Celibacy is always, shall we say, an affront to what man normally thinks. It is something that can be done, and is only credible, if there is a God and if celibacy is my doorway into the kingdom of God.
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Site: AntiWar.comIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vehement opposition to a Palestinian state aligns perfectly with a long-standing Zionist ideology that has consistently viewed the establishment of a Palestinian state as a direct threat to Israel’s very foundation as a settler colonial project. Thus, the mere existence of a Palestinian state with clearly defined geographical boundaries would … Continue reading "French Contradictions: Macron’s Palestine Play – Too Little, Too Late?"
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Site: The Unz ReviewRumble link Bitchute link Richie Allen began yesterday’s interview by apologizing: “I misunderstood something you said to me during the programme and I erroneously accused you because I thought that you'd advocated violence against people, Jews or otherwise, and you hadn't done anything like that.” I thanked him and said: I mean, to me, it...
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Site: AntiWar.comReprinted with permission from The Kucinich Report. Gaza is suffering the most intense bombing, per capita, of anywhere on earth, ever. Over 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, an area slightly smaller than the City of Detroit, Michigan, resulting in the recorded deaths of at least 60,000 Gazans and injuries to hundreds … Continue reading "War Dust and Collateral Inhalation: Israel Breathes in Gaza’s Dust"
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Site: The Unz ReviewWars end. Bombs remain. In December 2020, the crew of an English fishing boat was pulling in a string of crab pots 22 miles northeast of Cromer, a town in Norfolk, England, when they noticed a tug on the main line. An explosion blew the Galwad-Y-Mor into the air, injuring five crew members, one of...
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Site: Restore-DC-Catholicism
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Site: Novus Ordo Watch
“And the enemies of the Lord … shall come to nothing and vanish like smoke” (Ps 36:20)
Lying in State, the Body of Francis Appears to be Turning Dark
(image: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images – cropped)
The body of the late Jesuit apostate Jorge Bergoglio (‘Pope Francis’) has been lying in state inside an open coffin in St. Peter’s Basilica since Tuesday, April 22. Tens of thousands of mourners have been paying their respects.
On Friday evening at 8:00 pm local time, the casket will be sealed. The funeral will take place on Saturday at 10:00 am, followed by a procession to the Basilica of St.… READ MORE
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Site: Novus Ordo Wire – Novus Ordo Watch
“And the enemies of the Lord … shall come to nothing and vanish like smoke” (Ps 36:20)
Lying in State, the Body of Francis Appears to be Turning Dark
(image: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images – cropped)
The body of the late Jesuit apostate Jorge Bergoglio (‘Pope Francis’) has been lying in state inside an open coffin in St. Peter’s Basilica since Tuesday, April 22. Tens of thousands of mourners have been paying their respects.
On Friday evening at 8:00 pm local time, the casket will be sealed. The funeral will take place on Saturday at 10:00 am, followed by a procession to the Basilica of St.… READ MORE
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Site: non veni pacem
The picture above is the niche at St. Mary Mary wherein Antipope Bergolio will be interred in the ground beneath that slab.
Flashback (sorry, tldr, but worth it):
Visibility: God is not a jerk, the signs are literally everywhere, WAKE UP
Originally posted February 19, 2021
Miss B. has been writing about the satanic pectoral cross that is being used by Antipope Bergoglio as he rules over the anti-church. Closer inspection of said cross reveals more interesting details by the day.
It is the same cross used by the satanic pedo sodo Cardinal Bernardin back in the 1970s-90s, and this hardly seems a coincidence. It was Bernardin who ritualistically raped an 11 year old girl, known as “Agnes,” at a satanic black mass conducted by his bishop John Russell inside St. Mary’s church in Greenville, South Carolina in 1957. Agnes’ story, including her polygraph test results, can be found in Randy Engel’s The Rite of Sodomy, beginning on page 910.
Six years later, just six days into the pontificate of Pope Paul VI of odious memory, another black mass was conducted for the enthronement of Satan at the Vatican, inside the Pauline Chapel, on the Feast of SS Peter and Paul, 29 June 1963. It is at this event where Malachi Martin uses creative license to place Agnes’ rape in Windswept House. This black mass/enthronement was, at the time, the crowning achievement of the Sodo-Masonic infiltration, where they intended and “prayed for” the true Catholic Church to be subsumed by the anti-church, as the “Universal Church of Man” (Windswept House, beginning on page 16).
It makes one wonder if the events in Greenville were in fact an enthronement of Satan in the United States of America. The timing seems about right, doesn’t it? Bernardin went on to become a bishop at the age of 38, head of the USCCB, and finally Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago in 1982. He ruled the American Church and hand picked practically every bishop until his death in 1996.
Fast-forward to 2019-21. Moloch-worshiping “catholic” faux POTUS in DC, subject of Cardinal Archbishop Wilton Gregory, who himself was personally chosen and consecrated a bishop at the age of 36 at the hands of Bernardin. Arch-heretic antipope squatting on the Chair of St. Peter. Lies and blasphemies on a daily basis. Diabolical inversion of truth regarding all manner of the moral law. Pachamama enthroned… demon worship inside St. Peter’s and on the high altar itself. Then shortly thereafter, the true and pure unblemished sacrifice was taken away altogether; there has not been Mass said on that altar – the pope’s altar – in nearly a year. Do you think that too might be a visible sign of something being very, very wrong? https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/a-symbolic-sign-after-the-pachamama-worship-at-st-peters-papal-altar-unused-for-months-now
I am mirroring, below, all three posts from Miss B. regarding the pectoral cross, with permission. I only have two items to add to the backward/inverted leg/foot demon motif: Scroll down to the image of the full cross. First, take a look at the “sheep” on the far left of the cross. I smell bacon. Second, turn the image upside down. Look at the tunic, below the belt. Is that a hand grasping a phallus?
Folks, read it all. Click the links. It’s all out in the open.
The Satanic Bernardin-Bergoglio Pectoral Cross: “Why are the feet facing different directions?” Because the figure isn’t Christ… it is the ANTICHRIST
Now THIS is extremely creepy.
An eagle-eyed reader sent a very short email regarding the posts on the Bernardin-Bergoglio super-creepy pectoral cross. “Why are the feet facing different directions?”
I made the Scooby-Doo inquisitive noise and pulled up my picture and zoomed in on the legs and feet of the figure, and sure enough, absolutely no mistake, the leg on our left is facing backward – you can clearly see the musculature of the calf shows that the view is from the rear, you can see the anatomy of the knee is from the rear, and the foot itself is the view of the Achilles’ tendon and heel. The leg and foot on our right is clearly front-facing, as it should be.
So I start looking up “backward leg or foot” and… guys, it’s NEVER good. It is a UNIVERSAL motif of the demonic. As in, inversion, mirror images, the sowing of confusion, deception, leading people astray, especially children, oftentimes to ritual death. Just a few of the demonic “backwards leg/foot” entries include:
Tata Duende (Mayan demon, child kidnapper)
Churel (South Asian demon, vampiric, hunts young men especially)
Ciguapa (Dominican Republic demon)
Again, the common linkage with the motif of one or both legs/feet being reversed is that of DECEPTION and leading victims astray by confusion. Is the demon coming or going? Which way is it facing? The demon has a superficial initial appearance of normalcy, but is actually an inversion or MIRROR IMAGE.
If this isn’t apropos of the Bergoglian Antipapacy and the Antichurch of which he is the public face, I don’t know what is.
So now we not only see why the Bernardin-Bergoglio “pectoral cross” has a figure with a reversed leg and foot, but we also see the significance to the Luciferian cabal of usurpers at war with Jesus Christ and His Holy Church.
The figure on the Bernardin-Bergoglio pectoral cross isn’t Christ. It is the ANTICHRIST.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on February 19, ARSH 2021 by Ann Barnhardt.
More Photo Evidence on the Satanist Cardinal Bernardin, His Creepy Pectoral Cross That Antipope Bergoglio Also Wears, and the Satanic Grand Orient
Original post here.
Now, add:
https://oto-uk.org
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on February 18, ARSH 2021 by Ann Barnhardt.
Remember Antipope Bergoglio’s creepy pectoral Cross? Well, it’s EXACTLY the same Cross worn by the Satanist pedophile rapist, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin
Okay. Bernardin was the American satanist who was shot straight to the top of the American church and decided who was elevated to the episcopacy in the US from the late 1960s until his death in ARSH 1996.
Bernardin was the man depicted in the opening chapter of Malachi Martin’s “Windswept House” who co-presided with Bishop John Russell over the black Mass in South Carolina that was performed concurrently with a black Mass in the Pauline Chapel inside the Vatican to “enthrone satan” in the late 1950s. The child who was raped in the South Carolina black Mass, “Agnes”, corresponded with me in ARSH 2014 and confirmed that Bernardin co-presided over the South Carolina black Mass and raped her at the “consecration” equivalent. Agnes’ father was a satanist in South Carolina and provided her to the coven and was present when she was ritually raped.
Bernardin has been recruited by satanists out of the gay bar scene in Charleston when he was a pre-med undergrad at USC. The satanists placed him into seminary and saw to it that he shot straight to the top of the American church. Bernardin was made a bishop at age 38, and at age 40 was the head of the US bishops’ conference, a position of power which he retained until his death, and his coven of protégées still control to this day.
Bernardin was a key supporter of Saul Alinsky, and Bernardin paid for Barack Obama (Barry Soetoro) to be brought to Chicago and be trained in Alinskyism.
Read my piece from ARSH 2012, “The Bernardin-Alinsky-Obama Nexus” here.
Antipope Bergoglio has worn a creepy pectoral Cross with Christ (?) depicted with arms crossed since his elevation in Buenos Aires. On the left is Bergoglio before usurping the Petrine See, and on the right is after the usurpation, with a new silver version of the same Cross:
It is thought that this is actually a satanic icon, rooted in “Osiris”, and that the odd “dove” at the top is actually a goat head with horns, stylized so as to be claimed to be “a dove”. The face of the man looks like an evil death mask.
Not coincidentally, in December of ARSH 2019, a Pachamama worship ritual was performed at a televised Vatican “Christmas concert”, led by an Amazonian witch. These were the last days before the global putsch of the Covid political religion and the global interdict of the Catholic Church. This screen cap is literally of the Pachamama worship ritual inside the Paul VI hall inside the Vatican:
But here’s the new info, sent in by an eagle-eyed reader. This pectoral cross that Antipope Bergoglio wears is EXACTLY the same as that worn by the Satanist Cardinal Bernardin:
Interestingly, Wilton Gregory, the black sodomite hand-picked by the faggot Cardinal Donald Wuerl, himself a protégée of Uncle Ted McCarrick, to replace Wuerl in Washington DC, was Bernardin’s protégée (and assumed sodomy partner.) Here is a picture of the known satanist and child rapist Bernardin consecrating Wilton Gregory a Bishop at age 36, on Halloween ARSH 1983, and a picture of Gregory serving Bernardin’s Mass. You can see the edge of Bernardin’s pectoral Cross. Given Wilton Gregory’s flaming homosexuality and intimate connection with Bernardin, it is not at all unreasonable to suspect Wilton Gregory of being connected to Satanism. Which makes him just perfect to be the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington DC.
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Site: Zero HedgeLiberal Media Ditching "Food Deserts" Term For Far More Inflammatory-Sounding "Food Apartheid"Tyler Durden Thu, 04/24/2025 - 20:05
Having worn out the use of 'Hitler' over the last decade, the liberal media is searching for its next sensationalist descriptor for an otherwise innocuous "injustice" deserving of unlimited taxpayer dollars.
This go-round, the media is replacing their loaded "food desert" term with "food apartheid". Because, hey, when there isn't a World War II or full blown civil rights style crisis on the media's hands to all them to argue their ideologies...why not just invent one?
"The Associated Press periodically tweaks its style guide—often to make its left‑wing activism more subtle. Progressive activists do the same, inventing controversies out of thin air. Where we once spoke of “food deserts,” the Radical Left now insists on “food apartheid”—and expects us to pretend this contrived concept is happening in Seattle," Jason Rantz of 770 KTTH argues.
Rantz points out in an article out this morning that Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka pushes the idea that racism is behind the lack of quality grocery stores in areas like south Seattle compared to whiter neighborhoods.
“While ‘food desert’ might lead people to think there’s something inevitable... ‘food apartheid’ argues that these inequities are the result of intentional choices, and can be changed,” she writes.
True to her unwavering BLM alignment, Ishisaka sees racism in every disparity. Fewer stores in Black neighborhoods? “These inequities... contribute to health disparities that fall along racial and socio-economic lines,” she claims—suggesting a broad, selective conspiracy that oddly excludes Asians and poor whites.
Naomi Ishisaka blames “policies such as redlining and urban renewal” for underinvestment in Black neighborhoods—but sidesteps the more obvious factor: crime.
She even concedes that near her Rainier Beach home, “we have two Safeways, the closest of which has been the site of numerous incidents of gun violence,” unwittingly highlighting the real deterrent.
Grocery stores operate on thin margins and avoid areas where safety is a liability. That basic economic reality seems lost on Ishisaka, blinded by ideology.
The irony is rich: the same activists crying “food apartheid” also chant “ACAB,” oppose policing, and undermine public safety—then wonder why businesses won’t invest, Rantz says.
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Site: Public Discourse
Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a week-long series of essays at Public Discourse reflecting on Pope Francis’s pontificate, his legacy, and the Catholic Church’s future.
Witnessing the tireless dedication of Pope Francis over the last twelve years to those most in need—the poor, the sick, the rejected, those suffering in body and spirit—was an extraordinary gift to me. After his passing, I found myself thinking: How often today does God bless his people with a shepherd, particularly one with significant health challenges, who devotes such intense energy and affection to all that seek his attention?
I have no idea how Catholic prelates can prepare for the task of governing such a large organization in our complex and tumultuous world. Buenos Aires is not an easy place to be bishop: when asked why he never visited his homeland after his election, Pope Francis would joke, “I spent 76 years in Argentina. That’s enough, isn’t it?” But it was his home, and when he became Bishop of Rome, he came to a very different place, both in the culture of its people and in the particular issues that the Church faced there. What a profound cross it must have been for him to be suddenly, and unexpectedly, catapulted from being a subway-riding bishop on the verge of retirement, to steering the universal Church through the perilous waters of sex scandals and the Vatican’s grave financial difficulties.
