SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

Pontifical Academy for Life: Personal Values Reign Supreme

JANET E. SMITH

The exceedingly long book on life issues recently published by the Pontifical Academy for Life, Theological Ethics of Life (Vatican Publishing House, 2022; 517 pages) (TEL), maintains that on occasion contraception is a moral choice. What many miss is that this view is not the outgrowth of a new understanding of the nature of the conjugal act or a rejection of the teaching that contraception is intrinsically evil.

In the document, there is no engagement with any of the standard arguments put forward against contraception, either in Humanae Vitae itself or present in the theological literature defending Humanae Vitae. In a marvelous piece about the book, Gerhard Ludwig Müller and Stephan Kampowski note:

In previous times, people who did not agree with the teaching of Humanae Vitae or Donum Vitae simply said that they begged to differ and gave their reasons. The new approach, adopted by the PAV text, is in fact to state the opposite of the teaching, while at the same time claiming that one agrees.

The conclusion of TEL is not the result of a different evaluation of the purpose of the marital act but of a radically different view of what constitutes the moral goodness or evil of any action. A new emphasis is put on the importance of the judgment of an individual’s conscience. (See my “New Challenges to Humanae vitae: Conscience and Discernment.”) 

Conscience here is understood not as the place where the precepts of natural law are naturally known, the place where a person hears the voice of God. Rather, it is the repository of the values one has adopted through one’s choices; the moral agent has an obligation to obey his judgment rather than any teaching of the Church, any objective norm, any dictate of God. Or, one might say, God does not want us to adhere to a set of norms; rather, He wants us to be autonomous, to follow the values we have accepted, even if they conflict with the teaching of the Church, any objective norms, or dictates of God. 

But holders of that view might not accept my formulation. Perhaps they would say it is the teaching of the Church, an objective norm, and the dictate of God that we follow the values we have accepted. Although it is good to follow objective morality, what is most important is to decide in accord with our own values. The values that we have accepted should be based upon our own experience and the experience of others who live in our times; they should not be values dictated to us by norms reasoned to be in accord with human nature, for those are abstract and ahistorical norms. Rather, we must act in accord with the norms we accept, particular norms relevant to one’s experience.

All of that likely seems very muddled and thoroughly incapable of being conformed with Church teaching about morality, which basically is that God made an ordered universe and morality is a matter of living in accord with that order. Such is not an imposition on our natures or a curtailment of our freedom. On the contrary, it gives us dignity, and it leads to true human flourishing and the ability to be free from disordered passions and false values. 

Here I don’t want to challenge the “new paradigm” of moral theology purported to be an organic development of moral theology—but which looks a whole lot more like a jettisoning of a morality determined by objective realities and replacing it with a morality of our own making.  According to the new paradigm, the way to measure the morality of an action is to determine whether or not it is consonant with our own experience (and/or the experience of those living in our times) rather than it conforming to our nature, created by a loving God. 

Rather, here I want to show that experience attests that contraception has been a disaster for our culture, not only for matters sexual but even more so by helping to advance a view of reality that is ruining us.

In my now over thirty-year-old talk “Contraception: Why Not,” using studies from various scientific disciplines, I show the bad social, physical, psychological, and spiritual consequences of contraception. More and more women—even more and more feminists—are coming to recognize those bad consequences and are acknowledging that the sexual revolution has not truly been conducive to the happiness of women. Truth be told, it has not been conducive to the happiness of men and children either.  

My talk argues that it is reasonable to conclude that contraception leads to the acceptance and practice of promiscuity, to an increase of abortion and divorce, to an acceptance of homosexual relationships and marriage, to the use of pornography, to a desire to produce babies through technology, to harm of the environment, and to a frightening demographic decline. (An excellent source for information on the harms of contraception is Mary Eberstadt’s Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution. A revised edition is coming soon from Ignatius Press.)

Perhaps the worst effect of the acceptance of contraception is the fact that it has led to the rejection of the principle of non-contradiction; that principle that things have a nature and cannot be the opposite of what they are: A cannot be non-A, at the same time and in the same respect. It is the foundation of all valid reasoning.  

Now when I give the talk, I need to include as consequences of the widespread use of contraception the acceptance of transgenderism, which permits pre-K kids to “choose” to have their biological gender irreversibly mutilated; the obliteration of women’s sports; the housing of male rapists in female prisons; and drag queens at children’s library story hours.

A claim that violates the principle of non-contradiction means that an assertion or action entails a manifest contradiction: it is wrong to say an apple is an orange or a male is a female (at the same time and in the same respect); a married person can’t be an unmarried person at the same time and in the same respect. A person can’t be alive and dead at the same time in the same respect. It just can’t be true. Things are what they are.

Most of us are reeling at the number and kind of violations of the principle that have dominated public policy in the last several years. Small businesses and churches were closed during the Covid lockdown while abortion clinics, alcohol stores, and large supermarkets were open. Millions of unvaccinated illegal immigrants have been permitted into the country while nurses who have natural immunity from Covid were not permitted to work. 

At one moment, a person with Covid must be quarantined for 10 days; at the next moment, nurses with Covid are pressed to return to work after five days. No questioning of treatment or non-treatment of Covid patients was permitted; even now that the CDC has admitted it was wrong about many things about Covid, they won’t give an honest look at the number of excess deaths caused by the vaccines. The media wouldn’t cover Hunter Biden’s laptop, which gravely impugned his father, but they follow obsessively one after another of the witch hunts against Trump. The government and law enforcement permit highly destructive Black Lives Matter rioting, burning, and looting but treat the largely peaceful January 6 demonstrations as an attempted coup.  

You could undoubtedly produce a frighteningly long list of other examples of blatant disregard for fairness, for compliance with the basic facts about reality, since many in our times do not believe that assertions and conduct must conform to the truth. They think they should be allowed to act in accord with their own values, and those values cannot be questioned.  

Ouch, sounds like the “new paradigm” of the Pontifical Academy for Life, doesn’t it?

The acceptance of contraception was a major factor in starting the ball rolling for all this insanity—for that is what it is. Contraception entails a rejection of reality—the reality that fertility is a good thing—and supposes, illogically, that messing with good things results in good things not bad things. Sixty-plus years of the use of contraception indicates that that is a foolish thought.  

