Author: Robert Barrimond

Bondi & Kash Can’t Save Trump This Time

Trump’s calls to execute lawmakers show escalating authoritarian impulse and a bid to bury the Epstein fallout. The normalization is the danger.

Bondi & Kash Can’t Save Trump This Time | Secret Podcast Preview
AI Note

This summary was generated with the assistance of AI after reviewing the Bulwark episode transcript. It reflects the core facts and themes discussed by the hosts, but readers are encouraged to consult the original source for full context.

JVL and Sarah say Trump’s “hang them” posts are both escalation and distraction: he melts down whenever anyone reminds the military that their oath is to the Constitution, not to him, and this triggers his long-standing obsession with total obedience from “the guys with guns.” At the same time, he’s seizing on this outrage cycle to smother the Epstein-email story that was starting to corner him. The real danger, they argue, is how normalized this level of presidential extremism has become.

The MAGA Machine Can’t Save Trump From Epstein

Frum explains why Epstein shattered MAGA’s myths—and why Trump’s shame has his own movement turning on him.

The MAGA Machine Can’t Save Trump From Epstein (w/ David Frum) | The Bulwark Podcast
AI Note

AI was used to help summarize David Frum’s analysis, but it’s absolutely worth watching the full episode for the complete conversation and nuance.

David Frum breaks down why the Epstein scandal uniquely destabilizes Trump: it’s the one case where Trump acts genuinely guilty, triggering the conspiratorial right that built Epstein into a master myth. Frum explains how Epstein’s Jewish identity fueled para-MAGA’s antisemitic narrative machinery, why Trump can’t escape the story, and how the moral collapse around figures like Megan Kelly and Marjorie Taylor Green reveals a movement increasingly defined by paranoia, cruelty, and self-destruction.

Also in this episode:

  • Trump’s tariff policies and their role in raising consumer prices
  • The administration’s sudden pivot to reverse tariffs to curb inflation
  • Infighting across MAGA media personalities
  • Anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and how both left and right weaponize the distinction
  • Biden-era handling of Epstein/Maxwell documents
  • Michael Flynn’s $50M claim against the U.S. government
  • Political retaliation inside federal agencies during the Trump years
  • Expanding use of force in immigration enforcement
  • U.S. drug interdiction failures in the Caribbean
  • Venezuela policy and speculation around U.S. intervention
  • Canada’s economic vulnerabilities under Trump-era decisions

Why I’m a Believer: Mysticism, the Brain, and the God Who Won’t Go Away

Mystical experience isn’t fantasy but a deeper mode of knowing — where the brain’s highest integration opens us to the faintest glimmer of the God who won’t go away.

I’ve written about why I’m a Christian, how I conceive God and wrestled with the dogma of Trinity but not the existential why underneath all three. This subject lives closer to our deepest experiences than to doctrine or data. But those experiences can still be examined with reason, theology, and neuroscience. We don’t spend much time examining why we love our loved ones or why something inspires us at that deepest level rather we express that indirectly: how my wife makes me feel loved or how the Ignatian Principle and Foundation moves me. That’s what I’ll attempt to do here: use reason, theology and neuroscience to examine the contours of the Real beneath my belief and to explain why I find belief credible, inevitable, and intellectually alive.

A religion without mystics is a philosophy.

Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel,” 2013), § 262

To make a long story short, I have found mysticism and spiritual experience sufficient evidence to make belief epistemically valid. Mysticism is not irrational; it is how the human brain, and by extension the human person, apprehends the Real.

Mysticism as Knowing

Our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it…lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVI.

William James argued that mystical experience is a genuine form of knowing — not emotion or fantasy — marked by insight, authority, and transformative power. For him, these states are empirical data to be judged by their fruits, revealing truths that ordinary consciousness cannot reach.1

I found his argument logically persuasive because he was methodical and scientific in his accounting of these experiences that transcended race, gender, social status, and even culture. If the materialists are right about the epistemic strength of scientific evidence then James is, in fairness, also right by the same lights. So faith as crediting mystics with their genuine perception of a deeper order was utterly Jamesian, utterly reasonable.

The Brain as Reality Generator

What we think of as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain.

