The small-time Catholic fiction author who helped red pill me

In 2011, I worked my first real job and was a hardcore leftist Democratic socialist. Then I swallowed a bunch of red pills when I met a Catholic fiction author.

I won’t claim to be Catholic. There’s a laundry list of things they do that I disagree with. Ditto for mainstream Christianity in and of itself.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold value and that we can’t write off people’s real-life experiences. That was the case with one small-time Catholic fiction author who self-published four books way before Amazon KDP became a thing.

This author wrote Rebuking the New World Order, In the Wake of Michael, Skinhead Joe of Garabandal, and St. Anthony Over Kansas. You’ll hardly find a blip of these books online, since he published them before the days of e-books and never sought out audio narration.

He also had a newsletter—Yellowstone Press, I believe he called it—which talked about global conspiracies focusing mainly on the coming New World Order. This was in the early days of the internet, sometime in the late-1990s and early-to-mid-2000s.

Some people would’ve written him off as a lunatic, but when you look back at what he was doing, and if you’re lucky enough to own any of his books—I do have In the Wake of Michael—you can’t help but think how right he was. Or, at least that he was heading in the right direction.

Either way, he was the first person I met who believed institutions could lie — and meant it.

This man’s claims initially seemed outrageous

When I started working at a local grocery store in August 2011—I’ve written about this place a few times—I was a far-left-leaning Democratic socialist. Like many in that line of thinking, I was constantly pissed off at the world, and even more pissed that I had no choice but to accept a job that paid $7.65 an hour.

I had a sense of entitlement in those days. But anyway, I’m bagging groceries on my second day there, and after two hours I’m sitting in the break room. In there was this middle-aged guy who seemed to have a severe speech impediment, walked with a limp, and remembered hardly a thing I told him—he kept calling me Zach.

Enjoying this article? Catch the rest of it at The Rogue Scribe. Make sure you subscribe to the Scribe for more behind-the-scenes inspiration, short fiction, serial fiction, and confessionals.