Angus

Disassociated Jehovah's Witness⇒Sinner: Occult/Weird Sex Stuff/Alcoholic, etc.⇒Conservative Politics & Cancellation⇒ Catechumen @ 61 (& Sober)

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

My cohost, Walker Larson, and I talk about the meaning of Lent and for me it got unexpectedly personal.

https://t.co/2YWaGm4bW5

[chooch skookum @ChoochSkookum]

They replaced the statue of Robert E. Lee, removed in 2020 in New Orleans, with some weird demonic stuff.

[Saggezza Eterna @FinalTelegraph]

The Cinematic Cuck: How George Clooney Became Hollywood's Most Vain and Vacuous Parasite

George Clooney is the perfect specimen of Hollywood's rotting soul, a second-rate actor who has spent three decades playing the role of concerned citizen while embodying everything contemptible about coastal elite arrogance. Look at this creature, this Nespresso salesman in a tuxedo, who has built an entire post-career identity on lecturing working Americans about their carbon footprints while his private jets crisscross the Atlantic like airborne hypocrisies. He admits his climate activism is undercut by his own travel, calls it a "personal weakness," and expects applause for the confession. This is not honesty; this is the calculated humility of a man who knows no consequence will follow. He will keep flying, keep emitting, keep collecting his millions from European luxury brands, and keep telling you to bike to work.

The viciousness beneath the veneer emerged early and never stopped. In 2003, with Charlton Heston dying of Alzheimer's, Clooney joked about the diagnosis at an awards ceremony and when criticized, sneered that Heston "deserves whatever anyone says about him" because he headed the NRA. This is the true face: mocking a conservative icon's terminal illness because he disagreed with his politics. He later claimed it was a joke and offered a private apology, but the mask had slipped. He called George W. Bush "just dim," compared his administration to The Sopranos, and spent the Iraq War era posing as a foreign policy expert while his actual expertise began and ended with reading lines written by others. His 2005 film "Good Night, and Good Luck" was not art; it was a partisan hit job disguised as historical drama, McCarthyism analogized to Bush-era counterterrorism with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

His Darfur activism followed the same pattern: simplistic moralizing about complex conflicts, celebrity briefings at the UN that produced nothing but photo opportunities, and the reduction of African civil wars to good-versus-evil narratives that outsiders could solve with enough hashtags and satellite imagery.

Conservatives initially dismissed it as Bush-bashing; some later praised his persistence, but the fundamental critique remained. Celebrity activism is not policy. It is ego masquerading as expertise, and Clooney has made it his second career.

The financial hypocrisy is breathtaking. He raised fifteen million dollars for Obama in 2012, another fifteen million for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and called the sums "obscene" while pocketing the access and influence. He agreed with Bernie Sanders about money in politics even as he vacuumed it up. This is not principle; this is performance. He plays the conscience-stricken liberal for interviewers and the power-broker for politicians, collecting chits from both sides while delivering nothing to the causes he claims to champion. In June 2024, he co-hosted a fundraiser that raised twenty-eight to thirty million dollars for Joe Biden, then weeks later published a New York Times op-ed declaring that the Biden he saw was "not the same man" and that Democrats could not win with him. Trump called it turning on "Crooked Joe like the rats they both are," and the description fits.

Clooney took the money, posed for the photos, then knifed the candidate when convenient, later admitting that replacing Biden with Harris was a "mistake" because she had to run against her own record. He engineered a loss and then distanced himself from it, the Hollywood equivalent of taking credit for the greenlight and blaming the director for the bomb.

His Trump obsession has become clinical. He called Trump a "xenophobic fascist" in 2016, predicted Americans would reject him, and has spent every subsequent year proving himself wrong while doubling down. He called Trump a "Hollywood elitist" collecting a SAG pension, a projection so transparent it requires no analysis. In 2026, he called an Iran-related threat a potential war crime, prompting the White House to respond that Clooney commits "war crimes" with his movies. He told ABC and CBS they should have told Trump "go f*** yourself" instead of settling lawsuits, and accused Bari Weiss of dismantling CBS News. This is not political commentary; this is tantrum masquerading as insight, the ravings of a man who cannot accept that his predictions failed and his influence waned.

