☕️ 🌅 ROLLING STONES ☙ Sunday, April 20, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🌅

A C&C-style Easter message: Vaccine-science parody headlines meet First-Century martyr logic; war-weary believers shift from comfort to conquest; Resurrection hope surges in the shadow of hybrid war.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Resurrection Day! Please enjoy a blessed and fulfilling Easter today and this quick Easter message. The holiday roundup: Easter arrives with comfort and a clarion call to advance; resurrection hope in the shadow of war, vaccine absurdities, and a world reawakening; from Rome to Twitter, from trenches to triumph, we celebrate the greatest rescue mission in history—then and now.

🌅 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🌅

Among other things, Easter is a timeless monument to hope, an epic poem of success against all odds, arriving just after all appears lost, snatching victory from the bloodstreaked fangs of defeat. So it’s natural that, during the difficult days of 2020-2024, when we needed hope more than ever, we also celebrated more passionately than we had done before.

Last year, Easter’s C&C post included this truly insane Medical News Today headline: “Switching arms for vaccines could help boost your immunity, study finds.” It almost defies belief, no? Three years ago, in 2022, Easter’s top story discussed Elon Musk’s battle to buy Twitter— a prospect that then seemed uncertain, if not downright unlikely.

Behold, how far we’ve traveled, in such a short time. In 2022, Musk’s takeover attempt felt like a moonshot. Now, in 2025, the vaccine skeptic-in-chief leads the largest health agency in human history. The improbable became inevitable—fast.

In historical terms, it has been but the blink of an eye. But it felt like centuries.

As I perused those aging posts, so unmistakably different in tone and character from this year’s— it felt like they could have been written a hundred years ago during the First World War. And it dawned on me that this is the first Easter since I started blogging where readers don’t require reassurance and comfort so much as encouragement to surge forward.

So, that’s one huge thing for which to be grateful on this blessed day of days.

🌅 Of course, Easter is about much more than hope of liberation from creeping dystopia or even a dramatic, Hollywood-style rescue from certain death. The Biblical story is far bigger than that: literally everyone on the planet, including everyone who was born or who would ever be born, has all been rescued from death’s clutches.

Our souls may shed these imperfect bodies, but we’re promised perfect, ageless, and indestructible replacements.

Nor are we asked to accept that unlikely sounding promise on faith alone; God came to Earth and proved the concept. Jesus’ existence as a historical figure is widely accepted as fact, and his crucifixion and resurrection are the most well-attested events in the ancient period. So well attested, in fact, that many secular historians prefer speculating about absurd possibilities like Jesus only looked dead but was just comatose rather than trying to deny it actually happened.

At that particular time in history —the height of the Roman Empire’s global power— the sudden appearance and flourishing of a new monotheistic religion was nearly as improbable as the resurrection itself. It wasn’t like today, where a little wrongthink might get your Facebook page shut down. Back then, they punished monotheistic heretics by burning them alive, forcing them to fight angry wildlife, or just chopping them into convenient bite-sized bits.

The point is, in the First Century, defying the Approved Narrative could get you slowly and painfully erased. Evidently, picking that risky path required a pretty solid rationale. Thus, it seems more likely that, for some reason, First Century folk actually believed the Bible’s Resurrection story in a sufficiently convincing way that they’d undertake a great deal of discrimination and unpleasantness.

I doubt a clay pamphlet could do it.

🌅 They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Again we are at war. If I (and many others) are right, the Third World War —a hybrid war— has raged since at least 2014, and surmounted a critical inflection point in March, 2020, as a manmade biological weapon was unleashed on the entire world. A great deal of martial law, sudden death, and general all-around unpleasantness ensued. A world at war.

You, me— we are all veterans of a great conflict, a war for civilization itself, a blurry battle against chimeric leftwing ideologies that hardly even recognize themselves anymore. But last November, with the world clinging to scraps of hope, the tide turned and Gandalf crested the hill at sunrise with reinforcements, and the horns of Rohan blaring across the horizon.

Now we must secure the victory.

After experiencing the crushing false hope of Trump’s first election, folks understand how far we remain from any ultimate success in which we can finally rest. Even in conquest —if that is what’s happening— we must yet thread a perilous needle between triumphalism and tyranny, between vengeance and virtue, between zeal and wisdom.

As we humbly celebrate today’s Resurrection Day, focused correctly on its eternal promise of hope and redemption, here in the Earthly realm, we also recognize we’re celebrating in wartime, with appropriate prayers for relief and recovery. We pray today for peace, that it would be our final wartime Easter until that day when swords become plowshares, every tear is wiped away, and war is remembered no more.

From our home to yours, may this Resurrection Day bring both joy and fire for the road ahead.

Yesterday I Bidened-up the post schedule, running the paid subscriber version a day early. Sorry about the confusion. Nothing has changed and Saturday posts will remain available to all readers. I’ll catch you back here tomorrow morning, to start the new week off right.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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