The rejection of reality has become toxic to our culture. We want to manipulate things so they will be what we want them to be rather than to discipline ourselves to live in accord with reality. Yes, the modern world and technology have done wonders for reducing many kinds of human suffering, but they have also led us to believe that we can do a better job than God did of ordering reality. 

For instance, we think it better that we can render infertile sex that might be fertile. God messed up by linking sex and babies. Well, we can fix that, so we have. We don’t think we need to accept reality, which would mean respecting the beautiful reality that sex leads to babies; we would not have sex unless we were prepared to have babies. If we need to limit our family size, we would learn to use a method of natural family planning, which seems to be a major factor in helping marriages last. (For comprehensive information about natural fertility awareness and the harms of contraception, see www.naturalwomanhood.org.)

It is, in fact, a greater failure of logic than of imagination that we didn’t see that transgenderism would eventually follow upon the acceptance of contraception. Again, those who use contraception are rejecting the reality of their own sex and gender. Women and men want to have sex without “risking” becoming mothers and fathers. 

Women, in a sense, want to be men; women want to have sex that doesn’t lead to their becoming pregnant. They are more or less saying that they would prefer to be males in respect to the outcome of sexual acts. But it is just as serious that males don’t want to become fathers; that they don’t want to accept the responsibility of being providers for women and children. They want sex on their terms, not on reality’s terms, not on nature’s terms, not on God’s terms.

As more and more people are speaking of the horror of transitioning, it becomes clear that they were trying to escape some reality that had not been pleasing or had been painful to them by attempting the impossible task of changing their sex. What they have done, or allowed to have done to them by unscrupulous doctors, bears some resemblance to the use of contraception: it is a fleeing from the reality of one’s own body.

A culture that flees from reality is a culture that has become very susceptible to totalitarianism, for it no longer uses reality as the arbiter of claims to power and the policies power enacts. A totalitarian government can make us believe anything: insanities such as human embryos and fetuses are not human beings; such as putting kids in masks for months on end; such as allowing biological males to participate in female sports; such as letting in millions of unvaccinated immigrants while firing nurses who have natural immunity.

The Pontifical Academy for Life does nothing in its book on life issues to look at the tremendous damage that has been done by the philosophical assumptions that underlie the acceptance of contraception and by the nearly universal use of contraception in our modern day. It has wispy dreams of people making responsible decisions based only on their whimsical values. 

There is no evidence that the authors of this text read St. Pope John Paul II’s brilliant Evangelium Vitae. It would have helped them enormously had they read this passage:

Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim. 

John Paul II is speaking of a false view of freedom here, but his insight applies as well to the false view of conscience advanced by the Pontifical Academy for Life. Their book is an embarrassment to a Church that has wisdom the culture desperately needs.

[Photo: Pope Francis meets with the participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life (Credit: Vatican Media)]

By Janet E. Smith

Janet E. Smith, Ph.D., is a retired professor of moral theology.

TX Gov Abbott Turns Pro-Abortion Rape Argument on Its Head Using Left’s Own Logic

September 5, 2022

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In the last few years, conservatives with national profiles have stepped up to fight back against the ever-shifting language games that the Left plays to confuse and demolish social norms such as the family. They also understand the real evil involved in abortion. One example is the pro-abortion movement’s radical progressive allies in Congress and the Biden administration calling the evil procedure “healthcare” while accusing Republicans of wanting the death and/or imprisonment of women who have sought abortion up until the point of giving birth.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has now turned the tables against those attempts. He is turning the argument against pro-abortion people while using their weasel-like logic to turn them against him. It’s masterful.

The Hill:

Texas Governor. Greg Abbott (R), said that victims of rape in Texas can avoid pregnancies using emergency contraceptives such as Plan B. The Dallas Morning News reported Friday.

Texas bans abortions and does not allow exceptions for rape, incest, or other forms of sex.

Abbott said that while we want to support the victims, they also need to ensure that victims have access to health care as soon as possible. This was in an interview with The Dallas Morning News and KXAS-TV. The segment will air Sunday.

He said, “If they access health care immediately, they will be able to get the Plan B Pill that can prevent pregnancy from ever happening.”

According to Hill, Abbott continued:

The Republican governor told “Lone Star Politics”, that reporting a rape will ensure that the perpetrator is arrested and prosecuted.

To be clear, I don’t think that the pro-life Republican governor would want citizens of his state access to an abortion pill similar to “Plan B”. Absolutely not. Would I prefer Abbott to not use the term “health care” when describing any type of abortion method/procedure? Yes.

What Josh Shapiro Did To Priests Was Disgraceful September 6, 2022  Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro: On the website of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro it boasts that when he was Attorney General of the state he “exposed the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover up of child sexual abuse, identifying over 300 predator priests and thousands of victims and spurring investigation across the United States.” This is a distorted account of Shapiro’s shameful grand jury investigation of Catholic priests. (For more on this subject see my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse.) Shapiro convinced the media that he found evidence of 301 priests who abused more than 1,000 children over a period of seventy years. This is thrice false (1) not all the alleged offenders were priests (2) most of the alleged victims were adolescents, not children, and (3) the report was not evidentiary—it was investigative—meaning that the accused priests were never given the opportunity to rebut the charges.  Importantly, nothing could be done about most of those who were actually guilty. Almost all the accused were either dead or had been thrown out of the priesthood. No wonder Shapiro was able to prosecute only two priests. He knew this from the get-go, but he used the report to push for a suspension of the statute of limitations. Shapiro misused the grand jury for political purposes, and now he is at it again. Alan Dershowitz understands what a grand jury is supposed to do. “The grand jury has a specific function. It’s supposed to only indict or not indict. Indeed, prosecutors generally don’t issue reports for that reason because they only hear one side of the case. They don’t hear the other side. There’s no cross examination of witnesses. That’s why it is regarded as wrong for prosecutors to issue reports.” It is precisely because grand jury reports are not factual that the Catholic League filed an amicus brief challenging the right of the Pennsylvania grand-jury report to make public the names of eleven priests who claimed that doing so would violate their reputational rights as guaranteed by the state constitution. On December 3, 2018, our case, handled by Pittsburgh lawyers from Jones Day, won: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled 6-1 in our favor. In November 2019, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court task force, which had been empanelled two years earlier, vindicated our effort: it recommended abolishing grand jury reports altogether. Even those of a more liberal bent, such as former New York Times reporter Peter Steinfels, took apart the grand jury report piece by piece. To declare, as the report said, that “all victims were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church officials who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all” was unconscionable. He called it “grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust.” Steinfels also referred to the report “as a weapon in the debate over this issue,” citing its “ugly, indiscriminate, and inflammatory” rhetoric and unsubstantiated charges, “to say nothing of the evidence the report ignores.” He concluded that this was “truly unworthy of a judicial body” that is “responsible for impartial justice.” What is particularly galling about Shapiro is his total disinterest in prosecuting sexual molesters in the public schools. That’s where this problem has been the most serious. Yet he has never once shown any interest in holding teachers and administrators accountable for their delinquency. This kind of bias—one standard of justice for priests and another for educators—is despicable. Shapiro’s handling of the grand jury report on Catholic priests was disgraceful. That he is now using it as a campaign weapon makes him all the more contemptible.

