Are You A Black Sheep? Welcome Home.

Black Sheep is a publication for those willing to think outside the tribe.

Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say that a noncomformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, that one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you see yourself as an outlier, an outcast, an exile, a black sheep. You’re a thinker, a questioner, the kind of person who notices the things the powers that be don’t want you to notice. You may not even want to stand out. Life would be easier if you didn’t, but you can’t seem to help it.

Being a Black Sheep doesn’t just mean questioning official narratives. It means pushing back against your own tribe when they, too, fall into erroneous groupthink.

That’s a lonely place to be, but it’s absolutely essential. I know you know what I’m talking about. I bet at least once in the past six months, you’ve had occasion to ask just what the hell the people who are supposed to be your fellow travellers are thinking. Social media only enhances tribal lockstep. Online pile-ons that offer simplistic assessments of complex and naunced topics are dumbing down the conversations we’re having about the things that matter. We have to challenge ourselves to be better.

And if you’re like me, you’re increasingly concerned that if we don’t do something about what we’re seeing sooner rather than later, everything we know and care about will soon be gone.

This publication is for you. For us. Because together, we can do more than any of us can accomplish alone.

First, allow me to give you a little backstory on me, and why I started this project.

My name is Steve Skojec. I am a husband and father of eight children. By profession, I am a writer and cultural commentator.

I was born in 1977, and I have watched as the America I grew up in has become increasingly feeble, corrupt, and degenerate. I have been forced to confront the fact that my children will inherit a world that is much darker than the one I was born into.

I grew up in a very Catholic home, and went on to study and write about my faith in-depth, eventually making this my career, until I finally stepped away in 2021.

I am the oldest of six children. When I was young, I would occasionally wonder which of us was the black sheep of the family. Was it my brother Matt, who had such a different personality than me, or my sister Erin, who always embraced her eccentricities, or was it one of the younger kids, who I didn’t know quite as well since I left home when they were still small?

As a generally obedient and honest kid who was scrupulous about doing the right thing and practiced above-average conformity to the principles of his religious upbringing, I always thought of myself as the conventional one in the family.

It wasn’t until quite recently that I had an epiphany: no, you doofus. It’s you. You are by far the most different, the most outspoken, the most controversial, the most independent, and the one nobody else in the family is ever really sure they want to be associated with. You, not the others, are the black sheep.

My own mother, when someone she’d run into at church would ask if she was related to me, her quasi-(in)famous oldest son and Catholic pundit, would immediately put a disclaimer on the conversation before even knowing what the interlocutor thought of me: “I don’t always agree with what he says!”

It should have clued me in much sooner.

Instead, I saw my life as a picture of conformity. And in many respects, it was. I had a big mouth, a dark and sometimes cruel sense of humor, and a pugnacious, argumentative attitude, but my conditioning made me an observant rule follower and generally docile to authority.

I was raised to fear hell, and the watchful eye of a God who was always aware of what I was doing, even if my parents were not, who would punish me accordingly if I fell short of his expectations. In my large extended family, one’s involvement in and adherence to the Catholic faith was the only real social currency. Nobody cared if you became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, but if you said the rosary or went to daily Mass regularly, now that was something. I never got any wise counsel about going to college or figuring out a career or how to provide for the large family I was supposed to have some day, but there was always room to discuss, debate, or devote ourselves to religion. As a teen with a blossoming intellect, I would sit at my uncle’s dining room table with the men of the family and discuss religion and politics. If my opinions were informed, I had a place in that conversation, and was treated with respect.