Newberg M.d., Andrew; Eugene G. D’Aquili; Vince Rause. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (pp. 35-36). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Having satisfied myself with metaphysics, I turned to the neuroscience of belief. Dr. Andy Newberg wrote several books on the subject two of which I found extremely instructive, Why We Believe What We Believe and Why God Won’t Go Away.

Newberg argues that the thalamus is the brain’s reality-generator: it filters and synchronizes sensory input, stabilizing it into a coherent world that feels objectively real. This process—called reification—makes our constructed model of reality seem solid and external. When sensory input into the thalamus diminishes during deep prayer or meditation, the normal self–world boundaries collapse, and the brain reifies a different model: an undifferentiated, unitary state of consciousness. In Newberg’s framework, mystical experience is not a breakdown of reality but the brain’s highest integrative mode of perceiving it.2

In other words, the mystic perceives the world in a way that is “realer than real.” The epistemic upshot couldn’t be clearer. If you reading this post believe what you’re reading is real, then the mystic sees it in a way that’s more real than that. If you are one of those who dismiss mysticism as hallucination then you’d be logically compelled to disbelieve your experience as less real than a hallucination. It’s literally how your brain works.

God in All Things

St. Ignatius believed that we can find God in all things, at every moment, even in the most ordinary times. To do this, we must pay attention to what is happening in and around us and reflect on this experience…God is found in what is real, so we pray from what is real in our lives.

O’Brien, Kevin. The Ignatian Adventure: Experiencing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in Daily Life (p. 79). (Function). Kindle Edition.

It’s a familiar Ignatian refrain: God in all things. Here it takes on a universal tenor. A mystic, whether a Carmelite nun engaged in contemplative prayer or a Tibetan monk in deep mediation, has ordered their brains to perceive the God I believe in directly. It should be noted that this experience will never show us God but an infinitesimally small sliver of Godself.3

Seeing God in all things is also integrative. I read how mystics try to put the ineffable into words and how remarkably similar it is to the best theology in our spiritual tradition. Dogma as the silent, inexpressible truer faith that lies underneath kerygma the spoken faith in our everyday piety. The Trinity as paradox comes immediately to mind. All of the theological God-talk, in fact.

  • God is Nothing, i.e. No-thing.
  • God is One.
  • The only true thing we can say about God is silence.
  • God is all in all.
  • We are made in the image and likeness of God.
  • God is in our deepest selves.

And on and on and on. It was so clear to me that was the unifying connection between that silent YES in my heart of hearts and the elegant prose and poetry of Ignatian spirituality.

The trick is to remain epistemically vigilant and humble. Because we carry these experiences in daily life and remember them and naturally seek to interpret them. If we aren’t so lucky as to experience them ourselves we have to do the work to discern the accounts of others so we too remain grounded in what is real: God.

The God Who Won’t Go Away

In the end, this is what keeps me a believer.

Not sentiment.

Not inherited doctrine.

Not the feel-good stories I’ve spent years learning how to question.

But the convergence of experience, mind, and discernment — James reminding me that mystical states are a genuine mode of knowing; Newberg showing that the brain is structured to perceive reality at its highest level; and Ignatius teaching me how to test those moments so I don’t mistake comfort for truth.

  1. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, identified a consistent pattern across all genuine mystical encounters. He argued that mystical states are not sentimental or escapist but a form of direct knowing—a legitimate mode of human cognition. He called this “the noetic quality,” meaning that these experiences feel and function as revelations: they disclose insight rather than emotion. James held that mystical states are:

    Ineffable — they exceed language; they must be experienced to be understood.
    Noetic — they convey knowledge, not merely feeling.
    Transient — brief, but their impact endures.
    Passive — they arrive as gift, not achievement.

