Chu The Cud

Freemasonry is dying a slow death as it is now. Many Grand Lodges and its leadership don’t have a clue and only care about their per-capita.

Leadership is lacking.

Every year Masons are being expelled for embezzlement. In California, these are not isolated incidents; they are symptoms of a deeper decay in oversight, mentorship, and accountability.

They closed all the lodges in California under Gavin Newsom’s leadership for two years and destroyed all fellowship. Two years without labor, without ritual, without human contact did not merely pause growth, it reversed it. Momentum was lost. Brothers drifted. Candidates disappeared. What had been rebuilding in the right direction was fractured.

At the same time, the mystery that once distinguished the Craft has been willingly surrendered. Ritual, symbolism, and internal workings are now casually exposed on social media by brethren seeking attention rather than understanding. What was once entrusted is now performed. What was once earned is now uploaded.

Freemasonry does not die because men stop knocking.

It dies when those inside forget why the door mattered.

It dies when lodges are so desperate for members the West Gate is left open for all.

The Craft does not need trendiness.
It needs leadership with courage, restraint, and memory.

c 2026 Chu The Cud

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“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

— Abraham Lincoln 

Lincoln understood something many still refuse to face:

Great nations rarely fall to foreign armies. They collapse when internal discipline, responsibility, and shared standards erode.

The modern ideological left, often labeled “woke”, embodies this internal decay. It rewards grievance over competence, emotion over reason, and identity over merit. A society that trains its citizens to see themselves as victims will eventually volunteer for its own decline.

We need to start taking these woke movements seriously, not dismissing them as harmless cultural noise. They are organized, ideological, and strategic. And they must be confronted, exposed, and shut down through law, culture, and civic resolve before they hollow out the institutions meant to hold the country together.

Ignoring them has proven far more dangerous than opposing them.

Nikita Khrushchev echoed this truth from the outside. Though frequently paraphrased, his warning was unmistakable: America would not need to be invaded, it could be weakened by its own contradictions, softened from within.

Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, as the lingering ideological third term of Barack Obama, the United States has drifted closest to that danger.

Open borders, weakened sovereignty, and tolerance for adversarial economic blocs like BRICS attempting to undermine the dollar have accelerated internal vulnerability.

Foreign powers hostile to our way of life are advancing not with armies, but with access, slowly imbedding themselves in our infrastructure, creeping into our backyards, and eroding sovereignty piece by piece.

This is not invasion by force, it is erosion by access.

Under recent national leadership, the United States has drifted closest to that danger. Open borders, weakened sovereignty, and tolerance for adversarial economic blocs attempting to undermine the dollar have accelerated internal vulnerability.

Meanwhile, Trump represents a direct interruption of that trajectory, reasserting borders, national interest, and economic leverage.

At the local level, the same ideological pattern repeats. In New York City, leadership now reflects a soft collectivism, installed not by hardship or merit, but by privilege and ideology, stacking cabinets with officials who view governance as social engineering rather than stewardship.

This is not collapse by invasion.

It is collapse by mental illness redirected.

A free society cannot survive if it refuses to defend the principles that made it free. Borders, merit, accountability, and shared civic standards are not outdated ideas, they are structural necessities. When they are weakened, the nation does not bend. It hollows out.

When people refuse the cost of discipline, they invite control to replace it.

 As for freedom, it doesn’t announce its exit. It follows a magician’s rule:

“Now you see it… now you don’t.”

c 2026 Chu The Cud

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Collectivism does not arrive wearing chains.

It arrives with open hands.

The chains arrive soon after.

At first, it speaks in fairy tales,

of unity,

of shared burden,

of fairness redefined by laziness.

It speaks of cooperation through obedience.

Then alignment.

Then disillusionment through hunger.

The sovereign individual is not attacked,

but shackled to the usefulness of the collective.

Choice becomes void.

Dissent becomes a death sentence.

Excellence becomes a thing of the past.