I was desperate for affirmation and positive attention, so I found myself eagerly engaging in such activities and pursuits. I continued this even after I left my home in rural Upstate New York and moved on to other ventures. I did missionary work in several countries, founded and ran youth groups, taught religion in both a Sunday School and private Catholic academy, and got a bachelor’s degree in Theology from a university that bragged about its “dynamic orthodoxy.” Two decades later, working as a freelance writer for various Catholic publications in addition to my day job, I found myself hounded by an idea I could not dismiss: I saw a crisis coming in the Catholic Church under Francis, its new pope, about whom I had experienced a deep and unsettling feeling of darkness on the day of his election. I felt that I needed to do something about it. To warn people of the storm I saw coming, and hopefully, to help them to withstand the winds that would soon be blowing through whatever was left of Christendom. Every day, I found myself preoccupied with this imagery, and the feeling of urgency that I needed to do something with the awareness that I had at a time when so few others seemed to notice.

Several months went by, but the feeling that I needed to act did not subside. Unable to get the idea out of my mind, I finally pulled the trigger and founded my own Catholic publication, OnePeterFive, which rocketed quickly in popularity and almost as rapidly grew to become the most-read traditionalist Catholic website in the world.

I felt as though I had found my life’s purpose. Every skill I had learned at every seemingly unrelated job, my quest for recognition and respect as a Catholic thinker (started at those dinner table conversations of my youth), and my passionate instinct to dig up and expose the truth had all come together in one unified purpose, and the thing had absolutely taken off. After a patchwork career working in positions that were only tangential to my primary skillset, chronically underpaid as the father of a large family, I was finally a success, both in terms of personal accomplishment and financial sufficiency. For the first time in our marriage, we didn’t need two incomes, and I could act as the sole provider.

Everything seemed to have fallen into place. I thought I had finally made it.

But my daily work examining the corruption in the Church, coupled with my devotion to identifying and giving voice to uncomfortable truth had put me on a collision course with a realization I could never have anticipated: the discovery that the religion I had invested everything in and prioritized above all else for my entire life did not appear to live up to its own rather vaunted claims.

In covering the scandalous hierarchy and the proliferation of theological error, doctrinal contradictions, and malfeasance in governance, and in trying to reassure my audience that God was in control, and was surely not going to allow such travesties to continue in violation of the promise he made that “the gates of hell would not prevail” over his Church, I slammed head-first into the deep and unshakable conviction that I was participating in the perpetration of a fraud, of which I was also a victim.

What I saw was not the behavior or trappings of a divinely-protected and guided institution, but that of an entirely human invention making completely unfalsifiable and extraordinarily grandiose supernatural claims. My personal theological doubt over the dogma of papal infallibility blossomed into questions about other teachings, and in short order, the fundamental narrative of Christianity as a whole. Personal circumstances in my life over which I had spent much time in fervent prayer showed no signs of getting better, and were in fact seemingly getting worse. I was growing increasingly restless and angry. I felt my faith crumbling, and knowing how severe the fallout would be if that came to fruition, I begged God not to let it happen. I was in the middle of raising a small army of children, and I had an audience of millions. I knew myself. There was no way, if I reached the conviction that I had been a part of something false, that I could simply quietly disappear. I had honed my blade on inconvenient truth-telling, and this would be no different.

So I prayed desperate prayers that it all would not just slip through my fingers as I could feel it doing.

Like all my other prayers, these, too, went unanswered. My family and I had spent the better part of two decades making big sacrifices to try to live the most authentic and traditional Catholic life we could, and it felt as though all we received for that was more difficulty and unhappiness. Finally, when a young, arrogant priest at a parish we had helped to found went on a power trip and denied two of my children sacraments for specious reasons, something in me gave way. It was the last straw. My seemingly unshakeable faith, bent and bowed under an already heavy load, finally snapped.

Four decades of active, orthodox Catholicism collapsed almost overnight into the messy uncertainty of agnosticism. Catholicism had not just been my religion, it had been my entire identity. It had been the one adjective I wanted associated with my name more than any other, and now I was nothing but an apostate — pitiable at best; but in the eyes of many, I had become an enemy of the things I had once (and they still) held dear.