Even apart from the perennial challenges of governance, contemporary popes face the perennial task of confronting the needs of the wounded modern world—“smelling of the sheep,” as Francis would say—without becoming of the world. I especially appreciated the pope’s focus on fighting clericalism and raising up the laity and their contributions to the Church. On one hand, clergy need to learn how to leave in the laity’s hands the political and other temporal responsibilities that are the latter’s proper domain; on the other hand, the laity should often be called to assist the clergy in matters of the latter’s own proper responsibilities of Church government. Harmonizing these apparently dueling needs is no easy task; it is especially difficult when coupled with the challenge in any large organization—like the Church—of finding and training the right people to assume positions of leadership.
Pope Francis also devoted much of his pontificate to the challenge of implementing a culture of love in support of the truth in contemporary culture—a culture that does not grasp what authentic love is, because we treat love as a commodity. Many people—young people especially—are eager for caritas in veritate, and the pope sought to teach it to them through many of the themes of his pontificate: accompanying others, recognizing the concrete circumstances that we fallen human beings can find ourselves in, and always being witnesses to God’s infinite mercy.
Learning to Find Friends in Unexpected Places
The occasion of the pope’s passing gives us a chance to reflect on the lessons he has left us on how to give witness to truth and love in the modern world. What is the path forward—for the Church and for all people of goodwill? Following the pope’s example, we should ask how God is calling ordinary men and women to engage with the world today—a world in which people, particularly young people brought up amid a culture of chaos and confusion, are calling out for meaning and purpose. The question is especially urgent for those of us, like myself, who grew up in very different circumstances, often with more support than what many young people today have. I was blessed to be raised by a hard-working father who revered his wife, and a loving and deeply God-fearing mother, who both generously gave themselves to me and my six siblings. Not everything was great: I was raised in a small, poor town in Mexico’s Sonoran desert—now the cradle of the Caborca drug cartel. But on the whole, I had a very happy childhood. My young adult years were similarly fortunate. I earned advanced degrees, moved to the United States where I enjoyed enormous opportunities, and, thanks to the intervention of a friend and one of my brothers, I was rescued from going down the wrong path. I found a better way to which God was calling me, in Opus Dei.
The spirit of Opus Dei, a part of the Catholic Church, encompasses many ideals, one of which is the commitment to finding God in the parts of life where he might at first seem most distant. Pope Francis himself expressed this ideal very well in an audience of his I attended in November 2014:
When the Lord invites us to become saints, he doesn’t call us to something heavy, sad . . . quite the contrary! It’s an invitation to share in his joy, to live and to offer with joy every moment of our life, by making it become at the same time a gift of love for the people around us. If we understand this, everything changes and takes on new meaning, a beautiful meaning, a meaning that begins with little everyday things. For example: a lady goes to the market to buy groceries and finds a neighbour there, so they begin to talk and then they come to gossiping and this lady says: “No, no, no I won’t speak badly about anyone.” This is a step towards sainthood, it helps you become more holy. Then, at home, your son wants to talk a little about his ideas: “Oh, I am so tired, I worked so hard today. . . .”—“But,” [you tell yourself,] “you sit down and listen to your son, who needs it!” . . . [T]his is a step towards sainthood. . . . These are little things, but many little steps to sanctity. Every step towards sainthood makes us better people, free from selfishness and being closed within ourselves, and opens us to our brothers and sisters and to their needs.
Eventually I came to see that one area of secular life where people needed more help finding God’s truth was, paradoxically, in academia—in institutions of higher education ostensibly devoted to truth. I made my way to Princeton, New Jersey, where I helped start the Witherspoon Institute and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE). I saw these as means to help students and professors rediscover higher education’s vocation to truth-seeking—and perhaps, from knowing the truth, to eventually find its Author.
But I soon discovered another truth that Pope Francis recalled frequently throughout his papacy: that even those who seemed far from God, at least outwardly, could teach me a thing or two. One such person was my good friend, Princeton Professor Robert “Bob” Hollander. I got to know Bob through our common interest in tennis, which we regularly played together. I learned much from him during our after-game conversations about many things unrelated to religion. Bob eventually told me he was atheist, which for a young, zealous Christian like me was unacceptable. At first I asked myself, “Do I want to spend so much of my time with a heathen?” But I resisted my initial impulse to quit our friendship, and years later I came to realize what a good decision that was. Bob eventually had a profound, positive impact on me, because he helped me understand friendship better, thereby bringing me closer to the truth and to God. More practically, he gave me invaluable counsel at crucial moments, without which Witherspoon and FEHE might never have come to be.
Not many years after I came to the Princeton area and befriended Bob, I read an article that discussed Princeton University’s desire to expand its humanities offerings. I saw this as an opportunity for me to start contributing directly to higher education, by finding money to support Princeton’s effort. I was an engineer by training, not a humanist, so I could contribute little in the way of academic expertise; but I did have a lot of experience raising money for nonprofit work, from my time in Opus Dei. I went to Bob with an idea and a proposal: What if I could obtain a grant to support a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton’s Humanities Council? Would Princeton be interested? Bob’s response was immediate: We can make this happen.
And it did happen, but by a path that I would not have expected. Bob helped organize a lunch with Alexander Nehamas and Carol Rigolot—respectively the Chair and Executive Director of Princeton’s Humanities Council—along with Bob, and myself, to talk about the possible grant. I felt myself surrounded by people who were, in Pope Francis’s words, “on the margins” of God’s Kingdom—people who were quite secular and perhaps even in personal disagreement with Christian teachings. At the time Opus Dei was known for being “ultraconservative,” and therefore I felt the need to mention this fact to them, in case they feared it might cause controversy.
But my fear turned out to be unfounded. Nehamas and Rigolot welcomed the proposal for the fellowship, which was filled first by the late Michael Sugrue in the 1997–98 academic year. Nehamas found Sugrue to be “an exceptional teacher-scholar,” and he and others expressed sincere gratitude to me for helping bring him to Princeton. The experience was such a success that the Humanities Council eventually developed the fellowship into Princeton’s Society of Fellows, which today offers some of the most prestigious and sought-after opportunities in the academy. By taking this risk, Bob and I helped spur a renewal of humanities teaching at Princeton.
I later asked Bob why people who did not share my fundamental beliefs about truth would have gone along with my idea. He thought they simply didn’t care what I believed. He quipped after one of our tennis matches, “Luis, you are not a threat around here because you are Mexican, you are an engineer, and you didn’t go to Princeton.” I laughed hard. All the same, I think that particular experience revealed something that Pope Francis had been trying to remind us of: that the desire for truth is in everyone, and that if we present our interest in truth joyfully, even those who disagree with us might still recognize us as friends.
The things I learned from this experience planted the seeds in my mind for bigger projects. Five years later, in 2003, Robert P. George and I launched the Witherspoon Institute. Our idea was to sponsor teaching and research that we thought was urgently needed in academia but did not yet fit into its priorities. A particular area of concern to us was research on the importance of the traditional structure of the family to the well-being of children and all of society. Perhaps the most famous such project that we sponsored was the 2012 New Family Structures Study of Mark Regnerus. Through the use of good-faith and reason-based empirical methods, Regnerus did an enormous service to our understanding of the family, despite suffering a great deal of ideologically motivated backlash, thanks to Witherspoon’s support. And despite criticism, the research still stands today. Over time more and more people are coming to recognize its truth.
In 2013, Robby George and I founded the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE) to help students pursue truth through authentic friendship and robust intellectual life. Among the numerous related projects in which I have been involved, none gives me greater satisfaction than the Stanford Civics Initiative (SCI), which I helped Josiah (“Josh”) Ober to found and develop. Although in the end my contribution to the project was minor, I’ve been blessed by the deep and lasting friendship I developed with Josh as a result—a friendship as unexpected as that which I made with Bob.
I would have been able to do none of these things had I not, as Pope Francis exhorted us, taken the chance to befriend a man like Bob, even though on the surface we might have seemed unsuited for one another. Bob gave me practical guidance without which my ideals would not have become a reality. But more importantly, he reminded me that even people who seem far from God still bear the dignity of being made in God’s image. Even though they may not recognize God—or at least appear not to do so—they are still made for him, and for truth, which they are always seeking in one way or another. I think that the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus articulated this point quite well:
For paradise we long. For perfection we were made . . . This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives . . . This longing makes our love and friendship possible, and so very unsatisfactory. Hunger is for . . . nothing less than perfect communion with the . . . one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together . . . we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled.
The desire for truth can become a powerful bond of friendship—“intellectual friendship” as we say at Witherspoon and FEHE—as my friendship with Bob showed me. The experience also taught me to expand my heart, to understand better the mystery of what it means to be a person. Without this man, an atheist, I would have been a lesser human being. And, of course, Bob benefited from my friendship in turn: not just by the friendship itself, but from participating in the good it did for higher education—whether directly, in the Society of Fellows, or indirectly in the projects to which the Society gave rise: Witherspoon and FEHE. And then there were the occasional discussions about religion that we would have after tennis. I still maintain the hope that, when he died, the memory of those conversations helped him, in some mysterious way, to go to God.
Building Blocks for Civic Engagement in a Secular World
Pope Francis, it seems to me, was trying throughout his pontificate to urge Christians to find their “Bob” who might be out there—someone who, despite appearing to be far from God, is still searching for truth and friendship, has much truth to impart in turn, and has much good to do in the world that he might not do without our help. Bob taught me a great deal, but two things seem especially worth noting, since they were also close to the pope’s heart. They are what I call building blocks for civic engagement in our secular world.
The first is that which the Church proclaimed in Dignitatis Humanae and reaffirmed under Pope Francis. That every human person, even if he is an atheist like Bob, has an ineradicable dignity, because he is a being
“endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility.” At the same time every person is “impelled by nature” to seek truth, and we should strive not to let appearances distract us from this deeper reality. And yet, “[t]he truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” Therefore man cannot fulfill his “moral obligation to seek truth” unless he be free, “[enjoying] immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom.”
In other words, the best context for bringing others to truth is precisely through the kind of intellectual friendship that Bob and I had.
The second truth is something I learned through my work with Witherspoon and FEHE (which were inspired by what Bob and I achieved at Princeton University): namely, how vital the man-woman traditional family structure is for society. I also realized how important intellectual friendship was for defending the family. On one hand, the best way to make the case for the family is by appealing to truths that all people can understand—in this case, the truths of social science—and we must be confident that people will respond to truth. At the same time, that truth has to be presented well, by being framed in love. We need to be patient with those who disagree on fundamental truths about marriage and family, and we must strive to express ourselves in ways that will win them over. We need to show them that we care about these truths not to impose ourselves on others, but to serve others out of love. We must show our interlocutors that we love and respect them because they, like all people, are God’s children, just as I tried to draw Bob to God above all by being his friend.
Truth and charity should go hand in hand. One cannot love others unless that love is grounded in truth, just as love cannot make a family unless it be grounded in the truths of human nature. At the same time, the deeper one understands the truth, the more one loves it and other people—who are made for truth—and the more easily one can express truth winsomely, because of one’s confidence in its truth.
It is not enough to have the truth and to be able to argue logically for it, although all that is necessary. As Pope Francis reminded us, it is also vitally important to teach truth by the example of one’s love for others—by “accompanying” them along the difficult journey of life, as the pope liked to say. If we are to move forward toward a more just society, we must learn to accompany one another along the difficult, often surprising, and deeply rewarding path toward truth.
For his willingness to answer God’s call and the call of the Church, and for his faithful service until the end, I am grateful to Pope Francis.
Image by Gabriel Sozzi and sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
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Site: Zero HedgeZeldin Demands Mexico Act On Cross-Border SewageTyler Durden Thu, 04/24/2025 - 19:40
Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s trip Tuesday to this scenic family-friendly coastal tourist destination was all business and at times quite unpleasant, considering the noxious fumes he was there to discuss.
Zeldin visited this border city on Earth Day to try to put an end to a decades-long environmental catastrophe: Billions of gallons of sewage and industrial chemicals from Mexico have flowed into the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, closing local beaches and sickening U.S. Navy SEALs who train in the water on nearby beaches.
The cross-border pollution has been going on for decades with Congress addressing the disgusting effluence piece-meal, throwing more than $653 million at the problem over the last five years alone even as the contaminant levels surged.
The Tijuana River runs close to the coast in Mexico then flows into California, through Navy-owned land, and dumps into the ocean. In recent years, Tijuana’s population and industry have boomed, overwhelming its aging wastewater treatment plants and pumping stations and increasing the levels of toxins, including industrial chemicals, bacteria, and trash, in the river and nearby coastal waters. Scientists and researchers say the sewage doesn’t only contaminate the water – it also vaporizes into the air and they have detected high levels of harmful gases in the area.
Enter President Trump, who with his “drill-baby-drill” refrain may seem an unlikely environmental hero. But the president has been intensely focused on the border and has demanded that Mexico help stop the flow of illegal immigrants, drugs, and now human waste into U.S. territory and waters. During Trump’s first term, he usually either touted progress on his “big, beautiful border wall” or railed against Democrats efforts to defund it – without mentioning the sewage pouring into California coastal zones.
Now the problem is “top of mind” for Trump, Zeldin said.
Zeldin, a former Congressman from New York who ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2022, spent his day discussing various options to expedite solutions. He met the previous evening with his Mexican environmental counterparts and left the meeting hopeful about their commitment, but he also didn’t mince words.
“I’m a New Yorker, and if I say this in a way that offends people from Southern California, I’m sorry. But I know my counterparts in Mexico are listening,” Zeldin told reporters after a forum with a bipartisan group of congressman and local leaders. “What’s going on inside of the American who just cares about having it resolved – they don’t give a shit about how it gets done, as long as this crisis is over.”
Earlier in the day, while touring a U.S. plant that treats sewage as a secondary facility to one in Mexico, Darrell Issa, longtime San Diego-area GOP congressman, recounted an alarming story. He recalled one Border Patrol agent telling him the Tijuana River water is so toxic that his boots started disintegrating after stepping into it while doing his job.
Rep. Mike Levin, a Democrat representing northern San Diego County, later told reporters that his wife’s nephew who had trained as a SEAL near the border had been diagnosed with cancer in his 20s. The family can’t prove that his training in the deeply polluted water caused the cancer, but they have their suspicions. Other Navy vets have recently started dubbing the sewage outflows, located roughly one mile from their training waters, the “next Camp Lejeune.”
The Navy is considering relocating its Coronado training site for SEAL candidates after documenting 1,168 cases of acute gastrointestinal illnesses of its recruits from 2019 to 2023. The pollution has sickened swimmers, surfers, lifeguards, and border patrol agents, closing California beaches near the border more often than they’ve been open over the last four years.
Zeldin, who took a helicopter tour of the polluted areas and met with Navy officials Tuesday, said American patience has run out. In the coming days, he will deliver Mexico a to-do list to resolve the environmental crisis and plans to issue a joint statement outlining concrete steps, which must happen “as fast as humanly possible.”
