This Loud, Hollowed-Out World
by Donavon L Riley

News—what it should be, what it once was—has been smothered by a mountain of cheap tricks and chattering merchants. A teaspoon of truth, drowned in a pound of noise. Paul Craig Roberts calls it the “presstitute,” and the term, as ugly as it is, strikes like a blade in the dark. These words they feed us don’t enlighten; they derange, poison the mind. They plant seeds of worry, of contempt, of strange disorientation. They strip us bare of any real feeling and fill us with a secondhand fury, a hollowed rage that seems profound but evaporates in the light. They make us numb to blood, hungry for shadows and scenes of betrayal. Behind every headline, a hidden agenda twists the narrative, bending the heart to fit a pattern we barely notice, an underlying drumbeat. This isn’t truth; it’s preparation—a groundwork for chaos, a calling to kneel before something dark that looms just out of view.

Every story they tell us shapes a new and subtle mold, drawing us into a world made to their specifications. The machine that spins these tales aims not only to inform but to rule our very breath, to weave a climate where every image, every enemy, every so-called “threat” is sculpted by the invisible hands behind the curtain. Theirs is a careful art, practiced in the shadows: they hand us a list of enemies—whom to loathe, whom to pity, whom to erase from memory altogether. These storytellers are generous, sparing us the exhaustion of thinking too deeply or questioning at all. They assign the villains, set the stage, craft the props, and we follow along, pitchforks at the ready, as if summoned by an ancient trumpet. How kind of them to shield us from the raw, unsettling ache of finding our own way, of perceiving the world as it is without their tint.

And the effects are as poisonous as the fruit of some twisted tree, turning us to bitter souls and unthinking minds. The “news” has become one of the main purveyors of the anti-Christ spirit, twisting what’s natural into the grotesque, what’s true into illusion. We drink this poison daily, as our forebears would have drunk clean water, trusting it to quench us, but instead, it dries our bones. It is not merely distraction; it is distortion, a chant of something ancient and ominous preparing a world where minds are emptied, hearts flattened, souls turned hollow, bending to an unseen face. We are so easily led astray because we abandoned Truth long ago. And in this loud, hollowed-out world, we’re finding it harder and harder to find our way back to what is real, to anything that tastes of the divine.