But there was nothing I could do. What I had seen could not be unseen. I succumbed to a deep and paralyzing depression that lasted over a year. I had no idea who I was without this thing that had always been at the center of my life, giving it structure and purpose and order, but I also could not find a way to profess any creed with honesty and conviction. I felt the loss of something vital, and I questioned myself constantly. But I would not lie and say “credo” when it was no longer possible to do so truthfully.

I was stuck.

The upside was that through this grueling process of deconstruction, which continues at my other Substack, The Skojec File, I experienced a kind of rebirth and renewal. Unresolved childhood and religious trauma was at last surfacing and demanding to be dealt with; the breaking down of a lifetime of indoctrination, brainwashing, and fear was long overdue and utterly necessary for me to become a whole person. I came to realize with a deep and surprising conviction that I had spent my life pretending to know with certitude what could never be proven, and had carried that pretense with such utter uncritical confidence that my epistemology was completely broken.

I had no idea that I didn’t know what I couldn’t know.

I also realized that an authoritarian childhood home and an authoritarian religion, both enforced through threats and fear, had made me into an unquestioning conformist. I never went through a rebellious phase. I never partied or went off the rails. I never left the Church in my reckless youth and came back later, older and wiser, but carrying the scars of my sinful past to ground me. My entire youth was spent in an ever-increasing pursuit of a performative Catholic life. I was determined to show God I was on his team, in the hopes he would reward me — or at least not punish me too severely — when I finally shuffled off this mortal coil.

And then, suddenly, I found myself at mid-life, feeling like my eyes were open for the first time. Old, ingrained reflexes to submit to authority and not question began to relax, and finally to let go of their death grip. My willingness to be docile to prevailing narratives and authoritative institutions and my allergy to conspiracy theories slowly, inexorably began to recede.

I had lived my entire life as a white sheep, because it’s what I was trained to do: be a good soldier, keep your head down, don’t make waves, follow the rules, obey God, live a virtuous life, embrace suffering, go to heaven.

But as much as I had imbibed all of this, I was at constant war with myself. Seven years spent as one of the most vocal critics of the pope while trying to live as an orthodox Catholic was cognitive dissonance on steroids. I began to become a public critic of the religion I had once been willing to defend with my life, to the horror and opprobrium of many of my former supporters. It was psychologically, emotionally, and financially costly. I went from being a good provider to a quasi-catatonic mess. There were times when I — a man notorious for loquacity — could not even find the power to string sentences together. I would just sit there like a deer in the headlights, feeling sick to my stomach, unable to articulate emotions and thoughts and a deep and abiding grief I did not fully comprehend.

It was, I realize now, an experience of ego death.

And it was utterly crushing.

Slowly, painfully, I crawled out of Plato’s proverbial cave. At first, I was so angry. But gradually, acceptance came. Now, every day, I grow more eager to learn about and unearth the real world that lives beneath the pervasive veneer of manufactured narratives and managed reality. I no longer take for granted that I know “how the story ends” or the “ultimate truth” or “what God wants” from me. Frankly, I don’t even know if God is there, or if he is, that he cares.

I am cautiously open to this. And I still ask him to show me if he is there, and does care. I am critical of religion, but I also see that we are inheritors of the world that Christianity wrought, and that it is a markedly better place than the pagan world it replaced.

But it is dying before our eyes. And even as a tentative non-believer, I’m deeply concerned.

We are being actively lied to, manipulated, and kept in the dark. There are no sacred cows, no unaskable questions, no unutterable thoughts. We are heading into a new dark age, not stymied by too little information, but overwhelmed with too much — a great deal of it intentionally falsified. We swim collectively in a sea of noise and distraction in which we must search diligently to find authentic signals.

The truth is still out there, it’s just harder to find.

Here in the West — and my focus is particularly on America, where I live — our countries and our culture are being taken from us. The natural-born citizens of Western nations, regardless of racial and ethnic background, are being inorganically and forcibly replaced by foreigners who share neither our values nor our way of life. Even as a doubter in matters of faith, I recognize that we imperil ourselves by disinheriting the Christian ethos that animates and undergirds whatever is left of our once-great civilization.