OPINION

Abp. Viganò calls on bishops to defend marriage, oppose the errors of Amoris Laetitia

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Consider that your silence takes away from the Glory of Heaven the souls entrusted to you by the Supreme Shepherd, to whom even the one who sits in Rome will one day answer.

Archbishop Viganò prays the rosary at the 2017 Rome March for LifeClaire Chretien / LifeSiteNews

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Thu Sep 1, 2022 – 8:44 am EDT

BeyondWords

(LifeSiteNews) — In the glorious martyrs, Holy Church gives us examples of heroic virtues to imitate, showing us how the Grace of God assists those who love Him even to the point of facing torments and death. And while the wicked rage in vain against the bodies of the Martyrs in order to afflict their immortal souls, the Saints triumph with Christ precisely in witnessing to the primacy of Incarnate Truth over error, and of Immolated Charity over the seductions of the world. The palm of Martyrdom draws it sap from the wood of the Cross, and the crown of the Martyrs shines with the rays of the Redeeming Sacrifice of Our Lord.

Let us consider the example of the Πρόδρομος, the Forerunner, Saint John the Baptist, who preceded his Divine Master not only in announcing His Coming and the Baptism for the remission of sins, but also in facing death at the hand of the Tetrarch of Galilee, Herod Antipas, whom John admonished for the scandal that he gave to the people of Israel by keeping company in public concubinage with the wife of Herod the Great’s brother, Herodias.

These events, documented by historians, are mentioned in the Gospel along with the role played by Salomé in asking her stepfather for the Baptist’s head. Saint Ambrose comments: Ab adulteris justus occiditur, et a reis in judicem capitalis sceleris pœna convertitur. The just man is killed by adulterers, and the death sentence is pronounced by the guilty against their judge. Clauduntur lumina non tam mortis necessitate quam horrore luxuriæ: Baptist’s eyes closed not so much because of death but because of the horror of lust. Os aureum illud exsangue, cujus sententiam ferre non poteras, conticescit, et adhuc timetur: His golden mouth, now bloodless, whose sentence you Herod could not bear, grows silent, but yet you still feared it.

How can your voice be silent, dear brothers, in the face of the legitimization of adultery? Will you choose to make yourselves accomplices of those who bow to the spirit of the world and show obsequious deference to the powerful, going so far as to admit to the Eucharistic Table those who by their conduct violate the Commandments of God, despise the law of the Church and give scandal to the faithful?

How much longer will you allow the sanctity of marriage and the witness of Saint John the Baptist to be trampled underfoot? How much longer will you ignore the words of Saint Ambrose, on whose Cathedra sits today a successor who winks at the concubinaries to make himself acceptable to the guests of the new Herod? (here and here)

Tell Republican Senators: Defend natural marriage!

The Forerunner was not afraid to raise his voice against Herod, facing death with the serene abandonment of the just to the will of God. Will you be afraid to preach the Word, to insist in season and out of season, to correct, to rebuke, to exhort with all patience and doctrine (2 Tim 4:2), when the errors and deceptions of Amoris Lætitiaare inspired by Salomé more than by the Forerunner? When the author of Amoris Lætitia can at worst remove you from your Cathedra because of your fidelity to Christ? And even if you were to be brought before the courts, would you agree to renounce proclaiming Christ, and Christ crucified (1 Cor 2:2), in order to save your earthly life and lose eternal life?

I exhort you, most beloved Brothers, you who are the Successors of the Apostles, Ministers of Christ and dispensers of the Mysteries of God (1 Cor 4:1), to consider your responsibility in supporting the doctrinal and moral deviations of those who abuse their role and authority to sow error, offend the Majesty of God, humiliate the Holy Church and lose souls.

I exhort you, through the Wounds of Christ: awaken from your lethargy that makes you accomplices of a betrayal, for which you will have to give an account to the Just Judge on the day of your death. Consider that your silence takes away from the Glory of Heaven the souls entrusted to you by the Supreme Shepherd, to whom even the one who sits in Rome will one day answer. Do not make the Passion of the Redeemer to have been in vain, for He shed his Most Precious Blood in order to save repentant sinners, not to confirm them in sin.

The Lord asks you to be the guide of the Lord’s flock, using your Crosier to lead the sheep to the pastures of Heaven. Your destiny is to accompany them with Charity to the Eternal Glory for which they were created and redeemed, and not to precede them into the flames of hell.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

August 29, 2022

The Vatican Is Wasting Its Authority

09/01/2022

By Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, August 31, 2022

Under Francis, the Church is trying to use the extraordinary authority granted to the Apostles and to Peter to question the Church’s own divine mission.

You may not have noticed, but the Vatican under POPE FRANCIS is busy destroying the Catholic Church’s own claims to divine authority to instruct man about matters of faith and morals — its claim to be Mater and Magister, mother and teacher. To take the latest example, look to the recent televised interview of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, in which he said that the law that liberalized abortion in Italy was “now a pillar of our social life.” When pressed on whether it was up for debate, Paglia said, “But no, absolutely not, absolutely not.”

An Italian commentator Thomas Scandroglio said, “We have hit rock bottom. We are at a point of no return, at ground zero of morality, faith, reasonableness and consistency. We have the president of an academy founded to protect life protecting a law that destroys life.”

An Italian commentator Thomas Scandroglio said, “We have hit rock bottom. We are at a point of no return, at ground zero of morality, faith, reasonableness and consistency. We have the president of an academy founded to protect life protecting a law that destroys life.”

