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Scorecard: See If Your Representative Or Senator Supports The Second Amendment Or Not With just weeks to go till the 2018 midterm elections, there are lots of seats up for grabs. With that in mind, one of the most important areas our representatives need to be strong in is on your right to keep and bear arms, protected in the Second Amendment. Gun Owners of America has put out their scorecard and for some, it will be eye-opening. GOA Executive Director Erich Pratt writes: The anti-gun Left is hopping-mad, now that Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed to the Supreme Court. take our poll - story continues below Should military force be used to stop the caravan of migrants marching toward the U.S. border? Should military force be used to stop the caravan of migrants marching toward the U.S. border? Should military force be used to stop the caravan of migrants marching toward the U.S. border? * Yes, military force should be used. No, keep the military out of it. Email * Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Completing this poll grants you access to Freedom Outpost updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. They are motivated to get to the polls this November. So it is crucial that you and your pro-gun friends get to the polls. And that’s why GOA is putting the 2018 Congressional Voter Scorecard into your hands. There is a lot that’s riding on the line. If the Democrats take over the Congress, Nancy Pelosi has already said that passing gun control is one of her top priorities. But we have an ace up our proverbial sleeve. According to a recent study, the gun issue is an incredibly powerful, motivating issue in politics. The study reported that gun owners are more likely to show up to vote than those who support gun control. This is encouraging news. Having said that, gun owners can’t make informed choices if they don’t know who the pro-gun candidates are. So to that end, Gun Owners of America has released the recent voting records of your congressman and senators.

UK Bans Free Speech Activists While Admitting Numerous Preachers Of Jihad Violence, Hatred & Sharia The banning of free speech activists Martin Sellner and Brittany Pettibone from the UK is just the latest of many, many examples of how the British government bans foes of jihad terror while admitting its proponents. Pamela Geller and I are banned from entering the country for the crime of telling the truth about Islam and jihad. According to Breitbart, “Sellner, who described the detention centre as looking akin to a typical American prison, said he was told by authorities that his speaking at Hyde Park could cause violence and disrupt community cohesion.” That’s just what they claimed about Pamela Geller and me: that our visit could cause violence and disrupt community cohesion. But we, of course, have never advocated or approved of any violence. The UK Home Office meant that our visit could cause violence from Muslims. They were bowing to jihadist intimidation. Meanwhile, Britain has a steadily lengthening record of admitting jihad preachers without a moment of hesitation. Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri’s preaching of hatred and jihad violence was so hardline that he was banned from preaching in Pakistan, but the UK Home Office welcomed him into Britain. The UK Home Office also admitted Shaykh Hamza Sodagar into the country, despite the fact that he has said: “If there’s homosexual men, the punishment is one of five things. One – the easiest one maybe – chop their head off, that’s the easiest. Second – burn them to death. Third – throw ’em off a cliff. Fourth – tear down a wall on them so they die under that. Fifth – a combination of the above.” Theresa May’s relentlessly appeasement-minded government also admitted two jihad preachers who had praised the murderer of a foe of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. One of them was welcomed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nor does the UK admit only preachers of jihad terror. It admits jihad terrorists as well, even when it knows they are jihad terrorists. The Muslim migrant teen who bombed the London Tube told border officials that he was trained by ISIS, but was admitted anyway. Meanwhile, the UK banned three bishops from areas of Iraq and Syria where Christians are persecuted from entering the country. Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer

Anti-Gay Imam Featured Yet Again at Florida Democrat Gala The Democratic Party promotes itself as an advocacy group for all matters concerning homosexuals and labels politicians, who take stances opposite theirs on politically charged issues such as same-sex marriage, as bigots. Yet, the party keeps on inviting an imam, who has a long record of hostility toward homosexuals, to participate at its annual functions. This blatant hypocrisy shows the political bankruptcy of their leadership’s claims to be pro-gay and anti-bigotry and reveals their intention to pander to those in the Muslim community who spew intolerance and would wish others harm. On Saturday, October 7, 2017, the Palm Beach Democratic Party held its 2017 Truman Kennedy Johnson (TKJ) Dinner at the West Palm Beach Marriott Hotel, in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Keynote Speaker at the event was Governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe. Other speakers included: United States Representative Alcee Hastings; then-Florida Democratic Party Chairman Stephen Bittel, who resigned in November over allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior; and then-Palm Beach County Party Chairwoman Terrie Rizzo, who was elected in December to take over for Bittel as Chair of the Florida Democratic Party. Prior to the speakers, there was a joint invocation performed by a rabbi, two pastors and an imam. The imam, Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, is notorious for his unapologetic vilification of homosexuals. Shafayat Mohamed is the imam of the Darul Uloom Institute, located in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The mosque has been a haven for terror-related individuals and activity. “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla was a student of Shafayat Mohamed’s at Darul Uloom. Now-deceased al-Qaeda Global Operations Chief, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, was a prayer leader at Darul Uloom. And Darul Uloom Arabic teacher Imran Mandhai, along with mosque goers Hakki Aksoy and Shueyb Mossa Jokhan, hatched a plot at the mosque to blow up different South Florida structures, including area power stations, Jewish businesses, and a National Guard armory. While terrorism plays a huge role in his mosque’s history – and he has been around for all of it – Shafayat Mohamed’s personal history deals much more in bigotry than terror. One stop on Shafayat Mohamed’s Facebook page and one can view his profile photo of him holding a dark green book with gold border and letters on the cover. The book is “The Meaning of THE HOLY QUR’AN,” a version of the Quran that was banned by the Los Angeles public school system, in February 2002, for containing numerous anti-Semitic commentaries. In it, Jews are described as: “arrogant,” “jealous,” “selfish,” “spiteful,” “greedy,” “cursed,” “apes and swine,” and “under divine displeasure.” This may seem an innocent mistake on the imam’s part, but his actions against the gay community and sinister views are anything but. In February 2005, an article written by Shafayat Mohamed was published on the Darul Uloom website, entitled ‘Tsunami: Wrath of God.’ In it, he claims that gay sex caused the 2004 Indonesian tsunami and that most Jews and Christians, whom he refers to as “People of the Book,” are “perverted transgressors.” It is writings such as these that have gotten Shafayat Mohamed thrown off a number of Broward County boards. Even so, the imam has been unrepentant. In a speech he gave at Darul Uloom, in August 2015, titled ‘Quraan Torah Bible Forbid Man Marrying Man,’ he admitted that he “got sacked from many [county] boards, because there were a lot of gay people who said, ‘We don’t want him on that board.’” He said he had a choice, to “sit in Paradise or… sit on the board and go to Hell.” He began his speech by attacking President Barack Obama for supporting same-sex marriage. He asked the following, “Did you hear what President Obama said?… Do you know what a sad situation we are in this country?... Here you have the President of the United States of America saying that a man could marry a man?… Are we sleeping? Do you believe in the Quran? Are we gonna sit and have the Quran be ridiculed?” He then cited the Christian and Jewish Bible, barking loudly, “The Bible says that if a man sleeps with a man, he should be killed!” Shafayat Mohamed later lamented the existence of Muslim homosexuals. He decried, “Listen. Don’t deny it. They already got Muslim gay communities.” He as well spoke of his support for polygamy, an act that is illegal in the United States. He exclaimed, “Here the President says a man can marry a man, but you can’t say a man can have four wives…!” The October TKJ Dinner was not the first Democrat event Shafayat Mohamed has participated in. In fact, he has been involved in many, including giving the invocations at the Florida Democratic Party’s annual Leadership Blue Gala in 2014 (featuring Bill Clinton), 2015 and 2016. And given that this author has written about this before, the October event will probably not be the last occasion that he is embraced by the Democratic Party. Shafayat Mohamed is not the only Muslim extremist that has participated in the Democratic Party’s TKJ Dinner. In October 2015, the dinner invocation was performed by Wilfredo Amr Ruiz, the legal adviser of the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), a group that actively promotes former KKK leader and white supremacist David Duke. Ruiz, as well, founded AMANA’s Connecticut and Puerto Rico chapters. In July 2010, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned Ruiz’s AMANA for posting what the ADL called a “venomous” anti-Semitic Duke video onto the group’s official website. AMANA is currently promoting another anti-Semitic Duke-produced video, on the AMANA site. The President of AMANA, Sofian Zakkout, has referred to Duke as “David Duke, a man to believe in!” By inviting people like Shafayat Mohamed, an avowed enemy of the gay community, and Wilfredo Ruiz, whose group promotes white supremacists, to participate in its functions, the Democratic Party has effectively revealed its disregard for the concerns of those it disingenuously claims to advocate for and protect. It is time for Democrats to reject the bigotry of these radicals and see them for the liability they present. Failure to do so exposes the party’s liberal agenda as a sham. Beila Rabinowitz, Director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.

