It’s clear from the opening sentence, or even the cover art, where we’re going with this. “Trashworld: You live in a dystopia.” Things can indeed get worse, but they are already very bad, and the extent to which they have not hit terminal velocity is mostly due to the hangover of institutions and demography that are not dying so much as being killed.
The response to this is given by the titular Saint Boniface, who chopped down pagan idols in a physical and metaphysical demonstration of the power of his God – to on the one hand actually succeed in smashing them, but on another to demonstrate the courage with which he was willing to attempt it.
It is also a conscious contrast to Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option”, which did not go unnoticed by Dreher – a man so in love with the smell of his own farts he assumed the Pope was familiar with his work and assumes his audience waits with bated breath for the next story of his aesthetic experience of his classmates’ genitalia while he ponders how his sister’s death really makes him think, mostly about himself.
It’s a shame that Dreher called dibs on the various saint-options, because unlike Dreher’s self-justification for “maybe I move to Hungary and blog until the world recognizes my genius”, Isker is willing to self-consciously grapple with the limited utility of reason and debate in a world primarily driven by power – “while obviously useful, arguments do not matter in this culture clash”.
What then is the point of a textual polemic? On the level of power politics, it’s obviously not meant to convince Susan the United Methodist who thinks Christianity is about being nice but worries about girls sports with all this stuff going on. It’s not a Gramscian plan for forming cabals that can take over institutions. It’s not really a political strategy document that points out the hundred dollar bills lying on the sidewalk for the politicians willing to talk about the interests of the primary political constituency of the country.
What this book seems to be is a rather meta exhortation that externally focused Christian apologetics focus first on the fact that things are not okay, and secondarily on the positive vision of Christianity that addresses those issues. Some reviewers have made the mistake of assuming Isker is trying to convince the reader when he details the deep societal ills generated by and recursively generating “Trashworld”. This is not really the case – it is a brief book, and the individual chapters briefer still. What those sections serve to do is point out, which is a different tack altogether. No one who buys this book is going to be convinced by it into the idea that there are two sexes or that educational standards have plummeted or that Unthreatening Boyfriend Jesus is fundamentally unsatisfying, because that is mostly what they already believe. But as a manual for future polemicists and Christian apologists it highlights these issues as ones that discomfort even the normie id.
The “deconstruction”, or just condemnation and destruction, of these edifices of Trashworld is then followed by the construction of a positive Christian vision that recognizes, eg, that every part of the Bible is important, including the Old Testament bits about slaying and laying, or that men have a unique and separate role within the church and society at large. Importantly, this is an inversion of the typical advice for building mass movements, which almost exclusively start with the motte (“decolonization means being nice to black people”) and end with the bailey (“…and murdering ‘settler’ children”), driven heavily by vanguardism and feedback effects within participating institutions.
Obviously Christian religious movements, or right wing political coalitions, do not have the same toolkits available to them as left wing political movements. Exploring that would be its own book-length, or career-length, endeavor. To some extent in the Christian context the argument relies on the fact that actual Christian theology is so divorced from the average person’s day to day worldview that you simply cannot meet them on that level, and instead need to point out they are sick because they eat poisoned fruit, and the poisoned fruit comes from a poisoned tree. The same may in fact be true for right wing politics. It may be that construction of a “positive right wing vision for society” is secondary to, eg, vocally pointing out that the “land acknowledgment” everyone dozes through is an incitement to murder, and the structural change necessary to exclude the left from political power only follows smashing those left wing idols.
The American Sun 
“I would like to acknowledge that the Land on which we now stand was conquered & civilized by our mighty Ancestors, from the merciless Indian savages, who had seized it from earlier merciless Indian savages.”
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… who stole it from the original blonde haired & blue eyed people who lived here back when it was called Atlantis.
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“Isker is willing to self-consciously grapple with the limited utility of reason and debate in a world primarily driven by power”
LMAO
Deal with the pagans, and you’ll still have the Enlightenment Rationalists and the Positivists stamping their knives into Christian doctrine. Deconstruction is a boon and a proper blow to this religion.
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says the young white boy as he sits alone between masturbation and gaming/social media sessions, grappling with severe depression as he tries to figure out which corporation or demon he is is to worship today out of fear of evil (which he would ultimately call “self-preservation”).
they (tha pagans) and you (the demoniacs) are one and the same, the only difference is the demons you all worship, which is the same as paganism (worshiping fo demons) in the end. Therefore you’re missing the point. Feel free to stop dissociating and blaspheming and read my other comment here.