I recently came across the concept of something known as “a nailhouse.” If you’re unfamiliar with it, it looks like this:

It’s a particularly strong idiom in Asian culture, where rapid urban development often overwhelms and destroys traditional communities:

[Nailhouses] are best described as standalone buildings, “usually a residential property,” says the Lonely Robot Theme, an anonymous Substack writer, that continue “to stand amidst rapid urban development despite facing pressure from developers and authorities to vacate or make way for new construction projects.” 

In some instances, the structure will be in the middle of a roadway. Or surrounded by centrally planned development. It might be a seemingly ancient home or shop darkened by the shadows of modern buildings around and above it. The homes earned their label because they are “like stubborn nails refusing to be removed from the ground,” according to the writer.

Whatever the name, these unyielding holdouts are a sharp stick in the eye of planners, at times inflicting enough pain to “lead to changes in urban planning and development,” the Lonely Robot Theme adds. Dogged “opposition from determined property owners” has sometimes convinced authorities to “reconsider their plans and strive for more balanced and sustainable development.”

What can follow is “a dialogue between citizens and decision-makers,” after which planners – hopefully – respect locals’ desires rather than running over them. The writer traces nail houses to China, where they “have become a potent symbol of resistance,” then rapidly spread to other Asian nations.

This mentality is instructive. We cannot afford to go along mindlessly with the herd. We cannot afford to sit idly by as everything we have known and loved and cared about is taken from us. Not all progress is good. Not all tradition is outdated and bad. But the reverse is also true. We cannot afford to do things just because “that’s how they have always been done,” but neither can we reject what has been tested and proven to be beneficial. It does us no good to LARP as though we live in times long past, simply because we pine for “the good old days,” but neither can we succumb like uncritical rubes to whatever is new, fashionable, and exciting.

Once again, there is a storm on the horizon. This time, many more people are already awake to the danger. The problems facing the West are multifactorial, but some areas of specific concern have arisen as the highest priorities:

• The world is growing increasingly dangerous, with regional conflicts threatening, through mismanagement and outright malfeasance, to grow into global conflagrations. Russia and Ukraine. Israel and the Middle East. China and Taiwan. These theaters of conflict are ripe to explode into something more if something is not done.

• Immigration and migration have become issues of enormous concern in nations across Europe and North America. Suicidal border policies and intentional programs of demographic manipulation seek to alter electoral outcomes and seek to permanently shift the balance of power. Native populations are being overwhelmed by people who share neither language nor culture, causing conflict, disruption, and displacement. Criminal and terrorist elements are taking advantage of larger immigration flows to bring enemy combatants into our countries to hide and plot violent domestic events.

• Gender ideology has opened a rift between those with common sense and a desire for propriety and decency and those who want to advance this radical agenda at any cost. Children are being permanently mutilated, their reproductive systems altered or destroyed in the service of mental illness, isolation, and depression, with these “treatments” euphemistically branded as “gender affirming care.” Men and women are viewed not as distinct and compatible biological and spiritual entities, but as fungible beings with no basis in physical reality. Women and girls in particular are in increasing amounts of personal physical danger as men posing as women enter their most private spaces as well as their segregated competitions designed to keep them safe and competitive in the arena of physical activity and sport.

• Fundamental human dignity continues to be eroded by abortion, sex trafficking, and the popularization and ubiquitization of pornographic content creation as an accepted and normalized form of work and “entertainment.” Public degeneracy is on the rise, and confidence and happiness in mate selection among young men and women appears to be at an all time low. The vulgarization of the West is advancing at a rapid pace, and it affects us all.

• The loss of an authentic culture that produces quality art, music, writing, cinema, and thought leadership is diminishing our collective quality of life. It’s not just derivative, boring, overly-produced and ill-considered trash content that threatens, but the loss of any sense of the transcendental that enfeebles our ability to create works of lasting value.