Archbishop Viganò Speaks, the Neo-Catholics Panic In his eleven-page account, affirmed under oath, the Archbishop, marking a turning point in Church history, declares that senior Vatican officials, including former Secretaries of State Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone as well as Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, coordinator of Pope Bergoglio’s “Council of Cardinals”, covered up McCarrick’s decades of sexual predation and that Bergoglio himself continued the coverup. This article was first written to address the neo-Catholic commentator Massimo Faggioli’s attempt , following the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the fall of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, to minimize the homosexual crisis in the Church and blunt the correlative rise of what he derides as “neo-traditionalism.” As my piece was about to go to press, however, EWTN’s National Catholic Register broke the explosive story on the written testimony of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò , former apostolic nuncio to the United States (2011 to 2016). Faggioli’s propaganda piece now becomes merely illustrative of the points to be made here in light of this astonishing and indeed providential development. Regarding Bergoglio, Viganò testifies that in 2013 he personally informed him about McCarrick’s history, the dossier of the Congregation for Bishops on his sexual crimes against boys and young men, and the disciplinary sanctions imposed upon him by Benedict XVI (forbidding residence in a seminary, public appearances and Masses). Evidently already aware of these facts, however, Bergoglio not only rehabilitated McCarrick but made him a “trusted counselor” who advised the elevation of the pro-homosexual prelates Blase Cupich, Joseph Tobin and Kevin Farrell to the College of Cardinals and the prominent episcopal sees they now discredit. All of this happened before Bergoglio, bowing to worldwide public pressure, finally—only weeks ago—took decisive action against his “trusted counselor.” McCarrick had lobbied for Bergoglio’s election, along with Maradiaga and the infamous Cardinal Danneels, who covered up homosexual rape committed by a priest against his own nephew,has supported “same-sex marriage,” and advised the King of Belgium to sign a law legalizing abortion in 1990. As Edward Pentin notes: “all 3 prelates have since been special advisors of Francis or rehabilitated by him.” Viganò concludes his testimony by declaring that all of the prelates involved (many others are implicated), including Bergoglio, should resign their offices for the good of the Church. As to Bergoglio in particular, he courageously states openly the truth that so many of his brethren know but fear to speak in public: I want to recall this indefectible truth of the Church’s holiness to the many people who have been so deeply scandalized by the abominable and sacrilegious behavior of the former Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick; by the grave, disconcerting and sinful conduct of Pope Francis and by the conspiracy of silence of so many pastors, and who are tempted to abandon the Church, disfigured by so many ignominies. At the Angelus on Sunday, August 12, 2018 Pope Francis said these words: “Everyone is guilty for the good he could have done and did not do ... If we do not oppose evil, we tacitly feed it. We need to intervene where evil is spreading; for evil spreads where daring Christians who oppose evil with good are lacking.” [emphasis in original] If this is rightly to be considered a serious moral responsibility for every believer, how much graver is it for the Church’s supreme pastor, who in the case of McCarrick not only did not oppose evil but associated himself in doing evil with someone he knew to be deeply corrupt. He followed the advice of someone he knew well to be a pervert, thus multiplying exponentially with his supreme authority the evil done by McCarrick. And how many other evil pastors is Francis still continuing to prop up in their active destruction of the Church! [my emphasis] Francis is abdicating the mandate which Christ gave to Peter to confirm the brethren. Indeed, by his action he has divided them, led them into error, and encouraged the wolves to continue to tear apart the sheep of Christ’s flock. In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them. [emphasis in original] Before he was papal nuncio in Washington, Viganò headed the Governorate of Vatican City State after having served as Nuncio in Nigeria, a Delegate for the Pontifical Representatives of the Secretary of State of the Holy See and a Member of the Disciplinary Commission of the Roman Curia. In those capacities he had access to documents and witnesses that corroborate his own firsthand testimony. With Viganò’s testimony, the widespread homosexual infiltration of the post-Vatican II hierarchy, from the top on down, now emerges mountainously into view, never to be buried again. Even before that testimony, however, the fall of McCarrick and the Pennsylvania grand jury report had already presented a Sisyphean task to neo-Catholic apologists for the decrepit Novus Ordo status quo and the ill-starred Council that launched its installation. Yet there is little doubt they will continue the same polemic that for nearly sixty years has doggedly defended every one of the ruinous “reforms” that have resulted in a debacle without equal in Church history, even considering the Arian crisis of the 4th century. Those “reforms” included abandonment of the Vatican’s strict pre-conciliar instruction (1961) that “advancement to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers.” Today, neo-Catholic commentators, cowed by the demands of political correctness, refuse to state the simple truth that homosexuality is a perversion that precludes ordination as does any other grave psychological disorder. Kill the Messenger I suspect that not even Viganò’s historic testimony will change the neo-Catholic position. Quite the contrary, I would expect the neo-Catholic commentariat either to ignore Viganò’s witness, explain away his revelations or, failing that, make every effort to smear the man. The campaign to discredit Archbishop Viganò began instantaneously on the Catholic left wing. Only hours after Viganò’s sworn testimony appeared online, the professional Catholic dissident Sean Michael Winters, writing for National Catholic Reporter, smeared the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, who holds doctorates in both civil and canon law, as “a trafficker in conspiracy theories who mixes fact, fiction and venom,” “more than a little obsessed with homosexuality”—like Oliver Stone, who “was obsessed with the grassy knoll”—“a disgruntled former employee” and “always a crackpot.” Without addressing the merits, Winters dismissed Archbishop Viganò’s “wild claims” about bishops who are “subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality” and accused the Archbishop, along with unnamed other bishops and archbishops, of “speak[ing] about gay people with such hatred…” Winters issues the dire warning that “A putsch is afoot and if the U.S. bishops do not, as a body, stand up to defend the Holy Father in the next 24 hours, we shall be slipping towards schism long before the bishops’ meeting in November. The enemies of Francis have declared war.” Notice that for Winters it is not the Church or the integrity of her doctrine and discipline that must be defended against enemies, but only Bergoglio and the regime of novelty he is leading to its final extremity. John Allen’s instant analysis attempting to impeach Viganò’s testimony is, as one would expect from him, a bit craftier. His opinion is: “Take it seriously, but with a large grain of salt.” Which is just Allen’s more nuanced way of saying: “Don’t believe it.” Allen’s view is supported by such irrelevancies as the fact that Viganò’s account implicates “no fewer than 32 senior churchmen” (so what? ), that he “has a history” of “innuendo and conspiracy theories” (a gratuitous assertion unsupported by evidence of falsity), that he allegedly quashed an investigation of Archbishop John Nienstedt and ordered evidence destroyed (an allegation Viganò has immediately and categorically denied with conclusive supporting documents, but in any event a tuo quoque fallacy) and that Allen has “the impression that all this was orchestrated with a political agenda in mind” (the same “conspiracy theory” mentality he gratuitously attributes to Viganò). Mark Shea, easily the most insufferable of the neo-Catholic polemicists, has quickly followed Winters and Allen in trying to cast doubt on Viganò ’s claims. Ignoring eleven pages of detail, written and published under oath, he suggests there has been no “Documentation. Evidence. Proof.” Yes, Francis should resign if Viganò ’s allegations are true, Shea admits—a stunning concession coming from him. Yet, making no attempt to refute Viganò’s account on the merits, he tries to wave it all aside with his usual mode of argument—puerile mockery: “But at present, the eagerness of the Greatest Catholics of All Time to believe and repeat everything their itching ears want to hear about this Pope whose living guts they have hated from the moment of his election only tells in his favor, not against it.” Shea’s ever-expanding opus of digital invective never seems to rise above this sort of crude ad hominem attack: Well, if those people believe it, it can’t be true. The neo-Catholic propaganda mill will have a very difficult time smearing this witness, however. Speaking to Catholic News Agency, Monsignor Jean-François Lantheaume, who served as first Counsellor of the Nunciature in Washington, confirmed that “Viganò said the truth. That’s all,” when he stated in his sworn account that Nuncio Pietro Sambi conveyed to McCarrick at the Nunciature in Washington the sanctions that had been imposed on him by Pope Benedict—sanctions Bergoglio ignored for five years until forced to act by a worldwide storm of outrage. Furthermore, a series of prelates has vouched for Viganò’s character and credibility: - Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas has gone so far as to order all the priests in his diocese to read from the pulpit a statement that he finds Viganò’s