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Do “‘Conspiracy’ Thinking” Francis & his Inner Circle have Paranoia?

August 29, 2023

Newsweek

Pope Doesn’t Get America, Ex-Priest Says, After Francis Blasts US Catholics

Francis and his inner circle appear to have symptoms of paranoia. Cardinal Gerhard Mueller in a 2017 interview revealed that Francis told him:

“They tell me you’re my enemy.”

Muller in the interview said the “magic circle” around Francis does “spying on alleged opponents” and tells him who are his friends or enemies.

It seems that Francis may be overly attached and surrounded by certain persons with unhealthy thought processes and strange conspiracy ideas.

The Vatican Insider usually a solid news source which has access to ranking Vatican insiders close to the Francis on October 19, 2016 wrote a tabloid like paranoid article.

It slandered anyone remotely criticizing the questionable prudential actions and non- infallible teachings of Francis.

The Insider claimed that those who question Francis are in a global conspiracy with Russian strongman Putin against the him.

Phil Lawler and his CatholicCulture.org which defends many of Francis’s teachings and even the Argentine norm of Amoris Laetitia when commenting on this article said:

It is “likely…people surrounding Pope Francis” have a “paranoid style” and have fallen into ‘conspiracy’ thinking that “see enemies wherever there is resistance to their agenda.” [https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/the-city-gates.cfm?id=1367]

Francis like those who surround him appears to have fallen into paranoid and conspiracy thought processes as shown by his thinking the wishy-washy Muller is his “enemy.”

This is the namby-pamby Muller who while working in the Vatican attacked the Dubia Cardinals to the “bewilderment” of his staff at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith because he contradicted “everything he said… on the matter until now” according to Vatican expert Edward Pentin. (National Catholic Register, “Cardinal Muller TV Interview Causes Bewilderment,” January 9, 2017)

If Francis thinks the indecisive Muller is his “enemy,” who endorsed Amoris Laetitia and before said the divorce and remarried can’t receive Communion unless chaste, then it appears that the he may have dementia.

Alzheimer experts say a symptom of dementia can be paranoia.

The Alzheimer’s Foundation of America says individuals “with dementia may become paranoid.”

The Every Day Health post “The Seven Stages of Dementia- Alzheimer’s Disease Center” says a sign of severe dementia is:

“Changes in personality or behavior, such as increased paranoia.” (Everydayhealth.com, By Madeline Vann, MPH)

Wikipedia says paranoia “is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety and fear…typically includes…beliefs of conspiracy.”

Even EWTN commentator Robert Royal of The Catholic Thing said in the 2014 article “Pope Francis Needs New Friends” that Francis appears to be surrounded by certain persons with strange non-rational conspiracy ideas:

“He’s clearly in a bubble” with Cardinals like the German Kasper who wants “God to repeal the Laws of Non-contradiction” and radicals like the Honduran Maraiaga who were leading Francis to “connect…global poverty-with a kind of conspiracy theory about arms sales and war is simply bizarre.”

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html 

 –  LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.’”

–  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes: 

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html

– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”:
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.

Pray an Our Father now for America.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.SHARE

August 30, 2023

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

August 28, 2023

Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land.

Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable — a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to pre-civilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, an FBI and DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women’s sports and their locker room privacy?

We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to undo the work of the prior 12 generations. Consider the following:

ü Three leftwing prosecutors are criminalizing politics with more than 90 simultaneous indictments of Donald Trump, the ex-president and currently the leading Republican primary candidate. While New York prosecutor Letitia James is hounding Trump with a $250 million state lawsuit against the Trump organization and family, on the pretense of supposedly Trump overvaluing his real estate and filing inaccurate financial statements.

ü Is there any Mafia don, mass murderer, or terrorist who has faced so many indictments or suits in so many jurisdictions at almost the same time?

ü The prosecutors’ immediate lawfare agendas seem transparent enough. They wish to bankrupt candidate Trump with endless legal costs, humiliate him with his mugshot blasted over the Internet, put endless Lilliputian legal ropes over a shackled candidate Gulliver,  inflate the ego and agendas of local prosecutors, and purportedly earn Trump empathy enough to win the nomination only to be hemorrhaged with still more indictments, gag orders, and court appearances to bleed him out in the general election.

ü Americans ask themselves questions whose answers are never given. Why are all these Trump prosecutors leftwing or with Democratic connections?

ü Would any of the 90-something indictments for “crimes” of years past have been lodged against a citizen Trump who had retired from politics?

ü Why are these indictments of alleged wrongdoing of years ago now in summer 2023 suddenly both being synchronized in leftwing jurisdictions of New York, Washington, Miami, and Atlanta with the beginning of the 2024 election cycle?

ü Are any of the indictments against Trump also applicable to others?

ü Alvin Bragg’s charge of campaign finance violations (Hillary Clinton, 2016)?

ü Jack Smith’s allegations of encouraging mass civil unrest (Kamala Harris, 2020)?

ü Illegally removing and possessing classified federal documents (Joe Biden 2009-2022)?

ü Letitia James’s lawsuit alleging financial irregularities and fraud (Al Sharpton 2009-2014)?

ü Fani Willis’s claim that Trump was seeking to sabotage the constitutional duties of state electors (Martin Sheen, and an array of B-list Hollywood actors, 2016) and colluding to interfere with an election (Fani Willis 2003-4)?

ü Will any losing Republican candidate in a contested election any longer question the integrity of questionable balloting—in the manner of Vice President Al Gore in 2000, Sen. Barbara Boxer and 32 Democratic congressional representatives in 2004, candidate Jill Stein or Hillary Clinton in 2016, or Stacey Abrams 2018—and thereby risk financially and career-crimpling indictments?

ü Will conservative district attorneys in places like Wyoming, Alabama, or West Virginia now seek to indict Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Gavin Newsom to earn notoriety, weaken the opposing party, and leapfrog to higher office in the manner that we should expect a Fani Willis or Alvin Bragg to be currently planning?

ü When Republicans retake the Congress and White House, will they begin indicting all the weaponized prosecutors who colluded to exempt a grifting Hunter Biden for five years? Will they try Joe Biden as a private citizen for his prior corruption over the last 15 years?

ü Why would Donald Trump believe the 2020 election was “rigged?” Was he cribbing that belief from liberal journalist Molly Ball’s braggadocious 2021 Time essay? After all, she outlined what she called a leftwing “cabal” and “conspiracy” to change voting laws, turn on/turn off the 2020 Antifa/BLM street protests, absorb the work of registrars, and suppress unwelcome social media news.

ü Was it more morally suspect to question the ethics surrounding the election year 2020 or for Mark Zuckerberg to infuse $419 million to absorb asymmetrically the work of the registrars in key swing precincts?

A Cardboard Cutout President

We are witnessing the daily deterioration of President Biden to the point that caricatures and jokes about his senility are no longer funny. He is not just an embarrassment but becoming an existential danger to the country. Does anyone believe that in a national crisis over Taiwan or nuclear escalation in Ukraine, Joe Biden would or could make the final decision?