This is an image of the Church in auto-demolition mode. With Rome having taken revenge on Benedict’s detested liturgical restoration, it’s not a surprise to see Rome now taking further actions against John Paul II and Paul VI’s legacy in moral theology.

It’s not controversial to notice that, officially, the Catholic Church’s position on sexual morality and matters of human reproduction is at odds with the zeitgeist. In fact, it might be more appropriate to say it is at odds with the prevailing norms of human civilization. The Church is against abortion and euthanasia. It’s against divorce, and premarital sex. It’s against in vitro fertilization. And, most controversially, in 1968 of all years, the Church REITERATED ITS OPPOSITION TO ARTIFICIAL CONTRACEPTION in a document called “Humanae Vitae” (Of human life). This was a position that had been common among confessional Christians UNTIL THE ANGLICAN CHURCH ABANDONED IT AT LAMBETH IN 1930. All of these position flow, logically, from the Church’s other moral and theological commitments: that our reproductive capacity is good; that children deserve to be raised by their parents in committed families; that all human acts, including sex, have a non-self-referential purpose. Under John Paul II, the Church reaffirmed that all these teachings flow from the moral law, and that they are entailed in the very order of creation, in a document called Veritatis Splendor (The splendor of truth). These are not mere ideals that are proposed by the Church, and conformity to them is not a matter of individual conscience or some SUPEREROGATORY feat reserved only to the most special saints. These moral laws are binding on everyone at all times, in all places, in any psychological, social, or cultural condition.

Those two documents, Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor, were seen by conservative Catholics as vindication of the Church’s perennial moral teachings, its theological commitments about the moral law, and the sufficiency of God’s grace to assist Christians in obeying it. And to consolidate this understanding of morality and theology in the Church, the Vatican founded the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL) in 1994 as a kind of ongoing think-tank dedicated to doing research on new biomedical issues and technologies and to promoting the protection of human life in biomedical fields.

But the Church’s internal critics of Humane Vitae and Veritatis Splendor did not go away. And under Pope Francis, they have captured momentum and the institutions of influence, even at the Pontifical Academy for Life. Pope Francis ended all the lifetime terms of the members of the Academy in 2016, making the new terms five-year renewable appointments. He dropped a requirement that members sign a document promising to defend life in accordance with Church teaching. Earlier this year, the PAL published a book — a summary of a seminar — in which Church teaching was often repudiated. The introduction, written by Archbishop Paglia, presented it as an authentic development of Christian doctrine and as a “paradigm shift.” The first claim is made dubious by the credibility of the latter one.

Church proposes. By doing so, they largely make a hash of the Church’s teaching on sin, repentance, and actual grace. For if these are all ideals, and the Church is just accompanying people from where they are now, closer to the ideal later, then so long as one’s individual conscience approves of an act, all those actions formerly understood as sins are recast as approximations of the ideal. This radical rewrite of Christian morality already gained purchase in Pope Francis’ encyclical Amoris Latetia, which tried to find a way to allow remarried Catholics back to Holy Communion. In the months ahead, it is rumored, this relativizing understanding of conscience will be applied even more fully to the matters of contraception in another encyclical being prepared by members of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

So long as an active conscience is detected, who can say there is really sin? By such an understanding, the prophet Nathan could have excused King David as merely imperfectly approximating the idea for marriage when he sent the husband of Bathsheba to the front lines to die.

Under Francis, the Church is trying to swallow its own tail, to use the extraordinary authority granted to the Apostles and to Peter to question the Church’s own divine mission. If even the Catholic Church can no longer tell us what’s right and wrong, to hell with it.

This article first appeared HERE.

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The Mysteries of Long COVID

Long COVID may be one of many reasons why in a recession, labor paradoxically still remains scarce.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

August 31, 2022

When the original strain of COVID-19 arrived in spring 2020, a pandemic soon swept the country. 

By far most survived COVID. But hundreds of thousands did not. American deaths now number well over 1 million.

Amid the tragedy, there initially was some hope that the pernicious effects of the disease would all disappear upon recovery among the nearly 99 percent who survived the initial infection. 

Vaccinations by late 2020 were promised to end the pandemic for good. But they did not. New mutant strains, while more infectious, were said to be less lethal, thus supposedly resulting in spreading natural immunity while causing fewer deaths from infection. 

But that too was not quite so. 

Instead, sometimes the original symptoms, sometimes frightening new ones, not only lingered after the acute phase but were of increased morbidity. 

Now two-and-a-half years after the onset of the pandemic, there may be more than 20 million Americans who have had or are still suffering from what is currently known as “long COVID”—a less acute version but one ultimately as debilitating.

Some pessimistic analyses suggest well over 4 million once-active Americans are now disabled from this often-ignored pandemic and out of the workforce. 

Perhaps 10-30 percent of those originally infected with COVID-19 have some lingering symptoms six months to a year after the initial infection. And they are quite physically sick, desperate to get well, and certainly not crazy.

So far, no government Marshall plan exists to cure long COVID. 

While we know the nature of the virus well by now, no one fathoms what causes long COVID’s overwhelming fatigue, flu-like symptoms, neuralgic impairment, cardiac and pulmonary damage, and an array of eerie problems from extended loss of taste and smell to vertigo, neuropathy, and “brain fog.”

“Post-viral fatigue” has long been known to doctors. Many who get the flu or other viruses like mononucleosis sometimes take weeks or even months to recover after the initial acute symptoms retire. 

But no one knows why long COVID often seems to last far longer and with more disability.

Is its persistence due to one theory that SARS-CoV-2 is a uniquely insidious, engineered virus? Or do vaccines and antivirals only help to curb infection, while possibly encouraging more unpredictable mutations?

Who gets long COVID, and why and how is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” 

Those who nearly dies from acute COVID-19 can descend into long COVID. But then again so can those with minimal or few initial acute symptoms. 

The obese with comorbidities are prone to long COVID, but triathletes and marathon runners are, too. 

The elderly, the mature, the middle-aged, adolescents, and children can all get long COVID. Those with downregulated and impaired immune systems fight long COVID. But then again so do those with upregulated and prior robust immunity, as well as people with severe allergies. 