allegations credible. - Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, Arizona, issued a statement affirming that he has known Viganò for 39 years, has “always known and respected him as a man of truthfulness, faith and integrity” and that his testimony should “be taken seriously by all…” - Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit, Michigan issued a statement calling Viganò’s account “another daunting challenge to our confidence in the reliability of the Church’s leadership, during a summer of devastating news regarding clergy sexual abuse and infidelity.” (The statement has since apparently been scrubbed from the diocesan website.) - Bishop Athanasius Schneider declares: “Archbishop Viganò confirmed his statement by a sacred oath invoking the name of God. There is, therefore, no reasonable and plausible cause to doubt the truth content of the document of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.” - Cardinal Raymond Burke’s statement declares: “The declarations made by a prelate of the authority of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò must be totally taken to heart by those responsible in the Church.” - [And just two days ago, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco wrote a letter to his faithful which "speaks to Vigano's integrity and sincere love of the Church."] In another setback for the propaganda machine gearing up to impeach Viganò’s testimony, the Catholic Herald has just reported that Cardinal Wuerl must have known full well from Viganò himself that McCarrick was under Pope Benedict’s papal sanctions on account of his sexual misconduct because, as an Archdiocesan spokesman now confirms, at Viganò’s request as then papal nuncio Wuerl had to cancel a public appearance by McCarrick not long before Bergoglio’s election. The Herald asks the obvious question: “[I]f Cardinal Wuerl was unaware of the sanctions, and unaware of the reason for them, why did he ask no questions of the nuncio regarding the reason for his demand?” The question answers itself, and Viganò’s testimony on this critical point stands confirmed by Wuerl’s own spokesman. Bergoglio Pleads the Fifth Bergoglio himself, however, has already precluded any attempt to impeach Viganò’s testimony. During the return flight from Dublin after the “World Meeting of Familes,” he was asked to comment on Viganò ’s allegations that he had informed Bergoglio of McCarrick’s crimes in 2013 as well as the sanctions imposed by Benedict. Bergoglio declined to incriminate himself: Read the statement carefully yourselves and make your own judgment. I am not going to say a word about this. I believe that the statement speaks for itself, and you all have sufficient journalistic ability to draw conclusions. It is an act of trust. When a little time goes by, and you have drawn conclusions, perhaps I will speak about it, but I would like your professional maturity to do this work. It will do you all good, really. In other words, as Bergoglio cannot deny the allegations without lying, he will say nothing at all about them in the hope they will go away—with the help of sycophants in the Vatican press corps and shifty polemicists like Shea, who expects his readers to swallow his explanation that Bergoglio’s refusal to say anything in his defense when asked point blank about the charges against him “seems to me to obviously be the reply of somebody who believes the accusations are groundless…”. Seems to be. Obviously. The American “Gay” Church Expansion While events have overtaken Faggioli’s piece, it will remain useful here as a prime example of the neo-Catholic polemic. That polemic seeks to shore up the collapsing Novus Ordo establishment lest it give way to the dreaded traditionalist revival. But before I address Faggioli’s latest defense of the indefensible, some background is in order, including a discussion of further key details of Viganò’s testimony. First of all, as I predicted 16 years ago, because the Vatican under John Paul II had no intention of enforcing the pre-conciliar ban on admission of homosexuals to the seminary “a new bumper crop of homosexual ordinands is guaranteed—and with it a new harvest of scandal for the Church.” That prediction came immediately after the “pedophile summit” of 2002 in Rome, which I attended as The Remnant’s correspondent. In answer to my question then head of the USCCB, Wilton Gregory, made an explosive admission reportedby the international press: “it is an ongoing struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men.” The struggle, to the extent there even was one, obviously has been lost. Sixteen years later, the homosexual predator McCarrick has finally been exposed to the world, stripped of his cardinal’s hat and deprived of any ministry, but only after international media coverage of the Vatican’s semi-secret finding that McCarrick had raped a teenage altar boy 47 years ago. If not for that one case, McCarrick’s sixty years of homosexual debauchery might well have gone unpunished in this world and he would have died still possessed of all the phony honors that had been heaped upon him throughout his career as a parasite in the Body of Christ, including the favor shown to him by Bergoglio. The telling details of Archbishop Viganò’s testimony concerning Bergoglio’s friendly relations with McCarrick before he finally had to cut him loose—details conveniently ignored by Winters, Allen and Shea—are utterly devastating to any defense of Bergoglio. This would explain why he will not a “say a word about” Viganò’s charges against him. The Archbishop reveals, as already noted, that Pope Benedict imposed sanctions on McCarrick under which he “was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.” Viganò further reveals that those sanctions were communicated to McCarrick by then Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Pietro Sambi, but were also repeated by Viganò himself when he succeeded Sambi as Nuncio: I repeated them to Cardinal McCarrick at my first meeting with him at the Nunciature. The Cardinal, muttering in a barely comprehensible way, admitted that he had perhaps made the mistake of sleeping in the same bed with some seminarians at his beach house, but he said this as if it had no importance. Viganò testifies that on June 23, 2013, he obtained a private audience with Bergoglio after having encountered McCarrick at the Pope’s residence three days earlier, during which encounter McCarrick had told him with an air of triumph: “The Pope received me yesterday, tomorrow I am going to China” (evidently to assist in negotiating Bergoglio’s planned sellout of China’s underground Catholics to the Communist dictators of Beijing). Viganò wanted to know why McCarrick had apparently been relieved of the sanctions. During the audience Bergoglio queried: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” and Viganò replied with the truth Bergoglio obviously did not want to hear: I answered him with complete frankness and, if you want, with great naiveté: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.” The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject. But then, what was the Pope’s purpose in asking me that question: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” He clearly wanted to find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not…. It was also clear that, from the time of Pope Francis’s election, McCarrick, now free from all constraints, had felt free to travel continuously, to give lectures and interviews…. He [Bergoglio] knew from at least June 23, 2013 [the date of the audience with Viganò] that McCarrick was a serial predator. Although he knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end; indeed, he made McCarrick’s advice his own, which was certainly not inspired by sound intentions and for love of the Church. It was only when he was forced by the report of the abuse of a minor, again on the basis of media attention, that he took action to save his image in the media. [all emphasis in original] Before his long overdue fall McCarrick, as Bergoglio’s “trusted counselor,” had been instrumental in cementing into place the homosexual-friendly status quo of the American episcopate that oppresses and defrauds the faithful. It was McCarrick, noted Marco Tosatti, who was behind the elevation of Blase Cupich to the key position of Archbishop of Chicago, where Cupich has since promoted the homosexual subversion of Father James Martin. And Viganò now confirms Tosatti’s allegation: “The appointments of Blase Cupich to Chicago and Joseph W. Tobin to Newark were orchestrated by McCarrick, Maradiaga and Wuerl, united by a wicked pact of abuses by the first, and at least of coverup of abuses by the other two. Their names were not among those presented by the Nunciature for Chicago and Newark.” That is, the normal process was circumvented for these appointments. Remnant readers may recall that I spotted Cupich back in 2002, when he was the obscure Bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, as an example of what was coming in the Novus Ordo: accelerated degeneration. As I wrote back then, with the likes of Cupich in view: Cupich is the very model of a Novus Ordo bishop. He is the very exemplar of the crisis we must still endure…. Let the thing die of its own excesses, for as the “little synod” [the 2002 “pedophile summit”] demonstrates, the men who control this establishment will never restore it to anything resembling the vibrant Church that a long line of militant, uncompromising Popes delivered into their hands at Vatican II. For heaven’s sake, the men who govern the Church today require a Vatican summit meeting to agonize over whether serial child molesters should be defrocked. From the Vatican on down, through deliberate decisions and criminal neglect, the servitors of Vatican II have laid waste to the liturgy, the perennial clarity of Catholic teaching, the Church’s militant opposition to worldly thinking, the traditional formation in seminaries, the religious orders, the missions, the trust of the faithful in their own priests—in short, the very life of the Church—and dare to call it a renewal. We must no longer subsidize the malpractice of the architects of ruin. Nor must we join the neo-Catholics in their mindless applause when one of these incompetents attempts to repoint a brick or two in the crumbling façade they have erected to obscure the Church of old. As for William (“nighty-night baby!”) Tobin, after McCarrick had arranged for him to become Archbishop of Newark, Tobin, another episcopal booster of Martin’s pro-homosexual propaganda, promptly sponsored a “gay pilgrimage” to his cathedral in Newark. And it was McCarrick who obtained the cardinal’s hat for his roommate of six years, Kevin Farrell, whom he consecrated a bishop. Farrell, yet another promoter of Martin’s homosexual activism, arranged for Martin to “welcome ‘gay’ families” at the “World Meeting of Families” in Dublin from which Bergoglio has just returned. Finally, there is the appointment of the “pro-gay” Robert McElroy as Bishop of San Diego, concerning which Viganò reveals: “The appointment of McElroy in San Diego was also orchestrated from above, with an encrypted peremptory order to me as Nuncio, by Cardinal Parolin: ‘Reserve the See of San Diego for McElroy.’ McElroy was also well aware of McCarrick’s abuses, as can be seen from a letter sent to him by Richard Sipe on July 28, 2016.” Like Cupich, Tobin and Farrell, McElroy is an avid promoter of Martin’s homosexual subversion of the Church, calling opposition to Martin symptomatic of a “cancer of vilification [that] is seeping into the institutional life of the church.” Emboldened by the certainty that he will face no discipline whatsoever, Martin, now backed by “Cupich, Tobin, Farrell and McElroy,” as Viganò testifies, is urging all the “gay priests” to “come out,” including those ordained since the useless “pedophile summit” presided over by none other than McCarrick as the classic fox in charge of the hen house. But Bergoglio has also lent his own authority to Martin’s effort to mainstream homosexuality in the Church. As Viganò notes, it was Bergoglio who made Martin a “Consultor of the Secretariat for Communications,” even though he is a “well-known activist who promotes the LGBT agenda, chosen to corrupt the young people who will soon gather in Dublin for the World Meeting of Families…” “Father” Martin now confidently declares, sixteen years after the “pedophile summit,” that “The idea of a purge of gay priests is both ridiculous and dangerous. Any purge would empty parishes and religious orders of the thousands of priests and bishops who lead healthy lives of service and faithful lives of celibacy.” Martin thus revels in smug certitude that the future of the universal Church is in the hands of legions of intrinsically disordered homosexual bishops and priests and their homosexual successors, who will perpetuate an existing worldwide homosexual network, and that there is absolutely nothing we can or should do about it. A Worldwide Network of Corruption, Beginning at the Top None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that the homosexual invasion of the Catholic hierarchy is confined to American prelates and priests. The spread of clerical sodomy has not respected national boundaries but rather extends throughout the Church under the eyes of a Vatican apparatus that is itself thoroughly infested with homosexuals. This is thanks in large measure to Bergoglio, who made a flagrantly active homosexual, Monsignor Battista Ricca, “prelate of the gay lobby,” no less than head of his papal household. Moreover, it was Bergoglio’s right hand man, Cardinal Maradiaga, who sheltered his friend, Juan José Pineda, auxiliary Bishop of Tegucigalpa, from any discipline over his notorious homosexual liaisons with seminarians in that diocese. When an apostolic visitation, compelled by mounting public pressure, confirmed the charges against Pineda, he was forced to resign, even as Maradiaga dismissed the incontestable proofs against him as “slander.” Viganò notes that “the only thing that has been made public is that his resignation has simply been accepted, thus making any possible responsibility of his and Maradiaga vanish into nowhere.” Despite the fall of his friend Pineda, Maradiaga continues todefend and protect the homosexual corruption of his own seminary, involving incontrovertible evidence of rampant sodomy among the seminarians he refuses to dismiss, rejecting all the evidence as “gossip.” Concerning Maradiaga, who is also mired in financial corruption for which he offers no credible explanation, Viganò provides this withering assessment of the man and his relation to Bergoglio: In a team effort with Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga, [McCarrick] had become the kingmaker for appointments in the Curia and the United States, and the most listened to advisor in the Vatican for relations with the Obama administration. This is how one explains that, as members of the Congregation for Bishops, the Pope replaced Cardinal Burke with Wuerl and immediately appointed Cupich right after he was made a cardinal. With these appointments the Nunciature in Washington was now out of the picture in the appointment of bishops….. By now the faithful have well understood Maradiaga’s strategy: insult the victims to save himself, lie to the bitter end to cover up a chasm of abuses of power, of mismanagement in the administration of Church property, and of financial disasters even against close friends, as in the case of the Ambassador of Honduras Alejandro Valladares, former Dean of the Diplomatic Corps to the Holy See…. The Pope defends his man, Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga, to the bitter end, as he had done in Chile with Bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros, whom he himself had appointed Bishop of Osorno against the advice of the Chilean Bishops. First, he insulted the abuse victims. Then, only when he was forced by the media, and a revolt by the Chilean victims and faithful, did he recognize his error and apologize, while stating that he had been misinformed, causing a disastrous situation for the Church in Chile, but continuing to protect the two Chilean Cardinals Errazuriz and Ezzati. On the very day Archbishop Viganò’s testimony was made public, Sandro Magister summed up the entire state of affairs in the Church universal after decades of unrestricted homosexual migration into the hierarchy, to which Bergoglio has contributed mightily: “From the seminaries, to the clergy, to the bishops, to the cardinals, homosexuals are present at all levels, by the thousand.” Archbishop Viganò now provides his own decisive summary of the situation, based on firsthand experience with a now endemic homosexual corruption of the Church: Janet Smith, Professor of Moral Theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, recently wrote: “The problem of clergy abuse cannot be resolved simply by the resignation of some bishops, and even less so by bureaucratic directives. The deeper problem lies in homosexual networks within the clergy which must be eradicated.” These homosexual networks, which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc., act under the concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations, and are strangling the entire Church. [emphasis added] Defending the Council by Defending the Homosexual Status Quo At this moment, the entire Novus Ordo regime of novelty is threatened with collapse on account of its homosexual corruption, and voices throughout the Catholic world are now echoing Archbishop Viganò’s call for Bergoglio’s resignation, including Laura Ingraham: “Too little, too late from Pope Francis in Ireland. I stand with Archbishop Carlo Vigano. Time for the laity to demand a new Shepherd.” Even Michael Voris, in a highly amusing example of leading from behind, has finally abandoned his absurd refusal to criticize this pontificate and now declares with a screaming headline: “Pope Francis Must Resign.” Nearly three years ago, seeing what was certainly coming on the disastrous course Bergoglio had already clearly established, this newspaper published a petition which states: “We your subjects respectfully petition Your Holiness to change course for the good of the Church and the welfare of souls. Failing this, would it not be better for Your Holiness to renounce the Petrine office than to preside over what threatens to be a catastrophic compromise of the Church’s integrity?” Our petition was of course dismissed as “ridiculous” by the neo-Catholic commentariat. Today, our ridiculous suggestion is the stuff of mainstream news. From the neo-Catholic perspective, the events of recent days present a terrifying prospect: the final collapse of the Novus Ordo establishment, an end to the conciliar aggiornamento and a revival of integral Tradition, which growing numbers of young people are seeking. Hence even before Archbishop Viganò had come forward, commentators like Faggioli were already sounding the neo-Catholic air raid siren. Faggioli fretted that “[t]he abuse scandal and delegitimization of the episcopate has created a great power vacuum in the Church” that could be filled by the “neo-traditionalist Catholicism of the younger generations of American Catholics” who “attack American bishops and cardinals close to Pope Francis.” Accordingly, he rushed to the defense of Bergoglio and his corrupt regime against “a radicalization of religious conservatism in the neo-traditionalism sense...” For Faggioli, not only would Bergoglio’s resignation be unthinkable, so also would a purge of the homosexual and pro-homosexual prelates Bergoglio and his Vatican henchmen have systematically enabled. The Pope, he argues, is not “the CEO of the Catholic Church world, and the bishops as its managers whom the Pope can simply fire.” No, Bergoglio cannot “simply fire” bishops. Except whenever he pleases, as we have seen again and again with the conservative bishops and even Cardinals (Burke and Müller) he has sacked because their conservatism offended him or one of his friends, prompting even Crux to ask: “Does Pope Francis have an enemies list?” Then again, Francis even obtained the removal of his own “trusted counselor” McCarrick from the College of Cardinals, albeit only when forced to act due to worldwide condemnation in the media. So, according to Faggioli, the same Pope who sacks conservative bishops and cardinals according to his pleasure and has just removed a cardinal from the College of Cardinals in an