Biden cannot finish a teleprompter sentence without slurring his words, losing his place, or screaming and whispering incoherently. If that is his public persona, what he is like in private sessions of governance?

He spontaneously both shouts angrily and creepily whispers for effect. Moving a lightweight aluminum beach chair becomes a Herculean task.

In almost every impromptu speech Biden flat-out lies or spins self-serving autobiographical fantasies—often amid foreign dignitaries, grieving families, and refugees from devastating natural disasters.

Biden often does not know where he is on stage or where he is to enter or exit. He is one fall from oblivion.

Not since Woodrow Wilson’s final year in office, has any president simply been unable to fulfill his duties, both physically and cognitively.

Or perhaps the country is in the same position as when an ailing Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944 was deemed just hale enough to get elected and continue Democratic control of the White House, but deemed not healthy enough to finish his first year in office—necessitating the rapid removal from the ticket of the socialist Vice President—and an otherwise likely 1945 President—Henry Wallace.

Yet there has been almost no serious speculation in Congress or among the cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment. This silence is doubly strange given the Left’s former fixation between 2017-21 with removing Trump by any means possible—including invoking the 25th Amendment.

That silly effort led to the surreal—the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and the deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein scheming to wiretap Trump in private conversations to reveal his supposed craziness–or the Congress dragging in an incompetent Yale psychiatrist to testify that at a distance she had diagnosed Trump as demented.

Do we recall ex-Pentagon officials and officers talking openly about a military coup to remove the supposedly touched commander-in-chief?

Our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs contacted the head of the People’s Liberation Army to warn him that Trump might be unhinged. So is Gen. Mark Milley now making yet another call to Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army to warn him that Joe Biden is dangerously disturbed?

It is precisely that entire cast of characters who now sit mum as Joe Biden believes we are fighting in Iraq against the Russians or that his late son Beau was killed in action in Iraq, or it is impossible to square the tens of millions of dollars that flowed from abroad to the Biden accounts with any concrete expertise rendered or income reported as taxable.

Is the tolerance of Biden’s senescence because his blank stares and mental confusion prove useful to the Left by exempting the president from offering any defense of his mostly defenseless policies or defending his absurd claims to know nothing of the Biden family grifting operations that were predicated on his own offices?

Or do the puppeteers, the Obamas, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the hard leftists of the party find a non-compos mentis Biden mannequin a useful veneer in pushing through their extreme agendas? Or does the media call the shots, especially after they propelled a basement-bound Biden to the White House?

Mainstreaming Corruption

There have been a few corrupt presidents in our past, who (as in the case of Lyndon Johnson) left office far richer than when they entered, were surrounded by rogues (Grant and Harding), or were masters of leveraging and grifting long-term contracts and networks in their lame duck tenures to ensure their impending multimillionaire status the day they left office (the Clintons and Obamas).

But never in memory has an entire extended presidential family been involved in selling influence for millions of dollars in quid pro quo lucre—the vast majority of such ill-gotten gains likely untaxed, by being channeled through sham companies, foreign deposits, fake names, and alias email accounts.

Never has a corrupt presidential family itself offered so much proof of its own guilt. Do the Democrats have any idea of the smelly Biden albatross hanging about their collective necks?

How much longer can they continue to dismiss the communications on the Hunter Biden laptop?

Or the testimonies of IRS whistleblowers?

Or the assertions of Biden family business associates?

Or the statements of relevant Ukrainian oligarchs?

Or the latest assertions of Viktor Shokin?

Or the extraordinary efforts of the Bidens to stonewall subpoenaed documents, use fake names and shadow email accounts, compromise federal prosecutors, appoint sham special counsels, and use media toadies to the point of embarrassment to hide the ugly truth?

In sum, what are the Bidens so afraid of that prompted them to corrupt the DOJ and FBI to stonewall any discussion of the huge cash infusions that came from abroad into their family coffers?

Americans have impeached or nearly impeached presidents before for abuse of power, lying under oath, or supposedly using the government to pursue their own personal agendas or harass their enemies.

But never has a president been so clearly compromised by bribery from shady foreign government-related grandees in expectation of favorable treatment.

In other words, there is growing evidence that Joe and Hunter Biden, and likely Jim Biden as well, made millions of dollars on the hopes that then Vice President Biden, and perhaps one day a future president Biden, would alter or compromise U.S. foreign policy on the expectation of getting rich.

The State Department’s Ukraine team deemed Viktor Shokin making progress in rooting out corruption. So why did Joe Biden without consultation fire him? Did Biden put his own financial interests above the country’s—in a fashion that the Founders worried was impeachable “treason?”

If the current investigations are not halted or compromised, we may soon learn why the Constitution explicitly specified bribery and treason as an ironclad cause for impeachment.

Can Americans even comprehend that they have elected a dishonest man to the presidency who is protected by his senility, his decades-long everyman construct of ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton, his usefulness as a prop to the radical leftwing agenda, and the defensive and offensive weaponization of the criminal justice system?

Can Americans digest that instead of campaigning against Donald Trump, outdebating him, outspending him, and outfoxing him, their government must unleash kindred prosecutors to destroy Trump by blowing up the entire tradition of blind American jurisprudence?

Are the media and left claiming that to save the rule of law from Trump, they must first destroy it?

The Invalid Identification of Contraries With Contradictories

VITAL WORKS RECONSIDERED, #32

By Donald DeMarco | January-February 2013

Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Crom­well, Connecticut. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth & Charity Forum (www.truthandcharityforum.org).

Atlas Shrugged. By Ayn Rand.

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, might be the most perplexing and infuriating novel ever written. Its publication in 1957 was met with a tirade of scathing reviews from literary critics of diverse temperaments. On the Left, Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.” On the Right, former communist Whittaker Chambers, writing in National Review, said he found it “sophomoric” and “remarkably silly.” “Out of a lifetime of reading,” he wrote, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.” Ruth Chapin Blackmun saw it as a “polemic inadequately disguised as a novel.” Writing in The Saturday Review, Helen Beal Woodward said she found it “shot through with hatred,” an opinion shared by Granville Hicks, who wrote in The New York Times that it was “written out of hate.” A review in Time magazine asked, “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman — in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?”

Atlas Shrugged is 1,084 pages in length (small type, slim margins). It includes a bombastic, authoritarian, and tediously repetitious speech by the book’s hero, John Galt, that goes on and on for an astonishing 58 pages. The speech re-appears in Ayn Rand’s book For the New Intellectual, where it takes up 77 pages in slightly larger type.

Yet Atlas Shrugged has sold more than seven million copies. In 2009 its annual sales reached a high-water mark of 520,000. That same year it ranked #1 in Amazon’s “Fiction and Literature” category. It also took the top spot in a 1998 Modern Library poll. The Ayn Rand Institute donates 400,000 copies of Rand’s works annually, including Atlas Shrugged, to high-school students.