The French citizenship is the final punchline. After years of criticizing America, after calling Trump a fascist and predicting national decline, Clooney and his family received French citizenship in late 2025, settling into their Provence estate with the ease of people who have never depended on the nations they lecture. Trump posted that it was "good news," calling them "two of the worst political prognosticators of all time," and Clooney responded by agreeing America should be made great again "starting in November." The exchange revealed everything: a wealthy critic of America seeking European refuge, a man who treats citizenship as a lifestyle accessory, a "progressive" who flees to a country with its own immigration and crime problems because the taxes are lower and the wine is better. A French official questioned the "double standard" given Clooney's limited French; the question answers itself.

Clooney is not a civic-minded Democrat from Kentucky. He is a cosmopolitan parasite who treats politics as another Hollywood production, high-minded rhetoric and personal attacks with no accountability when outcomes disappoint. He is the perfect example of what has destroyed the left: unelected power wielded by people who have never built anything, never risked anything, never suffered the consequences of their prescriptions. He is smug, he is vicious, he is hypocritical, and he is ultimately irrelevant, a man whose cultural moment passed while he was still posing for the cameras. His career is a warning: fame is not wisdom, wealth is not virtue, and the most beautiful people can be the most rotten inside.

[Bree Solstad @BreeSolstad]

That one man sitting in a jury room fighting for justice against 11 Massachusetts libs is a modern day Saint Thomas Moore. Bless him.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@WaxFiguresTexas @RealMattFradd Maybe start sharing your faith with others, instead of whinging about people sharing their faith. I really cannot see what you are hoping to accomplish here; do you really think that converts should not share their faith until they meet some standard that you impose? That's crazy

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@WaxFiguresTexas @RealMattFradd No; you are wrong. Convert, come to Christ, learn your faith, and IMMEDIATELY began to share with others, the truth with which you have been gifted.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@BeSaintly Well and St. Paul DID MEET JESUS. Why is no leading with this Biblical truth?

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

Paul obviously DID meet Jesus. Why are people responding as if this not the case?

[Defiant Ghost @TheDefiantGhost]

Joe Rogan just said it out loud: Christianity was built by a man who never met Jesus.

Jesus never wrote anything down. Paul never met him.

The entire religion is built on a guy who claimed he had a vision on the road to Damascus… then started telling people what Jesus said 20 years later.

The first gospel isn’t a first-person account.
It’s estimated to have been written down decades after Jesus was already dead.
No diaries.
No letters from Jesus.
No eyewitness transcript.
Just oral history… then Paul.

Diamond’s point wasn’t “religion is fake.”
It was colder than that: World-changing movements don’t spread because of the miracle story.

They spread because of the organizer who shows up after the founder is gone.

Christianity didn’t just need Jesus.
It needed Paul.

[Eva Vlaardingerbroek @EvaVlaar]

Everyone is rightfully outraged over migrants in Ceuta beating a baby dolphin to death, but European children are raped and killed by migrants on a daily basis and we barely see this level of fury.

It took a dolphin calf. That says something about the way our society views the value of human children.

Take the Lindsay Clancy case. She strangled her three children to death and the left and feminists all rushed to her defense.

If she had strangled three dolphin calves instead, none of them would have defended her.

There’s something deeply wrong here.

[Megha @megha_lilly]

That’s because Catholicism to you is a costume you were handed down and you think nothing of it, you wear on special occasions. The people who believe freak you out because it’s not a costume to them but the truth. Their seriousness makes you question your own.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@WaxFiguresTexas @RealMattFradd Confirmed Easter '26.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@WaxFiguresTexas @RealMattFradd You're just in the wrong here, and doubling down doesn't help.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@WaxFiguresTexas @RealMattFradd If no converts evangelize, there will be little evangelization.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@WaxFiguresTexas @RealMattFradd Nah, he's pretty great. A puppy's enthusiasm, and super smart. He'll be okay.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@roddreher Well, but, she's 102.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@roddreher I did a 17-year stint as a Jehovah's Witness as a young man, so you know in my late life conversion to Catholicism I felt compelled to review end time theology. (as well as read "The Benedict Option")

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@TheCatholicEngr Praise God, prayer said. I hope it works out.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

@Atomsmade St. Thomas Aquinas helped make the study of nature intellectually respectable in Christian Europe by integrating Aristotle’s logic and natural philosophy with theology. His synthesis helped establish the Scientific Revolution.