The actions must be “aggressively pursued with extreme urgency,” he stated.
During the tour of the U.S. wastewater treatment center, lawmakers and local officials explained that expanding that facility alone will only take care of roughly half the problem. The center can treat only a limited amount of raw sewage before releasing it directly into the ocean. Meanwhile, Mexican factories and people are dumping chemicals and trash into the Tijuana River itself.
The Mexican government, Zeldin said, must clean up the river and prevent its citizens from re-contaminating it. In 2022, Mexico committed $88 million to help remediate the pollution but still needs to designate the funds to several ongoing wastewater treatment projects and upgrades. One of those projects must be installing floodgates to collect trash in Tijuana, Zeldin said.
“They cannot view this as a U.S. problem just because their contamination reached U.S. soil,” he said. “We need Mexico to not just commit to all the projects that will stop the flow, but in order to actually finish this project, they’re going to [have to] commit to that final cleanup.”
The meetings on the issue so far have been productive, Zeldin stressed, noting that the relatively new administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has appeared receptive to working out a “strong collaborative relationship” and a course of action.
Zeldin, however, did not outline any enforcement actions and said he has not discussed the possibility of making Mexico’s action on the sewage problem a condition to a pending agreement to lift tariffs.
“I haven’t had that conversation with anyone – that’s not something that I’ve heard,” he told RealClearPolitics. “But I wouldn’t read into that one way or the other.”
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Republican challenging Levin for his congressional seat, has been the one sounding the alarm since the first days of the Trump administration. During Tuesday’s meeting with Zeldin and other lawmakers, Desmond suggested a far simpler solution than the complex set of wastewater upgrades and expansions on both sides of the border under consideration.
“I’m happy to support the plant there, but – I’ll go out on a limb – I think we need to dam up the Tijuana River,” he said in the meeting, a video of which a reporter posted on X.com afterward. “That’s what everything’s being thrown into – mattresses, shopping carts, tires, diapers – everything that’s coming across the border.”
Desmond also expressed optimism that “real, tangible solutions” are on the way, but said he plans to continue keeping the pressure on Mexico.
“I’m not letting up until we see results,” he said after the meeting. “Holding Mexico accountable is no longer optional – it’s urgent. Our beaches, our health, and our military demand it.”
Zeldin didn’t comment on Desmond’s proposal to dam the river, which would no doubt anger environmentalists who have complained for decades that the pollutants are harming the entire Tijuana Valley estuary, leading to mass deaths of its fish and other marine life and a reduction in biodiversity.
Doing so would also violate numerous environmental regulations. The estuary is one of just 30 that remain protected in North America and is recognized by the United Nations as coastal wetlands in need of these safeguards. Even so, Mexican factories and others continue to violate the protections and disregard regulations.
The bilateral solution will likely be complex, Zeldin said, but the status quo is unacceptable. The administrator then predicted that the U.S. and Mexican government would be celebrating putting the crisis in the “rearview mirror” by Earth Day 2026.
“There’s no way that we are going to stand before the people of California and ask them to have more patience and just bear with all of us as we go through the next 10 or 20 or 30 years of being stuck in 12 feet of raw sewage and not getting anywhere,” he pledged.
As to why Trump is making the issue a priority now and why no other president, Democrat or Republican, over the last 25 years has successfully tackled it, Zeldin demurred.
“Look, I have plenty of thoughts as to missed opportunities in the past,” he told RCP. “But I’m not here to look backwards right now. I’m just looking forward.”
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' national political correspondent.
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Site: Henrymakow.comIn the 1930's many Americans looked to Nazi Germany for inspiration in their opposition to the Communist Rothschild banking cartel.Before Donald Trump, there was Father Charles Coughlin, who popularized fascism for Americans in the 1930s.When Fascism Was AmericanBy Joe Allen(excerpt by henrymakow.com)In the United States, the public and the press were virtually unanimous in condemning Kristallnacht, with one poll reporting that nearly 94 percent of Americans disapproved of Germany's treatment of Jews.Yet despite Nazism's unpopularity, one voice took to the airwaves to defend these actions -- Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest based in Royal Oak, Michigan. Coughlin was a popular radio personality with an audience of millions, largely concentrated in the northeastern United States, and in New York City in particular.In a highly anticipated broadcast that took place eleven days after Kristallnacht, Coughlin began by posing three questions: "Why is there persecution in Germany today?"; "How can we destroy it?"; and why is "Nazism so hostile to Jewry?"Coughlin presented a simple answer: Nazism was a "defense mechanism against Communism," and that the "rising generation of Germans regard Communism as a product not of Russia, but of a group of Jews who dominated the destinies of Russia."In the broadcast Coughlin minimized the Nazi "fine" of $400 million on Germany's Jewish community with the claim that "between these same years not $400 million but $40 billion . . . of Christian property was appropriated by the Lenins and Trotskys . . . by the atheistic Jews and Gentiles" and accused theNew York investment bank Kuhn Loeb & Company with helping to finance the Russian revolution and other Communist plots.Coughlin's unapologetic Nazi propaganda inspired swift backlash. WMCA, the New York radio station that provided his largest audience, demanded to see his scripts in advance of any future broadcasts, and cancelled his program after he refused. Coughlin later admitted that he used "Nazi sources" in his broadcast.Following the broadcast the New York Times' Berlin correspondent reported that Coughlin had become "the new hero of Nazi Germany." But Coughlin wasn't only a hero in Berlin; thousands of American supporters responded enthusiastically to his calls for militant action against "atheistic communism."Coughlin began broadcasting from his Michigan church, "The Shrine of the Little Flower," in 1926, when radio represented a novel, thrilling experience for millions of people. With his rich baritone voice, and slight Irish brogue which he employed for great theatrical effect, Coughlin was made for the new medium.The 1929 Wall Street crash and the ensuing depression impoverished large parts of Coughlin's working- and lower-middle-class audience. In the wake of the crisis his broadcasts changed from religious sermonizing to political commentary that began with violent attacks on communism. According to historian Alan Brinkley,As Coughlin attacked the "banksters" he blamed for the Great Depression, his audience grew massive. By 1933, the network of radio stations that carried his broadcasts reached a potential listenership of forty million.In November 1934, Coughlin announced that he would organize his followers into a new political organization, the National Union for Social Justice. He denied that it was a third party even though it bore the hallmarks of every traditional American political party, and was organized by congressional districts. Coughlin waited for the right issue to flex the muscles of his new formation and got it in January 1935 when Roosevelt proposed that the United States affiliate to the World Court.No president since Woodrow Wilson -- for fear of provoking an isolationist backlash -- had proposed the US make itself accountable to an international institution. A largely symbolic act, it initially appeared that Roosevelt would win the Senate majority needed to ratify the treaty for affiliation.Coughlin mobilized his forces along with other World Court opponents, including the mighty newspaper chain of arch-reactionary William Randolph Hearst. They overwhelmed Washington with hundreds of telegrams over one crucial weekend and defeated the treaty. A jubilant Coughlin declared that he intended to slay greater dragons. "Our next goal is to clean out the international bankers."The phrase "international bankers" was a euphamism for Jews and was widely used in those years by numerous public figures including auto magnate (and fellow Michigander) Henry Ford, who bankrolled the distribution of antisemitic propaganda through his newspaper the Dearborn Independent.Coughlin made the leap from antisemitism to open fascism after his political ambitions were crushed in the 1936 election. Coughlin had merged his National Union of Social Justice with the remnants of the late Huey Long's Share Our Wealth clubs, led by the antisemitic preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, and old-age pension activist Francis Townsend, in order to mount a third-party challenge to Roosevelt.The Union Party nominated North Dakota congressman William Lemke for president. Roosevelt, however, had shifted dramatically to the left during the course of 1935. In the face of failing New Deal policies and a huge upsurge in labor struggle, the president signed into law historic legislation including the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, the popularity of which undercut any electoral challenge.As Lemke's campaign faltered, Coughlin grew increasingly agitated and vitriolic. "When an upstart dictator in the United States succeeds in making this a one-party form of government, then the ballot isuseless," he asserted to an audience of twenty-five thousand supporters in Providence, Rhode Island. Coughlin declared: "I shall have the courage to stand up and advocate the use of bullets" and promised "more bullet holes in the White House than you could count with an adding machine."Winning less than nine hundred thousand votes across the country, Lemke went down in crushing defeat while Roosevelt secured one of the biggest presidential landslides in US history. With the election over, Coughlin announced that he would retire from the airwaves. Despondent, he confided to a reporter, "Democracy is doomed. This is our last election . . . It is fascism or communism. We are at a crossroads.""What road do you take, Father Coughlin?" the reporter asked."I take the road of fascism," the priest replied.-Related - America First. Although this documentary is in French, it contains footage of the American Nazi movement in the 1930's which actually had a paramilitary wing modelled on the SS dedicated to overthrowing the Communist FDR administration.Makow comment- Fascism was created by Organized Jewry as false opposition to provoke genocidal wars against humanity.
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Site: Zero HedgeWash. State Instructor And PhD Student Arrested After Assaulting Student Wearing MAGA HatTyler Durden Thu, 04/24/2025 - 19:15
A Washington State University instructor and PhD student, Patrick Mahoney, was arrested after allegedly assaulting a student wearing a red “Take America Back” Trump 2024 hat, according to a police report obtained by The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH.
The victim, Jay Sani, said Mahoney grabbed his hat and threw it, then, along with another suspect, Gerald Hoff, “grabbed Sani and took him to the ground.”
The police report says: “Once on the ground, Mahoney grabbed Sani’s head and slammed it into the ground. Sani then moved his hands to approximately shoulder height and said something to the effect of he put his hands up to not make the fight worse.
Mahoney said to the officer who contacted him: “You know, you’re f**king wearing that hat, you wanted someone to f**king look at it, right?”
“I asked Mahoney what happened tonight. Mahoney said that he saw ‘ol’ boy’ walking around. Mahoney did not name Sani by name but said ‘I’ve seen this guy, f**king, on campus before. I know he’s like f**king Right Wing dude. He’s got a f**king, like, Make America Great Again hat.'”
According to police, Mahoney referred to Sani as “ol’ boy” and admitted to grabbing the hat, saying, “You know, you’re fking wearing that hat, you wanted someone to fking look at it, right?” He claimed Sani “body checked” him, prompting Mahoney to tackle and punch him “to Sani’s jaw.”
Both Mahoney and Gerald Hoff were arrested for assault, according to 770 KTTH. “WSU suspended and removed Mahoney from all classes he previously taught,” The Daily Evergreen reported.
EXCLUSIVE: Frontlines reporter @choeshow has obtained surveillance footage showing Washington State University (WSU) PhD student instructor Patrick Mahoney and WSU employee Gerald Hoff attacking engineering student Jay Sani.
— FRONTLINES (@FrontlinesTPUSA) April 15, 2025
Sani claims that Mahoney and Hoff assaulted him… pic.twitter.com/AhNae3FDMTMahoney, described as a far-left activist, was suspended and removed from teaching duties. He has a history of union involvement and pro-Palestinian activism, including calls for a Gaza ceasefire.
The KTTH report says that Sani, who says he was bruised, condemned “how toxic the left has gotten.” In a Facebook post, he wrote, “To make it clear, I hate to say this, but i’m [sic] brown, but forget it. I’m an engineering student that wants to get the degree, and move on. So what if I like someone that you don’t like. We have the 1st amendment, and its not okay that just because you don’t like that person, I should be attacked for it. You had a chance in November to oust him, but you didn’t.”
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Site: LifeNews
If you were to believe pro-abortionists—but who would? —they have assumed the mantle of being “on the side of science.” This one-sided meme is as preposterous as it unscientific.
Whose principles are in harmony with basic biology and specifically human embryology? Ours, of course.
It’s simple. Each of us began our individual lives as human being at conception when sperm and egg united to form a new single-celled organism (the zygote) — a member of our species at the earliest stage of development.
To argue against this you have to pretend, among other things, that human life doesn’t really begin until implantation, which is a political, not a biological, conclusion.
The following is a perfect illustration of the pro-abortion insistence that time (and science and technological advances) stand still.
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When pro-abortion Law Prof. Mary Ziegler once wrote (as she did for The New York Times) that “The Abortion Wars Have Become a Fight Over Science,” she was trying to finesse the reality of fetal pain and the eminently defensible conclusion that abortion can cause “severe emotional disturbances” in some post-abortion women or increase their chances of “sterility.”
Ziegler writes, “Some insisted that fetal viability came earlier than the 24-to-28-week time frame set in Roe,” as if to suggest that believing preemies can be saved earlier and earlier in pregnancy is equivalent to believing the earth is flat.
Tellingly, the link in her 2021 story was to a 1979 Supreme Court decision! Has nothing happened in neonatal intensive care units in over 40 years, let alone since?!
Ziegler also opinions
This year’s skirmish wasn’t actually unusual, however. Rather, it was revealing of a larger shift in the terms of the abortion debate. Over the past few decades, the abortion wars have become as much a fight about science and medicine as they are about the law and the Constitution.
But, of course.
We are far more capable than we were decades and decades ago of understanding the agony that a pain-capable child will experience as she is torn about. We know a hundredfold more about the unborn child’s journey to birth and the remarkable interactions between mother and child.
The science of ultrasound, once extremely primitive, is now in 4-D and in color. We can see unborn children frolicking (so much for blobs of tissue).
We know that when it comes to abortion and anything touching on it, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the American Psychological Association may be “well-established” but (contrary to Ziegler) they are anything but “non-partisan.”
A test of any scientific group’s commitment to the evidence will likely be how it handles the fact that chemical abortions can be reversed, if the second of the two drugs is not taken. However, if, as I suspect, resistance will only harden, no amount of evidence will ever convince pro-abortionists that abortion pill reversal is anything other than “junk science.”
But their resistance is equivalent to trying to make time stand still.
The truth is the “underlying science” is on our side and not our benighted opposition’s.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.
The post If You Think Human Life Does Not Begin at Conception, You’re Anti-Science appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Zero HedgeTrump Says Baby Bonus For Moms "Sounds Like A Good Idea"Tyler Durden Thu, 04/24/2025 - 18:50
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
President Donald Trump has signaled a willingness to issue a financial bonus to mothers when they give birth.
The president was asked by reporters on Tuesday whether he might consider “some kind of bonus” to women for having a child. The idea was first reported by The New York Times, which cited anonymous sources who said administration officials are looking into a financial reward to increase the U.S. birth rate.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Trump said in response before quickly moving on to another question. The president did not go into any other specifics about the alleged proposal.