Rand’s book has had a decisive impact on a variety of influential people, including several prominent economists — Ludwig von Mises and Alan Greenspan among them — and an assortment of U.S. political figures. Of particular interest is Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, a Catholic who ran for vice president on the Republican ticket in the last election. Although the urban legend has been debunked that Ryan has required all his staff members to read Atlas Shrugged, there is little doubt that Rand has influenced his economic thinking. At a Washington, D.C., gathering five years ago honoring the author, Ryan stated, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”

What is Atlas Shrugged all about, and what is the meaning of its curious title? The novel explores a dys­topian America during an unidentified age in which its most productive citizens refuse to be exploited any longer by increasing taxes and tighter government regulations, and simply disappear. The consequence of U.S. society losing its ablest and most self-actualizing individuals is world collapse. John Galt, the heroic leader of this exodus, achieves precisely what he set out to achieve: “stopping the motor of the world.”

Galt returns from his self-imposed exile to save the disintegrating world by urging people to believe in themselves and work productively and achieve individual happiness. He concludes his 58-page polemic with these words: “I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Galt closes the novel by gesturing his tribute to the importance of money, “the barometer of a society’s virtue”: “He raised his hand — and over the desolate earth, he traced in space the sign of the dollar.”

In Rand’s thinking, the productive individuals have been carrying the world on their backs, as did the mythical titan, Atlas. In the novel, Francisco d’Anconia, a copper industrialist and Galt’s closest friend, asks him, “If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling, but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort, the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?” D’Anconia answers his own question: “What would you tell him? To shrug.”

When Atlas shrugged, the whole world toppled, symbolizing the need the world has for the courageous and self-assertive individuals who have been carrying it and have now decided to disappear and let the world collapse.

The philosophy embedded in Atlas Shrugged is the inversion of Marxist economics. For Rand, the ruling class is more important to society than the working class. The members of the former group are the producers of wealth; those of the latter are “useless parasites.” What her philosophy does have in common with Marxism is the view that there is a radical split between one class and another. Concomitant with this split is a lofty evaluation of one class and a low evaluation of the other. But for Rand, the ruling class operates according to a realistic metaphysics while the working class operates according to the “metaphysics of a leech,” illicitly drawing its sustenance from others.

The great disparity between these two groups is made abundantly evident in a pivotal episode in the novel in which all the passengers on a train die in a tunnel accident. Rand, narrating, expresses no sorrow for the victims of this catastrophe and implies that they deserved to perish because they were living with the wrong set of ideas. She describes, one by one, the mental errors of these unfortunate souls: The sociologist traveling in Car No. 1 taught that individual abilities are of no consequence. The journalist in Car No. 2 believed that it was proper to use compulsion “for a good cause.” The elderly schoolteacher in Car No. 3 taught her students that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil. The newspaper publisher in Car No. 4 believed that men are evil by nature. And so on. These first four passengers could have been philosophical reincarnations of Comte, Marx, Rousseau, and Hobbes, respectively.

Atlas Shrugged, as its author has described it, explores “the role of man’s mind in existence.” Rand does not see her characters so much as flesh-and-blood human beings but as carriers of ideas. The hapless train passengers, for example, were indistinguishable from their ideas. And since their minds housed the wrong ideas, in Rand’s view, they lost all justification for living.

It is a perfectly legitimate part of philosophy to refute an idea. But when a character is seen solely as the embodiment of his philosophical ideas, refutation becomes equivalent to assassination.

Neither love nor mercy plays any role in Atlas Shrugged. Characters who have the right ideas — Galt and his like-minded companions — are not loved but admired. And no mercy is given to those poor souls who live by the wrong ideas. All the characters, therefore, are cardboard cutouts. The “objectivist” philosophy that permeates Atlas Shrugged is perfectly suited for someone who is playing Monopoly. In such a game, the players can be as selfish as they want to be. When the game is over, they shake hands and return to their real lives, which are played out under profoundly different rules. In life, selfishness leads to isolation from and contempt for others. In no way can selfishness produce a better world. Real life involves inter-relationships, friendships, and virtue that is based not on admiration but on love. Nobel Prize-winning economist and far-left New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is unusually insightful when he describes Atlas Shrugged as a danger to young readers because it is “a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.”

Atlas, the titan, is tired of holding up the world. He shrugs and lets it fall and splinter into pieces. “Altruism is the root of all evil” — this maxim has a central place in Rand’s philosophy. No one, not even Atlas, should ever sacrifice himself for others.

This image is, indeed, intriguing. But it is also the antithesis of Christ, who willingly bears the weight of the cross, a burden made heavy by the accumulated sins of mankind. Christ wept in the Garden of Geth­semane. His tears were composed of love, mercy, and the hope of redemption. He, as a good shepherd, did not abandon His flock. Atlas shrugged and thereby separated himself from the better part of the human race. It would have been better had Atlas wept and not shrugged. But in Rand’s world, this is to expect too much, even of a titan.

Ayn Rand has been called the “godless goddess of greed.” Greed, not Jesus, is her god. She even titles one of the book’s chapters “The Utopia of Greed.” In rejecting the God of love, she must install herself as His replacement. But she does not make a convincing god. After reading Atlas Shrugged, reviewer John Chamberlain chastised Rand for trying “to rewrite the Sermon on the Mount.”

Rand considered herself to be history’s second greatest philosopher. “The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle,” she once said. As a tribute to this ancient Greek thinker, the three parts of Atlas Shrugged bear references to Aristotle’s logic: “Non-contradiction,” “Either-Or,” and “A is A” (the principle of identity). According to this principle, since A is A, it cannot be other than itself, or non-A. Therefore, any particular thing must be either A or non-A.

It is highly questionable, however, if Ayn Rand was well versed in Aristotelian logic. For example, Aristotle distinguished between contradictory and contrary opposition. Contradictories are always opposed to each other. If one is true, its contradictory is false, and vice versa. A and non-A are contradictories: If something is A, it cannot be non-A; if something is not A, it must be non-A. But with contrary opposition, the opposition is not complete. Both contraries can be simultaneously false. Hot and cold are contraries (within the genus of temperature), but the temperature of a thing can be neither hot nor cold but lukewarm.

Rand’s logical problem, as evident in Atlas Shrugged, is that she sometimes treats contraries as if they were contradictories. She believes that if Marxist collectivism is false, then radical individualism must be true. But these two philosophical views do not contradict each other, according to Aristotelian logic. They are contraries and can therefore be simultaneously false. If this is the case, then something else would be true.

When she labels Christianity as “the best kindergarten of communism possible,” Rand confuses contraries with contra­dictories. Christianity and communism are radically disjunctive belief systems. Christianity, which is concerned with the infinite and immortal value of every human being, is hardly identifiable with the collectivist view that has little or no regard for the individual. John Galt urges his listeners to “sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value.” But it is grossly unfair to characterize all mystics as people who hold individual life as valueless. True Christians are in the world but not of the world. Nonetheless, they regard both worlds — this one and the next — as important, one preparing the way for the other. This is another example of how Rand treats contraries as contradic­tories. It is wrong to be totally selfish; but it is also wrong to consider one’s own life to be worthless.