unprecedented disciplinary act under fire from the media, is somehow powerless to dismiss Modernist bishops who have created an obscene “gay culture” in the Church and replace them with orthodox, normal heterosexual males. Francis cannot “simply fire” even Cardinal Wuerl, who covered up crimes of homosexual predation by the priests he transferred elsewhere while Archbishop of Pittsburgh, and who authorized payment of $900,000 in hush money to bury sexual abuse claims against a homosexual priest involved in the production of child pornography. Wuerl, says Faggioli, “faces a complex situation: on the one hand Wuerl was not afraid of clashing with the tribunal over the Apostolic Signatura in the Vatican which wanted to readmit a priest from the Pittsburgh diocese to ministry… while in other cases he seems to have collaborated in covering up some cases… It is a very difficult position also because Wuerl became a symbol… beyond the specific accusations against him, from which he could not publicly defend himself.” In other words, because his situation is “complex” Wuerl, unlike McCarrick, should remain a cardinal and the Archbishop of Washington, DC, thus maintaining a key bulwark against the “neo-traditionalist” threat. Yet, as the Pennsylvania grand jury report documents, Wuerl assisted McCarrick in the coverup of his crimes and now brazenly lies about it. Here too Viganò’s testimony sheds light on the darkness: …. I myself brought up the subject [of McCarrick] with Cardinal Wuerl on several occasions, and I certainly didn’t need to go into detail because it was immediately clear to me that he was fully aware of it. I also remember in particular the fact that I had to draw his attention to it, because I realized that in an archdiocesan publication, on the back cover in color, there was an announcement inviting young men who thought they had a vocation to the priesthood to a meeting with Cardinal McCarrick. I immediately phoned Cardinal Wuerl, who expressed his surprise to me, telling me that he knew nothing about that announcement and that he would cancel it. If, as he now continues to state, he knew nothing of the abuses committed by McCarrick and the measures taken by Pope Benedict, how can his answer be explained? His recent statements that he knew nothing about it, even though at first he cunningly referred to compensation for the two victims, are absolutely laughable. The Cardinal lies shamelessly and prevails upon his Chancellor, Monsignor Antonicelli, to lie as well. Cardinal Wuerl also clearly lied on another occasion. Following a morally unacceptable event authorized by the academic authorities of Georgetown University, I brought it to the attention of its President, Dr. John DeGioia, sending him two subsequent letters. Before forwarding them to the addressee, so as to handle things properly, I personally gave a copy of them to the Cardinal with an accompanying letter I had written. The Cardinal told me that he knew nothing about it. However, he failed to acknowledge receipt of my two letters, contrary to what he customarily did. I subsequently learned that the event at Georgetown had taken place for seven years. But the Cardinal knew nothing about it! Cardinal Wuerl, well aware of the continuous abuses committed by Cardinal McCarrick and the sanctions imposed on him by Pope Benedict, transgressing the Pope’s order, also allowed him to reside at a seminary in Washington D.C. In doing so, he put other seminarians at risk. [emphasis in original] What really concerns Faggioli and those who think like him is not Wuerl and his “complex situation,” which is not complex at all. Rather, what he views with alarm as an “essential element” of the context in which Wuerl operates is that “scandals are also the opportunity for the neo-traditionalist Catholicism of the younger generations of American Catholics to attack American bishops and cardinals close to Pope Francis….” Better a thousand septuagenarian Wuerls in their lavish sties of corruption, financed by the faithful, than a single, young neo-traditionalist prelate! But what exactly is a neo-traditionalist? Quite simply: an orthodox Catholic who has had enough of the homosexual-infested regime of novelty imposed on the Church by the old men of the Council, Bergoglio merely being the latest, the highest placed, and one of the last. As Faggioli puts it: “In the last fifteen years, the American Catholic Church has been traversed by a radicalization of religious conservatism in the neo-traditionalism sense, especially in the younger generations of priests and intellectuals. They interpret the current abuse crisis as fruit of the mistakes of the Council itself and not only of the post-Council…” Just as Faggioli fears, many in the up-and-coming generation of Catholic clergy and laity recognize the obvious: that the conciliar texts, for all their prolix repetition of traditional teaching, opened the way to ecclesial disaster. Because in those texts—above all Gaudium et Spes, Dignitatis Humanae, Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra Aetate and Sacrosanctum Concilium—the Council verbally prostrated itself before “the modern world” and the practitioners of other religions while authorizing Bugnini (Secretary of the liturgical Preparatory Commission that drafted what would become Sacrosanctum Concilium) to begin demolition of the sacred liturgy that was the very foundation Catholic of orthodoxy and orthopraxis. To quote Paul VI, then in the depths of his conciliar delirium at the Council’s close: But one must realize that this council, which exposed itself to human judgment, insisted very much more upon this pleasant side of man, rather than on his unpleasant one. Its attitude was very much and deliberately optimistic. A wave of affection and admiration flowed from the council over the modern world of humanity…. Instead of depressing diagnoses, encouraging remedies; instead of direful prognostics, messages of trust issued from the council to the present-day world. The modern world’s values were not only respected but honored, its efforts approved, its aspirations purified and blessed. [emphasis added] Thus did Paul describe the conciliar “opening to the world” through which the world promptly invaded the Church, including large numbers of homosexuals who should never have been admitted to the seminary. In sum, Faggioli is representative of the thinking that requires defense of a homosexualized clergy if only for the reason that tradition-minded Catholics cannot be allowed to take their place: “This neo-traditionalist Catholicism believes that sexual abuses are committed only by homosexual clergy… and that the crisis of abuse can be resolved by a kind of Catholic Jacobinism that should eliminate all bishops and priests minimally engaged in dialogue with modern culture, and replaced by a young clergy marked by personal sanctity but also by a fascination for a mythical Middle Ages and the rejection of a Church-world relationship based on a principle of reality.” Rather than “young clergy marked by personal sanctity,” the neo-Catholic mentality Faggioli exemplifies prefers that homosexual priests and bishops be kept in place in order to continue the “dialogue with modern culture.” It is not the integrity of the Faith that matters but only perpetuation of the post-conciliar regime of novelty. Any abandonment of the regime must be viewed as ecclesiastical treason—“Catholic Jacobinism”—if not criminal activity. Faggioli would probably be more inclined to civil or criminal prosecution of “Catholic Jacobins” for “hate speech” than Novus Ordo bishops for their complicity in covering up homosexual rapes. “Homosexuality in the clergy exists and is a matter that must be addressed,” Faggioli fleetingly acknowledges toward the end of his piece, “but the abuse crisis cannot be resolved by making homosexuals within the Church the scapegoat of a scandal that has ancient roots, well before Vatican Council II.” And how does the Church “address” a massive infestation by homosexual priests and prelates without removing them from authority and ensuring that they cannot promote homosexual successors for generation after generation? Faggioli has no answer because what he is really arguing—the final beachhead of the neo-Catholic defense of their disintegrating regime—is that homosexuals in the hierarchy must remain in authority as an indispensable seawall against a “neo-traditionalist” storm surge. Faggioli’s argument demonstrates that neo-Catholicism has never been about making the authentic Faith more appealing to a “modern world” founded precisely on a rejection of the Church’s authority. It is not about the Faith at all. Rather, it is an ideological movement dedicated to the face-saving defense of a catastrophic failure in ecclesial innovation that has corrupted the human element of the Church in practically every department. For people like Faggioli, indeed for the tradition-hating Pope they blindly defend, the one thing to be feared is that more and more faithful will recognize the neo-Catholic polemic for what it is—a fraud—and begin demanding a return of everything the regime of novelty has stolen from the life of the Church. That is exactly what a growing number of Catholics are now doing, as even the secular press recognized less than three months before Bergoglio began his tyrannical reign. In this respect, what the neo-Catholics are defending at bottom is themselves—that is, the reputations they have all staked on their defense of the indefensible against the traditionalists they have arrogantly mocked and marginalized for decades only to see, to their horror, that traditionalism is ever more vindicated as the scandals of the Novus Ordo mount under this reckless Pope to an unsustainable, indeed apocalyptic, level. A return to integral Tradition is the threat that Faggioli sees as coming particularly from the young. Irony of ironies, he is now reduced to defending what is old and tired and corrupt against a restoration, led largely by a youthful vanguard, of what is ever ancient but ever new. For some, it seems, no price is too great—not even the good of the Church—to avoid the personal ignominy of being seen on the wrong side of history. Conclusion: The Fatima Connection Long before the arrival of Bergoglio in Rome, the