My Struggle as Editor of OnePeterFive, Pt III: One Non-Profit Against SkyNet

 

Mr Flanders continues his series of essays on his struggles against what he refers to as the Antichrist Technocracy of the internet.

From One Peter Five

By Timothy Flanders, MA

Part I: My Soul was Crushed by the Matrix… and then I took over OnePeterFive

Part II: Disembodied Antichrist Community: Good out of Evil?

So because of the internet, I met someone who made me Catholic. After that, I pretty much unplugged from Skynet, aka, the virtual reality known as the “world wide web.”

I plugged back into reality. And reality was beautiful. Thanks be to God.

Fast forward from 2013 to 2018 – the “summer of shame.” A lot changed in me during my time off the internet. A lot changed for the better, by God’s grace. But then I saw Catholics online questioning their faith because of the McCarrick scandal and a bad pope called Francis I. Without thinking much, I dove back into the murky waters of The Matrix.

Using the internet I began researching Church issues again and found OnePeterFive.com.

It was an online journal with hard-hitting information completely free for all to find. This helped me make some sense of what was going on, and introduced me more and more to the beauty of Catholic Tradition. It also allowed me to share whatever I could to help the faithful, as I began with my first article which explained why no one needs to follow Rod Dreher or Michael Warren Davis into another virtual reality called “Eastern Orthodoxy” in order to escape the cross of suffering that Jesus Christ demands of us in our time (there is no “Orthodox Church”).

At this point in the story I have to pause and ask for money. That’s right, money. In the virtual reality of the internet, you have to worship the Number of the Algorithm Beast to become “trending” in order to have the time to produce something substantial like OnePeterFive.

But does this beast worship Christ the King or not?

I have my doubts.

Instead of trying to worship the Algorithm Beast, Steve Skojec founded OnePeterFive in 2014 as a non-profit that existed solely on donations.

Below: see some of the origin story of OnePeterFivewith Dr. Mike Sirilla, who was with Founder Steve Skojec from the beginning. (Thank you, Steve, for writing your recent piece about Mary which inspired me to write this whole 5-part introspection.)

This allowed Steve to provide OnePeterFive free for everyone. People like me who just wanted Google to give me answers. Because OnePeterFive is free, the Google Beast was forced to cough up OnePeterFive.com, and there I was in 2018 discovering a pearl of great price.

Steve Skojec, Founder of OnePeterFive

Thanks, Steve.

After my aforementioned friend David Villeneuve, I owe another debt of gratitude to you, for creating a free resource like OnePeterFive.

Steve spent hours every month raising the funds to keep the lights on at OnePeterFive, so I’m incredibly grateful to him for that.

But that brings me back to the money: we still have mouths to feed and bills to pay at OnePeterFive. Help us pay those things and keep OnePeterFive free online so souls like me and you can benefit for free. This is not just “paying for a product.” This is a confraternity. This is an online community (on Telegram) where we can truly connect as traditional Catholics around the world and pray for the mission of OnePeterFive, chip in some cash for the costs, and fight like our forefathers with fasting and reparation under the banner of Our Lady of Fatima in her Russian icon.

Why do some Catholics mock this as “grifting”? Excuse me: are you a Communist? Do you understand that in the real world things cost money? Or do you think Catholic Social Teaching requires Catholics to offer all their work for free and pay obeisance to the Algorithm Beast? My brother: why not consider with gratitude the greatness of what we have been given, and contribute to a Catholic apostolate instead of complaining that you can’t make other men work for you for free?

Yes, we do want to provide OnePeterFive for free. It’s an apostolate, and that’s what I’m thankful for. If I was googling Church stuff in 2018 and found a paywall, I probably would have clicked somewhere else.

But I didn’t, because OnePeterFive is free.

But in 2018 it was only free because Steve had worked extremely hard for years to raise all the funds needed.

This allowed him to pay the writers, creating the best quality possible, maximising the apostolic power of the institution. (By the way, we still don’t pay our writers as much as First Things, for instance, because we cannot afford that. But we pay them what we can, and we can do that because of you.)

So that’s why I’m appealing to you to donate to our year-end fundraiser. This helps us continue to provide this information for free to everyone who searches the internet for the truths of Tradition, like I did in 2018.

But in 2018, when I plugged back into the internet, this Antichrist Technocracy, I did not realise that the demons immediately swirled their black wings and flew right at me.

The fact is, I underestimated the evil power of the internet. I thought the evil was merely the obvious evil, like “evil images” (euphemism: p*rnography).

No, it’s much worse than that. And I was about to experience that evil for myself, internally and externally.

To Be Continued

PART IV: “Orthobros” & the Subtlety of the Fallen Angels Online