Go Forth!

By Charlie Johnston

In 2006 I was involved in two Congressional campaigns, running one and consulting on another. I spent more than a little time at the Capitol Hill Club – the Republican legislators’ informal clubhouse in Washington, D.C. The campaign I was consulting on was a competitive district that leaned Republican. The one I was running was a 62% baseline Dem district. There were several things I was not happy about with the Republican National effort that year – and I spoke frequently about them at the clubhouse. The principled energy of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America from 1994 had long since dissipated – and Republicans were looking way too much like hogs at the trough just like the Democrats. I said repeatedly that our fundamental message that year was that “Our crooks are not as bad as their crooks.” While that was true, I considered it a badly losing message – because if people were going to have to vote for a crook anyway, they would vote for the real thing – the Democrats. At the time, we were looking at victory in the competitive district and we had gotten to within two points in the Democrat district, so everyone was happy. Except for me, who saw some serious landmines between then and election day.

Then came the House Page scandal. In case you don’t remember, that was a scandal in which some Congressmen and high-ranking aides had systematically engaged in sexual escapades with House Pages, many of whom were underage. It was a mostly homosexual scandal – and the Republicans, being in the majority, were in charge of the House Pages program. Within a week of that scandal breaking, every Republican candidate for Congress across the country dropped an average of 11 points. We never recovered…and Nancy Pelosi won the Speaker’s gavel for the first time.

It was a bad scandal, but not so far out that it should have had the watershed effect it did, given the raw facts involved. The reason it became a watershed moment is because it confirmed the growing suspicion voters had that Republicans had become the very sort of hogs they had been fighting 12 years earlier. That is how watershed moments work – when events confirm what had become a large-scale suspicion in the first place. That is why the assassination of Charlie Kirk has become such a watershed in America now.

For a decade, almost all the political violence has been coming from the left. Despite all the bleating the left has done about “white supremacy” and dangerous traditional Catholics and parents complaining to school boards, people had noticed that the rioting, looting, arson, and individual assaults had been almost entirely from leftist figures against conservatives. When Kirk was assassinated and the left erupted in public celebration, with the media trying desperately (and obviously) to do damage control, it confirmed for normal people that the left had, indeed, normalized murderous violence as a way to “resist” conservatives. And those normal people were repulsed and disgusted as they saw clearly the reality of what has happened. That is a watershed – and no amount of deflection or talking lamely about that leftist lame-o, Jimmy Kimmel, is going to change it. This is a big part of what I was talking about when I emphasized early this year that the rules have changed. All the tactics to confuse issues and blame innocents would work no longer. Even better than I had hoped for, a lot of young people (and some older people, too) are embracing for the first time – or re-embracing – the Christian values that built both this country and western civilization. That will bear fruit that will last. But we have a lot of clean-up left to do.

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The day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, my Crosstalk Interview was with renowned Exorcist Priest, Fr. Daniel Reehil. I have known Fr. Dan for over a decade. We became friends before he became an exorcist. Though he was pressed for time that day and it was a little shorter than usual, it made for a great conversation that covered some of the issues that burst forth into clarity on the spiritual battle we are now in.

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I am reprinting, in its entirety, the piece I wrote for the most recent CORAC newsletter below. I do this for two reasons: first, to encourage you to keep up with the CORAC Newsletter. It has a LOT of useful information. And second, because it needs to be covered here, too. So here we go:

I had planned to supercharge CORAC with the Go Forth program by this time this year. Unfortunately, I have had the second most physically challenging year of my life. The only one that was worse was 2003, when my neurological injury completely disabled me for three months and threatened to end me. But I responded to that within a few years by walking across the country – when it was supposed to leave me paralyzed on my right side. I had a very serious illness this year that had been developing for several years before reaching a critical stage. Fortunately, the treatment protocol I used has worked amazingly well. The disorder shows no signs of being present any longer – and all functions are normal. Unfortunately, the treatment protocol, itself, is debilitating – and I have to complete it to ensure the problem is completely eradicated.