    James concluded that mystical experience is a valid empirical datum: we must judge it by its fruits, not dismiss it by its strangeness. For him, mysticism is a channel of truth that expands the boundaries of what human beings can know. ↩︎
  2. Newberg breaks it down to three basic levels of consciousness:

    Dream State – The brain generates its own imagery with low coherence, giving rise to a fluid, unstable sense of reality.
    Waking Consciousness – Sensory input drives a coherent, structured world with clear boundaries between self and other—useful, but limited.
    Unitary State – Boundary-making regions quiet and the brain shifts into its most integrated mode, producing an experience of undivided wholeness. The deepest expression of this is Absolute Unitary Being (AUB), where self and world dissolve into a single field of awareness. ↩︎
  3. A physical analogy would be perceiving a grain of sand as part of the entire observable universe (1 x 1061). It is an awesome thought; no? ↩︎

Democrats Just Crushed Republicans

Democrats crushed Republicans not by shifting left or right—but by running the right candidates for their states, proving that normal, competent governance still wins. The GOP is cracking under Trump’s weight, and for the first time in years, the future looks governable.

AI Note

This summary was generated from The Next Level Podcast transcript using AI analysis to distill the episode’s core ideas. It’s meant as a guide — not a substitute — for watching the full conversation, which is absolutely worth your time.

The 2025 off-year elections weren’t just wins — they were a realignment. Democrats swept Virginia, New Jersey, and New York by running the right candidates for their states: Spanberger’s pragmatic normalcy, Sherrill’s suburban competence, and Mamdani’s populist activism.

“Tonight the resistance struck back.” — JVL, The Next Level

Together they proved the formula: coalitional pragmatism beats chaos. Turnout was massive, MAGA candidates were crushed, and the GOP now faces a lame-duck crisis. The Trump cult is fracturing — torn between populist grifters and exhausted traditionalists — while Democrats look energized and sane.

If this night signals anything, it’s that normal, competent governance still wins.

Watch the episode:
▶️ The Next Level Podcast: Democrats Just CRUSHED Republicans

The K-Shaped Economy: Raging Moderates on the Moral Collapse of American Prosperity

Galloway and Tarlov’s Raging Moderates episode captures America’s moral divide: a K-shaped economy feeding the top 1 percent while MAGA normalizes hate and authoritarian awe. Between Gatsby’s glitter and populist rage, they find the same creed—power without empathy, cruelty mistaken for strength.

This summary was generated with AI assistance to capture the moral and political through-lines of Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov’s latest Raging Moderates episode.

The full conversation is worth your time; watch it here.

Podcast: Raging Moderates – “Trump’s K-Shaped Economy”
Hosts: Scott Galloway & Jessica Tarlov

1️⃣ The K-Shaped Economy: America’s New Gatsby Era

During the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, military families lined up at food pantries while Trump hosted a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago—girls in martini glasses, confetti over unpaid workers. That tableau, the hosts argue, is the moral diagram of the K-shaped economy itself.

“Budgets are moral documents.”

“America is a terrible place to be unfortunate.”

GDP may grow 3.8 percent, but for most Americans “the bottom 90 serve as nutrition for the top 10 percent.” Markets become morality plays; as Galloway notes, “As long as the stock market is up, you can do anything—even deploy secret police with masks.”

The metrics that matter are off-book:

  • Pawn-shop sales, auto-loan delinquencies, Hamburger Helper spikes.
  • Teen self-harm, anxiety, and hunger.

These, not the S&P 500, are the nation’s true balance sheet.
The “K” is a hieroglyph of our values—one arm ascending toward excess, the other collapsing into despair.

2️⃣ MAGA’s Dark Communion

Later the hosts turn from money to morality. Their focus shifts to Nick Fuentes, whose praise of Stalin exposes what the MAGA movement has become: a coalition comfortable with white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarian awe.

“Strength and masculinity have been conflated with coarseness and cruelty.”

“The most dangerous person in the world is a young man without economic or romantic opportunity.”

Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and their online echo chambers reveal a movement that glorifies domination and calls it leadership. Algorithms amplify the poison because rage pays. Ben Shapiro, once an architect of grievance media, now looks aghast at the antisemitic monster it unleashed—a moral recursion too late to contain.

3️⃣ The Moral Through-Line

Between Gatsby’s glitter and MAGA’s rage lies a single creed: power without empathy. One end worships wealth; the other worships strength. Both treat human beings as expendable.

“Budgets reflect the values of a nation.”

When compassion is weakness and cruelty is currency, prosperity becomes performative. The republic mistakes spectacle for virtue, the algorithm for conscience, and domination for destiny.

