#710 President Donald Trump, Prometheus, Fire, and the Battle Between Good and Evil

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and paid the price. That ancient story is the lens we use to talk about a very modern question: who gets to hold the “fire” today, and what happens to ordinary people when truth, energy, and freedom are locked behind a new Olympus?

We start with the ache a lot of people feel right now, especially young men: the sense that shallow answers are everywhere, while meaning is harder to find. From there, we dig into why myths still matter, how archetypes repeat across history, and why the Prometheus story can function like a mirror for spiritual warfare and the battle between good and evil. I connect the symbolism of fire to creativity, discovery, civilization, and hope, then contrast it with the pull toward entropy, disorder, and chaos when we forget God and forget what it means to be human!

Then we move into the controversial part: I retell Prometheus as a modern story and frame Donald Trump as a Prometheus-like figure battling entrenched power. I also make the line clear: Trump is not Jesus Christ, and politics cannot protect your soul. The decisive fight is still “Christ or chaos,” and it begins in the individual human heart, then spreads into marriage, family, church life, and the nation.

To make this practical, I close with the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, a three-step blueprint for restoring human dignity through truth and love: renew the heart, renew the family, then rebuild culture. If this challenged you or gave you hope, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.

Also check out the Claymore Milites Christi Website!! 

Transcript

ook Announcement And Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:00

President Donald Trump, Prometheus Fire, and the Battle Between Good and Evil. Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riegert, your host, and it's good to be back with you after taking some time off to get the book I promised all of you published. It's now available on Amazon. The Claymore Battle Plan Handbook for Young Men and Spiritual Warfare. Get a copy today. As I wrote in the introduction, the Claymore Battle Plan is a three-step battle plan for restoring human dignity, the human heart, marriage and the family, united to Christ in the church, and the nation. It's a handbook for young men engaged in spiritual battle, and we are all in this spiritual battle, whether we realize it or not. That's why this book is for all of us, for everyone. For only if we get our hearts back and find a decisive direction for our lives will any of us have a chance to restore our families, our culture, and our nation. For humanity itself is in a fierce battle against forces that are bent on destroying us. Everybody senses that I'm talking to today, and I'm sure the same things happened to you. And the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook explains the battle and more. It's a practical three-step plan, three-step battle plan in order to restore the human heart again, the family, the nation, and confronting the evils of our time through the power of truth and the power of love. As I wrote into the in the introduction to the book, we live in an age of confusion and collapse. Every day the ear hums with noise of false promises, screens flash counterfeit versions of truth, happiness, love, freedom. The world insists that pleasure is purpose, that identity is self-invented, that truth is whatever feels right. However, in the chaos, and within this chaos, something deeper stirring, especially in the hearts of young men that we're meeting, there's a quiet ache that remains. There's a hunger for something more. I see it in their eyes. They're restless. They're tired of shallow answers and cheap imitations of meaning. They sense that life must have a deeper purpose, that they're made for something more, and you know what? They're right. They were. You and I were. So today I want to explore this spiritual battle we're facing and one that President Trump has been on the front lines fighting by weaving in an ancient myth. Why an ancient myth, huh? Because unfortunately, most people today haven't read them, right? The Odyssey and all those things that we read as kids, I don't hear them reading about them anymore. If they do, they forgot about them. And so they don't connect the dots. And what does that mean? Ancient myths aren't just dusty tales from long forgotten age. They're profound, they're profound mirrors of the human soul. They capture patterns of behavior, power, rebellion, resistance that repeat across centuries. Think about it. The archetypes in these stories, the tyrant who hoards power, the hero who defies himself, who has the courage to go against these great forces, and the masses of people caught between these two powers, between oppression and awakening, they're not inventions of the past. They're recurring truths about human nature. As Carl, as thinkers like Carl Jung, you've heard me talk about him many times, observed, the myths reveal universal patterns embedded deep within the human psyche. Jordan Peterson talks about this, the struggle against arbitrary authority, the spark of creativity that refuses to be extinguished, and the restless yearning in all the human hearts for something greater than mere survival. History doesn't merely rhyme, it echoes these same dramas because the core impulses of pride, fear, generosity, and courage, defiance remain