In a 1964 interview in Playboy magazine, sociologist Alvin Toffler put forth the following question to Rand: “In Atlas Shrugged you wrote, ‘There are two sides to every issue. One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.’ Isn’t this a rather black-and-white set of values?”

Rand responded: “It most certainly is. I most emphatically advocate a black-and-white view of the world. Let us define this. What is meant by the expression ‘black and white’? It means good and evil. Before you can identify anything as gray, as middle of the road, you have to know what is black and what is white, because gray is merely a mixture of the two. And when you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.”

“Then you believe in absolutes?” Toffler asked.

“I do,” was Rand’s laconic reply.

Philosophical ideas, however, do not mix in the mind the way colors do on a palette. Christian personalism is not a mixture of collectivism and radical individualism but an entirely different philosophy. It has its own distinct unity and integrity. It is not a blend and has a rightful claim to its own purity.

When Karol Wojtyla wrote The Acting Person, he exposed the errors of Marxist “totalism” on the one hand, and the errors of Cartesian subjectivism on the other. It was not a case of “either-or” because these two philosophical views were not contradictories but contraries. In the place of these two extremes, the future Bl. John Paul II developed a philosophy of personalism, a dynamic integration of individual uniqueness and communal obligation. The Acting Person discusses what it means to be a unique person, acting with others in the world. St. Augustine undertook a similar task in describing the identity of the human person. He wrote a book refuting Pela­gian­ism, the view that man is wholly good. He wrote another book refuting the opposite view, Manichaeism, that man is essentially corrupt. For Augustine, man is good, created in the image of God, but weakened by original sin. In other words, Augustine found both contraries to be false and proposed a third way that describes the true nature of man. For the Bishop of Hippo, it was not a case of “either-or.”

This notion of the person is completely absent in Atlas Shrugged. But its absence cannot be blamed on Aristotle’s logic. It is ironic that the only philosopher in history to whom Ayn Rand acknowledges any indebtedness is one whom she misunderstands and consequently distorts.

The simplistic, but logically invalid, identification of contraries with contradictories makes life appear to be both easy and appealing. If freedom and authority contradict each other, and if authority is wrong, then freedom must be good. The same simplistic resolutions can be made for the oppositions between self and other, man and God, citizen and government, rights and obligations, will and truth, this life and the life hereafter. Would it not be a glorious life if the self were not encumbered by the other — man by God, citizen by government, and so forth? But life so simplified represents a utopian delusion. The cross, by contrast, is an intersection of two vectors where, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “the fire and the rose are one.”

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The feast of Our Lady’s Assumption draws our mind to Our Blessed Mother as a shining beacon that leads us to God and to Heaven.We need to learn from her example and to make the earth more like heaven. We pray for this every day in the Our Father: “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”But is America more like heaven these days? From mass shootings, abortion and same-sex “marriage,” to the war in the Ukraine we see tragic events. Radical transgender policies are being pushed on our children at school in the name of tolerance. It is a time of confusion and suffering.But you and I can change that through the power of praying the Rosary as Our Blessed Mary told us to do. We need to use the power that was given to us to combat the evil that is devouring our Nation. Together we can win this spiritual war.Honor Our Lady by becoming her next Rally Captain by signing up here.The Rosary is a powerful way to combat the moral decay that is afflicting our Nation and shine Our Blessed Mother Mary’s beacon of goodness into the darkness. Join us by being united in prayer this October by becoming a Rosary Rally Captain.As Pope Pius IX stated; “Give me an army saying the Rosary and I will conquer the world.” Let’s join together across all America and pray the Rosary!Will you please join us in our mission to blanket this great Nation on Saturday, October 14th with over 22,000 Rosary Rallies?Honor Our Lady by becoming her next Rally Captain by signing up here.Become a Rosary Rally Captain and help defeat evil by clicking here!The groundwork has been laid. Our Blessed Lady has given us the power and method to change our world for the good.I invite you to use Our Lady’s power and prayers. I urge you to be a Public Square Rally Captain on October 14, 2023. It’s easier than you think.All it takes is a Rosary and a few friends praying in a public place.And once you say YES and agree to be a rally captain for the 2023 Rosary Crusade, I am certain that the Blessed Mother will grant you many, many graces as a reward for your outstanding efforts to spread Her Fatima message to a sinful and confused world.And I am writing to you and praying for you to accept this special commitment with Our Lady.You can join a brave and pious group of 22,000 Public Square Rosary Captains all across America by CLICKING HERE!What you can accomplish is amazing! Simply Amazing.On October 14th, 2023, you and I, plus tens of thousands of Catholics from Alaska to Puerto Rico, from Maine to Saipan, will all pray the public rosary to Our Lady together.We will pray in reparation for the terrible sins of our nation and to save souls who are cascading toward hell.And our prayers will bring America one HUGE step closer to the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.Let’s make a difference in our Nation and world!I remain your friend, In Jesus and Mary, Robert E. Ritchie Director, America Needs Fatima www.americaneedsfatima.org

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OPINION

How to Destroy a State With the Help of the Church

As liberal lawmakers destroyed the state of New York, Catholic Church leaders stood by and assisted in its demise.

• Greg Cook

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New York has attained a deserved status as a failing and broken state. Residents are fleeing the Empire State for sunnier climes like Florida, and the state’s dominant center, the formerly world-class New York City, faces problems of crime and immigration. Recent headlines showcase the state’s sad plight. LifeSiteNews reported on New York’s enshrinement of wokeness (DEI, LGBTQ+, etc.) in schools, making dissent a potentially punishable offense. And the New York Post recently reported: 

Nearly 160 Wall Street firms have moved their headquarters out of New York since the end of 2019, taking nearly $1 trillion—yes, that’s trillion with a ‘T’—in assets under management with them, according to data from 17,000 companies compiled by Bloomberg. 

As a native New Yorker who eagerly returned to the state in 2017—from fifteen purgatorial years in the Pacific Northwest—I don’t find these trends scary enough to make me move. After all, there’s really no place safe anymore. Red staters, I’m talking to you. While I want to look at religious and spiritual reasons for New York’s current predicament, let’s first consider those not primarily spiritual in nature.  

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

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How do you destroy a state? Politicize everything and install one-party rule. Tax, tax, tax. Treat every problem from an unnaturally huge urban perspective and use one-size-fits-all solutions to everything. Keep increasing the size of government and the state work force. Keep finding ways to interfere with the rights of property owners to use their own property as they see fit. Inculcate learned helplessness in vast numbers of the state’s residents and push policies guaranteed to corrode and tear families apart. Destroy one of the greatest cities in the world by overregulation, permissiveness, social engineering, and neglect. How do you destroy a state? Politicize everything and install one-party rule. Tax, tax, tax. Treat every problem from an unnaturally huge urban perspective and use one-size-fits-all solutions to everything.Tweet This

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But the death blow to this great state comes with the help of what should be our ally against all these attacks: the Catholic Church. A consideration of the life and death of retired Albany bishop Howard Hubbard will serve as a suitable introduction to this sad fact that New York has been betrayed by Catholic authorities. (For coverage of Hubbard’s career, see here, here, and here.) Hubbard was proud of his stances against Church teaching, as indicated in the obituary he paid a PR firm to publish. It said, in part,  

For 50 years Hubbard was a leader of the liberal wing of the American Catholic Church and a leading voice in public life in New York, an activist and outspoken advocate for peace and social justice, respect for life, care for the poor and marginalized, and friendship with other faiths, particularly the Jewish community. 