successive Vatican Secretaries of State, Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone, were instrumental in advancing the homosexual corruption of the Novus Ordo establishment. As to Bertone and Sodano, Viganò provides further vital testimony: Nuncio Sambi’s report [on McCarrick’s sexual abuse], with all the attachments, was sent to Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, as Secretary of State. My two above-mentioned memos of December 6, 2006 and May 25, 2008, were also presumably handed over to him by the Substitute. As already mentioned, the Cardinal had no difficulty in insistently presenting for the episcopate candidates known to be active homosexuals — I cite only the well-known case of Vincenzo de Mauro, who was appointed Archbishop-Bishop of Vigevano and later removed because he was undermining his seminarians — and in filtering and manipulating the information he conveyed to Pope Benedict…. Cardinal Angelo Sodano was Secretary of State until September 2006: all information [concerning McCarrick] was communicated to him. In November 2000, Nunzio Montalvo sent him his report, passing on to him the aforementioned letter from Father Boniface Ramsey in which he denounced the serious abuses committed by McCarrick. It is known that Sodano tried to cover up the Father Maciel scandal to the end. He even removed the Nuncio in Mexico City, Justo Mullor, who refused to be an accomplice in his scheme to cover Maciel, and in his place appointed Sandri, then-Nuncio to Venezuela, who was willing to collaborate in the cover-up. Sodano even went so far as to issue a statement to the Vatican press office in which a falsehood was affirmed, that is, that Pope Benedict had decided that the Maciel case should be considered closed. Benedict reacted, despite Sodano’s strenuous defense, and Maciel was found guilty and irrevocably condemned. It is no coincidence that, as I detail in my book on the Third Secret of Fatima, Sodano and Bertone have also taken the leading role in suppressing the integral Secret and reducing the Message of Fatima in general to a generic prescription for personal piety, stripped of its prophetic and admonitory content regarding the epochal malfeasance and corruption of the upper hierarchy to which they belong. Concerning my book, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, Viganò’s predecessor as Nuncio in Washington, whom Viganò’ credits with diligently reporting McCarrick’s crimes to the Vatican and conveying Benedict’s sanctions to McCarrick, made some very revealing comments during an interview with Robert Moynihan, published posthumously six years ago in Inside the Vatican: We were discussing the Third Secret of Fatima, the allegations that the Vatican has not published the entire text of the Third Secret as revealed to Sister Lucia, and the response of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, in a book where Bertone states that there is nothing more to be revealed. Sambi said, “Excuse me.” He got up, went out of the room, and came back with a book. “Here,” he said. “Do you know this book? You should read it.” It was Christopher Ferrara's The Secret Still Hidden. “Wait,” I said. “You are the Pope’s representative in the US, and you are urging me to read a book that questions what the secretary of state wrote?” Sambi replied, “All I am saying is that there are interesting things worth reading in this book. And in the end, we are all after the truth, aren’t we? The truth is the important thing...” The truth is indeed the important thing. And the truth about our situation is revealed in that still-hidden part of the Secret to whose contents Pope Benedict alluded during his pilgrimage to Fatima in 2010, identifying elements that do not appear at all in the obscure vision published back in 2000, which Sodano and Bertone tried to pass of as the entirety of the Secret at the same time they were covering up homosexual corruption in high places: As for the new things which we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice. [emphasis added] I believe that Archbishop Viganò’s precious testimony is a sign that Heaven itself is now responding to the “need for justice” in the Church. Whether or not justice involves the resignation of the most wayward Pope in Church history, the inevitable season of justice will culminate in the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Church’s restoration. This will be a final victory over the enemies within and their apologists, such as Faggioli, who, in typical neo-Catholic style, imperiously scoffs at the notion of “a young clergy marked by personal sanctity but also by a fascination for a mythical Middle Ages” and busies himself defending an unsalvageable mass of corruption he dares to describe as “a Church-world relationship based on a principle of reality.” I can only conclude by making my own these closing words of Archbishop Viganò:

'Oumuamua: Space Cigar Is Still Spinning From Mysterious Violent Collision The solar system’s strange cigar-shaped visitor 'Oumuamua—Hawaiian for “scout” or “messenger”—is tumbling chaotically as the result of a violent collision. And the interstellar object will continue to spin for billions of years as it journeys through space, scientists have reported in a study published in Nature Astronomy. This is the latest of several revelations following the first-ever discovery of a solar system invader last October. Initially believed to be a comet, then an asteroid, scientists think the wandering “interstellar object” is a hunk of ice wrapped in organic sun-blocking material. M Kornmesser/ESO/Flickr "At some point or another it's been in a collision," Queen's University, Belfast, research fellow and lecturer Wes Fraser told the BBC. The research team watched 'Oumuamua’s brightness change over time to model exactly how it was spinning. 'Oumuamua “appears to be in an excited rotational state undergoing non-principal axis rotation” the study authors wrote. This unusual “excited” movement is better known as “tumbling.” “Tumbling is an unusual state of rotation,” Fraser said during Sunday’s episode of the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night show. “It quickly starts to wobble around chaotically.” See all of the best photos of the week in these slideshows The icy cigar was probably knocked askew by a violent collision with another object. The researchers don’t know exactly when this happened, but suspect it took place before 'Oumuamua left its home stellar system. "It's hard to know if it was during planet formation or after the planet formation process," Fraser said during the show. "Certainly, more collisions happen while planets are growing than afterwards, so that’s a very good guess. But unfortunately we can’t get a high-resolution image of this thing to see what kind of crater is on it that might be attributed to the collision that caused it to start tumbling." The team think 'Oumuamua may eventually move less chaotically. "The tumbling actually causes stresses and strains internal to the object, and that slowly but surely squeezes and pulls on the object just like tides on the Earth to remove energy from the spin," Fraser said. But, at least for the next few billion years, the space invader is destined to continue its topsy-turvy spin.

“We Now Have Urban Ebola” In Congo, WHO Warns Of “Potentially Explosive Increase” In Cases This report was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge Experts fear an “explosive increase” in Ebola cases after an outbreak in Congo entered a “new phase” and spread from the countryside to a city. The BBC reports that Health Minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga confirmed a case in Mbandaka, a city of a million people about 130km (80 miles) from the area where the first cases were confirmed earlier this month. The city is a major transportation hub with routes to the capital Kinshasa. Forty-four people have been infected and 23 people are known to have died. Senior World Health Organization (WHO) official Peter Salama said the spread to Mbandaka meant there was the potential for an “explosive increase” in cases. “This is a major development in the outbreak,” he told the BBC. “We have urban Ebola, which is a very different animal from rural Ebola. The potential for an explosive increase in cases is now there.” Mr Salama, the WHO’s deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response, said Mbandaka’s location on the Congo river, widely used for transportation, raised the prospect of Ebola spreading to surrounding countries such as Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic as well as downstream to Kinshasa, a city of 10 million people. “This puts a whole different lens on this outbreak and gives us increased urgency to move very quickly into Mbandaka to stop this new first sign of transmission,” he said. The BBC adds that the WHO said it was not recommending any trade or travel restrictions either within DR Congo, for example between Mbandaka and Kinshasa, or internationally. But Mr Salama said that 13 countries in the region were boosting border screening measures and said DR Congo itself was increasing exit screening measures. “The good news is that the DR Congo population is very used to Ebola outbreaks,” he added. “They know to protect themselves by avoiding mass gatherings and mass funerals. They know as well that traditional healers can amplify the outbreak.” As The Daily Mail notes, it is the ninth time Ebola has been recorded in Congo since the disease made its first known appearance near its northern Ebola river in the 1970s. Ebola is most feared for the internal and external bleeding it can cause in victims owing to damage done to blood vessels. The Mail reports that health workers have recorded confirmed, probable and suspected cases of Ebola in three health zones of Congo’s Equateur province, and have identified 432 people who may have had contact with the disease, the WHO said. Supplies sent to Congo included more than 300 body bags for safe burials in affected communities. The vaccine will be reserved for people suspected of coming into contact with the disease, as well as health workers. The vaccine requires storage at a temperature between -60 and -80 degrees C, tricky in a country with unreliable electricity.