Since early 2020, no one has deciphered the cause, although numerous Nobel Prizes await anyone who unlocks its mysteries. 

Does a weakened but not vanquished SARS-CoV-2 virus hide out and linger, causing an unending immune response that sickens patients? 

Or does COVID-19 so weaken some long-haulers to the degree that old viruses, long in remission, suddenly flare up again, sickening the host with an unending case, of say, mononucleosis? 

Or is the problem autoimmunity? 

Is there something unique to the nature of COVID-19 that damages the vital on-and-off buttons of the immune system, causing the body to become stuck in overdrive, as it needlessly sends out its own poisons against itself?

Without knowledge of what explains long COVID, it is hard for researchers to find a cure. 

After all, is the answer to slow down the immune system to dampen the immune storm, or to enhance it to root out lingering viruses? 

Do more vaccines help or worsen long COVID? 

Is the solution some magical new drug, or discovering off-label uses of old, reliable medicines? Can a good diet, moderate exercise, and patience finally wear out long COVID? Or is its course too unpredictable or near permanent and chronic?

Is long COVID a single phenomenon, or a cluster of maladies, each manifesting according to one’s own genetic makeup, the particular history of past illness, and unique reaction to the initial infection?

If we have few answers, we do have an idea about the costs.

Long COVID may be one of many reasons why in a recession, labor paradoxically still remains scarce. Millions likely stay home in utter disbelief that they are still battling long COVID. Others isolate in deadly fear of getting either the acute or chronic form of the illness. 

The social costs to America of this hidden pandemic in lost wages and productivity, family and work disruption, and expensive medical care are unknown. 

But they are likely enormous, still growing—and mostly ignored.

September 1, 2022

Special Victor Davis Hanson Edition

How Democracy Dies in Darkness

in Five Easy Steps.

*

Part 1

August 26, 2022

What if you believed that the U.S. was in mortal danger because its elections continually led to the wrong results and policy choices?

What if the “people” were just too ignorant of what was good for them and continually displayed such dangerous cluelessness in how they voted? How could you even work with such chumps, dregs, crazies, clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables?

What if you still gave them lots of chances to reform and become enlightened on climate change, transgenderism, and race relations? And yet still they never appreciated your efforts on their behalf. Instead, they continued to buy AR-15s, or watch NASCAR or buy a RAM 2500 with a 700hp engine.

What if you worked hard to instruct these idiots through the media, social media, the arts, entertainment, foundations, academia, public schools, professional sports, Hollywood, Wall Street, and even the corporate board room—and yet still despite your control of the nation’s messaging and influencing, the dumb electorate voted for ignoramuses and unqualified buffoons?

What then would you be willing to do to save the country?

In a word, you would say “democracy dies in darkness” (darkness as in ignorance). And then you would scream “FORWARD!” And rally, with “YES, WE CAN!”

Then, as the saints you are, you would have to “intervene” extra-legally to save America. There would be no other choice. That is, you would have to destroy democracy to save it.

So, what you would do?

STEP ONE. Go after the wrong-minded Supreme Court. Discredit it. Have senators declare it “illegitimate.” Talk openly of ways the Pentagon or National Parks could avoid or weaken the Court’s rulings by creating sanctuary areas immune from federal jurisdiction.

Have the senate majority leader lead a mob to the court’s very doors and openly threaten conservative justices by name. Threaten their persons by warning that because they sowed the “wind” they would soon reap the “whirlwind” and thus had no idea what would “hit” them. Have mobs surround their houses and violate—with impunity—all federal laws prohibiting such intimidation of justices. In fact, ignore the law entirely and let anyone scream 24/7 outside the incorrect justice’s home.

Ferret justices out at restaurants. Swarm their dinner stables. Get in their faces. Have the president go abroad and openly attack the court in front of his foreign hosts. Serially scream in Congress that the court must be packed, enlarged by six more justices immediately, good men and women who would be properly sober and judicious progressives picked by legal-eagle President Joe Biden.

Talk of impeaching an illiberal justice. Talk even of subpoenaing his wife before a congressional committee. Protest, demonstrate, and obstruct any justice at campus lectures or public forums. Make clear the price for his harmful bad thought.

STEP TWO. Turn the FBI into a proper state police, an enlightened American Stasi. Sic the FBI on political opponents: confiscate the phones of elected House members in public. Raid the homes of journalists in the predawn hours. March them out in their underwear. Stage SWAT raids against an opposition president’s ally. Hell, raid the ex-president’s house itself. And tip off CNN to film the entire spectacle. Leak to the Washington Post that “nuclear secrets” for two years have been in Trump’s possession! Surprise the president’s lawyer at his office. Seize his files. Arrest a sexagenarian presidential advisor for not showing up for Congressional testimony—and put him publicly in leg irons.

Divert the FBI from silly things like investigating terrorists and cartels and traffickers swarming across the southern border or investigating bribery of officials by foreign governments. Instead, put FBI undercover agents at school board meetings, secretly to learn about and intimidate counter-revolutionary loudmouth parents who endanger the work of idealistic teacher unions and woke school board members.

The Secret Service is too ossified to protect progressive presidents from right-wing interference. The new FBI would become a presidential retrieval service. If dark elements may possess the first daughter’s lurid lost diary, replete with confessions of showering underage with the Commander-in-Chief, then hunt it down, and raid journalists’ homes. If a crack-addicted son of the president lost his laptop incriminating the president, then find it. Sit on it. Stonewall it and keep it out of the pre-ballot-day news.

Appoint FBI directors who are true-blue believers and are willing to stonewall and mislead Congress. Ensure they can lie to federal investigators, leak confidential and classified FBI documents to the media, falsify federal warrant applications, and plead amnesia when called out by the media or congressional investigative committees. And if you complain, then you are unpatriotic and likely a “domestic terrorist.”

Work with the Left in crafting pseudo-opposition research to destroy a wrong-headed presidential campaign. Hire a foreign ex-spy as a source. Spread his phony dossier to the media. Name the entire hit operation, “Operation Crossfire,”and set entrapment ambushes to get opposition foot soldiers to lie. Leak to cable news the narratives of “Russian collusion.”

 

Part Two

August 30, 2022

STEP THREE. Change voting and government rules when they are no longer useful. Claim any customs and traditions that are no longer advantageous are mere racist relics or the baleful legacy of old white men.