Billionaires Should Exist

Billionaires aren’t the problem—rigged systems are. In any fair economy with risk and a healthy dose of luck, outliers will emerge. The challenge isn’t to erase them but to hold them accountable: fair taxes, honest competition, and reinvestment in the people who made them rich. That’s stewardship, not socialism.

(Version 1.3)

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars,” she wasn’t wrong to name exploitation. But she was wrong to name every fortune that way. The line lands because populism is simple — and it targets people for hatred. Naming an enemy works. It always has. But if you’re serious about justice, you can’t build it on resentment. Billionaires should exist for one simple reason: in any fair system that includes a healthy dose of luck, they inevitably will.

The Game Is Capitalism

If I play a game, I play to win. I learn the rules, find the META[1], and compete to excel.

Capitalism is an amoral, not immoral, economic system. It doesn’t reward goodness or fairness; it rewards ownership of leverage, scale, and speed. That means we can — and must — bend it toward moral ends rather than cede the field to the greedy and rent-seeking. If you leave a game to the worst players, don’t be surprised when they corrupt it.

A honest game works for everyone. Practically speaking this means ownership should be as widespread as possible. The system works for who it’s supposed to work for: owners. Everyone benefits.[2]

Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong

She’s right that some billionaires got there through extraction — underpaying labor, gaming laws, hoarding rents. That’s theft by another name. But she’s wrong to pretend that’s the whole story. Some fortunes come from creation: innovation, coordination, risk-taking, with, it must be said, a healthy dose of luck. In any fair system that contains risk and randomness, outliers will emerge. Sometimes spectacularly so.

Jay-Z, for example, parlayed his monopoly on his enormous talent (and his wife Beyoncé) into a billionaire power couple. What wages did he steal? What worker collective should he establish? What about Steven Spielberg? Or Oprah? And so on. Workers are the lynchpin here and that leads me to my next point.

The Moral Obligation of Winners

When capitalism’s winners forget the social fabric that sustains them — schools, roads, courts, labor, consumers — the system curdles into rot. Politics becomes ugly and bad things can happen. They need to remember that social fabric consists of people who have voluntarily made them rich. So they should show gratitude — and afford that fabric fair taxes in proportion to the public goods they enjoy: living wages so full-time work leads to a full life, honest competition instead of monopoly or captured regulation, and reinvestment in the communities that raised your markets and your workers.

That’s not socialism. That’s stewardship. Leadership not rule.

The Progressive Error

Progressives too often confuse moral critique with moral condemnation. Ideals are twisted into ideology. They attack wealth itself which is both a blessing and responsibility instead of the unjust systems that distort it. The result is they drive away good people who would play on their team. If you vacate the field, you don’t purify the world — you forfeit it.

Their moral task shouldn’t be to wish capitalism away; it’s to discipline it — to aim its power at human flourishing instead of greed. That’s how you beat the game: not by quitting, but by outplaying the immoral within it.

The World I Want

I want a world where billionaires exist because they earned it justly — through ingenuity, creativity, service, and the courage to take real risks. I want a capitalism worthy of human dignity — one that lifts as it climbs and measures success by how many lives rise with yours.

The trick isn’t to stop billionaires from existing (as if you could) — it’s to police them so they don’t rig the system for their special benefit. That means taxing fairly so wealth contributes to the society that made it possible, curbing monopolies to keep markets open and innovation alive, and limiting political influence so money can’t purchase democracy. The goal is not to eliminate winners. It’s to keep the game honest.[3]

If I play a game, I play to win. The difference is, I know what winning should look like: a world where success uplifts rather than devours.

  1. Gamerspeak for Most Efficient Tactics Available. ↩︎

  2. How is more a discussion for another post. ↩︎

  3. The Nordics are examples of societies where there are more billionaires per capita than the United States but also have the highest unionization rates in the world. Embarrassing facts for ideologues across all stripes of our political spectrum. ↩︎

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Forrest Gump’s plain wisdom—“Stupid is as stupid does”—frames a meditation on ideology and discernment. We trade freedom for the comfort of belonging when we let ideas think for us. Faith is the way back to freedom: to think, to pray, to see.

