Decrepitude, Vol. 1: Prophets in a Feedback Loop
By The Gonzo Poltergeist — May 12, 2025
Before reality was digitized, it was enchanted.
In the biblical imagination, the world was not a closed system of matter and math. It was a structured cosmos, divided by layers: heaven above, earth below, and somewhere deeper still — the underworld, dark and humming. God ruled all three, and His will shaped everything within them.
What we call nature, they called testimony — a divine commentary in motion. The sun rose because it was commanded. The rain came — or didn’t — because someone was righteous, or wasn’t. Angels moved between worlds. Demons nested in the body. The physical and spiritual realms were not separate; instead, they were intertwined, with God’s will permeating every aspect of existence, from the rise of empires to the sores on a righteous man’s skin.
When Jesus healed the blind, no one questioned retinas or neural pathways; nobody yet alive knew that such things existed. The healing wasn’t a metaphor. It was a tear in the fabric of reality — a moment when the veil lifted and the sacred bled through.
Of course, they didn’t have access to modern physics or epidemiology. They were human animals — as we are too, but with better tools — navigating an often hostile and bewildering world with the few instruments available to them, making meaning from thunder, drought, and death, and constructing systems of discernment from myth, symbol, and whatever sacred substance passed for certainty.
Several credible historical sources suggest that the early Christians were probably tripping — literally — on ergot, a psychoactive fungus that grows on grain and has been linked to hallucinations, convulsions, and outbreaks of collective religious ecstasy, known throughout medieval Europe as St. Anthony’s Fire. This theory is notably explored in Brian C. Muraresku’s book, The Immortality Key, which investigates the role of psychedelics in early Christian rituals.
Of course, some believe the earliest Christians weren’t just filled with the Holy Spirit.
They were tripping.
But whether inspired by God or grain mold, the outcome was the same: a worldview where truth was not something verified, but something revealed — a world in which the deepest reality was not merely seen, but believed.
That ancient worldview — spiritual causality, divine intervention, moralized reality — never truly died. It just went offline for a while.
Now it’s back, and this time it brought Wi-Fi, a flag, and a YouTube channel.
MAGA does not operate in a shared empirical world. It operates in something resembling a sacred worldview — though not sacred in the sense of reverence, tradition, or awe, but more like a puddle of gas station squeegee juice, where sanctity is whatever Stephen Miller mutters from his gaslighting pulpit. Its version of reality is shaped not by observation or evidence, but by revelation, conviction, and spiritualized narrative logic. Trump is not a politician. He is a chosen vessel. His enemies are not wrong — they are evil. The stakes are not political — they are eternal.
Just like in the biblical model, the MAGA worldview collapses the boundary between the physical and the spiritual. Events are not random — they are orchestrated. Elections aren’t decided — they are stolen. Vaccines aren’t medicine — they are witchcraft, or worse, marks of the beast. The government isn’t flawed — it’s possessed.
And discernment? That biblical virtue of separating truth from falsehood? It’s still invoked constantly, but now it means learning to recognize the signs: which Twitter account is secretly a patriot, which headline is part of the globalist spell, which number, date, or typo holds the key to deliverance.
QAnon doesn’t feel like a conspiracy theory because it isn’t one — it’s a cosmology. It offers not just information, but meaning. It restores structure to a world that feels chaotic. It turns coincidence into code. It turns confusion into prophecy.
Where once the ancients turned to the heavens, MAGA turns to Truth Social.
And just like their spiritual ancestors, they do not believe they are wrong — they believe they are chosen.
But here’s the difference — and it’s not small.
The ancients didn’t have modern science. They didn’t have access to germ theory, neurology, weather models, or systems thinking. They interpreted the world with the tools available to them: symbols, visions, rituals, myth. They weren’t fools. They were doing their best.
MAGA, on the other hand, has the same access to scientific knowledge as you or I do. They carry supercomputers in their pockets. They can Google peer-reviewed studies in thirty seconds. The facts are not hidden — they are rejected. Not because they’re false, but because they come from the wrong priesthood.
What we now call MAGA is not merely a political coalition but, for many, a kind of living cosmology — a sacred narrative structure that casts Donald Trump as a prophetic figure, enemies as agents of evil, and political events as signs in a divine war. This isn’t theoretical. It was visible on January 6, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol carrying crosses, chanting prayers, and holding signs that read “Jesus Saves” — not as political slogans, but as declarations of spiritual allegiance.
This collapse between politics and prophecy is not unique to that day. The QAnon movement, deeply embedded within MAGA ranks, interprets world events as part of a cosmic struggle between good and evil — where coded messages replace facts, and faith in “The Plan” becomes proof of spiritual insight. Q followers didn’t just support Trump; they anointed him — or maybe it was that kid on 4chan pretending to be the Holy Ghost with admin privileges.
And layered atop that sacred structure, one finds a more familiar and dangerous force: the resurgence of white Christian nationalism — a worldview that merges racial identity, religious dominance, and political power, and frames all threats to that supremacy as existential and demonic.
It’s important to recognize the ancient shape of this thinking — not to mock it, but to understand its appeal. When the world feels unstable, abstract, and out of reach — and it is, even for the most well-adapted among us — there’s a deep temptation to return to older frameworks. The modern world demands too much: nuance, ambiguity, restraint. And for some lost souls, the wrong direction is better than no direction at all.
This is especially true for those who feel they’ve been reshuffled to the bottom of the deck — displaced by a culture that no longer speaks their language, a market that no longer values their labor, and a nation that no longer promises them centrality.
As we wrote in an earlier dispatch: “What we’re seeing in these men is not just rage — it’s grief in camouflage. The ache for glory dressed in tactical gear.” This purportedly sacred narrative fills the vacuum that reality left behind.
That doesn’t make it harmless.
When politics takes on the shape of prophecy, opposition begins to look like evil. And when the world is divided into good and evil, enemies are not merely mistaken — they are dangerous. In that kind of cosmology, violence doesn’t feel like an escalation. It feels like a cleansing.
We’ve seen this structure before—in temples and crusades, in theocratic cults and collapsing republics. The ancient mind never left. It adapted, waited, and found new forms. It’s here now, not in robes or incense, but in camo and trucker hats, livestreamed from pulpits draped in flags. It speaks in tongues of grievance and revelation, and it votes.
The sacred has returned—not as mystery, but as weapon. And it will not leave quietly.