ICE Arrests 22 In Chicago Area During 3-Day Operation CHICAGO — Federal officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested 22 criminal aliens and immigration violators in Illinois’ Cook and Lake counties during a three-day enforcement action, which ended Monday. During this operation, ERO deportation officers made arrests in the following Illinois cities and towns: Chicago (9), Cicero (4), Hoffman Estates (1), Palatine (4), Park City (1), Rolling Meadows (2) and Round Lake Beach (1). All those arrested were men between the ages of 20 and 53. Aliens arrested during this operation are from the following five countries: Ecuador (1), Honduras (2), Mexico (17), Serbia (1) and Ukraine (1). Six of the 22 arrested during this operation were criminal aliens who were released back into their communities after local law enforcement failed to honor an immigration detainer placed on the individuals by ICE. Immigration detainers request that ICE be notified before the individual is released from local custody for any reason. Most of the aliens targeted by ERO deportation officers during this operation had prior criminal histories that included convictions for the following crimes: sexual assault, kidnapping, assault, assault with a weapon, drug possession, theft, obstruction of justice and driving under the influence (DUI); two were known fugitive immigration violators, and six were arrested for illegally re-entering the United States after having been deported, which is a felony. The following are criminal summaries of the offenders arrested in Illinois during this operation: A 38-year-old Mexican citizen and a known gang member was arrested Jan. 8 in Rolling Meadows. He was previously convicted in Cook County for felony aggravated criminal sexual assault and bodily harm. He was previously deported. Cook County Sheriff’s Office did not honor the ICE detainer that was placed. He remains in ICE custody pending presentation of criminal prosecution for re-entry after deportation. A 37-year-old previously deported Mexican man was arrested Jan. 7 in Chicago. He was previously convicted twice of drug possession, and he has pending criminal charges for sexually assaulting a child. He remains in ICE custody pending presentation of criminal prosecution for re-entry after deportation. A 20-year-old Mexican man and a known gang member was arrested Jan. 7 in Round Lake Beach. He was previously convicted of battery. He is also Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient with two extensions. He was served a notice to appear before a federal immigration judge, and will remain in ICE custody pending disposition of his immigration proceedings. A 32-year-old previously deported Ecuadoran man was arrested Jan. 7 in Chicago. He has criminal convictions for DUI, domestic assault and assault. He remains in ICE custody pending presentation of criminal prosecution for re-entry after deportation. A 46-year-old previously deported Mexican man was arrested Jan. 7 in Chicago. He has a criminal conviction for possessing cocaine. He remains in ICE custody pending presentation of criminal prosecution for re-entry after deportation. Depending on an alien’s criminality, an alien who re-enters the United States after having been previously deported commits a felony punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison, if convicted. “Our dedicated officers strive to make our communities safer by arresting convicted criminal aliens and removing them from the United States despite the reckless sanctuary policies that are currently in place in Cook County that put our communities at risk,” said Ricardo Wong, field office director of ERO Chicago. “This operation focused on targeting immigration fugitives and criminal aliens in two Illinois counties, but we routinely conduct operations daily. By removing criminal aliens from the streets, our ICE officers provide an invaluable community service by improving public safety.” All of the targets in this operation were amenable to arrest and removal under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act. ICE deportation officers carry out targeted enforcement operations daily nationwide as part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to protect the nation, uphold public safety, and protect the integrity of our immigration laws and border controls.

The Remnant Newspaper The unmasking of McCarrick exposed the pervasive prelate coverup of homosexual sexual predation in the American Catholic Church. These swarmy power brokers have colluded far too long at the tragic expense of innocent boys and seminarians. For 60 years, Ted McCarrick roamed the halls of seminaries, harassing, raping, and assaulting young males around the world. His brother bishops all knew and they all stayed silent. How fortuitous and revelatory that McCarrick, the Molester would divulge his personal role in the pre-Conclave lobbying effort to elect Jorge Bergoglio as Pope. The notorious lavender mafia anxiously sought a simpatico Pope to advance its reformist homosexual agenda. Bergoglio was their man. The now well known McCarrick Villanova Speech on October 13, 2013 where he relayed the story about a prominent Italian man who met with McCarrick to ask him to lobby for the election of Bergoglio to the papacy. In light of the McCarrick scandal, the conversation takes on new meaning... McCarrick described the conversation with the Influential Roman: “Before we went into the General Congregation, a very interesting and influential Italian gentleman came to see me at the Seminary (where else?) where I was staying. We sat down and he’s a very brilliant man, very influential in Rome and said he had a favor to ask of me back home in the U.S., but then he said:” Influential Roman: What about Bergoglio? Molester McCarrick: I was surprised and said, What about Bergoglio? Influential Roman: Does he have a chance? Molester McCarrick: I don’t think so. No one has mentioned his name. He isn’t on anyone’s mind. Influential Roman: He could do it you know. Molester McCarrick: What could he do? Influential Roman: He could reform the Church. If you gave him 5 years, he could get us back on target. He’s 76. If he had 5 years—the Lord working through him, he could make the Church over again. Molester McCarrick: That’s interesting. Influential Roman: I know you are his friend. Molester McCarrick: I hope I am. Influential Roman: Talk him up. Molester McCarrick'll vouch for ya, Francis! #bromance And talk him up, McCarrick the Molester did! Oh, the irony! That the most prolific serial predator Cardinal would divulge the pre-Conclave Bergoglio plot to “reform the Church.” Now we know what “reform the Church” looks like in the Bergoglian papacy. Yes, the clever and tyrannical Bergoglio, through his manipulation of synods, footnotes, exhortations, personal phone calls, airplane pressers, and correspondence has nearly completed his task of modernizing the Roman Catholic Church in the past 5 years. The rallying cry for his homosexual modern agenda was sounded in his July 29, 2013 airplane presser. Who am I to judge set the tone for merciful embrace of homosexual priests. After 5 long years, his unrelenting mercy mantra seemingly extends only to homosexual clerics, not to the laity or clergy victims who protest the cover ups by prelates. Francis’ wink and nod to the homosexual lifestyle landed him on the cover of the Advocate, the gay magazine, as its Man of the Year. He lapped up the accolades from the secular culture and main stream media. Yet, fame is and predation is unrelenting, even for Popes. In the words of Queen Elizabeth, this year has been annus horribilis for Francis. Excuse the gay slang pun but, the chickens have come home to roost. The cascading revelations of papal sex scandals are toppling the barque of Peter. Will Catholic laity pay attention and take action? The McCarrick scandal created an earthquake in the Catholic Church with aftershocks that will last for years. The timing is eerily propitious and providential based on the 5 year deadline. Will the laity step up and reclaim our hijacked Catholic Church? This critical time in the history of the Catholic Church demands that the laity step forward to protect the Church, its children and seminarians from predators. We must close ranks before another precious child is exploited, a holy seminarian is violated, or another homosexual orgy is covered up at the Vatican. The first order of business is to scuttle the upcoming October Synod on Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment. Remember that influential Roman gentleman friend of McCarrick who said that Bergoglio could reform the Church in 5 years? Bergoglio’s upcoming Synod on Young People will serve as the culminating vehicle for the 5 year modernist reform of the St. Gallen Mafia. This Synod is designed to exploit the youth, like they’ve been doing for the last 60 years. If it weren’t so infuriating, it would be laughable that following the McCarrick scandal of sexual predation of young males and seminarians, by a Cardinal, and covered up by Bishops, the Catholic Church would host a Synod of Bishops on the topic of young people and vocations! Furthermore, this nightmare of a “sinod" is inviting youth from ages 16-29 to mingle with the Bishops to discuss the Church, faith and vocations. Are you thoroughly disgusted by this farce? The Bishops have proven that they cannot be trusted to protect young people and seminarians from predators. The ever growing global list of Bishops and Cardinals that have preyed on /and or covered up the sexual abuse of minors and seminarians over the last 60 years continues to enrage the laity. We are no longer Shocked, just fed up. Let’s start with the Cardinal who will lead the upcoming Synod, none other than Cardinal Kevin Farrell, Prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. As the DC roommate and protege of Ted McCarrick, Farrell so respected McCarrick, the Molester, that he fashioned his Coat of Arms as a tribute to Uncle Ted. Farrell’s pathetic and laughable defense “I never knew anything about McCarrick” video highlights the continuing conspiracy of denial by the U.S. Catholic hierarchy. Undoubtedly, Farrell as the head of this Synod chose his dear friend gay friendly, Fr. James Martin, S.J. to keynote the Synod. Farrell’s graciously offers notorious praise for Martin’s new book, Building a Bridge (to hell, ed.) exposes his obvious underlying homosexual agenda and aura of the upcoming Synod: “A welcome and much-needed book that will help bishops, priests, pastoral associates, and all church leaders more compassionately minister to the LGBT community. It will also help LGBT Catholics feel more at home in what is, after all, their church.” What merciful praise for Martin’s book, Cardinal Farrell! Contrary to the theme of mercy and compassion to LGBTs, it appears that your