Forrest Gump, an intellectually challenged man who was at the same time exceptionally wise, had a maxim: “Stupid is as stupid does.” In that single sentence lies an indictment of much of what passes for intelligence in our age — people with expansive vocabularies and expensive degrees still doing stupid things because they’ve given themselves over to emotional need without discernment and stopped thinking for themselves.

Ideology (Merriam-Webster): “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture,” and more pointedly, “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.”

Ideological (Merriam-Webster): “relating to or concerned with ideas or ideology,” and more critically, “characterized by blind or partisan devotion to a system or belief.”

The first is descriptive; the second is diagnostic. To believe an ideology is one thing: you have an ordered worldview. To have faith in it, however, is to let someone else do your thinking for you.

Most people don’t wake up and say to themselves, “Today, I’m going to let [insert ideology] do my thinking for me!” It doesn’t happen that way. It creeps in. We inherit our slogans from parents, pastors, pundits, or professors, and we wear them like armor against uncertainty. Over time, the armor becomes a cage — most clearly when it fuses with our identity. What once protected us begins to define us. Principles and faith demand the work of discernment — they force us to confront ambiguity and to wrestle with conscience. Ideology relieves us of that burden. It offers the comfort of belonging without the discomfort of examination. It trades freedom for (false) certainty and sells the exchange as virtue.

Ignatius of Loyola would have recognized this as a disordered attachment — the subtle clinging to anything that offers security at the cost of truth. When we identify more with our camp than with Christ, when we prize being right over being good, we begin to confuse the voice of the crowd with the voice of God.

Many ideologies begin as attempts to make sense of the world, and some even manage to remain supple — capable of reflection, repentance, and reform. But most do not. Once the slogans take hold, questioning becomes betrayal of oneself and one’s tribe. Curiosity feels like disloyalty. A set of ideas becomes the grounds for personal and corporate Pride, the mother of all sin. The all-important We then determines Truth and all the rest — replacing God.[1]

Faith, by contrast, is trust in God whom we can never fully know and who is always Mystery. It grows by encounter, by humility, by the willingness to be surprised. It doesn’t spare us the work of thinking; it deepens it. It doesn’t silence doubt; it sanctifies it by putting it in conversation with love. That’s what Ignatius meant by freedom — not the ability to do whatever we wish, but the grace to choose what leads us toward God even when the world shouts for certainty.

So, yes, “stupid is as stupid does.” Stupidity is the refusal — the refusal to look when Truth is right in front of you, whispering through the noise, inviting you — again — to be free: to think, to pray, to see.

  1. The Examen exists precisely to disrupt that drift: to pause, to look back, to notice what moved us toward love and what led us away. It’s not a prayer for the pure but for the brutally honest, for those who know how easily conviction turns into control. The Examen is a bulwark against idolatry. ↩︎

No Kings, No Knee: A Movement for Democracy

This weekend, I couldn’t join the protests but felt a renewed sense of civic spirit while observing from afar. The recent No Kings gatherings have transformed from mere protests into powerful rallies of unity and resolve. They reflected a deep commitment to democracy, reminding us that the instinct to resist lives on. Hope flourishes!

I didn’t march this weekend. Family duty came first, so I only drove past a small satellite protest, stopped quick to chat up some protestors, and kept it moving. But even from the margins, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: the sense that ordinary people are remembering how to be citizens. For the last year I’ve had a gnawing feeling that Americans didn’t have the appetite to fight for democracy, that we’d rather rationalize power than restrain it. “No Kings” is the right slogan for that feeling: a polite, pointed reminder that we don’t bend the knee.

The first No Kings back in June gave me a pulse: hopeful, but fragile. The second one hit different. Same message, more backbone–a lot more. Less spectacle, more resolve. You could see it in the way people showed up everywhere and didn’t need a headliner to tell them what to do. It read less like a protest and more like a rally–a gathering of spirit.

I’ve been helped in naming this by The Bulwark crew, who’ve framed it not as left vs. right, but citizens vs. subjects. Their read tracked what I felt driving by: this wasn’t outrage cosplay. It was calm, patriotic, neighborly. Families with flags, marshals with de-escalation, a lot of honking. “There was nothing hateful about it,” someone said on the show, and that mattered.