Other administration officials have suggested they favor policies aimed at increasing U.S. birth rates amid decades of decline.
Earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance said during his first public speaking event as vice president that he wanted “more babies” being born in the United States, adding that American “society has failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another as a core part of living in a society.”
“We failed a generation not only by permitting a culture of abortion on demand, but also by neglecting to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life,” he said.
Special government employee Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has repeatedly said that declining birth rates in the West could lead to a collapse of civilization.
“There’s a lot of things that I worry about. The birth rate is very low in almost every country and unless that changes, civilization will disappear. America had the lowest birth rate ever. That was last year. Humanity is dying,” the Tesla CEO told Fox News late last month.
In another warning, Musk wrote on Tuesday that “low birth rates will end civilization” in a post on X that was in response to posted graphs showing a decline.
Births in the United States rose slightly in 2024.
Just more than 3.6 million births were reported for 2024, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention preliminary data released in March. That’s 22,250 more than the final tally of 2023 U.S. births, which was released on Tuesday.
However, the United States has seen an overall decline in fertility since the 1960s.
In 2023, the country hit a record low of 54.5 births per 1,000 females between the ages of 15 and 44, or a 3 percent drop from 2022’s figures, according to the CDC.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office said in January that it lowered its projections for the U.S. population in 30 years to 372 million residents, a 2.8 percent drop from last year, citing declining birth rates and less expected immigration.
The budget office last year had projected 383 million people living in the United States in 30 years.
The United States had an estimated 341 million residents on New Year’s Day and is expected to grow to 350 million people by year’s end.
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Site: Zero Hedge'Cuomo Lied, New Yorkers Died!' - Protesters Storm Stage At Mayor Candidate ForumTyler Durden Thu, 04/24/2025 - 18:25
As he continues his bid for the New York City mayor's office, scandal-plagued former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was accosted by storm-staging protesters at a candidate forum on Wednesday evening. The young throng hurled profane insults at him, and condemned him for his deadly and dishonest mishandling of the Covid pandemic. Afterward, the organizer of the "Black Agenda for NYC" forum said it was a particular "disgrace" that some of the disrupters were white people.
A denim-skirted protester, whose gender is far from certain, climbs to the stage to join others showering Cuomo with curses (Michael Nagle - New York Post)
Cuomo was in mid-sentence on the stage at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn when the group of perhaps 10 protesters stormed the stage, some shouting "Fuck you, Cuomo!" They tried but failed to unfurl a long banner -- as NYPD officers wearing "Community Affairs" shirts quickly moved to intercept them.
It appears at least one of the prominent words on the banners was "KILL." As they were ushered out of the auditorium, some of the protesters chanted "Cuomo Lied, New Yorkers Died!" That line of attack almost certainly refers to Cuomo's catastrophic bungling of New York's response to Covid-19, which struck during his tenure as governor. His administration was widely condemned for ordering nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients who were discharging from hospitals -- a mandate linked to upwards of 15,000 deaths. The Cuomo regime was also accused of deliberately understating the number of those long-term-care-resident deaths by some 50%.
#Breaking A crowd storms the stage at Medgar Evers College as Former Governor Andrew Cuomo begins speaking at the Black Agenda’s Democratic Mayoral Forum #nyc #nycmayor #AndrewCuomo #cuomo #democrats #breakingnews @1010WINS pic.twitter.com/kMMjWjgaAx
— Mary-Lyn Buckley (@ml_buckley) April 24, 2025Cuomo barely budged as the mayhem broke out and then engulfed him. When it subsided he said, “That’s part of the problem in this system, right? Too much politics, not enough substance, not enough discussion." Later, he said, "If I don’t get protested about something, it’s a slow day...A lot of these issues are contentious. People have different opinions and God bless.” Speaking of God, Cuomo resigned his governorship in August 2021 after at least 11 women filed various accusations of unwelcome sexual advances by the now-67-year-old -- from kisses to groping to creepy comments.
A male protester and his unclassifiable, denim-skirted companion continue yelling as they're shoved out of the auditorium (Michael Nagle - New York Post)
At the podium, Henry Butler, the vice chair of the Brooklyn Democrats and organizer of the event -- and an endorser of Cuomo -- expressed disgust that white people would attempt to affect black people's opinions:
“The clown show is over. One of the issues and problems with the Democratic Party, who claim to be a big tent party, is that if you don’t have a certain view, then they try to shout you down. And I think it’s a disgrace when I see a bunch of young, WHITE progressives trying to tell black people who we should vote for. Do not tell us who we should vote for -- we are educated, we know how to think for ourselves. We don't need you here telling us what we should be doing and how we should vote!"
Contrary to Butler's characterization, it appeared most of the protesters were black -- including the first ones to mount the stage. If he's blaming the white protesters for the actions of the black ones, that would seemingly contradict his assertion that black people "don't need [whites]...telling us what we should be doing." Regardless, his denunciation of the white presence predictably elicited loud cheers and applause from the crowd:
“I think it’s a disgrace when I see a bunch of young, white, progressives trying to tell Black people who we should vote for,” Brooklyn Dems Vice Chair Henry Butler, who’s endorsed Cuomo for mayor, said after the protesters were walked out. “We know how to think for ourselves.” pic.twitter.com/qPRDKXh227
— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) April 24, 2025It's been a rough couple weeks for Cuomo. First, auditors reported that, under Cuomo, the state government poured $453 million into building an enormous stockpile of medical equipment essentially that went unused: Out of 247,343 medical devices purchased, the state wound up using only three pieces of equipment -- then left it to decay in warehouses the state rented to hold the horde. It's still sitting there five years after the pandemic arrived.
On Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent a letter to US Attorney General Pam Bondi, renewing his committee's criminal referral urging that Cuomo be investigated for making false statements to Congress -- about the deadly nursing home scandal. The previous referral was ignored by the Biden administration.
Several candidates are running for the Democratic nomination, but a recent poll has Cuomo well out in front at 45%, leading Socialist, Muslim, ethnic-Indian, Uganda-born, New-York-raised, failed rapper and Queens Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, who's the choice of 22% of likely voters. However, he's surged from just 9% in January on a campaign centered on rent-freezes, free buses and free childcare funded in part by higher corporate taxes. Consistent with the messaging of the stage-stormers, he's also attacked Cuomo on his handling of Covid-19.
"We will tax the most profitable corporations at the same rate as the radical socialist utopia of New Jersey and use those taxes to pay for things that'll improve the lives of every New Yorker."
— Jack Cocchiarella (@JDCocchiarella) April 23, 2025
Unlike the Post, @ZohranKMamdani doesn't think affordable rent should be scary. pic.twitter.com/G3jlK3wvBkIf you enjoyed Wednesday night's spectacle, there's ample opportunity for more: The Democratic primary isn't until June 24; the general election is on Nov. 4.
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Site: LifeNews
The selection process for the next United Nations Secretary-General, set to replace António Guterres in 2026, has ignited debate over a push to prioritize female candidates, effectively sidelining men.
And they’re reportedly all radical abortion activists.
Informal discussions within the UN General Assembly and Security Council, as outlined in a letter from General Assembly President Philemon Yang, emphasize appointing a woman for the first time in the UN’s 80-year history. This follows a 2015 resolution urging gender balance and regional rotation, with feminist groups and some member states, including France, arguing that a female leader is overdue after eight male predecessors.
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The process, governed by the UN Charter, involves the 15-member Security Council recommending a candidate for General Assembly approval, with permanent members (U.S., Russia, China, France, UK) holding veto power. Names like Amina Mohammed (Nigeria), Kristalina Georgieva (Bulgaria), and Michelle Bachelet (Chile) have surfaced as potential female contenders, though no formal nominations are yet public.
The race to select the next UN Secretary-General of the United Nations is well underway. All the frontrunners are women, and they are well-known abortion advocates.
The undisputed front-runner for the UN’s top job is Michelle Bachelet, a two-term president of Chile who led the UN agency for Women as well as the UN human rights office. She is a known champion of abortion rights and gender ideology and has been described as the Hillary Clinton of Latin America.
As president of Chile, she successfully shepherded a multi-year campaign to legalize abortion in Chile. As head of UN Women and the highest UN human rights official she streamlined abortion promotion in the UN bureaucracy as well as the promotion of transgender rights, including self-identification.
She issued a scathing attack against the U.S. Supreme Court after the 2022 Dobbs decision. In that case the court declared abortion was an issue that each American state should legislate democratically and not a constitutional right. Bachelet called the decision a “huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality” and said that “abortion is firmly rooted in international human rights law and is at the core of women and girls’ autonomy.”
Given her track-record Bachelet is the preferred candidate of the feminist left.
The post Top Candidate to Lead United Nations is a Radical Abortion Activist appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Zero HedgeTrump's Illegal Migrant Hunt Digs Into The IRS and Social SecurityTyler Durden Thu, 04/24/2025 - 18:00
Authored by Benjamin Weingarten via RealClearInvestigations,
Against fierce resistance, the Trump administration is enlisting the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration in its crackdown on illegal immigration.
On April 7, the IRS signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that alarmed progressive pro-immigration groups and like-minded advocates – and reportedly prompted the tax bureau’s acting chief to resign in protest.
The deal allows ICE to request the tax return information of migrants who are not in this country legally. In recent days, as part of a push to encourage self-deportation, the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration have also coordinated to strip benefits from otherwise inadmissible migrants granted parole during the Biden administration – a group posing national security concerns who have now had their parolee status revoked.
“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals," an unnamed senior DHS official told ABC News, while stressing the desire to “determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense.”
Past administrations have largely avoided such information sharing, both because of turf-protecting impulses and privacy concerns. In the current climate, several immigrant advocacy groups have sued to thwart cooperation between the IRS and Department of Homeland Security, claiming that they are likely to violate taxpayer confidentiality laws. The critics assert that the new policy is aimed not at legitimately prosecuting individuals, but at identifying migrants as part of an effort to deport them en masse – or to pressure them into leaving on their own.
The controversy highlights the sometimes novel ways in which the Trump administration is seeking to break down walls between agencies to share data in pursuit of its policy goals – whether to combat illegal immigration, streamline government, or ensure election integrity – and resistance has come both from outside groups and from within the federal bureaucracy itself.
As RealClearInvestigations reported in 2022, the IRS and its partners, including the Social Security Administration, have been reluctant to share information with agencies like DHS pursuing non-citizens, in part on privacy grounds. The IRS has neglected to use its own enforcement powers, evidence suggests, because of a view that the benefits to working illegal migrants – in their tens of billions of dollars in tax contributions annually – outweigh the costs to Americans victimized by identity theft by migrants using their stolen Social Security numbers.
But the Trump administration has pledged to mine and modernize the government’s data systems to eliminate “information silos” and help combat waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Social Security Administration is ground zero for these efforts. Millions of non-citizens have been issued Social Security numbers in recent years after entering the country and being legally authorized to work. The Trump DHS said in a January 2025 statement that the “Biden-Harris Administration abused the humanitarian parole program to indiscriminately allow 1.5 million migrants to enter our country.”
This month, DHS revoked the temporary parolee status of over 6,300 migrants either on the FBI’s terror watch list or with FBI criminal records. The federal government had issued all of them Social Security numbers. The Trump administration asserted that hundreds of them were collecting Medicaid. Dozens were also receiving unemployment insurance. Some obtained student loans.
On April 8, the Social Security Administration rendered this group ineligible for benefits and legal employment. It moved them to an internal “Ineligible Master File” – previously known as the “Death Master File,” since it contained rolls of dead former beneficiaries.
The Trump administration acted despite internal pushback, including from a senior Social Security IT official who appears to have been forcibly removed from his position in light of his opposition.
“President Trump promised mass deportations, and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told RCI. “He is delivering on his promise he made to the American people.”
Some 92,000 additional illegal migrants with criminal convictions but with Social Security numbers reportedly make up the next group to be shifted to the Ineligible Master File.
Former Biden administration Social Security Administration head Martin O’Malley expressed outrage. “If without due process, Trump and [Elon] Musk can unlawfully ‘disappear’ or ‘digitally murder’ anyone who legally entered our country, then they can do it to anyone already legally here,” said the former Maryland governor.
O’Malley’s acting successor at the Social Security Administration, like her IRS counterpart, left the agency in February amid efforts by DOGE to access “sensitive government records.”
During a recent interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Elon Musk and DOGE staffers suggested that they are also seeking to root out the massive fraud they believe plagues Social Security. Musk’s colleagues said 40% of phone calls to Social Security offices come from fraudsters trying to change direct deposit information to steal legitimate recipients’ funds. They also said that they had found that millions of people listed as over the age of 120 were marked as alive within the Social Security database, affirming 2023 findings from Social Security’s inspector general. Reports and independent analyses suggest at least a percentage of the dead have been issued Social Security benefits.
The X owner on loan to the federal government says fraudsters have exploited the fact that government “databases don’t talk to each other.” As an example, Musk said some seek disability or unemployment insurance using the Social Security number of a person marked as living in the Social Security Administration’s systems but actually dead. Such fraud “is happening all the time at scale,” he asserted.
Social Security’s inspector general reported around $72 billion in “improper payments” over the period from 2015-2022. DOGE has reported that some 1.3 million non-citizens issued Social Security numbers during the Biden years were enrolled in Medicaid. Only certain classes of non-citizens may be eligible for such benefits.
The government efficiency agency has also identified nearly $400 million in fraudulent unemployment claims since 2020 – though it is unknown if any significant portion of these claims went to non-citizens.
In March, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, limiting DOGE’s efforts to access Social Security Administration data, asserting that it was “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition … in search of a fraud epidemic.” On April 17, the judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction prohibiting DOGE members from accessing Social Security systems or records containing personally identifiable information – a ruling the Trump administration has indicated it will appeal.
The White House has argued that while federal law prohibits illegal migrants from obtaining taxpayer-funded benefits, “numerous administrations have acted to undermine the principles and limitations directed by the Congress through that law.” Such benefits in turn serve as a “magnet” for and “fuel” illegal immigration in the administration’s view.
Consequently, on April 15, President Trump issued an executive order, building on a prior order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” aimed at “Preventing Illegal Aliens from Obtaining Social Security Act Benefits.” Such benefits include not only Social Security, but Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and myriad other social programs.
A recent analysis by Center for Immigration Studies shows that 59% of households headed by illegal immigrants use at least one welfare program – and are “especially likely to receive food benefits and Medicaid relative to native households.”
