Welcome To America’s Make-Believe World

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

We used to pick up a good novel or see a new movie to enter the world of make-believe. Fantasy and fiction were categories of literature and art, enjoyed for what they were — a pleasant and often challenging indulgence of the imagination.
Not anymore.
During the lockdowns, Americans were forced to endure a lot of make-believe. Millions of kids went to make-believe schools, where make-believe teachers refused to teach, cashing their checks and abandoning their students.
We were forced into make-believe safety, as genuine community life and social cohesion collapsed while we quietly quarantined to make-believe protect others, except for the very real victims of the abortion mills that were deemed “essential” and open for killing 24/7.
While docile make-believe shepherds obeyed Caesar, locked-out real Catholics went to make-believe Mass, so deceived by the farce that some good souls even felt compelled to go to Confession if they hadn’t finished watching the video last Sunday.
Millions of government make-believe workers stayed at home, getting paid real tax money for having no work to do, while millions of real workers lost their real jobs and their real paychecks to please pestiferous politicians and their imperious make-believe “experts.”
But now we’re finally real. We’re finally free — right? Maybe not.

Who Threw Away The Key?

America has emerged from the lockdowns, but we’re still suffering from a lockdown mentality. What we once recognized as make-believe — “virtual reality” — has become permanent.
We now live in a world that is entirely make-believe.
We have a make-believe president who can’t remember his wife’s name, goes to war to save his job, and brings the country to its knees.
Yet like O’Brien in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth — a torture chamber — he insists that 2+2=5 and brags that he’s the Memory Care Unit on the second floor of the White House.
We have a make-believe economy that has reduced millions to subsistence-level survival. We have make-believe classrooms that union goons have converted into ideological reeducation camps.
“Reading, writing, and arithmetic” have given way to the silent, secret goal of Horace Mann, founding father of America’s government schools: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education,” he said, “are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
Yes, our children are their hostages, and their cause is sacred indeed. They worship their false gods as they defy the true one. Mann’s Masonic California co-conspirator, John Swett, was blunt: “Children belong to the state, not the parents,” he insisted in the 1860s.
Swett is hailed as the founder of California’s largest school union, which to this day names its most prestigious prize after him.
Of course, the make-believe schools impart a make-believe education where English is all about your pronouns, science is all about global warming and gender, and history is all about racism.
And don’t forget hatred. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Union’s first minister of education, taught that all religions — of which Christianity was the most dangerous — must be wiped off the face of the Earth. Religion teaches love and mercy, Lunacharsky explained, whereas Communism is based on hate, the necessary preamble to conquest.
And of course, he added, that requires that we kill God as well.

Will Reality Please Stand Up?

We even have make-believe wars, which unfortunately the Supreme Court cannot overturn, even though they’re all unconstitutional (in fact, the last valid Congressional Declaration of War was passed eighty years ago. We haven’t won one since).
We fight make-believe enemies who threaten us not at all while we ignore the real one as it blackmails the president, buys off our elites, enslaves hundreds of millions, and robs us blind.
We have make-believe soldiers turned into Woke zombies ordered to inform on one another by a criminal Joint Chiefs Chairman who secretly conspired with the enemy against his Commander-In-Chief and bragged about it.
We have make-believe citizens by the millions, as they swarm over our make-believe borders and defy our make-believe laws to steal billions in real benefits reserved for real Americans.
We have make-believe justice that punishes make-believe criminals while exonerating the real ones. We have a make-believe Congress whose members win make-believe elections decided by Big Tech and the Deep State, and then spend billions, voting by proxy while they vacation in Europe.
We have make-believe news with make-believe journalists spouting make-believe facts who treat truth with an echo chamber of silence.
We have make-believe sexes that defile the body, manipulate the mind, sully the spirit, and parade in pride down the Boulevards of Beelzebub. We have make-believe doctors who make millions using make-believe medicine to mutilate real kids for life. We have make-believe health care that destroys millions of real unborn lives. We have make-believe experts who boss us around to keep us make-believe safe.
We have make-believe marriage and make-believe families with real children bought from real Ukrainian mothers paid real money to bear them for make-believe fathers.
We have make-believe bishops who ignore real Canon Law while they grovel at the federal trough to get billions of our real tax money for their make-believe charities. We have make-believe Catholics who flaunt their rosaries while they desecrate the real Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ.
We have a make-believe Magisterium worshipping Pachamama, the earth-goddess who was destroyed by Our Lady of Copacabana in the sixteenth century.
God commanded Noah to be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, but today’s fervent followers of Pachamama today sing in harmony with Satan’s response: “Don’t be fruitful, don’t multiply, and let the Earth take control of you.”
Not only is Satan the Prince of this World, he is the king of make-believe. “I dream things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?’,” he tells Eve. “Dream along with me,” sing today’s Masters of the Universe.

Truth And Consequences

In Plato’s Myth of the Cave (Republic, Book VII), Socrates asks us to imagine a vast underground den, full of prisoners who have been chained in place all their lives. Even their heads are chained so they cannot see one another, or look left and right. Their only reality comprises shadows on a wall in front of them. The shadows are those of fake images held by hidden puppeteers that hold them up before a fire that projects them onto the wall. Even the voices of the shadows are bounced off the wall.
The prisoners see their own shadows as figures on the wall of that life. Bound to that world, they argue, have contests, confer honors and prizes, and live the life of the shadow-wall to the fullest.
It is all make-believe. Yet they do not know it is make-believe. They don’t know that they are prisoners. The cave constitutes the only life they know.
And then one is them is freed — forcefully wrenched from his place — and dragged painfully to the mouth of the cave.
There he gradually learns to see reality — first at night, then in the shadows, and finally in the full light of the sun.
There he sees the truth — for the first time. He realizes that he has been a prisoner all his make-believe life. He experiences a wave of pity for his former neighbors and longs to return, to tell them, to free them.
But he would not be welcome. In fact, if he “tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death,” Socrates concludes.
Every Catholic lives by the Truth that makes us free. Every tyrant lives by the lie and will kill to perpetuate it.
Remember, the Athenians killed Socrates.