Authoritarianism is, in part, a spell and these crowds broke it by refusing to play the villain in someone else’s story. MAGA provocateurs got a very powerful response: nothing. They were ignored. That discipline meant that this was not merely about just showing up. It was about movement, about soldiering.

What moved me most is how joy and seriousness coexisted. Joy says we remember who we are; seriousness says we know what’s at stake. The Bulwark folks called it out: June was people shouting “No!”; October was people saying “We still here…and we are moving.”

So, no, I didn’t lace up and chant this time. I waved, prayed a little, and kept my commitment to family. But I also exhaled. The first No Kings let me hope. The second let me believe that hope might scale. If democracy survives, moments like these will sit on the timeline—not because they fixed everything, but because they proved the instinct to resist still lives in us. And the slow work of God continues.

The Subtle Whisper of the Evil Spirit: When Pro-Life Ideals Are Corrupted

In Ignatian spirituality, we learn that the evil spirit employs cunning tactics to corrupt even noble ideals. This post explores how the pro-life movement, despite its aim to express Christ’s love for innocent life, has been spiritually derailed by rigidity and judgment. Through discernment, we uncover how subtle distortions of truth can lead even the most righteous causes astray and reflect on how to stay anchored in Christ’s compassion.

In Ignatian spirituality, we learn to discern the movements of spirits—those that draw us closer to God and those that subtly lead us away. For those practiced in this discernment, the evil spirit does not come clumsily or overtly. It is not a shouting adversary but a cunning whisperer, cloaking itself in righteousness to ensnare even the most devout. St. Ignatius teaches that the evil spirit adapts its tactics, employing deceit and half-truths to corrupt what is good and noble.

When I reflect on the current pro-life movement, I see not just a political struggle but a spiritual battlefield. The ideals of protecting innocent life—so central to the message of Jesus—are noble. Yet, like a wily general, the evil spirit exploits the movement’s zeal and transforms it into a source of harm, even to the very lives it seeks to protect.

The Advanced Tactics of the Evil Spirit

For those of us who strive to live the Exercises of St. Ignatius, the evil spirit no longer tempts us with base desires. Instead, it cloaks itself in what seems good. It whispers: Your cause is just; therefore, any means to achieve it are justified. This is a subtle distortion of truth, for it turns a righteous passion into rigidity, zealotry, and even cruelty.

The evil spirit plays on our desire for control and victory, urging us to silence doubt, ignore criticism, and dismiss the human faces of those we oppose even those we intend to help. Instead of inspiring compassion, it inspires pride. Instead of fostering dialogue, it sows division. Instead of focusing on Christ’s love for the vulnerable, it subtly shifts the focus onto our own righteousness and power.

How Corruption Manifests in the Movement

In the pro-life cause, this spiritual corruption can be seen in actions that betray the very principles the movement claims to uphold. Consider how laws are enacted without regard for the complexities of women’s lives, ignoring the cries of those in desperate situations. When compassion and accompaniment are replaced with legalism and judgment, the evil spirit’s influence becomes clear.

This is not to say that the fight for the unborn is wrong—it is noble. But when the effort to protect life results in policies that disregard the needs of the vulnerable mothers who carry those lives, it becomes a shadow of the ideal. The evil spirit is at work here, twisting a good intention into an instrument of harm, just as Ignatius warns.

The Way Forward

How do we resist this subtle corruption? Ignatius would direct us back to Christ himself. Jesus, who cherished the dignity of all life, never enforced his teachings with cruelty or coercion. His way was one of mercy and accompaniment. He dined with sinners, healed the outcast, and showed unwavering compassion even to those who opposed him.

For the pro-life movement—and for all of us in any moral struggle—the call is to imitate Christ’s love, which is never coercive but always invitational. Discernment requires us to ask: Is this action truly of God? Does it reflect the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? And to be clear, this must not be merely in our minds but in the real world by our actions and in others. If it does not, we must be willing to reevaluate, no matter how noble the cause.