The Trump administration released a fact sheet in conjunction with its latest order citing a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform indicating that taxpayers spend “at least $182 billion annually to cover the costs incurred by the presence of 20 million illegal aliens and their children, which includes $66.4 billion in Federal expenses plus an additional $115.6 billion in state and local expenses” – vastly outweighing their contributions including through paying taxes.
The order directs all impacted agencies not only to take relevant measures to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving benefits, but also to prioritize civil or administrative enforcement actions – while beefing up the full-time fraud prosecution teams across such agencies in conjunction with the Justice Department. The order also calls for the Social Security Administration to investigate earnings reports for those 100 or older with names mismatching those on file at the administration and, when warranted, to refer matters to relevant law enforcement agencies.
The Earnings Suspense File
A major area of Social Security fraud pertaining to immigration is found in the agency’s Earnings Suspense File.
This file records the earnings of employees whose W-2 wage and tax statements have names and Social Security numbers that do not match official records. For decades the file was relatively small and mostly included women whose names had changed with marriage. That change followed the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which required those seeking employment to fill out I-9 forms attesting to citizenship or work-authorized immigrant status, and to provide corroborating documentation and a valid Social Security number.
This effort failed to deter masses of illegal immigrants from entering the country and working – in turn contributing billions of dollars to entitlement programs in tax dollars, but doing so through stealing or fabricating Americans’ Social Security numbers, including those held by the elderly and children. The Social Security Administration estimated two decades ago that up to 75% of illegal migrants working on the books used fake or stolen Social Security numbers.
A 2018 Treasury inspector general report documented more than 1.3 million cases of employment-related identity theft from 2011-2016, and, in 2017 alone, 1.2 million cases in which illegal migrants used Social Security numbers that belonged to someone else or were fabricated.
Reflecting this identification theft, the total amount of wages recorded in the Earnings Suspense File rose from under $80 billion in the 1980s to nearly $190 billion in the 1990s and then multiplied tenfold over the ensuing two decades, to $1.9 trillion in wages by the end of the first Trump administration. During the Biden years, as millions of additional illegal migrants entered the country, that number would again surge upwards to $2.3 trillion by September 2024.
For comparison with those numbers, workers all told generated $9.2 trillion of earnings taxable under Social Security – up to the individual maximum of $147,000 – during 2022, the latest year available.
Boon or Bane?
Some see the work of illegal migrants as a major boon to the economy. In a June 2024 report, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which favors an “equitable and sustainable tax system,” estimated that in 2022, some 10.9 million illegal workers generated $373 billion in earnings, and paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, an advocate for limited immigration, has challenged that analysis, and presented its own, indicating that a far higher estimated illegal migrant population of 15.5 million as of early 2022, earning lower wages than the competing analysis suggested, generated a net cost to taxpayers of $150.7 billion annually.
The Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camerota has testified before Congress that illegal migrants “tend to earn modest wages and make modest tax contributions even when income and payroll taxes are taken out of their pay. This fact, coupled with the relatively heavy demands they make on public coffers – especially for education, health care, and means-tested programs – is the reason they are a net fiscal drain.”
These figures do not take into account the costs to those whose identities have been stolen by illegal immigrants working off the books.
In a recent interview, Trump administration Border Czar Tom Homan acknowledged the problem. “We know for a fact illegal aliens use Americans’ Social Security information to apply for jobs,” he said. Homan asserted that his wife had had her number stolen by an illegal migrant, hurting her credit.
In response to questions about whether immigration authorities would be making use of Social Security information to target illegal aliens for deportation, Homan replied that they should: “This is about protecting the American taxpayer, protecting their Social Security information.
“We’re protecting Social Security for the people who deserve it, for the people who paid into it for decades. We need to protect it for those that need it, and those who are authorized to receive it.”
The White House, Social Security Administration, DOGE, and the Treasury Department did not respond to RCI questions about whether they are examining the Earnings Suspense File to identify potential illegal migrants for pursuit in workplace enforcement activities.
Workplace Enforcement Called Key
The Social Security Administration did not say whether it would be restarting the process of issuing “no-match” letters to employers, indicating mismatched records between W-2s submitted and Social Security Administration records. The first Trump administration had issued such letters, but the Biden administration curtailed the practice, and generally eschewed workplace enforcement of immigration laws.
Proponents of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans believe workplace enforcement is key to any such efforts. Ronald Mortenson recently wrote for the Center for Immigration Studies that “removing millions of individuals illegally in the United States … can only ultimately be accomplished by large-scale workplace enforcement actions that identify large numbers of illegal aliens and lead to their deportation, that eliminate jobs for illegal aliens by holding employers accountable, and that encourage illegal aliens to voluntarily leave the United States.” He has argued DOGE and the Social Security Administration can facilitate these efforts by identifying fraudulently obtained and used Social Security numbers.
Tracking Illegal Voting
DOGE has reportedly used Social Security Administration information to help the Trump administration’s efforts to ensure non-citizens are not participating in U.S. elections. Antonio Gracias, a top DOGE official deployed to the Social Security Administration, recently revealed that of more than 5 million non-citizens to receive Social Security numbers during the Biden years, not only were 1.3 million on Medicaid, but thousands were registered to vote, and some had voted – based upon DOGE’s investigation of the records of just a few states. The administration, Gracias said, had made criminal referrals. DOGE did not respond to RCI’s inquiries.
In a March 25 executive order, the Trump administration instituted a series of measures designed to ensure that only citizens vote in federal elections, while also calling on the Homeland Security Secretary to grant state and local officials access to federal databases for verifying the immigration status of those registering to vote or who have already been registered; to, in coordination with DOGE, review state voter rolls and cross-reference them with federal immigration databases and request relevant state records to identify foreign nationals registered to vote and to share such names with state or local election officials; and for the attorney general to “prioritize enforcement” of laws punishing non-citizen registration and voting, including through use of relevant federal and state databases.
As RCI has previously reported, many states historically lacked access to federal databases for ensuring their voter rolls are free of non-citizens – in part due to the alleged reticence of the Homeland Security Department.
The administration’s critics have not only cast doubt on DOGE’s findings of fraud and questioned the intent of the administration’s associated policies, but sought to challenge the efforts to unearth them in court as illegal. Plaintiffs have challenged DOGE’s ability to access systems and data at agencies ranging from the Treasury Department to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Personnel Management.
Generally, they characterize such officials as unqualified if not separate and apart from the government – and therefore unauthorized to access the sensitive data contained in government databases, including under the Privacy Act.
In a representative response to one such suit, the Trump administration replied that it was facing “a spate of similar lawsuits seeking unprecedented judicial micromanagement of the Executive Branch’s ability to share government data with its own employees in exercising politically accountable oversight of agency activities.”
The administration boiled the arguments on the other side of many such cases down to this: “that it is unlawful for one employee of a federal agency to provide access to its data systems to another employee for the purpose of carrying out an Executive Order of the President.”
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Site: LifeNews
Tennessee Right to Life expresses extreme disappointment that Governor Lee signed into law HB0533/SB0449. The Governor received significant opposition to the bill but, in the end, decided to turn a blind eye to the many legitimate concerns about the legislation.
The bill, which narrowly passed in the House, establishes a “right” to contraception and IVF. Although the bill may have seemed well-intended, it opens a Pandora’s box and could have many unintended consequences.
Tennessee Right to Life and other pro-life groups and individuals are concerned that the law gives no consideration for human embryos that are destroyed if unused in the IVF process and expressed these concerns to the Governor. Unlimited numbers of embryos can be destroyed or discarded under this “right.”
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However, this is not the only problem with the law, it also:
- Offers no consideration for the oversight for minors either in the contraception or IVF section.
- Could negate the rights of parents to oversee their children’s wellbeing around contraception and even IVF (including egg harvesting).
- Could give Planned Parenthood an unlimited “right” to spread their deadly agenda to children without their parents’ knowledge.
- Could establish a right to paid surrogacy.
Pro-Life Tennesseans are frustrated by the Governor signing this bill, especially after contacting his office to voice their concerns and letting him know that anti-life organizations supported it, including Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.
“The governor’s signature indicating his full endorsement of this bill casts doubt on his pro-life convictions. He could have allowed the bill to go into law without his signature. Instead, he turned his back on those who trusted him to do the right thing.”
“We will give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t realize the ramifications of this legislation, but we fully expect him and his administration to address these many concerns in the 2026 session,” said Stacy Dunn, President, TN Right to Life.
The post Tennessee Governor Signs Bill Creating a “Right” to IVF appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
On Tuesday April 22, Attorney General Pam Bondi chaired the first meeting of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias emanating from Federal government.
AG Bondi summarized the inaugural meeting, “As shown…Biden’s DOJ abused and targeted peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.” Bondi declared, “we have ended those abuses….” At a recent White House pre-Easter service with Franklin Graham, President Trump mentioned the anti-Christin bias manifesting in the U.S. saying, “You don’t hear about that very much, but there is anti-Christian bias.”
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CEO of the brutally firebombed pro-life pregnancy center known as CompassCare, Rev. Jim Harden was the first to identify and denounce Biden’s pattern of anti-Christian violence and collusion of government bad actors in those attacks in and following June of 2022, calling for investigation into the FBI for slow-walking investigations into pro-abortion domestic terror. Rev. Harden then predicted that Biden’s DOJ and FBI would join the attacks on peaceful pro-lifers—which began shortly thereafter with the dawn, SWAT-style raid of Mark Houck’s home.
Rev. Harden says, “Once we began to see the obvious pattern of pro-abortion anti-Christian persecution emerging, we starting tracking it on a time-line. The time-line is certainly not exhaustive.” However, Harden continued, “The coordinated anti-Christian violence and lawfare emanating from private and public actors is disturbingly ironic when viewed in the context of a nation founded on a Constitutional Rule of Law with Freedom of Religion listed as first on the Bill of Rights.”
The Task Force members represent a Presidential tour de force, including among others Secretary of State Marco Rubio, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., and Defense Secretary Pet Hegseth. The Task Force was initiated by President Trump’s Executive Order 14202 on February 6, 2025. The Executive Order states in part, “the [Biden] Administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.”
This included the unconstitutional conviction and jailing of peaceful pro-lifers while “at the same time…pro-life centers sought justice for violence, theft, and arson perpetrated against them, which the Biden Department of Justice largely ignored.” The EO went on to cite the surging number of attacks on pro-life churches and pregnancy centers by 8-fold through 2023. One of the Task Force functions is to “identify deficiencies in existing laws and enforcement…[contributing] to unlawful anti-Christian governmental or private conduct…[recommending] appropriate actions that agencies may take to remedy failure to fully enforce the law against acts of anti-Christian hostility, vandalism, and violence.”
After three years of ongoing private and government attacks against his organizations in New York, and AG Bondi’s assurance that the attacks emanating from within the Federal government have ceased, Rev. Harden makes the following suggestions: New FBI Director Kash Patel to initiate a nationwide investigation into pro-abortion Antifa now manifesting itself again through Tesla protests. Provide AG Bondi the names for indictment of the Antifa pro-abortion terrorists that firebombed CompassCare. AG Bondi and her team review his 5-Point Plan to Prosecute Corruption in Federal Law Enforcement, his 7-Point Sex Trafficking Opposition Plan and his 9-Point Plan to Protect Women and Children from Abortion Fraud and Injury.
CompassCare helps women have their babies in five pro-life medical offices across New York State and Telecare around the world. CompassCare is a non-profit raising awareness and funds through the annual Walk for Life on May 3, 2025. Become a lifesaver. Go to CompassCareWalk.com today.
The post Trump, Bondi to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias Against Peaceful Pro-Life Americans appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing a pregnancy resource center network and an organization of Christian employers filed a motion Thursday to intervene in Samuels v. Trump for the purpose of protecting the authority of a U.S. president to direct executive branch policy and thus to fire senior federal officials who reach their position of authority by presidential appointment.
In the case, a former federal official and agency head is suing the Trump administration after the president fired her for refusing to follow an executive order that calls for the federal government to end harmful gender-identity policies. ADF attorneys explain in the motion that the Constitution requires that the president be able to set policy for the executive branch and thus to terminate the employment of federal officials who impose harmful gender-identity mandates.
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“Government officials are appointed to serve the people of America, not impose their divisive ideologies,” said ADF Senior Counsel Julie Marie Blake. “Commissioner Samuels has a history of defying constitutional authority in favor of her agenda, and executive oversight allows the president to supervise and remove officers of the executive branch. We believe the court should hear from employers who benefit from President Trump’s actions, which is why we are urging the court to allow them to intervene.”
In 2024, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission member Jocelyn Samuels voted to impose policies that misinterpret Title VII and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which force employers to facilitate and promote gender-identity ideology and abortion procedures. Shortly after, Trump signed relevant executive orders on Inauguration Day that Samuels refused to follow, leading to her job termination.
Christian Employers Alliance, represented by ADF attorneys, sued to challenge the EEOC mandates in January 2025. CEA and Choices Pregnancy Centers of Greater Phoenix are now asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to let them intervene in the case to keep Samuels from regaining her job and imposing illegal policies that burden their religious beliefs.
The post Christian Pregnancy Centers Support a President’s Ability to Fire Federal Officials appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
The ACLJ is taking action to defend the constitutional rights of a peaceful pro-life advocate who was threatened with criminal charges for simply exercising his First Amendment freedoms in Carbondale, Illinois.
On April 16, our client Brandon, a sidewalk counselor and founder of Gospel for Life, was peacefully advocating for life with pro-life signs in the public area near an abortion clinic. As part of his outreach, he used small temporary signs similar to a yard-sale sign that read “Please don’t abort your baby” or “Free baby supplies” to women in crisis pregnancies.
That’s when Carbondale officials stepped in – not to protect free speech, but to suppress it.
A city employee, under direction from the city attorney, ordered our client to remove the signs, claiming they violated a local sign ordinance. When Brandon respectfully explained that the signs were legal and he had a right to engage in constitutionally protected speech, the city employee responded bluntly: “No, you don’t.”
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Despite Brandon’s full compliance with Carbondale Ordinance 15.4.10.8 – including placing the signs more than 20 feet from any curb – the city escalated the situation. Police officers were called in. Threats of citation and criminal charges followed. Brandon’s pastor called us for help, and we were able to intervene immediately on behalf of our client and prevent an arrest or a citation from being issued.
However, more troubling, when Brandon tried to follow up the next day and inquire about obtaining a sign permit as a nonprofit, he was told by the same city employee who threatened to pull up his signs that no such permit existed – despite the ordinance explicitly providing for one. This was not only misleading but also a blatant misrepresentation of the law.
Let’s be clear: The First Amendment protects the right to speak out in public spaces – especially on matters of public concern. The courts have consistently struck down vague ordinances and arbitrary enforcement that chill free speech. Carbondale’s actions here are not only unconstitutional – they’re dangerous.