When in the majority, demand the end of the racist filibuster. When in the minority save it as a roadblock to fascism.

Damn the Electoral College as undemocratic and racist—unless the blue wall returns and the sure leftwing electoral votes of California, Illinois, and New York reassume dominance.

Let in two more states and with them four more progressive senators.

Pass a national voting law that supersedes state balloting and bans once and for all any requirement to show a valid ID to vote in person.

Insist that any effort to check mail-in ballots against registration lists, or to require full signatures and accurate addresses are racist and must be banned nationwide. The goal is to have 65 percent of the voters not vote on Election Day.

Expand court packing to the district and circuit courts to increase the number of enlightened jurists.

STEP FOUR. Remake the U.S. Congress. Insist that your Speaker of the House can bar any opposition member from a committee, despite the nomination of the minority leader.

When in the minority, insist that any such neutering of the House minority leader is racist and sexist. Arrest and indict any former opposition figure who refuses to obey a congressional committee summons; however, if the majority is lost and the right people are subpoenaed by the wrong people of the opposition party, claim such subpoena power is tyrannical, Nazi-like, racist, and bigoted.

Have your House speaker publicly tear up the State of the Union address, the moment the opposition president hands it over on national television. If in the minority, vote to censure any such Speaker who would destroy the hallowed protocols of the House and so cheaply attempt to embarrass an enlightened president.

The moment you take over a majority in the House, preferably in the opposition president’s first term, impeach him. Impeach him again a second time, when he rebounds. Impeach him when he leaves office. 

Impeachment now, impeachment tomorrow, impeachment forever!

When in the majority, create and pack select committees. Call no hostile witnesses. Allow no cross-examinations. Pressure witnesses to flip testimonies to avoid possible criminal referrals. Send out dozens of subpoenas. Veto all minority party committee nominations—unless these members will not be reelected and have at least once voted to impeach the president of their own party.

STEP FIVE. Create border chaos. Destroy immigration law. Open the border. Call racist and xenophobic any who oppose three million illegal aliens pouring into the country. Defame your border patrol as medieval whippers, who harm the innocent. Stop all border wall construction. Send illegal entrants to purple states most prone to be flipped to correct thinking.

Insist newcomers do not need to be tested or vaccinated for Covid. Demand that background checks or prior certification of refugee status are racist constructs—and no longer necessary.

Be selective. Turn away Venezuelans and Cubans, Eastern Europeans, or Taiwanese as counterrevolutionaries. Favor those from the poorest and most leftist homelands. Give all illegal aliens phones, money, IDs, and flights to whatever cities they wish. Claim that citizenship is a racist obstruction to voting rights, which are universal and have nothing to do with being a legal citizen.

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NEWS

Cdl. Müller’s reflections on Vatican curial reform as prepared by Cardinal Mueller prepared for a consistory but which he was unable to deliver because Jorge Bergolio ended the consistory prematurely

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The Pope cannot change the Church’s hierarchical and sacramental order by appointing lay people as heads of a diocese or of a curial office, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith emphasized.

Cdl. Gerhard Müller.Franco Origlia / Getty Images

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Maike
Hickson

Thu Sep 1, 2022 – 4:41 pm EDT

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(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), kindly provided LifeSite with a copy of his reflections on the reform of the Curia as it is being implemented with the papal document Praedicate Evangelium, signed by Pope Francis on March 19. Müller had intended to present his statement (see full text below) to the Consistory of cardinals that met at the end of August in Rome, but due to the limited time allotted for speaking at the meeting, he was not able to deliver it.

In his statement, the German cardinal, who was dismissed by Pope Francis in a sudden fashion in June 2017, makes it clear that he sees a worrisome trend currently taking place in the Church. He opposes both a strong papalism that undermines the sacramental teaching authority of each individual bishop as well as the undermining of the ordained office and authority by delegating leading positions in the Roman Curia and in dioceses to lay people.

“It is not progress in ecclesiology,” he wrote, “but a blatant contradiction to its fundamental principles, if all jurisdiction in the Church is deduced from the jurisdictional primacy of the Pope. Also the great verbiage of ministry, synodality, and subsidiarity cannot conceal the regression to a theocratic conception of the papacy.”

The German prelate insisted that the Pope’s authority is based on the fact that Christ Himself has given him the authority, and no one else. “Peter acts in the authority of Christ as His Vicar. His authority to bind and loose is not a participation in the Omnipotence of God,” Müller insisted. He goes on to say that “the apostolic authority of the Pope and of the bishops is not of their own right but only a spiritual power conferred to serve the salvation of souls through the proclamation of the Gospel, the sacramental mediation of grace, and the pastoral direction of the pilgrim People of God to the goal of eternal life.”

That is to say, the Pope’s authority is bound and limited by his duty to lead souls to salvation the way Christ Himself has ordered it. He is not independent of Christ’s mandate.

Therefore, “a Church totally fixated on the Pope was and always is the caricature of the Catholic ‘teaching about the institution, the perpetuity, the meaning and reason for the sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff,’” the cardinal explained.

Based on the principle concerning the limits of the authority of the Pope, Cardinal Müller makes it clear that the Pope cannot change the Church’s hierarchical and sacramental order by appointing lay people as heads of a diocese or of a curial office. “Nor can the Pope confer on any lay person extra-sacramentally – that is, in a formal, legal act – the power of jurisdiction in a diocese or in the Roman curia, so that the bishops or priests may act in his name,” the prelate wrote.

The publication of this intervention by Cardinal Müller is the second intervention by a cardinal that could not be delivered at the recent Consistory. German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, a church historian, was not able to deliver his remarks either, and so Sandro Magister published them on his blog. In this intervention, Cardinal Brandmüller bemoaned the fact that under the pontificate of Pope Francis the free discussion of cardinals with the Pope have essentially ceased to exist. “In ancient times this function of the cardinals found symbolic and ceremonial expression in the rite of ‘aperitio oris,‘ of opening the mouth,” the cardinal wrote, which means “the duty of frankly expressing one’s own conviction, one’s advice, especially in consistory.” He then added that this necessary frankness “is being replaced by a strange silence.”

The German prelate therefore found that the consistories under Pope Francis are not very effective and helpful. “Forms were distributed to request speaking time, followed by obviously spontaneous remarks on any sort of topic, and that was it,” he described the past consistories. “There has never been a debate, an exchange of arguments on a specific topic. Obviously a completely useless procedure.”