Recognizing the Evil Spirit in Our Midst

The evil spirit thrives in division, pride, and fear. It whispers that compromise is weakness and that love is insufficient. But Christ shows us that true power lies in humility, and true victory is won through love, not domination. For those of us trained in Ignatian spirituality, the call is to remain vigilant, discerning not only the good from the bad but also the good from the counterfeit.

The pro-life movement, like any human endeavor, is susceptible to the cunning of the evil spirit. Its noblest ideals can be corrupted when we lose sight of Christ’s example. We must remain anchored in prayer and discernment, striving always to express God’s love—not our own righteousness. For in the end, it is only by walking humbly with God that we can do what we were born to do: God’s will.

My Zwift Setup

It can difficult and confusing to figure out how to set yourself up with Zwift. My hope is this will clear some of that up.

Because Zwift has a plethora of configurations it is compatible with on setting up your own pain cave, it can be really hard to figure out how to get things working. It was often confusing for me to nail down details and design a cost-effective setup. As you can see, my pain cave is not that large, but it took time, a fair bit of research and a bit of luck to get the setup to where my wife and I think it’s perfect for us. I hope taking look will give you some ideas about your eventual setup! Ride on!

The Basics

  • Wahoo Kickr Snap smart trainer
  • Wahoo Kickr Headwind smart fan
  • Trek FX 2 Disc fitness bike
  • Schwalbe 700c x 35 indoor trainer tire
  • Front wheel block (included with Kickr)
  • TV/Monitor stand
  • Insignia 32″ HD TV
  • Apple TV HD with Zwift app

The Why

My FX 2 hybrid is classified as a “fitness bike” which is perfect for Zwifting. (My wife has a Trek Verve 2 comfort hybrid.) Because it’s a smart trainer, Zwift can control my Kickr Snap to accurately simulate climbs and descents as well set the resistance for workouts, esp. in ERG mode. To keep from overheating, I picked up the Headwind smart fan which adjusts fan speed automatically based on my speed or heart rate. (WARNING: Overheating can become a real safety issue. For your own safety, always use a fan with Zwift.) I had to get the training tire because both the trainer and my original rear tire were damaging each other! The roller was literally wearing the rubber away like a pencil eraser and the road debris jammed in the tire tread with marring the roller. The rubber compound in the blue training tire fixed both problems. (WARNING: Never ride a training tire outdoors! That’s an accident waiting to happen.) Because I have 50-year-old eyes, I run Zwift on a somewhat older Apple TV connected to a flatscreen. I need the bigness! 邏

The Quality of Life Stuff

  • Apple Remote case with wrist strap
  • Apple AirPod Pros
  • Phone mount
  • Zwift Companion app on my iPhone and Apple Watch
  • Yoga mat
  • Rock Bros. bike thong
  • Tommaso commuter shoes with SPD cleats
  • Bontrager commuter pedals
  • Specialized BG Grail gloves

The Why

With the Zwift app running on the Apple TV, the remote case keeps the remote attached to my wrist and the AirPods gives me the best in-game sound experience possible. I run the Zwift Companion app on my phone mounted to the handlebars. That app makes interacting with Zwift easier, allows me to message other Zwifters as I ride and connects the trainer, my bike’s cadence sensor and my Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor to Zwift. (Apple TVs have some Bluetooth limitations the Companion app gets us around.) The yoga mat and bike thong just keep things clean and sweat from destroying my bike’s finish or the carpet.

I use gloves with padding in the palm to reduce the sweat and discomfort from holding onto a flat bar for long time. I clip in on Zwift to maximize power and to train for when I use my road bike. The commuter pedals give me the flexibility of having flat pedals for casual riding/stopping safety and clip-in pedals for power. The shoes have mountain bike/gravel bike oriented SPD cleats that work well with the pedals.

The Extra

  • Bontrager Connection aluminum wheel
  • Shimano 11-28 rear cassette
  • Disc brake pad spacer (in my hand)

The Why

I got these items because my wife and I both Zwift on different hybrids. The third wheel and cassette however can be used by both bikes. Finally, braking can seriously damage a wheel-on trainer. That’s why there is no disc brake rotor on that wheel. The brake pad spacer keeps the brake pads from sticking together if one of us accidentally squeezes the brakes.

So there you have it. I hope this post was informative and you have the info you need to get you’re own setup going!