He vociferously advocated for ordaining women and for the Church to confess to racism and anti-Semitism. In his early days as a “street priest,” he helped establish Hope House (crisis intervention) and Providence House (drug rehabilitation). Consecrated a bishop in 1977 at age 38, he ruled the Diocese of Albany (New York’s capital city) for thirty-seven years. During that time, he controlled the state’s Catholic policy and was also prominent on national committees and even the Vatican’s Secretariat for Nonbelievers. Notably absent from the obituary is any mention of Christ or the Gospel.  

In the past few years, Hubbard was investigated for neglectful oversight of predator priests and himself engaging in abuse. He asked for release from the priesthood in 2022 (which was denied) and attempted civil marriage earlier this year. In the life of one prominent New York prelate, we have a summary of all the ills of post-conciliar Catholicism and a primer on the malpractice of Catholic leadership which contributed to New York’s downfall. But Hubbard’s wayward trajectory could be a case study for other states. 

To mention a few other examples of this Catholic malpractice, we could quickly name several high-profile New Yorkers who ascended the ladder to the heights of the state’s Democratic Party while claiming they were faithful to the Church. The current governor, Kathy Hochul, is one. Her immediate predecessor, the disgraced Andrew Cuomo, is another. Unlike his father, Mario, Andrew made no pretense of agonizing over moral aspects of policy and law, and he defiantly installed his mistress in the Governor’s Mansion. Even the pugnacious Daniel Patrick Moynihan bought into the Democrat agenda.  

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Lawmakers have targeted the Church in legislation such as extending the statute of limitations on sex abuse allegations, which has resulted in hundreds of new cases against the Church in New York. Subsequently, most of the state’s dioceses have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  

My own rural corner is not immune to these problems, but the biggest problem is probably demographic. The people who go to Church are dying out and not being replaced. The nearest diocesan-affiliated Catholic school is at least an hour away. Religious orders have evaporated, and increasing numbers of priests are foreign-born. Covid restrictions kept many away from Mass; and of those, many never returned. 

All these problems would be enough, but they are compounded by a loss of a sense of mission, of proclaiming Jesus Christ crucified. In June, the month of the Sacred Heart, a “Pride” celebration was held at the village’s main park, which happens to sit directly in front of the Catholic Church. Neither the pastor nor parishioners responded, but a group of local traditional Catholics did. An organizer badgered the pastor’s office until he finally replied, begrudgingly consenting to a Rosary gathering inside the Church building. He averred that the “Pride” celebration was “just about mental health.” The group prayed all fifteen decades of the Rosary in reparation for the offenses nearby against the Sacred Heart. 

In August, my wife and I visited the annual county fair. I noticed at least two faith groups with volunteers on-site reaching out to fairgoers. The local parish had an unmanned exhibit inside a hall that featured outreach services—not the Gospel. But at the local historical society’s display of uniforms, we happened on a beautiful set of vestments (“fiddleback”) from 1939. The message seemed to be that Catholicism here in my hometown is either just another social service or a museum piece.  

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A letter to the bishop was responded to by the Vicar for Clergy with a defense of first feeding body and not soul that echoed Dostoevsky’s damning “Grand Inquisitor.” “It reminds me of the lessons learned by Catholic missionaries years ago,” he wrote, “that you cannot share the Faith with a starving and naked person until you feed and clothe them! Only then can that lead to conversion.” That would surely be news to the North American Martyrs, St. Boniface, or St. Paul. 

However dismal the politics of my state may be, the role of Catholic malpractice is the final nail in the coffin. I only pray readers in other states may pay attention where they live—because it can happen to them too. The history of life under totalitarianism shows that people can persevere when the Church is with them; but when the Church’s leadership and priests are largely co-opted, what chance do we have? Perhaps the only choice left is to find the right spot for a final stand. 

[Image Credit: Shutterstock]

Author

• Greg CookGreg Cook is a writer living with his wife in New York’s North Country. He earned two master’s degrees, including one in public administration from The Evergreen State College. He is the author of two poetry collections: Against the Alchemists, and A Verse Companion to Romano Guardini’s ‘Sacred Signs’.

The Biden Clan’s Con 

Is Coming to an End

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

August 24, 2023

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one’s political career.

And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments while being shielded from political consequences.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

So Trump in 2019 had good reasons to ensure that none of the Bidens were still burrowed deeply into the Ukrainian payoff machine.

In contrast, Joe Biden had far less grounds to unleash the full powers of government against his probable 2024 rival ex-president Trump.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is not charging Trump with bribery of the Biden sort. He does not allege that Trump gave special foreign policy preferences to those foreigners who paid his family for such services.

Instead, Smith argues that Trump unlawfully took out classified presidential papers—although Joe Biden did nearly the same.

Biden kept quiet about his vast removal of classified documents for over a decade. Not until Trump was being investigated did Biden suddenly notify the government of his illegal removals.

In contrast, a combative and boisterous Trump fought openly and constantly with federal archivists over which of his papers at his Mar-a-Lago estate were truly classified.

Prosecutorial leaks floated all sorts of unproven nefarious agendas that had prompted Trump’s disputes over his presidential papers.

But no one to this day has seriously asked why Senator and then Vice President Biden secretly and weirdly removed and kept such sensitive material for years.

Recent reports allege that Hunter Biden may have been treated with kid gloves by prosecutors, partly because Hunter’s lawyers had threatened otherwise to call Joe Biden to the stand as a favorable witness.

Government prosecutors under pressure from the White House apparently balked at the nightmare of a befuddled president of the United States testifying under oath about the supposed innocence of the very guilty Hunter Biden.

In truth, the former drug addict Hunter has played lots of such strange games with his own family.

In his laptop communications, Hunter whined that no one in the family appreciated his hard work at family grifting.

He sounded petulant that his father forced him to fork over half his income to the Joe and Jill Biden household.

At a time of universal scrutiny of Hunter, the last thing any sane first son might do would be to HAWK his childish paintings at exorbitant prices to those wishing to buy influence with his father the president.

In effect, Hunter was almost daring the White House to stop his blatant grifting artistry.

Instead, the Bidens moved Hunter into the White House, apparently to keep him under closer watch.

Hunter is still out of control. He could take the family down with him unless President Biden continues to shield him from prosecution.

Ironically, the double standard used by Biden and the media to hound Trump has only raised new questions of fairness.

Why had the Biden family—with its far greater legal exposure—never faced such serial indictments?