The last known controversial Consistory where the cardinals of the Catholic Church were still able to speak freely was the 2014 Consistory, at which Pope Francis invited Cardinal Walter Kasper to present his Kasper proposal regarding the admittance of remarried divorcees to Holy Communion. As Italian vaticanista Marco Tosatti reportedat the time, a large number of cardinals opposed Pope Francis’ initiative. Since then, Pope Francis never allowed such a free discussion to take place during a Consistory. These two German cardinals are to be commended for making sure that such a partial discussion can take place in public now.

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Please see here Cardinal Müller’s Reflections on Pope Francis’ Curial Reform:

Comments on the Reform of the Curia in ‘Praedicate evangelium’

By Gerhard Card. Müller

It is not progress in ecclesiology, but a blatant contradiction to its fundamental principles, if all jurisdiction in the Church is deduced from the jurisdictional primacy of the Pope. Also the great verbiage of ministry, synodality, and subsidiarity cannot conceal the regression to a theocratic conception of the papacy.
These ideals should not only be passed on to others as desiderata but should be demonstrated daily in the exemplary treatment of one’s own collaborators, especially priests. It is necessary to be absolutely clear about the fundamental difference between the ecclesiastical authority of the pope as the successor of Christ and his political-worldly functions as sovereign of the Vatican State or of the Holy See as a subject of international law. Any ecclesiastical jurisdiction is apostolic-sacramental in nature and related to the salvation of souls as distinguished from the political-juridical nature of the exercise of power in a state, including the Vatican State.
Peter acts in the authority of Christ as His Vicar. His authority to bind and loose is not a participation in the Omnipotence of God. For he did not say to him, “To you is given all power is given to you in heaven and on earth” (cf. Mt 28:18). The apostolic authority of the Pope and of the bishops is not of their own right but only a spiritual power conferred to serve the salvation of souls through the proclamation of the Gospel, the sacramental mediation of grace, and the pastoral direction of the pilgrim People of God to the goal of eternal life. Since Peter confessed Jesus as the Son of the Living God on the basis of the Father’s Revelation, Christ gave him the promise: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my (!) church.” (Mt 16:18).

A church totally fixated on the Pope was and always is the caricature of the Catholic “teaching about the institution, the perpetuity, the meaning and reason for the sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff” (Lumen gentium 18). With this conception any ecumenism with the Orthodox and Protestants is doomed to fail from the start. Regarding the classical separation of potestas ordinis and jurisdictionis, which is supposed to establish a total papal jurisdiction, Vatican II renounced it because of its inadequacy. Already according to Thomas Aquinas, the potestas ordinis does not merely mean the authority to administer sacraments. Rather, potestas ordinis means, that in the ordination all powers are conferred, even if the pastoral office may be limited in its concrete jurisdiction. (S.th. II-II q. 39 a.3). Thus, there are not two equivalent categories of potestas ecclesiastica, but only the one potestas ordinis, of which the potestas jurisdictionis is an integral but subordinate part.

Also, the separation of the bishop of Rome with his potestas ordinis for his diocese from the potestas juridictionis of the Pope as successor of Peter for the Universal Church contradicts formally the dogma of of Vatican I (Dog. Const. Pastor aeternus 2. Cap. Canon: “Si quis dixerit…. Romanum pontificem non esse beati Petri in eodem primatu sucessorem anathema sit.” DH 3058). The Roman Curia is the institutionalized participation of the Roman Church in the Petrine primacy. It cannot be organized in a purely secular way according to the criteria of a multinational foundation. This seems to be the unresolved basic problem in the approach of “Praedicate Evangelium.” It takes revenge when, in the elaboration of important papal documents, systematic theology is neglected and instead of clear dogmatic principles a combination of spiritual desiderata and secular categories of power are the basic hermeneutical approach.

The Church as the universal sacrament of the salvation of the world is rooted in the Incarnation. We cannot, like the Protestants, split the Church into an invisible community of grace (communio) and a visible community of law (societas). The visible community of faith is not a religious organization founded by human beings, but the ecclesial-sacramental Body of Christ (Vat. II. Lumen gentium 8). It serves in martyria, leiturgia and diakonia the most intimate union of human beings with God and the unity of Humanity (LG 1). Therefore, it is always Christ Himself Who, through the bishop, teaches, sanctifies and governs pastorally or juridically (LG 20f). Neither the Pope and the bishops nor – as in the Protestant and Catholic church state system – the secular authorities or a mixed body of laymen and clergymen (see the German synodal aberration!) can lead the Church of God like a secular organization, be it in an authoritarian-monocratic, be it in a synodal-democratic form.

According to its sacramental nature and not only because of positive legal norms, the office of the bishop can be exercised only collegially in communion with the entire episcopate cum et sub Petro. Each bishop, by virtue of his consecration, shares in the jurisdiction of the episcopate as a whole, while the Pope, as head of the college, can also speak and act in the name of Christ for the whole Church. Every bishop, by virtue of divine right, participates in the Ecumenical Council (LG 25).

The Pope, however, is not a superbishop or absolute sovereign of the Church as if he shared in the Omnipotence of God, but as the head of the local church of Rome, he is the perpetual visible principle and foundation of unity in faith and communio ecclesiarum(LG 18: 23).

Nor can the Pope confer on any lay person extra-sacramentally – that is, in a formal, legal act – the power of jurisdiction in a diocese or in the Roman curia, so that the bishops or priests may act in his name. “Bishops, therefore, with their helpers, the priests and deacons, have taken up the service of the community, presiding in place of God over the flock, whose shepherds they are, as teachers for doctrine, priests for sacred worship” (Lumen gentium 20).

Contrary cases in the history of the Church and the Papacy are not theological arguments, but only evidence of deficient theology or of the abuse of spiritual authority for secular purposes. It bodes ill the suppression of the congregations of the cardinals (as a partial assembly of the consistory of all cardinals) in favor of formal equality of all the institutions of the Curia and the Holy See as bureaucratic, administrative authorities with the name of Dicastery.

Certainly, the dicastery for media communications can be headed by a competent layman, but precisely not the Congregations for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Liturgy, the Bishops, the Clergy, etc., whose prefects, as clerics of the Roman Church, work with the Bishop of Rome in his capacity as successor of St. Peter (in short, “the Pope”).

