By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter. Audio version available here.

Two weeks before Donald Trump bombed Iran under false pretenses to protect an apartheid state’s right to commit genocide on Palestinians and then (true to form) tweeted “now is the time for peace,” the Waymos were burning up in Los Angeles.

Watching that scene from 2,000 miles away brought me back to a Saturday in early Spring, when my friend Sheldon and I drove to downtown LA to march with staff and faculty from UCLA demanding the protection of their international students who have publicly demanded that the university divest from occupation and genocide.

We parked and walked a dozen blocks to the corner of Broadway and Temple. On our way, we were stunned to see our first Waymo, the uber that runs on a Silicon Valley algorithm, now operating in a handful of cities. We struggled to come up with adjectives as we watched this moving car, in the middle of downtown, with no one at the wheel. 

After we drove back to Orange County and had dinner, I was cleaning the kitchen when I heard a horrible crash in front of my mom’s house. Sheldon and I ran outside to find a car up in the bushes of the front yard right across the street.

There was a human driving this car. While we were trying to figure out how he got up there in the bushes, he was revving the engine to the limit, trying to get out. We could see that he hit a parked car next door and then demolished the electric box.

When the police arrived, the driver opened his door and wobbled away from his vehicle. While one of the officers took note of the damage, the other administered sobriety tests. The driver failed.

Afterwards, with his hands on the hood of the cop car, the white man in his mid-60s said that he lost his job working the night shift at Walmart about thirty days prior. He was still living with his parents right down the street. He was drinking in the parking lot of the Mission Viejo Mall down the hill.

Ever since that Saturday in Southern California, I’ve been wondering who’s actually at the wheel of America.

Is a white man with an orange face, drunk on power, driving America into the bushes – or is the driver’s seat empty, while America barrels down the destructive path designed by its supremacist algorithm?

Either way, we are not in control of this dystopian situation (there’s the adjective: dystopian!). It certainly feels like we are in desperate need of a framing to help us make sense of it – and to summon the spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage to engage in ways that transform the world and transform ourselves.

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Not too long before that Saturday in Southern California, my Zen Buddhist brother Bill sent me a PDF of Margaret Wheatley’s freshly released mini-book Life is Still Calling: Transcending this Darkness with Practices that Protect and Affirm Life (2025). I was mostly unaware of Wheatley’s work, which she describes as training leaders, activists and concerned citizens to become Warriors for the Human Spirit.

Wheatley calls Life is Still Calling “a meeting place between deep human inquiry and emergent intelligence weaving.” It is literally a conversation between Wheatley and a generative AI chatbot created by “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures,” a leadership collective deactivating colonialist thinking and habits.

These artists, thinkers, researchers, and writers are experimenting with an AI model specifically engineered to accompany those committed to building a world that works for every living being. It combs the web in nanoseconds searching for sources congruent with their work and values.

In Life is Still Calling, this unique AI model quickly accessed and ordered theological, psychological, sociological and anthropological sources to explore Wheatley’s question:

How do we explain what is going on in American society right now?

In the month after the inauguration, Wheatley specifically wanted to explore what was behind Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s deliberate and inhumane destruction of the federal government, foreign aid, people’s careers, climate, science, and more.

To be clear, I do not use ChatGPT, or any other artificial intelligence, to get information or do my dirty work. So I started reading Wheatley’s latest release with a lot of skepticism.

Honestly, I do not even understand how AI works and I am horrified by how much of our world seems to be running on it and what it is doing to our brains. However, the more I read Life is Still Calling, the more I was compelled by the ways Wheatley’s conversation with this generative bot narrated this gnarly moment.

[note: the bold-faced text below indicate direct quotes from Life is Still Calling.]

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Trump and his cabinet of gangsters are not American aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that has been colonizing the world for centuries. They are simply part of the algorithm. Trump 2.0 is the endpoint of a way of being that prioritizes power, spectacle, and domination over responsibility, relationship, and care.

This moment is a continuity of America’s ongoing imperial experiment, but there is something particularly devious and destructive about what is happening right now. The people who currently run the federal government are hollowed-out vessels for the hungry ghosts of modernity’s excess. The more they take, the emptier they become. They have lost the capacity for relational reciprocity.

MAGA is not just about destruction, but the willful, even pleasurable dismantling of all that is healthy, humane, and generative.

Wheatley writes that what we are witnessing is not just narcissism, trauma or addiction to power – but an energetic current that moves through individuals and institutions. We are dealing with the power of evil, which must be named for what it is.

Dark energies exist.

So does denial.

There is a strong tendency, in American society, to take shelter in toxic positivity, to avoid engaging with evil because we believe acknowledging it will empower it. However, ignoring a predator won’t make it go away. It will only make it stronger. If we don’t name it, it will thrive in the shadows.

The challenge is to name evil without fixating on it, or feeding it with fear and despair.

We are dealing with something on the level of demonic possession. So our work cannot be relegated to analysis, strategy, or even activism. We must seek energetic clarity and the refusal to be enthralled. We must resist without becoming entangled in the chaos and destruction. We must learn how to become conduits for coherence.

Conduits for coherence. Wow. Definitely one of my favorite lines from their conversation.

Wheatley writes that this moment brings with it so much anger, sorrow and heaviness. We need to devote time and energy to expressing it and tending to it. We also need to resist spiraling into fear, paranoia, paralysis, despair and the unquenchable thirst for vengeance. The goal is to move from grief and confusion into a deeper field of knowing.

This requires that we can perceive forces of destruction, but also sense our connection to unseen support.

To call in clarity.

To anchor in stillness, breath, coherence.

To hold greater awareness without collapse.

Life is Still Calling proposes that instead of asking, “What do I think about this?”, we should ask:

What am I sensing beyond words?