A Republican House of Representatives had ended prior Democratic protection given the Bidens.

And the Ukraine war has again turned attention to the Biden-Burisma connection and Hunter’s shaking down of Ukrainian officials.

Finally, Joe Biden can no longer work a full day. He mutters. He stumbles. He serially lies.

He hijacks solemn occasions commemorating national tragedies by trying to one-up the grieving with his own self-absorbed stories—mostly irrelevant and narcissistic half-truths.

If a cognitively and criminally challenged Biden cannot finish his term, we will finally learn the full story of 15 years of Biden family corruption.

The Bidens will lose the only impediment—Joe Biden’s political machinations—left in the way of an honest, full-blown felony investigation into what is likely the most corrupt presidential family in American history.

The Biden Clan’s Con 

Is Coming to an End

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

August 24, 2023

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one’s political career.

And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments while being shielded from political consequences.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

So Trump in 2019 had good reasons to ensure that none of the Bidens were still burrowed deeply into the Ukrainian payoff machine.

In contrast, Joe Biden had far less grounds to unleash the full powers of government against his probable 2024 rival ex-president Trump.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is not charging Trump with bribery of the Biden sort. He does not allege that Trump gave special foreign policy preferences to those foreigners who paid his family for such services.

Instead, Smith argues that Trump unlawfully took out classified presidential papers—although Joe Biden did nearly the same.

Biden kept quiet about his vast removal of classified documents for over a decade. Not until Trump was being investigated did Biden suddenly notify the government of his illegal removals.

In contrast, a combative and boisterous Trump fought openly and constantly with federal archivists over which of his papers at his Mar-a-Lago estate were truly classified.

Prosecutorial leaks floated all sorts of unproven nefarious agendas that had prompted Trump’s disputes over his presidential papers.

But no one to this day has seriously asked why Senator and then Vice President Biden secretly and weirdly removed and kept such sensitive material for years.

Recent reports allege that Hunter Biden may have been treated with kid gloves by prosecutors, partly because Hunter’s lawyers had threatened otherwise to call Joe Biden to the stand as a favorable witness.

Government prosecutors under pressure from the White House apparently balked at the nightmare of a befuddled president of the United States testifying under oath about the supposed innocence of the very guilty Hunter Biden.

In truth, the former drug addict Hunter has played lots of such strange games with his own family.

In his laptop communications, Hunter whined that no one in the family appreciated his hard work at family grifting.

He sounded petulant that his father forced him to fork over half his income to the Joe and Jill Biden household.

At a time of universal scrutiny of Hunter, the last thing any sane first son might do would be to HAWK his childish paintings at exorbitant prices to those wishing to buy influence with his father the president.

In effect, Hunter was almost daring the White House to stop his blatant grifting artistry.

Instead, the Bidens moved Hunter into the White House, apparently to keep him under closer watch.

Hunter is still out of control. He could take the family down with him unless President Biden continues to shield him from prosecution.

Ironically, the double standard used by Biden and the media to hound Trump has only raised new questions of fairness.

Why had the Biden family—with its far greater legal exposure—never faced such serial indictments?

A Republican House of Representatives had ended prior Democratic protection given the Bidens.

And the Ukraine war has again turned attention to the Biden-Burisma connection and Hunter’s shaking down of Ukrainian officials.

Finally, Joe Biden can no longer work a full day. He mutters. He stumbles. He serially lies.

He hijacks solemn occasions commemorating national tragedies by trying to one-up the grieving with his own self-absorbed stories—mostly irrelevant and narcissistic half-truths.

If a cognitively and criminally challenged Biden cannot finish his term, we will finally learn the full story of 15 years of Biden family corruption.

The Bidens will lose the only impediment—Joe Biden’s political machinations—left in the way of an honest, full-blown felony investigation into what is likely the most corrupt presidential family in American history.