This year I have been able to work through the challenge, unlike in 2003. But instead of being able to juggle 15 items simultaneously, I am only able to effectively juggle four or five. That puts me at a substantial disadvantage – and CORAC has paid a price because of it.

Rightly or wrongly, when I get whopped, I rarely see it as God saying, “No.” Rather, I see it as Him saying, “Not yet.” And it is usually prelude to a fantastically productive period. I offer the suffering involved up for people and things I love and, so, getting pruned from time to time works out pretty well for me and those around me. But most folks are neither as patient nor as optimistic as I am, so it can be challenging in its own way for those around me. Usually, the lifting comes at the time of the ultimate anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima or during my overlapping Novenas to the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Tepeyac. I am hoping for Fatima this year…and for supercharging at the dual Novenas.

I thought, during this forced interregnum, it would be good to tell you more about what Go Forth is all about – and why it is key to what lies ahead for this country and this world in the next few years.

I was delighted at the re-election of Donald Trump…and even more delighted at the disciplined and determined way he set about to start restoring normality to the body politic, despite the shrieking, determined, opposition of the forces of chaos which have been ascendant for almost two decades. I was wary, though, of the complacency that would likely hit people who thought that Trump could set everything right. Frankly, I think that complacency was what caused God to allow the election of 2020 to be stolen by people who are little more than deranged orcs. Neither he – nor we – were yet the people God intended us to be.  Four lines from W.B. Yeats poem, The Second Coming, reverberate through my head over and over:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

(Yes, for anyone who wants to tell me, I know quite well that Yeats had a lifelong interest in mysticism and the occult. Deep insight turns up in the oddest places – and we impoverish ourselves if we do not acknowledge it because of the sometimes offensive nature of the person from which it comes. Thank God St. Thomas Aquinas saw the profound merit in the pagan philosopher, Aristotle! Our rich Christian heritage would be poorer had he not had the maturity and grace to recognize wisdom from wherever it came.)

With the heavily politicized and ugly violence of the last few weeks – the shooting of schoolchildren at Mass in Minnesota by an angry transgender, the murder of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska on a train by a violent felon who had been released 14 times by leftists, culminating in the assassination of Charlie Kirk by the angry, leftist, boyfriend of a transgender – I think people have finally realized that, while we have a vigorous ally at the head of the federal government, it is we who are going to have to rebuild our culture to be healthy and Godly again. After the American Constitution was adopted, John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Over the last 60 years, as the progressive, anti-Gospel project has taken hold in this country, we have proven Adams right. Trump can rebuild the infrastructure for a moral and religious people to use, but only we can make ourselves into that people again.

I have been heartened to see even some very secular columnists realize what a spiritual battle this has truly become. The transgender mass shooters, particularly those who have targeted Christian schoolchildren, have filled notebooks and manifestos with satanic images and dogma. You can almost see relentless conservative secularists looking at all this and pondering that, maybe there is something far more fundamental than tax policy and economics going on here. God is inviting us to a great new awakening, a great revival of the Judeo-Christian morality that made us a great country and an inspiration to all the nations of the world. We just need see it and move to establish it with vigor.

I conceptualized the Go Forth initiative as a key to accomplishing that revival. I think the disorders we have finally recognized across our culture are just the beginning of troubles. I suspect that, before all is done, much of our technology will go awry and even fail, leaving us, for a time, effectively in the mid-19^th century in terms of how we will have to live. There is nothing disastrous about that. Culture worked quite well and smoothly (with its own flaws) during that time period. Faith, family, marriage, community, and home were the keys to thriving then – and, together, they gave profound meaning to people’s lives. It strikes me in this nihilistic age, that God is likely to forcefully put us in a situation where we recapture those virtues. Root, hog, or die.

Unfortunately, the great majority of people alive today (except in third world countries) have no clue how to live – much less thrive – in such circumstances. Shoot, if the utilities were out for more than a few weeks and Uber Eats was not delivering, a lot of people in the cities would starve to death. The Go Forth initiative was intended to rebuild communities from the ground up, showing people what was needful, specifically, as the organizing principles. As it turns out, my original effort was too political and not spiritual enough. I don’t regret that. We had enemies of religion and of freedom holding all the levers of power in this country at the time. Getting past that threat seemed the most urgent need when I first conceived this project. But I do see why God would say, “Not yet,” to me and make me wait and retool to get it right.