Consequently, the sacramentality of the episcopate also means that the bishops are neither deputies nor delegates of the pope (LG 27). They exercise the spiritual powers conferred on them by Christ during their ordination in the name of Christ, not in the authority of the Pope, as this extreme papalism of today again wants it. The deposition of a bishop or the moral pressure on him to resign voluntarily can be justified before God only as ultima ratio in view of the bonum ecclesiae. Necessary is a re-reading of “Praedicate evangelium” in the light of the binding doctrine on the Church in the Dogmatic Constitution of Vatican II., “Lumen gentium.”

Translation of the original text was provided by LifeSite’s Dr. Maike Hickson.

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Anti-Catholic Asst. Principal Placed On Leave September 1, 2022  Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the latest news regarding a Connecticut anti-Catholic school administrator: Yesterday, we enlisted the support of our email subscribers asking them to contact Dr. Toni Jones, Superintendent of Greenwich Schools, regarding revelations that Jeremy Boland, Assistant Principal of Cos Cob Elementary School, has admitted that he does not hire Catholics. We are delighted to report that subsequent to our news release, Jones announced that Boland was placed on administrative leave, pending the completion of an investigation. Cos Cob is a prestigious public school in a wealthy neighborhood. The reaction of public figures in Connecticut to this outrage has been heartening. Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, condemned Boland’s anti-Catholic remarks, saying, “The Connecticut State Department of Education is aware of the incident, has been in contact with Greenwich Public School administrators, and is monitoring the situation’s progress.” Bob Stefanowski, a Republican who will challenge Lamont in the upcoming gubernatorial election, went further, contending that if Boland is found guilty, “it is my hope that he is fully prosecuted and never sees the inside of a classroom again.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said, “Of course I support a full investigation.” Blumenthal’s Republican challenger, Leora Levy, blasted what Boland did as “un-American.” She also encouraged school officials “to initiate a review of hiring practices and curriculum.” First Selectman Fred Camillo, a former Republican State Representative, attended Cos Cob School was taken aback by what happened. “This hits home. To think that Roman Catholic applicants may have applied for teaching positions and not received proper consideration due to their religion seems like something from a bygone era, not 2022.” Majority Leader State Sen. Bob Duff, a Democrat, said he supports “a full investigation to determine if this illegal discrimination has been allowed to happen by leaders in Greenwich beyond this man and if so all parties need to be held accountable.” State Rep. Kim Fiorello, a Republican, took a shot at the media, saying, “this is not bombshell breaking news to so many parents in Greenwich and parents across our state, who for months have been sounding the alarm. You have been ignoring them.” State Sen. Ryan Fazio, a Republican, stated that “The greatest offense that we saw on that 12-minute video was, without doubt, the notion that our public education system does not answer to parents.” Democrat Congressman Jim Himes said, “I have full faith this matter will be investigated thoroughly by the State Department of Education and Greenwich Public Schools and that parties will be held accountable.” The Catholic League appreciates all of these comments. We most fully endorse the position of Democrat Majority Leader State Sen. Bob Duff. It is not enough to conduct a probe of Boland: We need to know if anti-Catholic bigotry is entrenched in Greenwich public schools. At a minimum, this means, as Levy said, there must be a review of hiring procedures. An Orthodox Jewish lawyer, and friend of the Catholic League, contacted me to say that “Boland is an anti-Catholic bigot and I’m sure he feels the same way about Orthodox Jews and all others who believe in traditional Biblical values.” He offered his legal assistance. He’s right. Boland spoke so casually about his refusal to hire conservative Catholics that it suggests he has been doing so for some time, with impunity. If this is the case, then as Stefanowski said, he needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We need to know how many Catholics have been turned away from employment in Greenwich public schools, and not simply at Cos Cob. We also need to know if religious profiling is systemic in the schools, and if those who hold to traditional moral values have been excluded from consideration by school administrators.  To this end, we are contacting officials at the State Department of Education and the Greenwich Public Schools, asking for such a probe. Show your support for Sen. Majority Leader Bob Duff’s call for an investigation beyond Boland: Bob.Duff@cga.ct.gov

Kamala Harris Backed Bail Fund Released Man Now Charged With Murder, Again

August 31, 2022

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Vice President Kamala Harris has a lower approval rating than President Joe Biden and all her predecessors. Even with these low standards, VP Harris outperforms herself in the race for the bottom.

Tuesday’s Minnesota Alpha News reported that Shawn Michael Tillman, a St Paul resident, was arrested for murder. This comes just weeks after Tillman was rescued from an indecent exposure charge filed by the progressive Minnesota Freedom Fund. This controversial organization has a history of bailing out violent offenders. It was promoted by Kamala Hariri in 2020 during George Floyd protests. Harris wrote the following tweets from her personal account on Twitter:

Even Kamala Harris, who is a little sloppy, would be able to tell that protesting was not illegal. However, there was violence and property destruction in Minnesota. Rioters had already taken over a police station and set fire to it. When Harris offered her support, Minnesota looked almost like the Luftwaffe had triumphed.

“Don’t forget to chip into the @MNFreedom Fund if you can to post bail for protestors on the ground in Minnesota.”

Minneapolis looked like a warzone. This was what some viewers found exciting, while Hollywood celebrities cheered on the destruction.

My colleague reported that the fund received over $35 million in donations. Kamala Harris, and at least 13 Biden campaign staffers, donated to the fund. The murder Tillman was charged with, but that would not have occurred without MFF posting bail. This isn’t the first time the fund has failed to protect communities from criminals in custody.

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It is quite shameful that a Vice President supported criminals who set fire to a city, including a precinct and police station, making it look like a war zone. It is disgusting that a Vice President solicited donations for a fund to release dangerous criminals into the local community. This resulted in violent assaults as well as a growing number of homicides.

Tillman was previously convicted eight times of indecent exposure and a weapon charge. Tillman is charged with murder in a rivalry. He is accused of firing six bullets from his handgun on his victim, who was located near a light-rail station. This was caught on video surveillance and investigators believe it happened at 4 AM. Minnesota Republican legislators continue to attempt to prohibit organizations such as MFF from operating within the state. Fox News reports that Harris’ office has yet to respond to comment requests.