etched in who we are. From ancient empires to modern boardrooms and political capitals, the same forces continue to play out. Tyrants seeking to chain humanity to darkness and defiant figures rising to steal back the light. You saw this during COVID, huh? This is why revisiting these myths matter so much today. They remind us that what feels new and unprecedented in our world is often ancient. When we recognize these patterns, we gain the wisdom needed to navigate the challenges of our own time. So here today I want to dive into one of those most powerful myths ever told, the story of Prometheus, the Titan, who loved humanity enough, or at least cared about them enough to divide Zeus himself. Prometheus stole fire from the gods, not merely a physical flame, but the creative spark that lifted humanity from philal survival into civilization, into discovery, into hope. And for this act of caring about humanity, Zeus, the powerful one, right, the embodiment of arbitrary and oligarchic power today, punished him mercilessly. But what if that same timeless struggle is unfolding again in our own era, and of course it is. Today I want to tell this ancient myth as a modern story, one in which Prometheus appears in a contemporary form, challenging today's self appointed gods of control and returning the fire of freedom, energy, truth, human potential to what? To the people. Ooh, sounds like a populist movement, right? So get ready. This is the story of a modern Prometheus, bold, unyielding, chained yet unbroken, reminding us that no throne of power can forever dim the light meant for all of mankind if we only wake up. So let's begin. Long ago, the poets told a story about the ruler of Olympus. At the same time, night covered the world, and mankind huddled in darkness. Zeus held power over the heavens, and today like today's finance guys on the oligarchs, reigning with great and arbitrary power. But Zeus didn't love mankind, and neither do these powerful elites we hear about today. In his design, human beings were meant to remain weak and primitive. Listen to this. Creatures shivering in darkness, scraping together what little they could to survive. But one among these titans refused to accept this fate. Promisius looked upon mankind and he cared about them. So he rebelled. High above men on the bright heights of Olympus, the gods guarded the sacred fire that mortals were forbidden to touch. But one titan, Prometheus, watched the suffering of humanity and felt pity stir within him. Prometheus climbed the mountain of the gods, seized the flame from heaven, and carried it down to earth, hidden in the hollow reed, and gave it to humans. When that first spark touched the hands of man, the long night of ignorance over mankind that he was in began to end. For Prometheus stole not just the fire which can power life and economies, he stole the fire of creativity for the human mind. As a result, writing, mathematics, architecture, medicine, and science, and with them hope were allowed to humans for the first time. For this, Zeus attempted to crush him, chaining him to a rock that was intended to be eternal punishment unless Prometheus renounced his cure for humanity. Prometheus did not submit, though. Using his gift of foreknowledge, he warned Zeus that the Olympian oligarchs were doomed to destruction through their own foolishness, their arrogance, and their evil. The universe created with God by God, this is God with a capital G, is creative, it's beautiful, it's good, it's truth. It's not the world the oligarchs desire, which is enthropic. What does that mean, enthropic? From entropy, huh? A condition of decline, disorder, decay. See, it's a tendency for systems not enlightened by God with a capital G now, not Zeus, but the actual God of the universe. If they if if you get rid of God and humanity is left in themselves, they get into that darkness or they seek this power on top, but they're just as dark, if not even more so. And so not enlightened by God, what do we do? We move toward chaos, stagnation, the loss of energy or creativity rather than growth and renewal. This is what happens throughout human history. When man loses the sense of God, man also loses the sense of what it means to be a human being. Today, it's either Christ or chaos. And because man, including Christians in name only, there's so many of them, have accepted the secular world, chaos is breaking out all over the world. And that chaos always begins in the individual human heart. In the ancient story then, Prometheus gifts to humans allowed them to soar in great revolutions and triumphs of the human mind, like the Renaissance and its ear, our own American founding, and now are leaving the bounds of Earth itself and exploring space. Truth be told, we stand at the beginning of a new era for humans. If we did this right, fusion and vision, power, it can create limitless power and energy and discoveries and biophysics hold out hope of conquering certain diseases, among other great adventures and discerning the laws of the universe. Man is meant to discover them, and God gave us this sense of awe and wonder and restlessness to go out. By contrast, the primitive Zeus has reappeared in the form of the small, incompetent, and frozen minds of our present elites. I hope that we never forget the Tony Fauci's and the Bill Gates of this world who unleashed COVID on us, shut down the whole world, lied to us into taking a jab that they called the vaccine, which anything but that, worse than not effective, worse than