Brownstone Institute
Reflections on the Triduum: Can the Darkness Turn to Light?

From the Brownstone Institute
BY
The days leading up to Easter Sunday of 2020 were the darkest days not merely of my priesthood, but of my life.
People were no longer allowed to attend Mass or even to go to Confession. My very life’s vocation was rendered suspended indefinitely. Worse yet, I experienced a deep sense of betrayal as I had been formed to believe that it was a priest’s job to be ready to “preach, pray, or die at any moment.” The lack of pushback against what had never happened in the whole of history seemed to render such a sentiment a macabre joke.
I experienced a similar sense of betrayal from many of my “friends” on Facebook. From the beginning I was vocal about how predictions of doom were obvious untruths and that lockdowns were tantamount to civilizational suicide. Many heaped mockery and derision upon me for having spoken blasphemies against the Narrative.
Echoing Jeffrey Tucker’s moving reflection, the sunrise had become a curse. Waking up became a moment to wonder what fresh new Hell would be unleashed upon us. It was during this time that I encountered a song which framed perfectly the emotions I was feeling:
No good word today,
No good word today,
The sun’s still a shining
And I’m still above the ground,
But there’s no good word today.
Worse yet, now approached the Sacred Triduum, the special liturgies which begin the evening of Holy Thursday and carry us through into Easter Sunday. The thought of celebrating this holy time in an empty church for the benefit of internet streaming transformed my favorite time of year into a period of intense dread.
It was as if the “night” of John’s Gospel, which represents an end of the “day” when the works of the Father may be done (John 9:4), the time when men stumble because the light is not in them (John 11:10), and when the betrayal of Judas is set in motion (John 13:30) had become our unbroken reality with no end in sight.
Of course, the night is not to be feared, for the darkness has not overcome the light (John 1:5). My experience of Good Friday and Holy Saturday in 2020 became a profound moment of grace for me, a moment that would strengthen my resolve against the forces of evil which had brought us to such a dark moment in human history.
Good Friday: Fear Begets Darkness
In seminary, one of my Scripture professors challenged us to understand that the text of Sacred Scripture doesn’t reveal all of its secrets in one’s first reading, but only through constant revisiting. Tasked with celebrating and preaching the Good Friday ceremony to only a camera, it occurred to me for the first time that, just like in lockdowns, nearly everybody was motivated by fear:
-The Sanhedrin is fearful of any challenge to their religious authority and they accomplish the trial at night due to fear of riots.
-Pontius Pilate is fearful for his career, as this whole affair has the potential to be the final straw that ends a career that has placed him in this “last chance” assignment. Pilate is fearful of the crowds. Pilate is fearful even of the concept of truth itself.
-Eleven of the Twelve Apostles are fearful. The faithless betrayer and thief is afraid for the end of his ability to embezzle and looks for one final opportunity to cash out. Nine disappear into hiding completely. The leader observes from a distance, but denies his friend and Lord under the slightest of social pressure.
– The crowds, easily manipulated by the passions of the moment, rapidly change their tune from “Hosanna” a few days earlier to “Crucify him” out of fear of standing out against the direction where these events were clearly going.
Such great evil accomplished in so short of a time! The fearful spiritual darkness of night unleashed the worst that humanity was capable of, not merely once in human history but as a recurring pattern. The spread of fear in March 2020 clearly had nothing to do with God or goodness. As I preached that day, I drew attention to a news story from an Emergency Room just days prior. Fear and panic were so prevalent that a woman assaulted and killed an old woman with dementia who, while confused, moved too close to her.
What was happening was evil. What was happening was dark, and it was fear that was the means by which this evil created the darkness.
Easter Vigil and the Missing Voices
Saturday night after dusk is the time for the Easter Vigil. Once again, I was charged with preaching. But at this ceremony, I would have a disturbing spiritual experience during the chanting of the Exsultet by the deacon when he arrived at the part which announces:
Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,
ablaze with light from her eternal King,
let all corners of the earth be glad,
knowing an end to gloom and darkness.
Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,
arrayed with the lightning of his glory,
let this holy building shake with joy,
filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.
At this point I began crying and shaking. It was as if I could hear in my mind a malevolent voice taunting me: “Filled with what people’s voices? Look at these empty pews! Look at what I have accomplished! Behold and despair, priest.”
I did not listen to this voice, whatever or whoever it was. Instead I was filled with a sense of defiance, a defiance which I expressed in my sermon later in that ceremony. The light conquers the darkness! Nothing matters more than gathering together to fill a church and cry out with mighty voices! This evil which we have brought upon ourselves must never happen again.
That night I gathered with friends at a house for a wonderfully and defiantly illegal social gathering. There was no distance, no masking, and no fear, only a celebration of the coming of Easter.
Mere days later I would write my first op-ed wherein I condemned these indefinite lockdowns as intrinsically evil. Merely posting on my private social media wasn’t enough; conscience convicted me that my voice had to go public. Now was the time to side with the light which the darkness cannot overcome, even through manipulation of human fear. Now it was John Cash’s cover of an old gospel song that reinforced my disposition:
… He spoke to me in the voice so sweet
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angel’s feet
He called my name and my heart stood still
When he said, “John, go do my will!”
… Go tell that long tongue liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down
Defiant Lights Against the Darkness
For Christians, Easter has always been associated with the initiation rituals whereby the works of darkness are renounced and put to death so that the new life belonging to the Light of the World may be begun. In ancient days, the catechumens would defiantly turn towards the West to make this renunciation and then turn to the East, leaving behind everything to make their profession of faith.
Far too many voices want simply to “move on” and pretend as if the last 3 years never happened, even as we continue to deal with the destruction which has been wrought. This is an attempt to avoid admitting just how dark the things which were done were, because such an admission would require repentance, as I argued at the beginning of Lent.
Three years ago I felt the depth of the darkness which had entered the world, and I was moved to choose defiance in favor of the light. This brought my path to be part of the good work being done here at Brownstone. A Happy Easter to all, and let us continue the good fight against weaponized fear which seeks to prevent us from experiencing our highest goods.
Brownstone Institute
If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Brownstone Institute
The New Enthusiasm for Slaughter

From the Brownstone Institute
By
What War Means
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
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