As GK Chesterton said:
“And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political and common courage sense. They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God; how could they prove it? They only prove (from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia. They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest sweatshop owner should not be punished by men. With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here. With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove. Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion. The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.”
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Now I could be here all day giving quotes as your specific malady is as old as sin (literally) and well documented. Noting your specific avenue of worshiping evil through fear of evil, I will remind you that neitzche spent the last ten years of his life screaming and demanding to commit suicide in an insane asylum. Somehow this attracts you, and as Chesterton said, when a nihilist insists his oligarchy is one of large muscles and strong wills: we MUST constantly remind him that his empire is nothing more than weak nerves.
Hillaire Belloc to you:
“Now the Manichean was so overwhelmed by the experience or prospect of suffering and by the appalling fact that his nature was subject to mortality, that he took refuge in denying the omnipotent goodness of a Creator. He said that evil was at work in the universe just as much as good; the two principles were always fighting as equals one against the other. Man was subject to the one just as much as to the other. If he could struggle at all he should struggle to join the good principle and avoid the power of the bad principle, but he must treat evil as an all-powerful thing. The Manichean recognized an evil god as well as a good god, and he attuned his mind to that appalling conception.
Such a mood bred all sorts of secondary effects. In some men it would lead to devil worship, in many more to magic, that is a dependence on something other than one’s own free will, to tricks by which we might stave off the evil power or cheat it. It also led, paradoxically enough, to the doing of a great deal of evil deliberately, and saying either that it could not be helped or that it did not matter, because we were in any case under the thrall of a thing quite as strong as the power for good and we might as well act accordingly.
But one thing the Manichean of every shade has always felt, and that is, that matter belongs to the evil side of things. Though there may be plenty of evil of a spiritual kind yet good must be wholly spiritual. That is something you find not only in the early Manichean, not only in the Albigensian of the Middle Ages, but even in the most modern of the remaining Puritans. It seems indissolubly connected with the Manichean temper in every form. Matter is subject to decay and is therefore evil. Our bodies are evil. Their appetites are evil. This idea ramifies into all sorts of absurd details. Wine is evil. Pretty well any physical pleasure, or half-physical pleasure, is evil. Joy is evil. Beauty is evil. Amusements are evil—and so on. Anyone who will read the details of the Albigensian story will be struck over and over again by the singularly modern attitude of these ancient heretics, because they had the same root as the Puritans who still, unhappily, survive among us.“
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Just three more quotes.
First from Belloc:
“One might put it in a sentence and say that the new paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall before it knows where it is into satanism.”
“Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible. Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons began to fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung heap. The psychology of it is really human enough to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.”
Third From God Himself To St Catherine Of Siena The Seraphic Virgin about why you are this way and why We in The Church are not:
“Do you know dearest daughter, how I raise the soul out of her imperfections? Sometimes I vex her with evil thoughts and a sterile mind. It will seem to her that I have left her completely, without any feeling whatever. She does not seem to be in the world, because she is in fact not there; nor does she seem to be in me because she has no feeling at all other than that her will does not want sin. I do not allow enemies to open the gate of the will that is free. I do let the devils and other enemies of humankind beat against other gates, but not against this, which is the main gate guarding the city of the soul. I do not will the soul’s death as long as she is not so stupid as to open the gate of her will. They cannot enter unless her own will chooses to let them in.”
Contrition, Conversion, Confession, Penance, Repentance.
death, Judgement, Heaven, or h*ll.
PERIOD. END OF.
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“…All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us, outcast, exiled, his new delight,
Mankind, created, and for him this World!
So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new World, shall know.”
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I just noticed your name, I recognize you from twitter you do nothing but this blaspheming schtick all day, every day. Truly, the dissident right was just an asylum for people too mentally ill to be on the left, and are furious that Catholics have conquered it for something useful.