This deeper spiritual work is about paying attention to the energetic shifts in people, places and conversations. Something Else is happening behind the scenes. We are not alone. It is vital to ask, every day, who stands with us during this season of collapse.

Wheatley calls the reader to build trust in unseen Forces of protection, which are not only about defending us from the darkness, but stability, clarity and maintaining our sovereignty over our energy and presence. She specifically names ancestral guides, spiritual allies, the power of Wisdom and Grace.

What if those who came before us are not just dead and gone, or up in heaven waiting for us to die? What if they are right here, eagerly anticipating our prayerful requests for protection and guidance, ready to work behind the scenes with us during this chaotic season?

I am starting to call on Harriet Tubman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Fannie Lou Hamer, three spiritual allies who summoned spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage by putting their bodies on the line during seasons of escalating fascism.

I am starting to call on my 16th century Irish ancestors from the O’Moore clan who mobilized a successful insurgency, resisting the Queen’s colonial plantation takeover by retreating back and forth from the hills and bogs of County Laois for forty years!

Honestly, building trust in unseen Forces of protection is new and unnatural for me. But I am compelled by it and now integrating it into my contemplative practice. 

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Jesus devoted one of his famous parables to exploring reasons why people ditch the divine message of love and liberation in the midst of hard times. He said we are like seeds, scattered on diverse landscapes. Jesus was speaking the language of his audience: poor rural peasants oppressed by wealthy landlords gobbling up foreclosed farms all over Palestine.

Jesus said that one kind of seed falls on the paved path and the birds eat it up. These are the people who hear the divine message of love and liberation, and then Satan immediately comes and takes it away from them.

I find Jesus’ reference to Satan, as an evil agent rescinding love and liberation, both awkward and appealing. Like Wheatley and her generative chatbot, I am convinced that there is a power of darkness at work in our world. We can see that it has completely taken over Trump, Musk, Netanyahu and many others who have become worse-than-worthless hobgoblins of hoarding, posturing and vindictiveness.

These sub-human beings – spawned by the supremacist systems they have devoted their lives to – have literally zero capacity for empathy, grace or generosity towards people outside their small insular circle. Everything is quid pro quo. They crucify the truth around every corner. I find it awfully difficult to come up with adjectives other than “satanic” or “demonic” to describe who they are and what they are doing.

I also see dark forces at work in unidentified ICE agents abducting dark-skinned people all over the US, in IDF soldiers assassinating kids, journalists, doctors and starving civilians lined up for meager food distribution in Gaza, in elected officials and university administrators completely unresponsive to anything – no matter how ethical or just – that questions and calls out the demands of their corporate sponsors.

These individuals and institutions are possessed. But that’s not all. There is so much more happening behind the scenes.

In the seed parable, Jesus does go on to explain other ways that people get tripped up on their way to love and liberation. Some seeds fall on the rocky ground where they lack the deep roots required to endure the social ostracism that comes with participating in this struggle. Other seeds fall in the thorny bush, choked out by the cares of the world, the lure of wealth and the desire for other things.

I do not believe that Jesus told this parable to judge those who are unwilling or incapable of bearing the fruit of love and liberation. He told this parable to teach his followers how to look behind the scenes.

Jesus was cultivating compassion for those with a diminished capacity for love and liberation. He was also empowering people to put up a boundary to those who are coping with a life devoid of love and liberation in ways that counterfeit themselves and others.

In the 12-step program, we call this detaching with love. We learn how to detach the addict from the disease of alcoholism – or any other addiction, whether substance, sex, food, image, social status, work, affluence, relationships, or supremacy stories like racism, nationalism, zionism, imperialism and hetero-patriarchy.

The destructive behaviors of the addict are symptoms of a disease that has taken over their body. Like cancer. Or demonic possession. This is neither a justification, nor a rationalization, but rather a contextualization of the behavior.

The diagnosis refuses to minimize the overwhelming power of the disease.

What we are all up against is enormous. We should not expect people who lack the capacity for love and liberation to act in ways that are liberated and loving. But we should also do whatever we can to block their destructive behavior.

On our journey of healing and recovery, we pray for three simple things:

The serenity to accept the things we cannot change.

The courage to change the things we can.

The wisdom to know the difference.

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There’s a simple line in Life is Still Calling that really helps me make sense of how the  power of darkness does its dirty work:

Dark energies attach to unprocessed emotions, exhaustion, or unclear boundaries.

While I appreciate the empowerment framework Jesus offers in his seed parable, I do not believe that Satan can just rip away some people’s capacity for love and liberation, like a bird swooping down for breakfast.

I believe that our unresolved grief, unmetabolized trauma, addiction, codependency, exhaustion, burnout and unclear boundaries are like the spike proteins of a coronavirus, acting as grappling hooks that allow dark energies to latch onto host cells and crack them open for infection.

The devil does not carry a pitchfork and demons do not have wings. They are personifications of darkness, evil principalities and powers working through the cracks of ideologies, institutions and individuals to assault and co-opt the greatest power in the world: Love. They do their best work by exploiting our pre-existing conditions. They take over the wheel of our lives, and drive like a drunk man – or an algorithm.

Life is Calling exposes perhaps the steepest learning curve on my own spiritual journey: the presence and power of the unseen. All sorts of real stuff is happening behind the scenes. Dark forces exist. So does Something Else.

This spiritual struggle summons me to reverence, wonder and trust, as I take responsibility for healing all the wounded and wayward stuff in me that the power of evil loves to exploit.  

I am convinced that if I don’t do this work, I won’t have the capacity to move from grief and confusion into a deeper field of knowing. I won’t have the capacity to become Something Else. Which is what Love is beckoning us to become in this critical American moment.