And freedom,

once surrendered in inches,

is never returned.

c 2026 Chu The Cud

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We’ve reached a strange point in history where having an opinion is mistaken for having something to say.

Conversation used to require presence.

A room.

Shared air.

Eye contact.

At least the courtesy of listening and understanding before responding.

Now an algorithm tosses a headline or a thumbnail into the void, and suddenly everyone feels obligated to weigh in, whether they watched it, read it, or understood it is irrelevant. The act of reacting has replaced the discipline of thinking.

Take Dave Chappelle’s new comedy special on Netflix.

He went deeper than usual, and that’s not a flaw, it’s survival. Repetition kills artists. Staying in the same groove too long turns originality into a cover band of itself. Growth requires wandering, different fields, different risks, different silences.

This special felt closer to Norm Macdonald’s style: a slow walk, a long story, five minutes of patience just to earn one punchline. Not everyone gets that. Not everyone wants to get that.

And that’s fine.

What isn’t fine is the swarm of opinions from people who never engaged with the work at all, only the outrage about it.

That’s where the algorithm comes in.

The algorithm doesn’t reward understanding.

It rewards reaction.

Words become “dangerous,” not because they lack truth, but because they disrupt monetized comfort. So instead of addressing ideas directly, we’re forced into linguistic gymnastics, new words, new euphemisms, new meanings, all to smuggle the same old truths past the filters.

This is what the creators of the algorithm want your reaction to. To push you further into their abyss.

It’s not progress.

It’s distortion.

Loudness replaces insight. 

Speed replaces reflection.

Opinion replaces comprehension.

And everyone speaks, but fewer people actually say anything.

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c 2026 Chu The Cud

There is a growing habit in this country of borrowing the suffering of the past to justify the laziness of the present.

People invoke the suffering of past generations as if it were a lottery ticket, proof that they are owed something today.

But the men and women who actually endured that suffering worked brutal hours in unbearable conditions, with no guarantees, no safety net, and no applause.

The men and women who actually endured slavery did not live in abstractions. Their lives were not hashtags or talking points. They worked in suffocating heat, under threat, under punishment, under conditions most people today couldn’t endure for a single afternoon. 

They did not complain on podcasts. 

They did not demand applause. 

They did not mistake grievance for virtue.

They survived.

They didn’t sit around demanding rewards for grievances.

They survived.

They endured.

They worked.

And it’s hard to imagine they’d recognize themselves in a culture that treats inherited pain as a credential for entitlement, or hardship as a reason to opt out of responsibility.

History is not a vending machine.

Suffering is not a substitute for effort.

And no one honors the past by using it as an excuse to demand something for nothing. 

The people who lived through real suffering didn’t demand the world bend for them, they bent themselves to survive it.

To use their suffering as an excuse to do nothing, to wait in line for handouts while declaring moral superiority, is not honoring the past. It is trading on it.

Using their pain as leverage for entitlement isn’t justice. It’s disrespect.

You don’t honor suffering by cashing it in, you honor it by building something great from it. 

History has become a prop.

Pain has become currency.

And responsibility has quietly exited the conversation.

And survival required something that is deeply unfashionable today: endurance, discipline, and work.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Remember when a recording artist was given a few albums to find their voice?

When record labels didn’t just chase hits, they developed artists.

A&R departments worked with them, shaped them, challenged them, and believed in what they could become, not just what they delivered on the first try.

Remember when NFL quarterbacks were drafted and given time?

Time to learn the system.

Time to sit behind a veteran.

Time to fail quietly, adjust, and grow into leaders before being handed the weight of a franchise.

Greatness was once cultivated.

Now you get one season. Sometimes half of one.

No patience. No investment. No belief.

Swipe right.

Swipe left.

Swipe up.

Swipe down.

If it doesn’t happen instantly, we’re not helping you.

We’re moving on.

The NFL moves on. Remember, it’s not sports anymore, just another entertainment outlet.

The music industry moves on.

The culture moves on.