Allow me to tell you things about your and neitzche’s “god”:
contrary to your emotion, the devil is a d*ad, d*mned, created, contingent being. the devil has no power to give you, the devil has no power for himself, no authority. the devil wants nothing more than for you to be dead and damned.
your worship of evil is due to fear of evil.
you blaspheme God thinking it will make you “be like gods,” and so you pretend you are fully curated by demons to ensure your special p*n*shments in h*ll are as worse as they could possibly be, same with your bl*d prices on earth. when you find you are weaker than evil, which is an absence of What Is Rightly Ordered due to d*ad soul, you then begin to worship evil as “all powerful” because you have no means of admitting your capital sin of pride, spiritual pride, is a lie.
you begin with with capital sin of pride, opening yourself up to all sin and all d*ath and all d*lusion by the self-destructive act of believing you have taken Divine Will for yourselves by wishful thinking. you hold this as absolute.
unable to get rid of this defect of yours, you are destroyed by evil and so therefore begin worshiping evil as “all powerful” because you refuse to admit you are totally weak. therefore you assume evil is somehow “greater” than God because you cannot admit yourself both a liar and lied-to.
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It would have been helpful if you read even one of my posts.
God IS The Uncreated, Uncontingent Prime Mover Who Is So Far Above His Creation that you may only witness Him as He Acts Upon Creation. This comes from God As “Ipsum Esse Subsistens” or God As “The Subsistent Act Of To Be Himself.”
All Causality Necessitates The Uncontingent, All Contingency Necessitates The Uncreated, and vis versa every way. This is the Proof of Existence, which is also a Creation Of God. It’s also the founding statement of both Aristotelian and Newtonian physics.
All God does is for The Good Of The Created, He needs nothing. We Need to be Free of your evil, for you are a tyrant, We need to be Delivered. We are and always will be; We are Protected from you and all you do.
The Church Is The Eternal, Indefectible, Immutable, Indestructible, And Most Of All Catholic Body And Bride Of Christ; The Perfection Of Israel. Created By The Holy Spirit In 33AD. Everything Promised To Israel And Man is Perfected In The Church In Full.
The Church Created All you know, don’t know, & all you take for granted. without your Remaining Catholic Capital, you lose it all. you are personally, deservedly, in the process of this.
you cannot deny this! no matter how hard you commit s*c*de in denial of Reality, Reality remains.
Human Beings Are Lovingly Made In The Image Of God.
you were allowed to be born here instead of directly in h*ll to give you this singular chance to Repent. More on that in the next part.
you cannot hide sin behind a lie, or all the lies at once, or anything at all, because even the smallest sin is bigger than the universe. bigger than anything. you are also more important than the universe, but you have made yourself pretend to be so small by sin.
To this standard God Judges you.
your denial of God And His Church is not due to your “knowledge” but a ridiculous emotionalism.
your clear sexual sin and other devilry made clear just by looking at your account made you ashamed, and you have done every evil you can imagine to try to bury them. Yet Shame Is The Natural Response to you doing the unnatural, and it would be there if you heard of God or not.
therefore your rampage should be directed at yourself, as you are the only problem. More on that later.
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But why can’t you read my posts?
Good Is What Is Rightly Ordered, As God Created Everything To Be.
freedom is Responsibility.
will is the capability to do Good, and does not exist WHATSOEVER unless you understand Good as Good.
free will is therefore the Responsibility to do Good.
Now, Love is to will the Good of the other as other, as I said already. Unless you understand and accept Good, and therefore understand and accept God fully and totally, you have neither a will or Love to the point you are actually totally incapable of Love.
this is the source of your problem. you have no capability to Love, so therefore nothing makes sense to you other than “wealth, pleasure, power, honor” and trying to d*mn others in your place.
Piety Is Duty To God, Family, And Country in that order. When you lose one duty, you lose them all. God Rips them from you.
Good Is What Is Rightly Ordered, As God Created All To Be.
evil is not a thing, it is an absence of Good that is caused by sin (division from God) and therefore causes you to malfunction as your soul repeatedly dies.
you cannot deny Love, Absolute Truth, And Natural Law any more than you can make them go away. your incapability to understand Love means you have none of it, and are incapable of it. this is the source of your problem. you have no capability to Love, so therefore nothing makes sense to you. Why? God gave you over to a reprobate mind because you let the demons in.
Victim Souls are those who are United To The Cross in sickness or deformity or pain to show those around them what their dead souls look like but also to remind them of their own mortality and h*ll.