As we outlined in our formal demand letter to the City Attorney, we are calling for:
- Written assurance that Brandon may continue his peaceful pro-life advocacy, including the use of compliant temporary signs;
- Access to the proper permitting process for nonprofits as outlined in the city’s own ordinance; and
- Confirmation that signs promoting free resources from pro-life Pregnancy Resource Centers will not be misclassified as “commercial.”
The ACLJ is committed to standing with sidewalk counselors, pro-life advocates, and every American whose constitutional rights are under attack. Brandon was not disrupting traffic, blocking access, or inciting unrest. He was offering compassion, hope, and alternatives – something the First Amendment was designed to protect.
We will not let cities like Carbondale, Illinois, weaponize vague laws or bureaucratic red tape to silence and retaliate against the pro-life message. If the city does not immediately cease it’s unconstitutional activity, we will file a lawsuit.
Stand with us. Share this story. And pray for continued courage for pro-life heroes like Brandon.
LifeNews Note: Jordan Sekulow is the Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).
The post Man Threatened With Criminal Charges for Holding Pro-Life Sign appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Fr. Z's BlogWhen did the Sun rise at Rome? 6:15 When will it set? 20:03. What cycle is the Ave Maria Bell in for the Curia? 20:15 It is the feast, among others, of Sts. Maria of Clopas and Salome, disciples of … Read More →
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Site: Novus Motus LiturgicusIn the Breviary of St Pius V, Vespers of Easter Sunday and the days within the octave present only one peculiarity, namely, that the Chapter and Hymn are replaced by the words of Psalm 117, “Haec dies quam fecit Dominus; exsultemus et laetemur in ea. – This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice therein.” In the Office, this is labelled an “antiphon”, but it is really the Gregory DiPippohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295638279418781125noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: Rorate CaeliAt a time of turmoil, nothing could be better or more important than rooting ourselves deeply in the Catholic tradition. One of my favorite quotations is by St. Prosper of Aquitaine (390-455), writing in his own age of chaos: “Even if the wounds of this shattered world enmesh you, and the sea in turmoil bears you along in but one surviving ship, it would still befit you to maintain your Peter Kwasniewskihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05136784193150446335noreply@blogger.com
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Site: PeakProsperityTrump's Federal Reserve drama, China's trade stance, gold's surge, and the risks of a debt-laden economy are explored with Paul Kiker, while discussing the importance of actively managing wealth during volatile markets.
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Site: OnePeterFive
Dear OnePeterFive donors, supporters and readers, As the conclave looms over the Church and everyone is asking questions about what’s next, we at OnePeterFive want to begin preparing for Sacred Heart Month. Last year we promoted the Sacred Heart flag for June and shared photoshops of everyone’s efforts. Whoever becomes the next Pope, the Sacred Heart is still King over June and every…
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Site: Fr. Z's BlogToday’s Roman Station is the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles. Scott Hahn talks about the bond of Christ and His Body, His Church, His Bride, which is our bond. How about music for Easter? US HERE – UK HERE the wonderful Benedictines … Read More →
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Site: Mundabor's blogMore details have emerged about the last wake moments of the Evil Clown. Let me tell you from the start that there will be no “dead man discounts”. The way I understand it is this: the man wakes up at 5:30, asks for a glass of water. I think he drinks it. Then he reclines […]
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Site: AsiaNews.itIn a letter, women of different faiths and nationalities (including many from Asia) express 'respect and gratitude' for the pontiff who recognised their "vital role'. In the meeting in the Vatican in January 2023, he urged them to rediscover the 'feminine aspects" in every religion. His memory is a blessing and a call to continue to build a world in which everyone is listened to, valued, and empowered.
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Site: Fr. Z's BlogI don’t think this is AI: Cardinal Tagle sings “Imagine” aka “Why I Should Never Be Elected Pope.” https://t.co/nCKUhVVr7y — Father V (@father_rmv) April 24, 2025 Lyrics Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us … Read More →
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Site: AsiaNews.itA source talked to AsiaNews about how Chinese Catholics are coping with Francis's death. Remarks and pictures abound on local social media. 'Amid the sorrow and mourning, the joy of announcing love prevailed,' as 'a spontaneous explosion, not very cautious, but conscious that death and fear are not the last word.' An elderly lady and the Pope shared an 'impossible dream': she wanted to visit the Vatican, while he wanted to visit China.
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Site: Henrymakow.com(left, Harvard President Alan Garber)Please send links and comments to hmakow@gmail.comHarvard sues Trump administration to stop a freeze of more than $2 billion in grantsBOSTON -- Harvard University announced Monday that it has filed suit to halt a federal freeze on more than $2.2 billion in grants after the institution said it would defy the Trump administration's demands to limit activism on campus.Makow- Commie Jews have destroyed higher education in the US by imposing their disintegrative woke agenda on students. Now they're winging that Zionist Jews (MAGA) are underming academic freedom by stopping DEI and protests against Gaza genocide. This is rich coming from people who purged conservatives, promoted gender dysphoria and made students take poisonous vaccines. Rearranging reality to suit your interests is what defines Cabalist Judaism and Cabalist Jews.The Presidents of 7 out 8 Ivy League Universities are JewishGlobalist Jews Run Most Elite Universities-Jews Grossly Over-represented at Elite SchoolsLess than 2% of the US population, Jews represent 23% of enrolment at Ivy League universities"Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination." - Ron Unz (who is an ethnic Jew)Makow--"Jews are overwhelmingly Left-leaning which ensures that US academia is a branch of the criminal Communist movement for world government a.k.a "globalism." This movement holds that "Truth" is defined in terms of the "revolutionary" goal, i.e. upending all values, replacing God with Satan, stealing everything from everyone and finally killing them using world war as a pretext."Makow- Universities are Masonic Brainwashing MachinesI'd only send my son to university if he had no talent. Only go to university is to get a trade, i.e. science, business and engineering. Avoid humanities and social sciences like the plague. They are brainwashing.----Dr. Kevin McCairn is one of the only scientists studying those calamari-like clots being pulled from cadavers: both vaxxed and unvaxxed. This info is important...particularly for those in the medical and scientific communities.---Peter Thiel, Nazi Jewish eminence gris behind Trump has a curious fascination with nuclear apocalypse.Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern TechThis is consistent with our view that Trump et Chabad are plotting a cataclysm to fulfill Biblical Prophecy.Israel cancelled 27 visas for left-wing French lawmakers and elected officials, who were invited by the French consulate in Jerusalem, two days before they were set to arrive, the officialsMichael Snyder--The CEOs of Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe's Warn That Store Shelves All Over America Could "Soon Be Empty""If you are going to need anything made in China, I would buy it now while you still can. Many companies have already decided that it no longer makes any economic sense to import Chinese-made products into the United States because tariff rates are so high. As a result, there are certain things that will soon no longer be available to U.S. consumers. On Monday, when I posted an article warning about "empty shelves" in the months ahead, some people thought that I was exaggerating. But of course the truth is that I was not exaggerating at all. On Tuesday, the CEOs of Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe's specifically warned President Trump that store shelves all over the country could "soon be empty" during a meeting at the White House..."--Canada Proud Launches Attack Ads Linking Mark Carney to 'Notorious Pedophile' Jeffrey EpsteinPierre Poilievre's office won't say if it condones conservative group's ads juxtaposing prime minister with a "global child sex trafficking ring""This is Mark Carney, this is his wife Diana Carney, and this is Ghislaine Maxwell, the recruiter for notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's global child sex trafficking ring," the video notes. "Carney says he knew nothing of their crimes when he spoke to her at this party, but is that true?""Here's the truth Mark Carney doesn't want Canadians to see," the caption adds. "He's in politics to help his rich, creepy friends, not working Canadian families."Makow- If I were Poilieve, I would run TV ads exposing Carnage as a member of the international pedophile syndicate and Rothschild proxy.--"Today I went to the market on a trip to look for some wheat. With great difficulty I found a little of it and bought it, at a very, very high price. We spread around it and baked it and ate it, as you can see. Famine is spreading among the people and there is nothing for us to eat. Thanks to your donations, today I was able to pay part of my university tuition fees, register for the semester and begin completing my education."A Way to Help Gaza-VAXX DESTROYS CONSCIOUS CONNECTION TO SPIRIT!!!WHY IS FLUORIDE ADDED TO OUR DRINKING WATER? FOR PRECISELY THE SAME REASON!!!-Emergency Warning: U.S. Accelerates Self-Replicating mRNA for H5N1We Must Stop mRNA and Self-Replicating mRNA Before It's Too LateMark Trozzi--"I am issuing a red alert: the United States has fast-tracked the development of a self-replicating mRNA injection for H5N1. In light of the devastating harm caused by previous genetic injections, this reckless move must be halted immediately before greater tragedy unfolds.-Bug And Tug: WEF Investigates Klaus Schwab Over 'In-Room Massages' And Other AllegationsOne day after it was reported that World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, 88, resigned after Chairman after 55 years, the WSJ reports that Schwab is under investigation by the organization he created after a whistleblower alleged financial and ethical misconduct by Mr. "eat the bugs" and his wife.----Hollywood's woke blackout: Studios ditch Pride to cash in on conservative AmericaStudios retreat from LGBT themes amid regulatory pressure in a silent exodus"There's also the matter of public fatigue. Americans are tired of being lectured. Box office returns, streaming numbers, and network ratings all tell the same story. Once-dominant liberal cable channels are in freefall. As of December 2024, CNN and MSNBC had lost half their prime-time audiences, plunging to 30-year lows. Fox News, meanwhile, is thriving. So are conservative-leaning podcasters like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, now the dominant voices in America's 'new media' landscape."--Wesley Everest- The Trump Shots have turned the general population autistic. They can't look me in the eye. They can't stand anything new. They can't hold a conversation. They know their duties and NEVER color outside the lines."I realize people's souls are damaged or gone, leaking away. I come to this conclusion from five years of observation trying to be most objective. They simply are in their own world especially if the cell phone is in their hand. Unapproachable and distant, they are ghosts in their own bodies. Got nothing to say of substance about anything.I'm convinced the 'vaccinated' can tell I am 'unvaccinated'. Our energies don't match. They move away from me quickly and soon in a crowded bar I am sitting alone, no one near me. It happens all the time. I can see Life in some and have guessed correctly many times that the person I may be interacting with is not chemically altered. Five years in, it's getting easier.People are different and there is no way you can convince me otherwise. From the beginning of this crime, I have maintained my humanness. I'm not giving it away for a free donut. The disappointment I have in my family, friends and people in general is profound. They ignore me and I ignore them. That is what my life has become."--Dr. Reiner Fullmich sentenced to 45 mos in jail for opposing mass poisoningPersecution by the State: German secret service dossier reveals Dr. Reiner Füllmich must be stopped at all costsFor exposing the truth about the covid "pandemic," Dr. Füllmich was under special surveillance since 2021, a German secret service dossier provided by a whistle-blower and presented to the court reveals.The dossier specified that Füllmich was to be stopped "at all costs"; that "it is necessary to prepare a criminal case against Füllmich, [including the] collaboration of prosecutors and suitable third parties," and recommending "the recruitment and involvement of trusted persons amongst Füllmich's closest circle."
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Site: Saint Louis Catholic
Good morning to you all, and a continued Happy Easter! Christus Surrexit! Surrexit Vere!
I apologize yet again, to those very few who enjoy reading here, for light blogging in the extreme lately. If you only knew how the current state of national policies is increasing my workload…
Long days, long, long days. Stuporous nights.
Anyway, to the post. The title of this post is a callback to an ancient local Catholic blog that adopted the puntastic name you see up top. It also describes the content herein. No one asked, so here are some of my random things to say about the upcoming conclave and pope business stuff:
- I’ll move past the fact that with things being so crazy and unreal these days my first thought was that it was super convenient to use JD Vance’s visit to Bergoglio as a means to definitively fix the time of his death. As in, he didn’t die long ago when no one had any proof of life for like a fortnight in the hospital. JD saw him! All the appointments made after hospitalization were A-OK, super humble as usual. Perry Mason stuff. I say I am moving past it because who is to say who’s been making the appointments all along? And they sure are from the same spirit that animates them all. In other words, maybe one day we will learn but right now there are bigger fish to fry.
- As any Catholic would for any soul that leaves this life, even one who appears quite vile, I pray for repentance, mercy and salvation. Heck, it was my last blog post. But this post that describes the “traditionalist response” to Bergoglio’s death is beyond dreck. I read an excerpt of the piece at another site and stifled a gag reflex. And then I realized that it was from T.S. Flanders at OnePeterFive. So “traditionalist” was just an expression one uses without knowing its meaning, I guess.
- Ann Barnhardt’s novena to St. Catherine of Siena for a restoration of the papacy and a holy and true pope is a very good intention to a very good saint. I recommend it to everyone. Mundabor’s prayer for us to be given an “unmerited break” is spot-on as well.
- Archbishop Vigano, who, if we really do get an unmerited break, seems like an excellent choice to be pope, gave an interview that went unpublished, so he is publishing the questions and answers at his X site. Here is one that gets to things pretty well:
“What will be the future of the Church now that Pope Francis has died?”
“The death of Bergoglio crystallizes, so to speak, a situation of widespread illegitimacy. Of the 136 Cardinal electors, 108 were “created” by him; which means that whatever Pope is elected in the upcoming Conclave – even if he were a new Saint Pius X – his authority will be compromised by having been elected by false cardinals, created by a false Pope. For this reason, some time ago, I asked my Brothers in the Episcopate to clarify these aspects before they proceed with the election of a new Pope. Certainly, the situation is disastrous and humanly without a solution. However, as Bishop and Successor of the Apostles I cannot help but remind everyone that the Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, is destined to face the passio Ecclesiæ following the example of the Lord. It will be precisely from this passion – in which everything will seem lost as on that Good Friday 1,992 years ago – that the Church will be reborn, regenerated, and purified. During these days in which we celebrate Easter, every Catholic finds in Christ’s triumph over death and sin the reasons for their own faithfulness to the Gospel. Our Lord told us, shortly before He faced His Passion: Do not be afraid: I have overcome the world.”
5. Finally, a question many have asked over the last 12 years, myself included, is what to make of the upcoming conclave if one takes into account that it is governed by Universi Dominci Gregis, the Apostolic Constitution of Pope John Paul II, with some modifications by Pope Benedict XVI, and one further considers that Bergoglio has purported to make the overwhelming majority of voting age “Cardinals”, as Vigano describes above. Yet further consider that not all, but most, of these were “made Cardinals” and then immediately walked over to see Pope Benedict XVI, with beaming photos and what not. In other words, were these men actually made Cardinals by the Pope Benedict XVI? One is sure of nothing here. But UDG requires that only Cardinals can participate in the conclave.
