost two generations. I always knew they were stoking their rage to actually start killing those who did not submit to them. Combine angry attitude, little actual knowledge, and preening self-righteousness and this is always the end game. In New York City, self-righteous ignorant orcs are about to elect an open socialist as mayor. I give it little more than a year before the rest of the state and its neighbors start begging Trump to build a wall around the new Gotham City.

At this point, anyone who does not realize we are fighting demonic powers and principalities just isn’t paying attention at all. This week, God has allowed the issue to be forced. If we take the lesson, the establishment media that has been terminally ill for so long, will finally die, collapsing in on itself. The Democratic Party, having been subject to a hostile takeover by demonic forces, will die. No midterm hope for you boys. In time, an honest party for responsible liberals will rise to take its place. Activists who engage in fiery, but “mostly peaceful” murderous protests will hear responsible officials start to give orders to shoot active offenders.

Above all, I will tolerate no more lectures in crackpot theology from sinister atheists telling me what I must do to be a “good Christian.” I will bear no lectures on tolerance from people who eagerly offer to punch me in the face. Nor should you. Recognize calls for both sides to cool down as the cynical dodge it is by leftists seeking to escape accountability for their war on God and freedom.

I just pray that our hierarchy and Priests understand where we are, what time it is, and find both their chest and their spines.

John Adams said, just after the Constitutional Convention, that, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We are not the people we should be. Pray that God helps us become that people. With His help, do your part.  If we do, we will truly be great again, both in word and in deed.

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim

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The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)

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