August 02, 2023Special EditionThreat to Democracy By: Judd GarrettObjectivity is the ObjectiveAugust 17, 2023 On Monday, a Georgia grand jury passed down a 98-page indictment against former President Donald Trump and 18 other co-defendants. The indictment reads that “Trump and the other Defendants charged in this indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” Donald Trump must surrender in Fulton County Georgia by noon on August 25 to be arraigned and have a mugshot taken (which will immediately be leaked to the press). Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis claimed that decision to indict was not politically motivated. She said, “I make decisions in this office based on the facts in the law. The law is completely nonpartisan. That’s how decisions are made in every case to date.” Curiously, the trial is scheduled to take place within the next six months which means that it will occur during the heart of the Republican primary. The alleged crime took place in December 2020, yet they waited almost three years to bring charges. The timing of the charges could not have been any more politically damaging to Trump, yet we are to believe that they were not politically motivated. By challenging the results of the 2020 election, Trump is being charged with conspiracy to overturn the results of a Presidential election. But didn’t the Durham report prove that Hillary Clinton ‘refused to accept that she lost, and knowingly and willfully created a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the 2016 election in favor of her’? Isn’t that what the Mueller investigation was all about? Didn’t Hillary Clinton provide false evidence, and lie to the FBI to trigger the special counsel investigation with the express purpose of trying to overturn the 2016 election? Wasn’t the entire Russian Collusion hoax and Mueller investigation one gigantic racketeering scheme to overturn that election? Where are the indictments for Hillary Clinton and every member of the Democrat party who was involved in that conspiracy? There is none, and there never will be any. Hillary isn’t an “election denier”; she didn’t“threaten our democracy”; “she persisted”. On second thought, didn’t Albert Gore challenge the results of the 2000 election and try to get the results overturned? Didn’t we spend over a month suffering through investigations and court proceedings talking about things as absurd as “butterfly ballots” and “hanging chads” in a grand conspiracy led by Al Gore to overturn the results of the 2000 election that he lost? The difference is Al Gore is a Democrat and Donald Trump is a Republican. So, when Al Gore challenges the results of his lost election, every court in the land allows him to do so and he is called patriotic. We are then lectured on how strong democracies get stronger when the results are challenged. Whereas most of Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election, were not heard in the courts, not based on merit, but based on procedure, and challenges to elections no longer strengthen our democracy; we are told that they are a threat to our democracy.  In 2000, our court system paved the way for Al Gore to make his challenges all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 2020, our court system put up every possible roadblock to prevent Donald Trump’s challenges from ever being heard. And now he is being charged with a crime. If it is a crime to challenge the results of a Presidential election, then Al Gore and Hillary Clinton should be charged with the same crime as Donald Trump. But we all know that will never happen. Democrats can do whatever they want and get away with it. And Republicans have to follow every single letter of the law, or they will have the book thrown at them. Donald Trump was not the first nor will he be the last candidate to challenge the results of a Presidential election, but he will be the first and possibly only one, who will be thrown in jail for doing so.  In a typical word salad, Vice President Kamala Harris discussed our system of government and revealed how little she actually understands our system of government. She said, “Everything is at stake right now. When democracy is intact, it strengthens the people. It protects and fights for fundamental freedoms, individual rights.” Actually, it is our Constitution that ‘protects fundamental freedoms and individual rights’, not our democratic process. I think she was sick the day they taught civics in the sixth grade. She is still operating under the delusion that we are a “democracy” and not a Constitutional Republic. She went on to say, “Democracy [is] incredibly fragile. It will only be as strong as our willingness to fight for it.” Isn’t the party in power arresting their leading political opponent an existential threat to our “incredibly fragile”‘democracy’? If our ‘democracy’ cannot stand up to a challenge, then we really don’t have that strong of a ‘democracy’ in the first place. While all of this is going on, we are still $31.5 trillion in debt as a country. In February, Mitch McConnell during a trip to Europe said, that there is no “time limit” on American support for Ukraine. So, it is highly unlikely that our national debt will ever be reduced by even a dollar. It’s going to keep going higher and higher and higher. Michael Burry, the man who successfully predicted the housing crash in 2008 and made billions shorting the housing market, just made a $1.8 billion bet against the stock market. So, all indications show that our economy is on the verge of imploding. The biggest threat to our Republic is not Donald Trump challenging election results; it is our grotesquely large and ever-expanding debt. Our current $31.5 trillion national debt can be best characterized as theft, generational theft. People who are not even born yet are going to be paying off the debts that our elected officials are accruing and benefitting from today. We are stealing from future generations. None of the people who will pay this debt back would have voted for these politicians who accrued this debt. So, which of the politicians are going to be indicted for this grand larceny? None. Only Trump gets indicted. The other politicians can do whatever they want. It is estimated that by 2033, the interest that we will pay on the debt every year will exceed all of our non-military discretionary spending in the budget. Service on our debt will explode to $1.4 trillion per year which exceeds what our yearly deficit is. So, we will be going further into debt, solely because we are trying to pay the interest on our existing debt. We are on the verge of being fiscally upside down. This is why our politicians talk incessantly about Trump, indictments, threats to democracy, trans-rights, and the like. When the pickpocket steals your wallet, he bumps into you first. While you’re focused on the shoulder that he just hit, he slides your wallet out of your pocket. The politicians do not want us to see them picking our pockets, so they have us focus on other things. And if the politicians do not steal your money through debt and taxation, they do so through printing money and inflation. Because of the extreme inflation created by Joe Biden’s reckless spending to pay off his campaign donors and the Federal Reserve printing trillions of new dollars, the average American family is paying an extra $709 per month from when Biden took office in 2021 – that is an extra $8,508 per year. Couple that with stagnant wages means that the middle class and the poor are getting poorer as the rich are getting richer. Maybe this is why Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen is saying how wonderful it was that she ate “magic mushrooms” while visiting China. If they can normalize the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms, then there will be a lot fewer people noticing the theft that the Fed is committing in plain sight. Our leaders tell us, ‘Take magic mushrooms, look at the UFOs, Donald Trump’s indictments, the threat to democracy, January 6th, just don’t ask questions about the debt, the deficit, the Federal Reserve, the $120 billion to Ukraine. We’ll be in our mansions and gated communities while your children have to negotiate the homeless encampment to get to school and then avoid the pornography and groomers once they get to school.’ I look back on previous generations of Americans and the legacy they left for future generations. The generation of our founders left the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The Civil War generation left the legacy of 600,000 Americans laying down their lives to ensure freedom and rights for all people. The “greatest generation” – the World War II generation, stopped a totalitarian takeover of the free world. What are our current generations going to leave to future generations? A stack of bills piled a mile high, internet censorship, cancel culture, wokeness, castrated boys – a sad, ridiculous, and evil legacy. The Temptations had a hit song back in the ’60s called, ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’. The chorus went like this:  Papa was a rolling stone,Wherever he laid his hat was his homeAnd when he died, All he left us was alone. And when this generation of politicians dies, all they are going to leave us is a ‘loan’ – one big fat $40+ trillion loan. If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

Apparently, the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Arlington, Texas, no longer recognizes the authority of, and will have no further relations with, the current Bishop of Fort Worth or his officials.  

An online August 18, 2023, “Statement of the Reverend Mother Prioress and Chapter” says in pertinent part:  

“…no longer recognize the authority of, and can have no further relations with, the current Bishop of Fort Worth or his officials, and forbid him or any of his officials or representatives to enter our monastery property or to have any contact or relations with the monastery or any of its nuns or novices. No one who abuses us as has the current Bishop of Fort Worth, has any right to our cooperation or obedience.”  

You can read the Reverend Mother’s complete online statement at:  http://www.carmelnuns.com/

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s statement, in support of the Carmelite Nuns, is also available online at:  http://carmelnuns.com/Assets/ArchbishopViganoStatementArlingtonCarmel18Agosto2023.pdf  

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O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be understood, as to understand…

     ∞ St. Francis of Assisi  

Joe Biden’s Race Against the Truth

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

August 14, 2023

Joe Biden has about 17 months left as an elected politician—if he is lucky. That projection guides most of the inexplicable and shameless behavior of the Department of Justice and Biden himself. View Biden as in a race against the truth. Will he be physically and mentally able to complete his term and head to retirement before his decades-long crimes of corruption catch up to him?

Joe Biden’s serial yarn that he never knew anything about his son Hunter’s quid pro quo grifting with rich foreign grandees has been finally exposed as the old lie it always was.

Biden’s fallback untruth—that he never got involved in Hunter’s business—proved instantly laughable, given prior damning testimonies from Hunter’s business associates, from IRS whistleblowers, from the assertions of foreign beneficiaries, from Hunter’s laptop, and Joe’s own earlier loudmouth braggadocio about using threats of canceling U.S. foreign aid to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into corruption of the sort in which his son was knee deep. (Did not then-President Barack Obama know the nature of Biden’s corruption when he appointed him as point man on Ukraine)?

To his partners in corruption, Hunter referred to his father variously as the “big guy” as well as the recipient of “ten percent” of the leveraged income. And apparently, as a rather greedy pop, Hunter whined that Joe himself demanded half of all Hunter’s shake-down income from abroad—despite Hunter’s payment of many of Joe’s monthly bills incurred on his palatial lakeshore mansion.

At some point, even the corrupt leftwing media and DNC cannot continue to laugh off eyewitness testimonies, whistleblowers’ revelations, bank records, Hunter Biden’s computer messaging, Joe Biden’s phone calls and personal appearances, and the evidence from foreign beneficiaries.

And then there is simply the power of reason and logic.

Over the last five years of this hushed-up tawdry saga, Americans knew immediately that Joe Biden was lying in all his denials of any involvement whatsoever in the procurement of a large part of his income from abroad simply because no one in the entire Biden family had any business, investment, or energy expertise. In other words, as grifters without Joe, the Bidens had zero market value.

As energy consultants, financial investors, or international analysts, they had no qualifications—a fact known and remarked upon by their corrupt foreign partners. If any doubt about that, try to guess how much the prior cash recipients Jim or Hunter or Sarah or Hallie, or Kathleen Biden will be getting from foreign concerns for services rendered after Joe leaves office.

