Why you should be acquainted with poetry. If you're a stranger to great verse, now is the time for your introduction. I hope this may help set you upon a lifetime journey that rescues you from cultural philistinism. From Beowulf to Ezra Pound and the Italian fascists, and the Catholic troubadours to Shakespeare and TS Eliot, this art form has always possessed a profoundly mystical cosmological power and human significance. It's a crippling symptom of our time's deafness to the divine music that we have lost an appreciation for and understanding of its wealth. Even if you're not totally stranger to it, the wisdom of some of history's greatest minds can help us anamnestically recover how poetry uniquely illuminates the inner depths of reality. Read: kolcsey.substack.com/p/on-po…

> "Other European" This means Albanians and Russian-Jewish oligarchs btw.

After a muted attendance, both among the laity and episcopate, at this year's Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage – I can say the same thing is happening in the Catholic world. Slop gifters have helped tank the movement. Between 2018 and 2024, Catholicism's inertia was exponentially picking up. I began my conversion in 2019 when Catholicism's momentum and cultural capital was riding this wave. There was a flurry of young converts. Enthusiasm about the Traditional Latin Mass, despite Pope Francis' opposition, was igniting. But, seeing the thriving and growing nature of this dissident sub-culture, an influx of opportunisic charlatans saw their chance to capitalise. What followed was a cascade of AI-scripted unthinking, lazy, unprofound, Catechism-quoting mediocrity which reduced our religion to the most generic Catholic Answers-tier (remarkably generic, entry-level, and safe) e-content that can be mostly summarised as "Protestantism bad, use the sacraments, submit to the Pope". The e-content consists of little more than making the most agreeable and basic apologia for clerical statements on issues such as gender, sexuality, and migration to appeal to all under the aloof, trite, platitudinous Third Position guise that "Catholicism is neither left nor right". It's invariably produced by people who clearly love the sound of their own voice, seeking clout, and women caked in makeup. The success now appears to have stalled, while the religion is reduced to vague devotional sentiment and the same sort of self-help therapy found virtually everywhere else. But nobody has a need for more of the same of what they already have. All of this effectively stifled many of the factors behind Catholicism's initial appeal during its period of recovery. Gone were the serious critiques of liberalism from our philosophers. Catholicism always confidently wrestled with the difficult questions of the age – in phenomenology, anthropology, cosmology, and policy – while being unafraid of radicality. The Third Way evasion propounded by the slop-merchants is cowardly evasion. It's true Catholicism doesn't share the mechanistic, utilitarian view of the market and workers by libertarian capitalists, but neither does the authentic right. If one knows the true ontological shape of the left and right, stemming from their origin after the French Revolution, it's extremely clear which side of the aisle our religion falls on. Hierarchy, particularity, family, patriotism, division, justice tempered by mercy, the primacy of truth over individualistic self-invention, just war, the death penalty, the natural order as a gift and design over transgenderism and transhumanism, beauty as the teleological form of fulfilled potency, suffering as a necessary opportunity for virtue and love. The left rejects all of these. The right and Catholicism does not. Our disagreements with the left's advance of abortion, euthanasia, gay "marriage", mass-migration, moral relativism, existentialism, sexual "liberation", and the like, are therefore symptoms of fundamental departure and not incidental. Not that you'll hear as much from the slop influencers, who wish to farm engagement and be as palatable as possible. When one lacks conviction, one seeks popularity and consensus. However, humans can detect insincerity. Again, why convert if there's nothing radical, different, or helpfully medicinal to all they're already steeped in with our epoch. Catholicism as cliché is now the rule online. Fortunately one can still find thriving good, intelligent trads and parishes and new converts with big, young, flourishing families. But they are largely offline – prudentially deeming it wiser for their work, familial, and spiritual lives to renounce the distractions of technology. Yet this leaves the cultural sphere online open for these vultures. Our growth has been suffocated by the content creators who appeared out of the woodwork five minutes ago. They are a scourge.

If (when) we win, and Europe recovers from the smouldering ruin and rises anew – the eternelle power of L'Amour Toujours will be studied.

This is the most contrived sloppa I have ever consumed. 50,000 big macs could never be as carcinogenic as this

Trads are accused by advocates of the rite of Paul VI of making an idol out of the TLM. But it's plainly the opposite. Trads are the ones who point out the liturgy can be meaningfully devotionally enriched by rubrics – chant, orations, preceding and succeeding prayers. The argument from advocates of the Novus Ordo suggests it's mystically infallible. Annibale Bugnini and his pencil pushers in the 1960s, we are to believe, co-authored this sacred formula with angels, in perfect alignment with the will of God, and it is the most optimal way of worshipping possible. You are a heretic or schismatic for even thinking anything could or should be done in a manner otherwise than as they prescribed.

We have a naive assumption in the West that corruption is something only backwards illiberal countries do. Because, of course, our esteemed prophets of data tell us. It was only on my Politics course when a (diligent but heterodox) Professor of Russian Studies pointed out that Freedom House – which is otherwise provided to students of Political Science all around the first world as a gold standard for measurements and indexes on civil and political liberties – is funded by the US government and is essentially a propaganda machine. It would often rank Russia lower than Venezuela and in the same category as North Korea. European rogue states who broke from America's liberal internationalist foreign policy doctrines (such as Hungary) would curiously immediately sink in the ratings. US allies, despite any mass-infringement on freedoms of speech, would benefit from high scores. There are certainly differences in our lands compared to the banana republics and autocracies of the third world, but we're not as free as it is alleged. We've just become particularly competent at subtle propaganda, sedation, and soft coercion.

Reminder – a not insignificant part of the reason Europe fractured into Wars of Religion in the 16th century was that one side said: "Maybe we should stay true to and keep unbreakable, lifetime vows. Actually." Five centuries later, can we acknowledge they were right?