There is so much shrouded in things we cannot know that it seems like the foggy gnostic mists of actual sedevacantism loom. We pray to God to avoid that morass. Because, as others have pointed out, the Church of Christ is VISIBLE. And she endures to the end of time and in eternity. Pope Benedict’s purported resignation while remaining pope was visible. Whether the next group of men who enter the conclave are all Cardinals is not so visible. I have speculated that perhaps if the pre-Bergoglian Cardinals participate and back the selection it may be enough. According to the terms of the governing law it may not. I decline to make that call, at least not now.
It will be tough enough (speaking in purely human terms) to get a true pope, let alone a good one, let alone a holy one. One of the intentions in the St. Catherine of Siena novena prayer is for the good Lord to let us clearly see where His Church is so we may support and love her– and most importantly be counted among her members. But Christ is steadfast and He is omnipotent. We can and must trust Him in this as in all things. Watch and pray…
I think I will take some time in the interregnum to reread the legal texts above and pray to God that He has mercy on us.
And always avoid any suggestion or temptation to see the Church or this election as a political matter.
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Site: AsiaNews.itOn a visit to the archbishop's residence, the president bowed three times before the pope's picture. A Taiwanese delegation will travel to Vatican City led by former Vice President Chen Chien-jen, a Catholic. Meanwhile, three days after the pontiff's death, the Patriotic Association posts a statement on his death, calling for prayers.
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Site: Catholic Herald
The Catholic Church risks a schism if it does not choose an “orthodox” leader, German Cardinal Gerhard Müller has warned ahead of next month’s conclave.
Müller, 77, has long been a leading light among traditional Catholics who often opposed the reformist approach of Pope Francis, and he is one of a handful of “conservative thinkers” in the Catholic Church based in Rome, alongside US Cardinal Raymond Burke, reports The Times.
Müller says he disagrees with the use of the labels “liberal” and “conservative” for the Catholic Church, pointing out the divide in the Church is deeper. The new pope, he said, “must be orthodox – neither a liberal nor a conservative”.
He said that “the question is not between conservatives and liberals but between orthodoxy and heresy”, adding: “I am praying that the Holy Spirit will illuminate the cardinals, because a heretic pope who changes every day depending on what the mass media is saying would be catastrophic.”
The next pope, Müller argues, should not “look for the applause of the secular world that sees the Church as a humanitarian organisation doing social work”.
Müller described Francis as a “good man” though they disagreed on much. Müller listed his differences with Francis, starting with the late pope’s 2023 decision to allow the blessing of same-sex couples. Pope Francis said at the time that “we cannot be judges who only deny, push back, exclude”, but the move sparked enormous controversy, with bishops in Africa and Asia refusing to permit the blessings.
The list of Müller’s grievances with Francis’s papacy also extends to the late pontiff’s focus on migrants and the environment, The Times reports.
Müller notes that “Pope Francis is well viewed by the mass media and there is a risk [the cardinals] are saying, ‘We should continue’”. Instead, he said, “they have the responsibility [at the conclave] to elect a man who is able to unify the Church in the revealed truth”.
RELATED: Cardinal Nichols on conclave vote: ‘intimidating’ but it’s our duty
He added: “I hope cardinals are not so influenced by what they are reading in the headlines.”
Nearly 80 per cent of the 135 cardinals eligible to vote were picked by Francis, pointing to a potential so-called liberal majority within the conclave, The Times reports. But the views of many will not be known until they mingle with fellow cardinals at the pre-conclave meetings known as general congregations, and which could well influence subsequent votes.
Asked if he would promote his brand of doctrinal Catholicism at those meetings, which begin in earnest after Francis’s funeral this Saturday, Müller said: “I have to do it; I owe it to my conscience.”
The alternative, he cautioned, was a Church that risks splitting in two if an “orthodox” pope is not elected.
“No Catholic is obliged to obey doctrine that is wrong,” he said, adding: “Catholicism is not about blindly obeying the Pope without respecting holy scriptures, tradition and the doctrine of the Church.”
Appointed by Francis’s traditionalist predecessor Benedict XVI as the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, Müller kept his job after the Argentinian pontiff’s election in 2013 but soon challenged his leader’s liberal agenda.
In 2017 he was dropped by Francis after criticising the Pope’s decision to allow communion for divorcees who remarry outside the church. His views are likely representative of other “conservative” cardinals determined to elect a more orthodox successor to Francis.
A former bishop of Regensburg in Germany, Müller has also been the head of dogmatic theology at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University.
In a 2023 book that The Times says “will be a convenient manual for conservatives at the conclave”, Müller criticised Francis’s deal with China to jointly appoint bishops, likening it to Vatican appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s and warning: “You cannot strike deals with the devil.”
Gerhard Müller also cautioned cardinals arriving for the conclave vote to avoid the backroom manoeuvres depicted in the Oscar-winning film Conclave.
“It’s not a power game played by stupid people looking to manipulate, like in this film, which has nothing to do with reality,” the German cardinal said.
RELATED: Social media push for Cardinal Sarah as next pope gains momentum
Photo: German Cardinal Gerhard Müller attends the funeral procession of Cardinal Joachim Meisner in Cologne. (Credit Elke Wetzig.)
The post Cardinal Müller warns Church risks split if ‘orthodox’ pope not chosen first appeared on Catholic Herald.
The post Cardinal Müller warns Church risks split if ‘orthodox’ pope not chosen appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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Site: Catholic Herald
US Vice President JD Vance has revealed that he has “thought a lot about” the fact he saw the Pope only the day before the pontiff died, describing the Easter encounter “as a great blessing”.
JD Vance was among the last officials to meet with an ailing Pope Francis before he died on Easter Monday. Vance spoke about the 20 April encounter with reporters in Agra, India, while on a four-day visit with his wife, Usha, the first Hindu-American second lady, reports the Catholic News Agency (CNA).
When asked about that now seemingly providential meeting on the morning of Easter Sunday, Vance said he had “thought a lot about that”.
“I think it was a great blessing,” Vance added.
Vance met the Pope during a state visit to Italy that preceded his onward journey to India. The main purpose of the two visits was to discuss shared economic and geopolitical priorities with the leaders of both governments, according to the White House. The full trip occurred from 18 April through 24 April.
During the papal audience, Pope Francis gave the vice-president three chocolate Easter eggs for his three young children as well as a Vatican tie and rosaries.
“It’s pretty crazy actually, and obviously when I saw him I didn’t know he had less than 24 hours still on this earth,” Vance said, before adding:
“He saw a lot of people, he affected a lot of lives. I try to just remember that I was lucky I got to shake his hand and tell him that I pray for him every day because I did and I do.”
AGRA, INDIA – APRIL 23: U.S. Vice President JD Vance and his family, including wife Usha Vance, visit the Taj Mahal on April 23, 2025 in Agra, India. (Photo Kenny Holston – Pool/Getty Images)
Vance also discussed how he is refusing to politicise Pope Francis’s death.
“A lot of people, especially in the American press, want to make the Holy Father – his entire legacy and even his death – about American politics,” Vance told reporters in Agra.
“He was obviously a much broader figure than the United States of America. He represents over a billion Catholics worldwide,” Vance said.
When asked about the “disagreements” that the Pope had with President Donald Trump, both during the latter’s first presidential administration and as his second one got started, Vance said he was “aware” of them before highlighting that the Pope “also had a lot of agreements with some of the policies of our administration”.
“I’m not going to soil the man’s legacy by talking about politics,” Vance added. “I think he was a great Christian pastor, and that’s how I choose to remember the Holy Father.”
When asked about what type of pope he would prefer to be elected next, Vance said he would pray for the cardinals who will cast the votes in the upcoming conclave, CNA reports.
“I won’t pretend to give guidance to the cardinals on who they should select as the next pope,” the US vice-president said. “We’ve got plenty of issues to focus on in the United States.”
He added: “I’ll just say a prayer for wisdom because I obviously want them to pick the right person, I want them to pick somebody who will be good for the world’s Catholics, but I’ll let them make that decision and obviously they’re entitled to do so.”
Vance also offered condolences to Catholics around the world coming to terms with Pope Francis’s death.
“We’re very saddened by it,” Vance said. “Our condolences to Catholics all over the world, but especially [to those] back home who love and honour the Holy Father.”
Vance has previously spoken publicly in praise of the homily Pope Francis gave in an empty St. Peter’s Square at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with Vance describing how meaningful it was to him at the time and that it remains meaningful to him today.
“That is how I will always remember the Holy Father, as a great pastor, as a man who can speak truth to faith in a very profound way at a moment of great crisis,” Vance said in a speech at the annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast held in the US capitol at the end of February this year.
He also commented: “I think that we should, frankly, take a page out of the books of our grandparents who respected our clergy, who looked to them for guidance, but didn’t obsess and fight over every single word that came out of their mouth and entered social media. I don’t think that’s good.”
RELATED: JD Vance acknowledges Pope’s criticism and prays for his recovery
Photo: U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks at the Rajasthan International Centre on April 22, 2025 in Jaipur, India. The Vice President’s remarks focused on the U.S. and India’s shared economic priorities. (Photo Kenny Holston – Pool/Getty Images)
The post JD Vance opens up about his papal meeting the day before Pope died first appeared on Catholic Herald.
The post JD Vance opens up about his papal meeting the day before Pope died appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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Site: Catholic Herald
Filipino Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David has downplayed talk about “popular candidates” in the upcoming conclave that will occur following the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday.
David, who left Manila for Rome on the morning of 24 April to attend Pope Francis’s funeral on Saturday and then to participate in the subsequent conclave, said a papal election is unlike the political processes seen in different parts of the globe.
“There are no candidates in a conclave,” David, the bishop of Kalookan, told reporters on Tuesday after a Mass celebrated for the repose of Pope Francis’s soul at Kalookan Cathedral.
David dispelled the notion that the conclave is like a political election – a relevant comparison given the Philippines is holding its midterm elections on May 12. “No one will give dole-outs. No one will put up tarpaulins. No one will mount a campaign,” the cardinal said.
“A conclave is a retreat. The cardinals will pray, and it is in the spirit of prayer that we will ask not whom we want to elect, but whom the Lord wants to succeed Pope Francis.
“That’s why we have a big moral and spiritual obligation to enter into the conclave, not in the spirit of politics but in the spirit of prayer for the continuity of the mission of the Church,” David said.
Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David attends a Mass with new Cardinals at St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, 8 December 2024. (Photo by ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images.)
David, 66, is the 10th cardinal from the Philippines, and is participating in a conclave for the first time. He was part of the last batch of cardinals created by Pope Francis on 7 December 2024.
David, known for his opposition to former president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, is also the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.
He has been cheered by supporters as a possible replacement for Francis. His college schoolmate when he attended a Jesuit university – Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle – is also a popular papabile from the Philippines.
Containing 86 million Catholics, the Philippines is the biggest Catholic-majority country in Asia and the third biggest in the world. This makes the papal election a highly-charged topic in the country both online and offline, prompting clergymen such as David to educate their flock about the nature of a conclave.
In his interview with journalists on 22 April, David said that since the conclave is a “retreat”, part of the cardinals’ duty is to discern through getting to know their fellow cardinals better.
One way by which they get acquainted with each other, according to David, is by writing each other personal letters.
He said another way is by doing research, noting that there is a website compiling the biographical data and other basic information about the different cardinals. “I am there. I was surprised, I didn’t even know who did my write-up,” he said.
When asked about the qualities of the next pope, David said he should be “somebody who will sustain the vision of Pope Francis of synodality”.
Referring to Francis’s synodal vision, David added: “That’s his biggest contribution – to propel the Church in mission. That the Church should not be too ‘churchy’ and inward-looking. That it should open its doors and look outside, at society. Because we have a mission: We are the salt of the earth, we are the light of the world.”
RELATED: Cardinal Müller warns Church risks split if ‘orthodox’ pope not chosen
When it comes to the Church and “our impact on society”, he cautioned: “So what if we are building big parishes, but we don’t make a difference in society?”
When asked about the possibility that the Catholic Church will gain an Asian pope, David said, “Well, in our time, anything can be made possible by the Holy Spirit.”
“It’s true: Before, the Global North was the centre. Now, the majority of the Catholics are in the Global South,” the cardinal said.
He noted that the bishops of the Global South have even banded together to form the Conferences of the Global South, composed of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences and their Latin American and African counterparts.
They often hold Zoom meetings, he said, as “a way to strengthen the bonding of the Global South”.
Despite this shift in the global landscape of the Catholic Church, the Filipino bishops have continued urging Filipino Catholics not to treat the forthcoming conclave like a horse race.
A spokesperson for the Filipino bishops’ conference appealed to Filipinos not to campaign online for one of their own: Tagle, pro-prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelisation and former archbishop of Manila, and who is widely viewed as a strong contender.
“We leave it to the cardinal electors to decide who will succeed Pope Francis,” Father Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the CBCP Episcopal Commission on Public Affairs, said on Radio Veritas.
“It’s not prudent for the public to promote Cardinal Tagle as the next pope, as this could create the impression that the conclave might be swayed by external influences, if Cardinal Tagle [were to be] elected as the next pontiff.”
Secillano, who is also the spokesperson of the Archdiocese of Manila, added: “The independence of the electors must be respected, and the least we can do is pray for Cardinal Tagle and the other cardinal electors.”
RELATED: ‘Papabile’ of the Day: Cardinal Parolin
Photo: People react as white smoke rises from the chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel indicating that the College of Cardinals have elected a new pope, Vatican, Vatican City, 13 March 2013. Pope Francis had been chosen as the 266th Pontiff, and as Benedict XVI’s successor, selected by the College of Cardinals in conclave in the Sistine Chapel. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)
The post A conclave doesn’t deal in ‘candidates’, cardinal explains first appeared on Catholic Herald.
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Site: Ron Paul Institute - Featured Articles
A little over a year ago, I spent a week living and studying at the Vatican as a guest lecturer at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a university-like organization of scholars that explores ideas of interest to the Vatican. Last year, the Academy addressed the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas on the 750th anniversary of his death.
This is not an esoteric subject. Aquinas taught that all rational persons are capable of discerning right from wrong and good from evil by the exercise of free will and human reason, and they do not need the government to aid them in this endeavor.
This is generally known as Natural Law. My presentation was on the concept of natural rights, a derivation of Natural Law.