And we call it progress.

Quarterbacks are thrown into broken systems with no offensive line, no stability, and no protection, then blamed when they can’t create magic.

We don’t ask who failed to develop them. We ask who’s next. The rookie year has become the audition, and anything less than immediate dominance is treated as disqualification.

The same disease infected music.

Artists no longer arrive raw, uneven, and human. They must show up fully formed, algorithm-ready, viral-approved.

If the first single doesn’t hit, the file is deleted. The artist is deleted. The investment disappears. No one asks what they might become, only what they can produce right now.

This isn’t about football.

And it isn’t about music.

It’s about a culture that no longer builds people, it consumes them.

Development has been replaced by analytics.

Mentorship replaced by metrics.

Patience replaced by dopamine.

Swipe culture didn’t just change dating.

It rewired how we measure human worth.

We no longer grow talent.

We test it.

Sample it.

Discard it.

There is no long arc anymore.

No apprenticeship.

No belief in unseen potential.

Only performance, or disappearance.

Greatness has never been instant.

It has always been cultivated.

And cultivation requires time, guidance, and belief.

We’ve eliminated all three, and called the wreckage efficiency.

And now AI arrives, not to fix this, but to finish it.

A machine trained on impatience will not build greatness, it will erase anything that doesn’t perform on command.

The tsunami didn’t come quietly.

We were just looking down at our phones scrolling while it rose a hundred feet in front of us.

-2025 Chu the Cud

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What unfolds on screen is one battle after another, stitched together into a disjointed revolutionary tale that comes across like delusionary story held together by dry spaghetti.

To begin with, the film simply did not need to be this long. And because it insists on its length, it also insists on stuffing itself with forced political signaling:

The Christmas Adventurers Club a stupid name of a group of white supremacists, an over the top looking transgender character because all kids have a transgender friend, and a politically correct revolutionary on the phone with Bob, become offended by language while asking Bob for a code word for, “what times is it?”

None of these elements feel earned or moved the story. They feel jammed into the story like square blocks forced into a round hole.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a drunkard, pothead is lackluster. He has film presents as he does in all his films but that’s all. No depth or layers.

Sean Penn fares no better as Lockjaw, a military hardliner whose defining characteristic appears as a stereotypical angry combat officer. He would have been more interesting as the trans character in the closet.

Penn overacts the role, stomping through scenes, screaming through other scenes with such exaggerated intensity that it feels less like he’s on autopilot, walking through his role.

Instead of grounding the film, the performance becomes another distraction.

The daughter Willie, played by Chase Infiniti was another character without any depth or life. We as the audience never get to know who she is.

That’s the most frustrating part, this could have been an interesting film. There could be a version of this story that works. But the filmmakers seem unwilling to trust the audience or the material without pushing a current political narrative alongside it.

If that’s what I wanted, I could have watched Heated Rivalry, which bills itself as the story of two men on a hockey team who fall in love, essentially Brokeback Mountain on skates.

By the time the final action sequence arrived, I was struggling to stay awake. The stakes on screen mattered less to me than the stray thought running through my head about whether Leonardo DiCaprio was sleeping with his co-star. That’s not engagement, that’s distraction.

I expected more out of Paul Thomas Anderson, with his track record of films.

If you have three hours to burn and absolutely nothing else to do, you could watch it. Or you could put on Seinfeld reruns and still laugh at jokes that actually earned their place.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Homelessness is no longer treated as a problem to solve.

It has become a revenue stream to protect for the corrupt.

Billions flow through nonprofits, consultants, task forces, housing authorities, and government programs, yet the tents multiply, the streets decay, and accountability disappears.

Like the prison system, the incentive is no longer resolution.

It’s maintenance.

This isn’t compassion. It’s industrialized corruption.

A solved crisis ends funding. A managed crisis guarantees it.

Money lost and unaccounted for. People lost and abandoned.