not stopping infection or preventing transmission. It caused harm to healthy bodies. Like Zeus, the so called ruler gods of today, spread chaos everywhere. We have addicts who align our city streets, crime proceeds unchecked. A modern slave trade, including child sex trafficking, flourishes across our borders until who came in? Oh yes, we could say the word Donald Trump came in and closed those borders down against many Christian so-called churches, huh? That were helping facilitate all of this, huh? And then how about in the government schools? Children are taught nothing and then groomed for sex. Poisonous drugs flow across our open border, counterfeited to deliver certain death to people, huh? In the fentanyl trades, and we were just allowing this to happen. Our our failing oligarchs say we are too many people on this earth and culling the population through famines, wars, disease. Ooh. The green climate hoax robs the poor and gives to the rich. I mean, when energy prices go way up, who who benefits from that, huh? Certainly not the poor, they can't afford it, right? And the money that flow from this green climate hoax to these rich people is amazing. The poisoning of our food and medicine has caused so many, including children to suffer. Why they, like the ancient gods, pursue any means to accomplish their goal. They don't care. You will own nothing, they proclaim, and be happy. How often have we heard that, huh? In the shadowed spires of this new Olympus, glass towers now rising above Washington and global boardrooms, the gods of old had returned in modern guise. These new Olympians hoarded the sacred fire of liberty, chaining nations with endless regulations, opened borders that diluted sovereignty, rigged economies that enriched a few, and truth suppressed beneath layers of censorship and dependency. Mankind shivered again in the gloom, promised DEI, right? The so called equity that divides and enslaves us, doesn't it? Keeping poor darkened human beings fighting with one another, keeping them addicted to porn and all of these things, so they never look up and see what's happening to them. But then something happened. Among the mortals walked in a titan reborn, Donald J. Trump, builder of gleaming towers, unyielding voice of the forgotten, he had risen from the world of deal makers and dreamers, his golden hair gleaming like the sun he dared to challenge. Trump gazed across the suffering people, families crushed by inflation, workers betrayed by offshore factories, patriots silenced by the god's digital storms, and his blood forged in a lineage of ancient defiance, boiled with righteous fury. Defire doesn't belong to them, he said. Not to you false immortals, he roared from the steps of the people's house. He stole not only the flame that the powers of factories and economies and gave them back to us, but the deeper flame of creativity and hope, the vision of limitless fusion energy lighting the future, borders secured like a shield, trade deals forged in strength, unfiltered truth that unlocks minds, and the American spirit soaring once again toward the stars. Zoops, Zeus and his pantheon laughed from their high seats, didn't they? When he did that. Mortals must kneel, they thundered, and they hurled bolts of law fear against Trump, impeachment, endless investigations against him. Even tried to assassinate him a couple times, right? But Trump scaled the political mountain anyway. With the cunning of Hermes and the strength of Hercules, he descended among the people and rekindled the fire in their hands. We will make this nation great again, he proclaimed, in arenas packed with the awakened. The flames spread like wildfire across across heartlands and cities alike. Factories started to come back to life. Families felt warmth returned to their wallets. Citizens rose, casting off the chains of dependency and demanding their birthright of freedom. Parents could stand up for their children against gender ideologies that sought to render their children sterile and mutilate their little bodies. Christians could no longer just be locked up or praying outside abortion mills. Men were no longer welcome in women's bathrooms, locker rooms, or women's sports. Ruthless jihadists were prevented from access to nuclear bombs that they would certainly unleash on infidels, huh? Drug cartels could no longer assume power over entire nations without a fight. Sex traffickers were hunted down. Children, those missing children in the border, they were rescued, so many of them now. Humanity, once dim and docile, now burned with renewed vigor. Zeus's rage shook the heavens. Chain him, he commanded. Like Prometheus before him, Trump was bound to the rock of their perpetual torment, a ceaseless barrage of indictments, media, eagles tearing at his name and his legacy day after day after day, their beaks of lies and leaks ripping into his reputation. Each day their pain came back to him, but each night the people's will regenerated his resolve. Some way he got up every morning and went out to fight. Through this long ordeal, Trump endured. The flame he had stolen continued to blaze in millions of hearts, and so the modern Prometheus stood defiant, reminding every age that no throne of power can forever withhold from mankind what is rightfully theirs, the fire to rise, to build, to explore the universe, and to be free. Your duty as ears of this Promethean fire is not merely to survive the oligarch's cold night, but to carry that restless hope onward, to build, to dream, to