The Vatican, which is a fraction of the size of Central Park in New York City, has a fine guest house on the grounds, called The Domus, which was my home for four days. It was also the permanent residence of Pope Francis.
My 24 colleagues and I were dining in the small Domus dining room on our first day there, when the Pope came in and sat two tables away from us. It was surreal.
Here is the backstory.
How do we know what we know?
Aquinas set about to answer that intriguing question. How do we know that we exist, that 2 plus 2 equals 4, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line? These are truisms; thus, they cannot change and all rational people can discern them. They are true intrinsically, whether we believe they are or not.
Aquinas taught that all rational adults can discover the truth by the exercise of free will. That exercise requires rational thinking. At the time he taught this, it was radical, as other scholars taught that forces outside of us drew us to discover truths.
Let’s say you like chocolate ice cream. Aquinas taught that you can rationally choose chocolate whenever you have an ice cream choice to make. Others taught that you really didn’t choose chocolate; it chose you — meaning that you can’t control your tastebuds.
This is not hairsplitting; rather it is central to Western thinking. If we don’t have free will, if we are just animals drawn to satiate our tastes, then are we responsible for our behavior? Can we take credit when we hit a home run or compose a symphony, or is all this just animal instinct acting out?
Aquinas’ views are known today as Natural Law. And the derivative of Natural Law are natural rights. Aquinas taught that the same God who made us in his own image and likeness gave us the gift of free will. We can use that free will to discover truth, practice baseball, learn music or choose our favorite ice cream. We can also use that free will to harm others, like stealing a purse or robbing a bank.
Aquinas taught that when we see a purse being stolen or a bank being robbed, we instinctually know that we are witnessing evil. How do we know this? We are hardwired by our Creator to discern good from evil.
But we cannot know this unless we have the free will to reject it. As God is perfectly free, so are we — his creatures — perfectly free.
The theory of natural rights — extrapolated from Aquinas — teaches that our rights are permanent claims against the whole world that no one, not even government, can take away. Of course, the purse snatcher and the bank robber give up their rights when they violate the rights of the purse owner and the bank depositors.
Today, we allow the government to take our property, privacy and free speech from us all the time.
Aquinas knew that government is the negation of liberty. We in the 21st century realize that we have a government that is utterly indifferent to our rights. The folks who run the federal government — no matter which political party is in power — believe they can kill any foe, steal any property, extinguish any right, declare any wrong, regulate any behavior, tax any event and insinuate themselves into any relationship so long as they can get away with it politically — all in defiance of Natural Law.
In America today, we see the destruction of Natural Law principles and the rejection of natural rights.
Now, back to the Pope.
Catholics believe that he is the Vicar of Christ on earth. But Francis may have been the worst pope in history. He watered down Church teachings on marriage, sexuality and confession. He declined to judge right from wrong. He forbade the Mass that every canonized saint in Heaven attended and participated in since 1564. He has even claimed that all religions are equal and welcomed in the eyes of God — contrary to 2,000 years of express Church teaching. This is heresy.
He attacked long-standing theology, universal liturgy and Thomistic Natural Law; when his principal job was to preserve them. He even questioned the concept of sin.
Nevertheless, it was surreal when he was brought into the guesthouse dining room, using a walker and an assistant at each arm. It was bizarre when he sat with his back to us. I wanted to go up to him and greet him, but the Swiss Guards had warned us not to approach him or call his name.
Two days later, I turned a corner in the guest house lobby, and there he was, 10 feet away — just the two of us. I gently bowed and whispered, “Your Holiness.” He looked at me and moved on.
Now, mercifully, Francis is gone. I pray for his soul and I pray for his successor. Please Lord, may the next Pope be a Catholic Pope.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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Site: Steyn OnlineGreetings to one and all and thanks for all the well wishes and prayers over the past week and welcome to this week's super sized batch of Laura's Links...
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Site: Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
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Letter from law professor, Stephen Mikochik urging Delaware Governor Meyer to veto assisted suicide bill HB 140, “The Ron Silverio/Heather Block End of Life Options Law.”
Stephen MikochikDear Gov. Meyer:
I am a professor emeritus of Constitutional Law at Temple Law School in Philadelphia and a senior lecturer in Jurisprudence at Ave Maria Law School in Naples, Florida. I have reviewed numerous state proposals to legalize physician-assisted suicide. House Bill 140 would authorize that practice in Delaware.
I urge you not to sign H.B. 140. The bill threatens vulnerable patients, is not needed to mitigate pain at the end of life and creates a right that all competent persons who wish to end their lives for whatever reason will demand.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that physician-assisted suicide is not a fundamental right guaranteed by the Federal Constitution;[1] and nowhere has the Supreme Court of Delaware held it protected under the State Constitution. Therefore, the question of whether to legalize assisted suicide is one of policy in Delaware; and the balance clearly weighs in favor of rejecting it.
On the one hand, a chief reason for rejecting assisted suicide is the protection of vulnerable patients from abuse. As the U.S. Supreme Court explained:
We have recognized … the real risk of subtle coercion and undue influence in end-of-life situations. … The risk of harm is greatest for the many individuals in our society whose autonomy and well-being are already compromised by poverty, lack of access to good medical care, advanced age, or membership in a stigmatized social group. … The State’s interest here goes beyond protecting the vulnerable from coercion; it extends to protecting disabled and terminally ill people from prejudice, negative and inaccurate stereotypes, and societal indifference. The State’s assisted-suicide ban reflects and reinforces its policy that the lives of terminally ill, disabled, and elderly people must be no less valued than the lives of the young and healthy and that a seriously disabled person’s suicidal impulses should be interpreted and treated the same way as anyone else’s.[2]As shown in the attached letter to Sen. Sokola, H.B. 140 provides only phantom safeguards for vulnerable patients.
It is argued on the other hand that assisted suicide is needed to mitigate physical pain at the end of life. Most terminal patients, however, die peacefully; palliative care can control the pain of those who do not; and sedation is available if that care proves ineffective. Irremediable pain is not a major concern terminal patients express for seeking assisted suicide and is not a qualifying condition in H.B. 140 or nearly all other assisted suicide measures. Thus, it is not a factor that should tip the balance in favor of legalization.
It is further argued that H.B. 140 is needed to mitigate distress at the end of life. As the U.S. Supreme Court observed, however, many patients who request assistance in suicide withdraw that request when their depression is treated.[3] Depression, of course, affects others who have no terminal condition; but that only strengthens their claim for access to assistance in suicide since they may face distress, not for months, but for a life-time.
Finally, it is argued that assisted suicide protects the dignity of terminal patients by respecting their choice. Yet, the threat to dignity is death itself; choosing death by poison over death by cancer is a feeble capitulation to that threat. To recast that choice as the right to act on one’s deepest beliefs on the meaning of life would make “the right to suicide and the right to assistance in suicide … the prerogative of at least every sane adult[:]”[4]
The depressed twenty-one year old, the romantically-devastated twenty-eight year old, the alcoholic forty- year old who choose suicide are also expressing their views … [on] existence, meaning, the universe, and life; they are also asserting their personal liberty.[5]
The State may act gradually to avoid the free-fall that Canada has faced; it may make exceptions for those whose family obligations would fall upon it if they died; but, once suicide is legalized for terminal patients, expansion is inevitable: How could the State distinguish among persons’ beliefs about the meaning of their lives?
You alone can sign H.B. 140 into law. You thus have the awful power to choose between life and death. I urge you not to sign it, and choose life.
Respectfully submitted,
Stephen L. Mikochik
[1] See Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997).
[2] Id. at 731-732 (citations & internal quotation marks omitted).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington, 49 F. 3d 586, 591 (9th Cir. 1995), reversed en banc by 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996), reversed by Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 721.
[5] Id. at 590-591.
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Site: AsiaNews.itThe Philippines Church and its people pay homage to Pope Francis. Cardinal David remembers him as a pastor among the faithful who chose 'the dusty roads to the peripheries." Cardinal Advincula remembers his 2015 visit as a "moment of grace". President Marcos declared three days of national mourning. ...
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Site: Mises InstituteThe latest bogus narrative of this sort comes from one of my readers who is convinced that Trump is right in denouncing those central bankers who inflate too little.
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Site: Rorate CaeliWith the death of Pope Francis and upcoming conclave to elect the next Supreme Pontiff, the organizers of Missae pro Missa ("Masses for the Mass") hereby announce our third -- and perhaps most important -- campaign: a worldwide spiritual bouquet imploring God for a holy pope as the next Successor of St. Peter.As with the earlier two campaigns, launched in 2023 and 2024 Peter Kwasniewskihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05136784193150446335noreply@blogger.com
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Site: AsiaNews.itCivil and religious leaders have paid homage to the memory of the Argentinean pontiff.Under his leadership, the Church completed the efforts begun by predecessors to bring Islam and Christianity closer together in the face of escalating fundamentalism.From the banking crisis to the explosion at the port of Beirut, the pope's closeness in the face of the great tragedies in the country's recent history.
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Site: Novus Motus LiturgicusThe May 1st application deadline is approaching for summer graduate courses in sacred music at the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music. Graduate-level study structured for busy schedulesIn-person, intensive course formatsAffordable room & boardFree tuitionLearn more and apply here.Courses:Choral InstituteComposition SeminarOrgan ImprovisationIntroduction to Gregorian ChantVocal Pedagogy – Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0
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Site: PaulCraigRoberts.org
What Happens to Us if President Trump Loses the Existential War with the Evil American Establishment?
Paul Craig Roberts
A few readers thought I went a bit too far in my column two days ago when I expressed concern that if President Trump loses the existential conflict between Mega Americans and the corrupt anti-American Establishment, a return to power of the Democrats will mean oppression for traditional white ethnic Americans. Not in America, they said. But, yes, especially in America.
White heterosexual gentiles, especially males, have been second class citizens in the United States ever since Alfred Blumrosen at the EEOC stood the 1964 Civil Rights Act on its head and defied the clear statutory language in the legislation and imposed racial and gender quotas on white gentile heterosexual American men. These quotas have been in effect for 60 years, supplemented during the Biden regime with DEI-imposed quotas.
The American judiciary, despite the 14th Amendment absolutely requiring equality under the law and the clear unambiguous language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, did nothing to enforce the Constitution and the Law. The American judiciary, the American corporations, the American universities accepted and enforced the illegal and unconstitutional racial and gender quoters. Essentially, the quotas are still in place. The US Supreme Court ruled against them a year or two or so ago, but in a weak way that did not stop the Biden regime from extending them to DEI privileges and refusing to promote in the military based on merit. Instead, the Biden regime placed racial and sexual constraints on military promotion. Promotions were not available for white heterosexual gentile males.
So what does law mean in the US? Nothing except the right to gain money by suing and the right of partisan Democrat judges to block the President of the United States from fulfilling his contract with the electorate. For example, currently 12 Democrat states are suing the Trump administration for alleged damages to them from tariffs which so far are nothing but negotiation tools.
There is no law. American Law Schools were taken over years ago and turned into instruments for overthrowing alleged white, racist America.
The George Soros-implanted Leticia James in New York is the perfect example of an Attorney General trained in law school to use law as a weapon against those in the way of revolutionizing American society. The electorate in New York is so indoctrinated and brainwashed that the people accept as attorney general a person committed to their demise. What was once our greatest state appears now to be our most stupid.
The same happened in journalism schools. I was an invited lecturer for some period at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism or at some program of the institution. I remember watching the transformation of journalist training from finding and reporting the facts to learning to use journalism to support narratives that advanced the agendas of the ruling establishment. It became the only path to employment and success, and the budding “journalists” moved willing into it. Today they know no other function. Today the normal function of journalists is to lie in support of the agendas of the American Establishment, which most certainly is not a Mega American establishment.
I don’t think Trump understands the strength of the forces that he has challenged. If you peruse the left-wing websites, you will acquaint yourself with the retaliation that is being prepared for the “Trump deplorables,” Hillary’s term, once Trump is defeated or out of office.
Without going there, let’s just consider what Democrat members of Congress, elected by Americans, have to say about the retaliation measures they will be able to use once Trump is gone.
Democrat US Representative Jamin Ben Raskin represents the 8th congressional district of Maryland. He is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School. He led the impeachment of President Trump during Trump’s first term of office.
US Representative Raskin has issued a threat to everyone who does business with the Trump administration that “when we come back to power we are not going to look kindly.”
In other words, Raskin has clearly threatened repercussions for doing business of any kind with a lawfully elected government of the US.
This threat, of course, applies to the “domestic terrorists” who elected Trump. Remember, it is Trump who is trying to restore America, and the Democrats who are trying to turn America into a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel. But Raskin, the Democrats, the left-wing and most of the white liberals regard President Trump’s effort to resurrect America as the imposition of fascism. In US Rep. Democrat Raskin’s words, “We’re going to restore strong democracy to America and we will remember who stood up for democracy in America and who tried to drive us down towards dictatorship and autocracy.”
Raskin is indicting the traditional Americans who elected Trump by such a large margin that the Democrats could not again steal the presidential election.
It is my opinion that Trump, his government, and his supporters do not understand that they are up against a more powerful destructive ideological force than America ever faced from the Soviet Union. The entirety of the Democrat Party, media, universities, deep state, are totally opposed to America and want to transform America into a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel.
How else can you explain decades of totally open borders?
How else can you explain teaching white kids that they, their parents, their grandparents are racists who exploit black people?
How else can you explain teaching kids that they are born into the wrong body and need sex change operations that their parents cannot prevent?
The United States is a crazy land as is all of the Western World. The Belief System that comprised Western Civilization has been destroyed by decades of propaganda from well-funded universities.
As I have said before, every institution that constitutes the United States has been hollowed out by decades of anti-American propaganda from American universities and public schools. Those who defend America have been written out of public discussion and banned from the presstitute media. I used to be a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, a columnist for Business Week, for the Scripts Howard News Service. I was often on the major TV networks. Today I am totally banned. As a truth-teller, I am an enemy who must be suppressed.
Americans are very slow in realizing that the Democrats are an ideological party, like the Bolsheviks. Democrats already know the truth and are unbothered by facts. Facts are what serve the agenda. The truth is in the agenda.
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Site: Mises InstituteThe Green New Deal was proposed in 2019 and became the legislative centerpiece of the Biden administration. Like the first New Deal, it has garnered favorable media coverage, legislative hype, unkept promises, and a dismal track record.
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Site: Mises InstituteTrump’s current drive for lower interest rates and more easy money is doing little or nothing to help the working-class and ordinary people Trump claims he is helping.
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Site: Mises InstituteSales of previously owned homes in March fell 5.9% from February to 4.02 million units. That’s the slowest March sales pace since 2009.
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