Usually it is a sick child or a starving kid in Africa or a baby born with a deformity. Something that causes those in your sad, evil situation to scream “KILL THEM I DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT THEM ANYMORE,” simply because they remind of The Four Last Things (death, Judgement, Heaven, or hell) and that the soul of the sinner looks worse than The Victim Soul looks externally.
you see (or don’t), that God cannot make the person themselves sick, as to overcome sin you must look outside yourself. If seeing Heaven in the Beauty of a Cathedral or Icon won’t do that, then seeing h*ll in the damage you do to your fellow man by sin is the only other way.
this drove neitzche to die screaming for ten years in the asylum. Just as assuredly as it drives you into comment sections to do the same.
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I would really recommend you read my previous posts because all the quotes are about you. Especially since your defense mechanism was to double down on your satanism.
Now could you please especially deny your oligarchy of weak nerves to read this quote twice From God Himself To St Catherine Of Siena The Seraphic Virgin about why you are this way and why We in The Church are not:
“Do you know dearest daughter, how I raise the soul out of her imperfections? Sometimes I vex her with evil thoughts and a sterile mind. It will seem to her that I have left her completely, without any feeling whatever. She does not seem to be in the world, because she is in fact not there; nor does she seem to be in me because she has no feeling at all other than that her will does not want sin. I do not allow enemies to open the gate of the will that is free. I do let the devils and other enemies of humankind beat against other gates, but not against this, which is the main gate guarding the city of the soul. I do not will the soul’s death as long as she is not so stupid as to open the gate of her will. They cannot enter unless her own will chooses to let them in.”
Contrition, Conversion, Confession, Penance, Repentance.
death, Judgement, Heaven, or h*ll.
PERIOD. END OF.
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And just as there is a preponderance of sodomy and hatred for j’s on the d-right (not shocking since all your thought leaders like bap and second city b and hanania are all sodomite j’s), here is
God Himself To St Catherine Of Siena on that:
“They not only fail from resisting this frailty…but do even worse as they commit the cursed sin against nature. Like the blind and stupid having dimmed the light of the understanding, they do not recognize the disease and misery in which they find themselves. For this not only causes Me nausea, but displeases even the demons themselves, whom these miserable creatures have chosen as their lords. For Me, this sin against nature is so abominable that , for it alone, five cities were submersed, by virtue of the judgment of My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear them…It is disagreeable to the demon, not because evil displeases them and they find pleasure in good, but because their nature is angelic and thus is repulsed upon seeing such an enormous sin being committed. It is true that it is the demons who hits the sinner with the poisoned arrow of lust, but when a man carries out such a sinful act, the demons leaves.”
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I would like to begin my comment by acknowledging that I am on stolen Soultrean/Atlantid land…
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Oof, I bought this book the moment I saw this review, and honestly this review is better than the book itself.
The Saint name of the book and even the chapter headers and liberal use of Catholic terms make it sound initially like the book is written by a Catholic and is presenting some simple-yet-high-minded, repeatable Catholic polemics relating to the culture of death.
Instead it’s a book phrased in 2020’s twitter slang, full of pop culture references, and is written by an evangelical pastor trying to plagiarize the most basic, bog-standard, 2000-year-old Catholic Dogma; then passing it off as if he just suddenly figured it out on his own by observing modern liberals. Absolutely reeks of a man who has come to the full knowledge of protestantism as the progenitor of all of his enemy’s ideologies but thinks he can maintain his indulgent, southern pastor lifestyle and survive the storm by smuggling in undisguised Catholicism through the back door.
I couldn’t refund this fast enough. I recommend you just not buy it whatsoever. Instead you could read any book written by Catholics over the past two millennia or any book on Catholic Social Teaching written in the past 200 years.
Who you should read instead:
“The Tome Of Leo” covers everything stated in this book and considerably more, and that book was written by Pope St Leo The Great in 300AD!
St Justin Martyr’s work covers much of the same topics and it was written in 130AD!
St Iraneus’ “Against the heresies” is basically the same book as this but in detail and understanding mr isker couldn’t dream of, and that was written in 180AD!
St Bellarmine, St Chrysostom, St Augustine, St Aquinas and St Thomas More dedicated their lives to discussing this topic and much more.
St Josemaria Escriva and St John Bosco not only cover this topic in a modern way, but do so specifically through the lens of speaking to boys who had no Fathers. Both lived in countries full of war orphans whose dads were soldiers who “pumped and dumped” the first girls they met on leave and then either died in war or ran off. They even teach young boys basic grooming, emotional, and relationship techniques without any of the toxic idiocy of the manosphere.
You can get nearly all of these either free online, about $5 a piece in paperback reprints, or in $1 ebook collections on amazon.
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