explore, and to refuse any throne that would dim the light within us. And so for now the fire endures. But mankind must now stand and fight to keep it burning. For this is a spiritual battle beyond anything that President Trump can protect you or I from. He is facing incredible enemies all over. What we're witnessing today has been accelerating for many years as mankind rejected God, became numb to the evil of their days, leaving a vacuum first in their own hearts, then in their marriages and their families, even in the church. Not the church of God himself of Jesus Christ, but the shepherds in the church, huh? Leaving a vacuum. And what was it filled with? For those with those who sought power, money, sex that would ultimately destroy humanity and they don't care. Now I think things will get worse because Donald Trump is not Jesus Christ. He's not some saint or even some great white knight that can go on forever on this great white horse, not unless we all stand up. He just gave us the fire. So what's going to happen now, huh? We have to put on the armor of God. Then we have to buckle up, for this is a spiritual battle, and it always has been for this. For what? For what? For control of the human heart and our eternal destiny. God with a capital G seeks the salvation of your soul and my soul. Satan does everything in his power to prevent that. Ultimately, then it's up to you and me and every human being to use their free will to choose. Do we choose Christ or chaos? This is why the Claymore battle plan was born. It was forged at the intersection of two realities, on the one hand the darkness of our age, and the other the unquenchable light of divine truth. It was shaped by the evils that I personally have witnessed, and you know about them, the assault on human dignity, the distortion of love, the destruction of innocence. It was also shaped by the young men, though, that I know myself, who were meeting, who are rising up to meet these challenges with courage and faith. But now they wonder what. They haven't been given much just this flame now. We have to be, as men, we have to reach out to them, not let them fall through the cracks. We have to take that flame and that sense that something's wrong and help them make this into a flame into a fire. Otherwise we're going to lose our whole civilization and our future for our kids and our grandkids. What does it mean to be a man? How we have to pass this on. We haven't done a very good job of it. Saint John Paul said the future of humanity passes by what? By the family. He believed every young person must discover for himself his dignity, his mission, and his capacity for heroic love. His vision articulated John Paul's vision most fully in the theology of the body, but throughout all his writings and talking, reveals that the human person is created for communion, for self-gift, for greatness. This vision is the heart of this handbook. The Claymore Battle Plan Handbook is not simply a collection of ideas, not just information to digest. It's in our DNA. It's when the human heart, your human heart, my human heart, and our experience of life touches the gospel, touches God Himself in such a way you have that aha moment. The light starts to open up in your eyes. You'll be able to see. So it's a strategy for reclaiming what's been lost. It's a battle plan for restoring the dignity of the human person through truth and love. The Claymore sword is your weapon. Just see the Claymore sword behind me if you're watching this on video. That's that big two-fisted double sword, huh? Made famous by William Wallace and Braveheart, huh? It's not a weapon of violence, but a weapon of truth. Its name recalls both the great double-edged sword wielded by Scottish warriors and the ancient Christian call to become Militas Christi, soldiers for Christ. Claymore Militus Christi. Pick up the sword and we become soldiers of Christ. This is a call to arms, not against flesh and blood, remember, but against the rulers of this present darkness, Saint Paul wrote in Ephesians six. It's an invitation to rise above the confusion of this aiscover what it means to be a man fully alive, fully human, and fully free. The Claymore battle plan offers a three-step blueprint for renewing the world by first renewing the man himself. Reclaim the dignity of the individual human heart. Renew marriage in the family, understand what that's supposed to be, what that looks like and why. Then we go out like a ripple and rebuild the culture and rebuild the nation. Every battle begins in the human heart. This journey begins there as well. It advances to formation, fraternity, brotherhood, prayer, mission. You're not doing this alone. Join us. It culminates in a life of authentic love, lived in the power of the Eucharist, that love that conquers sin and death. This movement is for the bold, for young men, old men, all of us that care about humanity, they care about what's true, good, and beautiful. For those who feel the fire of God's call burning within them, even if they cannot name it. For those who are tired of being spectators in a culture of destruction and ready to fight for what is, again, true, good, and beautiful, especially the beauty of love. So take up the Claymore sword, join us, hit subscribe below, hit like, share it with your friends who are looking for hope for their restless hearts. Then order a copy of the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, and a link is going to be provided below. Hey, God bless you. Great to be with you again.