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

Brian Holdsworth on fire today.

[Brian Holdsworth @briankeepsworth]

It's not that there's no color, it's that it's a specific color grade. The natural world is a mess of colors which sometimes appear beautiful (like sunset). Filmmakers use color grading techniques to make every shot a palette of a few coordinated colors. This is the result. 1/2

[Angus @Old4aCatechumen]

The 80s were, in fact, peak America.

[Variety @Variety]

Ryan Reynolds says ’80s nostalgia “paves over all the trauma” of the “tumultuous” decade:

“The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”

In Apple TV’s “Mayday,” Reynolds stars as a U.S. Navy pilot who builds an unlikely friendship with an eccentric ex-KGB agent (Kenneth Branagh) obsessed with ’80s American culture.

https://t.co/oDB5S9Uc3y

[Ecclesia Antiqua @EcclesiaAntiqua]

A note on the long game in Catholic/Protestant apologetics:

You could dust off Catholic talking points from the ’90s and ‘00s and they’d still largely hold up. Meanwhile, William Lane Craig has, unfortunately, fallen into even more unorthodoxy even by Protestant lights. (He said recently he can’t affirm the creed.) James White-style apologetics is increasingly going the way of the dodo, especially amongst effective Protestant apologists. The best in that category is Gavin Ortlund, whose project, as far as I can tell, is largely defensive: reassuring Protestants that their beliefs aren’t ahistorical accretions. (Unfortunately, Wes Huff has made so many historical mistakes that there’s now a question mark behind much of what he says. I hope that this improves, because there’s much good he can do with his platform.)

One possible reason for the difference in quality is that Protestant apologetics spent years arguing with the New Atheists. Catholics apologists kept focusing on the old debates, requiring special attention to church history. Now that atheism has receded as the main battlefield, many Protestant apologists look relatively unprepared for what much of the culture is yearning for: a return to antiquity, mystery, and tradition. Youngsters see all that in the ancient Catholic Church; they tend not to see that in Gavin-style churches. (Gavin senses this, which is why much of his content is about it.)

And Catholics have opened another front: miracles. The debates against the New Atheists focused on one: the resurrection. (A great argument, btw.) But now Catholics are telling the world about Catholic miracles from recent times with thousands of eyewitnesses (some living), lots of documentation, and even photographic and scientific confirmation. We have nothing like that for the resurrection. (The Shroud of Turin may be an exception, but most Protestant apologists (eg, William Lane Craig) have tended not to use this Catholic relic.)

Non-Catholic apologists don’t know what to say because they were caught off guard. They didn’t study these miracles. They don’t know the facts, which are very impressive indeed. They’d love to have thousands of contemporaneous eyewitness accounts by Christians and non-Christians, like Catholic and Orthodox Christians have for Zeitoun, for just one example.

That creates a serious dilemma. Protestants have to explain away Catholic miracle claims without using arguments that undermine their own case for the Resurrection. If thousands of eyewitnesses from friend and foe alike supported by photographs and healings don’t suffice, why should a handful of accounts written years after the events they describe suffice?

We may start seeing in real time what happened at the Reformation. When Catholics challenged Protestants, ‘where are your miracles? We have them,’ some responded by inventing cessationism, the view that miracles happened in the apostolic age, but not after.

So far, the dominant response hasn’t (yet) been cessationism. We don’t (yet) know what it’ll be. But it’s telling that many are resorting to demonic explanations to account for the evidence of supernatural signs in the cases Catholics can bring up. That’s a concession that the evidence really is strong. I doubt people who are yearning for antiquity, tradition, and beauty will see demonic activity in thousands of healings and other miracles that have brought people to Christ and out of the culture.

It’ll be interesting to see how the counter-apologetics unfold. But right now it looks like people are scrambling to find an effective response. They’re so far failing.