The Biden familial mediocrities had nothing to offer shady wealthy foreign interests other than they were not only related to the Vice President of the United States but also could guarantee that Joe Biden had no scruples whatsoever, and so even while in office he would call or meet his son’s associates to substantiate Hunter’s promises of favorable diplomatic or business treatment from the Obama—or a future Biden—administration. Note Biden seemed to have no worries whether his family’s lobbying of Ukraine, Russia, or China conflicted with the interests of his own country.

And so deals were cut, millions were rerouted to Biden accounts to avoid scrutiny, and the Biden clan got rich off Joe’s offices and his son’s rank criminality. Joe’s adjusted gross income on his 2016 return of $396,456 soared on his 2017 return to more than $11 million. No one knows whether these or any of Biden’s returns showed reported income commensurate with what either he actually received or with his lavish lifestyle, bank accounts, and his multiple expensive homes.

Rarely has any prosecutor enjoyed a more riveting confessional than Hunter Biden’s laptop that established his credentials as a drug addict who burned up millions of dollars on his various drug and sex addictions, while confirming that his father was central to the family consortium’s shake-downs. Without an obsequious media, a Democratic Senate, and a weaponized Department of Justice, all the Biden recipients of foreign cash would by now have been prosecuted, and likely found guilty of an array of felonies.

But like everything Joe and Hunter do to excess, they were not just shameless in their raking in money by using Joe’s senatorial and then vice presidential offices and likely presidential candidacy, but in covering up their crimes.

Nothing is more emblematic of that brazenness than Biden aide and future Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s phone call to a former CIA interim director to round up 50 intelligence “authorities” to lie on the eve of the 2020 debate and election that the laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” To go to such extremes to leverage proverbially retired “wise men” to so blatantly misinform, disinform, and warp a presidential election reflects the paranoia of the Biden family over Hunter’s laptop confessional.

Enter Merrick Garland. Like Blinken, his job description entailed hiding the truth about Hunter Biden’s incriminating evidence. First, Garland had assured the nation that no special counsel was needed to investigate the Bidens’ influence peddling. And on spec, his lieutenant Delaware prosecutor David Weiss slow walked for years all investigations of Biden family wrongdoing.

The Biden Department of Justice since January 2021 assumed that with a Democratic House and an obsequious media, it could simply run out the clock on any of the many Biden crimes that were not sufficiently covered up. Any problematic data or testimony that eventually entered the public domain, would do so only after the statute of limitations had expired. This cover-up continued to work well for the first two years of the Biden administration.

But then the unexpected happened. First, the Republicans took the House in 2022 and suddenly could subpoena witnesses and documents over the objections of the media and Democratic congressional toadies.

Second, the Ukraine war broke out and refocused popular interest in the past Biden-Ukrainian profiteering.

Third, when Donald Trump announced his reelection candidacy, he was soon met with a cohort of weaponized leftwing prosecutors. Immediately he and his supporters legitimately pointed out that while he was being politically neutered by the left, his possible 2024 opponent Joe Biden was given de facto exemptions.

Finally, the congressional testimonies and whistleblowers grew so embarrassing, and the stark contrast between the government coverup of Biden’s crimes and the weaponized effort to destroy Trump so glaring, that even Biden’s handlers and Merrick Garland were forced to act—at least sort of.

So last week the DOJ flipped. It abruptly announced that after years of a deliberately stalled David Weiss investigation and the collapse of Weiss’s own phony plea deal before an honest judge, Garland would now appoint a special counsel, after all—again, sort of.

Garland then did something so outrageous that it eclipsed even his prior blatant politicization of his department. First, he violated the special counsel statute by hiring an inside government attorney—another apparent confirmation that Garland and Biden were paranoid that any legitimate outside counsel might well tap into a gold mine of Biden family felonies.

Second, he selected as independent counsel none other than David Weiss, the very prosecutor who had tried but failed to fool a judge into accepting a laughable Hunter Biden plea deal. Weiss’s only other alluring recommendation was that he had previously spearheaded and slow-walked the DOJ non-investigation of Hunter.

Third, by elevating the title—but not the mission—of Weiss in a manner that previously he promised he would not, Garland cleverly ensured that Weiss would likely not show up to testify before the House about prior and ongoing whistleblower allegations that prosecutor Weiss had blocked investigations concerning Hunter that otherwise might well have led to multiple felony indictments. Now as special counsel, Weiss will even likely refuse congressional subpoenas concerning incriminating Biden information on grounds they would prejudice or interfere with his special counsel inquiries.

How could Garland believe he could fool the American people with the veneer of a special counsel appointee and then violate the very spirit and text of the law about such appointments by naming Weiss?

Reason is not what guides the petulant Garland, who has never recovered from the trauma of being humiliated when his Barack Obama lame-duck supreme court appointment was recessed by a Republican Senate. Instead, Biden rescued Garland from bitter obscurity with the implied rationale, as Joe himself has mused openly to friends, that Garland should go after Trump, Biden’s past nemesis, and now his leading opponent in the 2024 presidential race.

What then is the long-term Democrat strategy that requires such short-term malodorous skullduggery?

Biden must be healthy and crime-free enough to finish his remaining term, but at all costs not run for reelection. A full one-term Biden prevents a 2023 or 2024 presidency of an utterly incompetent Kamala Harris and thus in addition her route to the 2024 Democratic nomination—and in theory perhaps even a longer presidential tenure.

Democrats will have enough trouble keeping Biden semi-coherent and upright over the 17 months without a string of indictments involving high crimes and misdemeanors from bribery to treason, if indeed Biden did alter U.S. policy at the bequest of his paymasters in China, Russia, Ukraine, or Romania.

In other words, Weiss was selected for his past loyal suppression of the Hunter investigation and his future further quashing indictments as special counsel. That fact almost ensures that Biden can finish his first term without an impeachment trial in the Senate or a forced Nixon-style resignation, given the enormity of his illegality.

Ensuring the viability of Biden’s next year-and-half will mean Kamala Harris does not inherit the presidency from either a physically or mentally incompetent Biden—or a president so reduced by bribery and racketeering counts that he is forced to resign.

Biden then will likely not run for reelection, pleading age rather than his own and his family’s blatant corruption. That will be another subtext for Weiss’s slothful investigation to be ground down into oblivion. Harris will not be president, and be reduced to just another wannabe 2024 primary candidate. She will likely, as in 2016, not win a single delegate.

By 2024, Democrats will be seeking a young Gavin Newson-like candidate. Harris will not be the nominee, much less President by default. And Joe will likely be so bewildered that Weiss in a few months “for the sake of the country” will not hound either an enfeebled ex-president or his dutiful son.

DOJ lawfare then works in two ways: by commission in neutering the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump after trying to ensure that he will win the Republican primary and nomination; by omission, in de facto suppressing momentum for Biden indictments and thus allowing the Biden family to be prison-free through 2024 and onto retirement—and thus sparing the nation a Harris presidency.