• A demographic crisis is looming, and in the next decade or two, it will utterly re-shape our world. Populations are facing collapse across Asia and Europe, and this will re-shape the world economically and socially. The Breton Woods era is over, and globalism is in its final days. By the time today’s young children are grown, the world will look completely different than it has for the past 75 years — in other words, the only world everyone alive today has ever known.

• The growing influence of unelected bureaucrats and deep state plutocrats in our politics is threatening to undermine democratic self-governance and usher in an Orwellian way of life. The increasingly transparent manipulation of the populace by the media, the blatant dishonesty and corruption of our political classes, and the loss of trust in institutions and experts is creating an emergent phenomenon of alarm and awareness that is destabilizing societies even further. Conspiracy theorism is rampant, and not without good reason, but accurate discernment of truth from falsehood is becoming an increasingly rare and necessary skill. Separating what is really dangerous from imagined and exaggerated threats is becoming absolutely essential.

• The Artificial Intelligence revolution is advancing at a breathtaking pace. It will completely transform countless industries, displace millions of jobs, increase the need for new, sustainable forms of energy, and forever change our relationship with the technologies that have become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives.

• The de-stigmatization and disclosure of humanity’s encounters with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) and non-human intelligence will have a profound impact on humanity. Something beyond our comprehension is occurring, and it is interacting with us and with our military apparatus in ways that challenge our supremacy on the planet and may well re-define our understanding of the laws of physics, the universe itself, and our place in it.

There are undoubtedly additional areas of concern. These are the ones that rise effortlessly to mind. These are the kinds of topics I hope to explore here at Black Sheep.

We aren’t here to make news or break it. We won’t be the first on most stories. My hope is that we can offer thoughtful commentary on issues that matter as they arise, as well as covering topics that are evergreen.

We need to be able to discuss these issues openly, analyze them fearlessly, and propose actionable solutions. I created Black Sheep in the hopes that it can become one beachhead in a multi-front effort to take back our communities, nations, and cultures from those who seek to destroy them.

Just like in the months leading up to founding OnePeterFive, I have been feeling an increasing urgency to take action; to open a discussion about what we are witnessing and what we can do about it, building a community with those of like mind. Like an obsession, an earworm, the name and idea of Black Sheep has come unbidden into my mind hundreds of times in the past few months.

I decided I could no longer wait for the right opportunity to move forward. Better to start and course correct along the way than to wait too long and miss the moment.

The moment is undoubtedly here.

We do not need to agree on every particular to be allies. We need only to seek the same thing the generations before us did: the preservation of our homeland and way of living, and a better life for our children and those who come after us.

I do not intend this to be a solo effort. I intend to invite other thinkers I respect to collaborate in this endeavor. I have a tendency to be a lone wolf, but this is not something any of us can tackle alone. That said, I don’t have a lineup ready to go. The feeling that this needed to be started right now, today, before things get any crazier, meant that I’m moving forward with what I have. We’ll course-correct en route.

Today, I’m just planting a seed. I don’t know how it will grow or change, but I expect this project to be dynamic, evolving as necessary to meet the needs of those it aims to serve. It’s an effort that will take a lot of time, and as such, I have enabled paid tiers to help fund the work. Initially, all of the content here will be offered for free. At some point, I may introduce paywalled and premium content to facilitate the financial stability of the enterprise. I am a writer, at the end of the day, and this is how I and others like me make our living.

For now, we’re going to bootstrap this thing. If you’re OK with figuring things out as we go along, we’re going to get on just fine. I’ve chosen as our logo this particularly agitated (and somewhat) humorous Black Sheep, who looks like he is bleating out an energetic, “WTF, are you serious?!” like so many of us do every day when we read the news.

Thank you for joining us. Please subscribe today to ensure you don’t miss any updates going forward.

Let’s think outside the tribe. Let’s not be afraid to question the official story. Let’s demand more than we are being given.

Together, let’s do everything we can to take our civilization back.