Go Forth covers three major components to rebuild a culture that works. They are, as follows,

Practical: This involves reviving and teaching the specific skills people would need if suddenly set back into a mid-19^th Century setting. CORAC has already been doing that with its seven national teams. Those teams include Health and Wellness, Prayer Teams, Communications, Sustainability, Education, Crisis Scenarios, and a Defense League. Using a mix of homeopathic remedies and traditional modern medicine, the Heath and Wellness Team helps people take control of their own health while taking advantage of what modern medicine legitimately has to offer – without relying on it, particularly as it has gotten so politicized. The Prayer Teams bathe both CORAC and the world in prayer while bringing people from disparate areas together to collaborate in this great work. Communications involves a nationwide network of ham radio operators – because ham radio will still work if internet, cell towers, and phone lines go down. Sustainability actively revives and teaches frontier-type skills alongside ordinary skills that people have lost sight of. Education has developed classical curricula and resources people can use to teach their children the canon of western knowledge. Crisis scenarios works to anticipate sudden disruptions or emergencies and teaches people how to navigate such events with the greatest effectiveness. The Defense League unites people who have experience in law enforcement, military, and other public order professions to help people develop strategies and tactics to defend our homes and communities.

Communal: All of the skills we work on are vital, but they work best when used in community with each other. Not everyone can be good at every skill. By relying on each other, we can divide labor effectively and form functioning communities at every level. In doing so, we see how important it is to be able to rely on each other and cooperate – and we see how vital each member of a community is to the whole. In modern, nihilistic times, people have lost the sense of how to form working communities, what skills are most appropriate, and how they can interact and amplify each other. When done right, under God, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Spriritual: Morality does NOT consist of angrily sitting on the sidelines, criticizing others for not measuring up to what you think they should. It involves humbly doing the little you can right in front of you consistently – and giving thanks to God for the little you can do and being grateful for what you have. Living simply brings this home and gives meaning to life, meaning that is found in service to those around you which, properly ordered, is service to God. Is it any wonder, as we have inverted this, that morality has become devilish? It is we who are charged to go forth and help people see the Gospels with fresh eyes.

This was to be laid out in detail in the CORAC Manual – the Organizational Handbook and Manual for Forming Functional Communities. After almost three years of work, I am still not satisfied with it – and clearly went off in some wrong directions. I feel terribly guilty for our European affiliates, for Europe is falling deeply into dystopia in real time. People in America have just realized that we cannot negotiate with the demonic forces of the progressive, atheist project. All around us, the strict materialists, in whatever discipline they are to be found, are dead men walking. But, oh, do they have attitude and passionate intensity for their projects of destruction!

Most of my life, I have lived privately this cycle of suffering, barrenness, renewal, and extravagant fruitfulness. Now you are living it with me. I don’t like it. I am very private in dealing with my own rhythms and cycles. From the time I was 20, I have had about a dozen times when it seemed to be over for me, only to serve as prelude to profound new productiveness. I think God has chosen for it to be this way this time. We will get the Go Forth initiative launched – and its timing will be just as needed. If I had to guess, I will be at 100 percent at the time of the October Feast Day of Fatima – and all will be released to get started around the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception.

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Our dear friend, Beckita’s young granddaughter died unexpectedly last week. It is a terrible tragedy. I hope you will consider donating to the GiveSendGo fund for the family. And offer up your prayers for Beckita and her whole family.

Also, Bob Scheich, our Region 12 Coordinator, lost his adult niece in the last few days. His brother (her father) is hurting a lot. Please offer prayers for the Scheich family, too.

These are, obviously, challenging times for many of us. I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. Remember that he who endures to the end is he who will be saved. (A MUCH higher authority than me said that). Endure – and pray for each other. God bless you all.

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim

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