Steak dinners for the orchestrators. Dumpster leftovers for the victims.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Many of us men, those of us still clinging to a cache of common sense, have experienced the same quiet tragedy: losing our wives to Donald Trump.

Not in the traditional sense, of course.

Not flowers, secret texts, or hotel rooms.

This is a mental affair.

An all-consuming fixation.

A constant checking-in.

A relentless emotional investment in a man, women swear they despise.

And many of us husbands wouldn’t participate in the consistent conspiracy practices so we were told they can’t be with us. 

Even dating sites have in the forefront. “If you support Trump I’m not interested. Swipe away from me.”

Donald J. Trump has become the unseen third party in the marriage.

Every conversation eventually finds its way back to him.

Every tragedy, foreign or domestic, arrives pre-labeled, gift-wrapped, and proudly announced:

“This happened because of Trump.”

They don’t just watch him.

They track him.

They don’t just dislike him.

They need him.

And here’s the irony they’ll never admit: they are the real MAGA cult, always finding a way to insert Trump into the conversation,

keeping him relevant,

keeping him central,

keeping him alive in every room they enter.

Because without Trump, there’s an uncomfortable silence, and in that silence, they might have to confront something far worse than a former president: Their own thoughts.

Trump didn’t steal their husbands.

He didn’t steal democracy.

But he did manage to move into their heads rent-free, redecorate, and become the most discussed man at the dinner table who never once had to show up.

And that, gentlemen, is the strangest love affair of all.

And they are the true Cult of Trump. 

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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The inexpensive little ritual we once lived for, once a week, usually on a Friday or Saturday night, meant stepping into the big black red sometimes blue box filled with the smell of buttered popcorn, padded seats, sticky floors, towering screens, and the electricity of strangers sharing the same anticipation.

You went there to be transported, to let a story lift you out of your own life and drop you into another. The air hummed with the unspoken agreement that for the next two hours, we would all surrender to the same world.

You walked into that darkened chamber not just to watch a film, but to give yourself over to it, to let a story reshape your thoughts, to carry it into the following days, revisiting scenes and moments in conversations with others.

You went with someone beside you, fingers interlaced, hearts syncing in the dark as the surround sound rolled across the room and made you feel as if you had stepped into the film itself.

And when it was a comedy, the laughter was so strong it shook the theatre at times, strangers becoming a single, roaring heartbeat.

It was more than entertainment.

It was an incredible social event.

The line for tickets and popcorn was filled with anticipation of what was to come. The lobby became a stage for everyone’s stylistic choices, Instagram before Instagram.

And I remember how powerful that bond once was. When I was young and a karate movie was playing, we all came out of the theater throwing kicks in the parking lot like future black belts.

The films of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t just entertain me, they inspired me. I wanted to train, to lift weights, to become stronger because those stories made me feel as if I could.

That was the force of communal imagination at work. A film didn’t just stay on the screen; it followed you into your life.

But that world is slipping away, along with the socialization of a generation steeped in SAD (Social Anxiety Disorder).

Today, we watch movies alone on couches, half-distracted, half-invested, scrolling through our phones while a story plays in the background like wallpaper. The communal heartbeat is gone. No shared laughter shaking the walls, no collective gasp, no whispered “Did you see that?” to the person beside you.

We traded presence for convenience, human connection for personalized algorithms, and somehow convinced ourselves the exchange was equal. But deep down, everyone feels the quiet truth: isolation has become the new default setting. And we’re lonelier for it.

Because the truth is, humans aren’t designed to live on islands of convenience. We need shared wonder, shared emotion, shared distraction from the grind of our own thoughts. Storytelling began as a communal act, fireside circles, open-air stages, crowded rooms leaning in together.

The movie theater was simply the modern version of an ancient ritual: a place where strangers became a temporary tribe, united by light, sound, and imagination. 

Maybe the real magic of the movies was never the screen at all, it was the reminder that for a brief moment, we didn’t have to face the world alone. 

And perhaps that is what we are truly missing today: not the films, but each other.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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