mentor, McCarrick set out to groom and grow an LGBT community. Clearly, you and Fr. Martin have much in common since you both claimed you were “shocked” by the McCarrick allegations. Explain to Catholics why would you headline a homosexual affirming speaker at a Synod for youth and seminarians? In case you haven’t been reading the McCarrick headlines or noticing the plunging mass attendance and collections, Catholics don’t trust their boys around priests and are furious that their seminarians are subjected to unrelenting homosexual sexual harassment. McCarrick is the last straw. All credibility is lost. The October Synod is yet another example of Church leaders exploiting Catholic youth for their own personal power agenda and selfish motives. Bergoglio’s five year plan is nearly complete. Catholics must shed their trust and naivety in the papacy and bishops’ conference. Dare, if you will, to read the thrill, the excitement and anticipated results of the Synod in the radical New Ways Gay Catholic Ministry article, entitled, Youth Synod Document shows Vatican evolution on LGBT Topics. The article highlights the New Ways excitement over the shift in the Vatican approach to the LGBT issues at the Synod: “Another significant development is the acknowledgement that LGBT people have a desire to be part of the church. In one section, the document states: “some LGBT youth … wish to benefit from greater closeness and experience greater care from the Church.” “This acknowledgement is a welcome change from the hierarchy’s traditional rhetoric that suggests LGBT people are opposed to religion. As New Ways Ministry knows from over 40 years of pastoral work with the LGBT community, LGBT Catholics have a deep spirituality, often forged by remarkable journeys overcoming rejection, alienation, and marginalization. LGBT Catholics have stayed a part of the church, despite statements and actions which have offended and hurt them.” The New Ways article highlights the efforts of Cardinal Kevin Farrell and his Vatican cronies to promote the LGBT agenda for the upcoming Synod: “A third development is that the document shows that Vatican officials paid attention to concerns about LGBT issues which were raised by youth at a pre-synod meeting in Rome during March of this year, and also from youth around the world who made their views known to the Vatican online.” And what of the infamous Instrumentum Laboris, drafted by the crafty Cardinal Baldisseri, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, noteworthy of the infamous First Synod on the Family? Known for his manipulative polls and magical modernistic results, Baldisseri infamously stated that “dogma has its own evolution.” Baldisseri stayed true to his modernist form and agenda and to the delight of the New Ways Ministry, he announced at the Vatican press conference that his office is using for the first time ever the LGBT acronym to refer to gay people in a spirit of inclusion. Lest there be any doubt about the secret agenda and outcome of this Synod, Cardinal Baldisseri raises the exclusion rainbow flag. Baldisseri notes that the upcoming Synod is to “make the entire Church aware of its important mission to accompany every young person, none excluded.” This papacy is awash in the prissy, pop psycho speak, jargon of accompaniment, listening, and dialogue dazzling the media with empty tropes and luring the uncatechized into its globalist mantra of one world new age religion. Not surprisingly, Baldisseri never once mentions that dreaded word, dogma in the Instrumentum Laboris, but effuses about accompaniment 136 times! This doltish and dimwitted document wreaks of psycho babble, insults the intelligence of young people, and will destroy the future of the Church. Welcome to the dumbing down of the Catholic Faith by the St. Gallen Mafia and their don, Jorge Bergoglio. This Synod will exploit the youth and seminarians, just like Ted McCarrick. The handwriting is all over the 37 foot Vatican wall. The time to take a stand against this radical hijacking of Holy Mother Church is now. Expose and rout every last predator. Purge every homosexual from its clerical ranks. #StopTheSynod. It has all the markings of a Gay Pride Rally. __________________________________________ Elizabeth Yore is an attorney and international child rights advocate who has investigated clergy sex abuse cases.

Rep. Danny Davis was For/Against/For/Against Farrakhan Rep. Danny Davis helped get the ball rolling by praising Farrakhan. Democratic Illinois Rep. Danny Davis defended Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as an “outstanding human being” on Monday. Farrakhan’s history of racially extreme comments includes blaming Jews for the September 11 attacks, saying white people “deserve to die” and praising Adolf Hitler as a “very great man.” “I personally know [Farrakhan], I’ve been to his home, done meetings, participated in events with him,” Davis told TheDC. “I don’t regard Louis Farrakhan as an aberration or anything, I regard him as an outstanding human being who commands a following of individuals who are learned and articulate and he plays a big role in the lives of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people,” he emphasized later. Then Rep. Davis' office issued a statement disavowing Farrakhan. And then Davis got right back to talking to the Daily Caller and disavowed the disavowal. “The congressman was insistent that The Daily Caller misquoted him during the interview and that he didn’t subscribe to Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic statements and actions in the past,” the ADL official told JTA in a statement. “He expressed an interest in seeing some of the latest statements made by Farrakhan vis-a-vis Jews, which we promptly shared with him.” The congressman wasn’t sure why the ADL wrote that he had been misquoted in his praise for the anti-Semite, and said he wasn’t sure if someone from his office had told the ADL he was misquoted, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Sunday. “I think that was what they wanted to write. Nah, I don’t have no problems with Farrakhan, I don’t spend a whole lot of my time dealing with those kind of things,” Davis said. “That’s just one segment of what goes on in our world. The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question and his position on that and so forth. For those heavy into it, that’s their thing, but it ain’t my thing,” he said The term "Jewish Question" is largely used by anti-Semites. So Davis then sorta disavowed his own statements. J Street endorsed him. And then he talked to the Daily Caller again. Democratic Illinois Rep. Danny Davis thinks Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a notorious racist and anti-Semite, does “outstanding work” but doesn’t agree with Farrakhan’s positions that white people are “devils” and Jewish people are satanic. Progress! "I don’t spend a lot of time, I buy Final Call when I see them. I’ve been to Saviour’s Day, I’ve read, I’ve been a fan of Elijah Muhammad, so those are my positions, but I do disagree with the notion that white people are devils.” I wonder how far a white congressman would get saying, "I attended the Klavern, but I don't agree with the KKK's views about black people." But that's Rep. Davis' current views. He likes a racist hate group. But doesn't believe white people are devils or Jews are satanic. Whoever the JTA has on the "explain away Farrakhan's Dem fandom" beat is going to be busy again. But this is typical of the Dems and their useful idiots. And J Street is on record as endorsing a politician who praised a racist hate group leader and discussed the "Jewish question."

Swedish PM does not rule out use of army to end gang violence Sweden will do whatever it takes, including sending in the army, to end a wave of gang violence that has seen a string of deadly shootings, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said in Wednesday. Sweden’s murder rate is relatively low in international terms, but gang violence has surged in recent years and Swedes are worried that the police are unable to cope. In 2016, the latest year for which official statistics are available, 106 people were murdered in Sweden, a country of 10 million. But Swedish TV reported there were over 300 shootings, mostly in turf battles between gangs over drugs, protection rackets and prostitution. Four people were shot dead in the first week of this year. One man died after picking up a hand grenade outside a subway station in a suburb of Stockholm. Law and order is likely to be a major issue in a parliamentary election scheduled for September with the populist, opposition Sweden Democrats linking public concern about the rising crime rate to a large increase in the numbers of immigrants. “It would not be my first option to bring in the military, but I am prepared to do whatever is necessary to make sure that serious, organized crime is stamped out,” Lofven told news agency TT. The government has promised police an extra 7.1 billion crowns ($880 million) through 2020, toughened laws on gun crimes and made it easier for the police to monitor private phone calls and emails, among other measures. But a report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention shows increasing numbers of Swedes worried about crime with confidence falling in the police and the judicial system. “People are shot to death in pizza restaurants, people are killed by hand grenades they find on the street,” Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson said in parliament on Wednesday. “This is the new Sweden; the new, exciting dynamic, multicultural paradise that so many here in this assembly ... have fought to create for so many years,” he said sarcastically.

Tea With the Curate: The Attack on Marriage is an Attack on Christ in the Eucharist Pope Paul VI’s 1965 encyclical on the Eucharist, “Mysterium Fidei,” was the first place I saw anyone say that the body and blood, soul and complete divinity of Christ was actually present in the consecrated species. Having been raised in Remi de Roo’s Victoria in the 1970s, I had naturally never heard anything at all about the Eucharist. The understanding that Catholics believed what they believe about it came as a bit of a shock. (Read the full document here. ) With the hindsight of 52 years and a great deal of very dirty and unappealing water under the Catholic bridge, we can see it as a kind of warning prophecy. Published just three months before the close of Vatican II and just as Annibale Bugnini was cranking open the floodgates of his never-ending stream of liturgical alterations, Mysterium Fidei is now an important marker of a critical turning point in Catholic history, perhaps the most important of modern times. Who can read this without cringing at what we now know was about to happen: Therefore, we earnestly hope that the restored sacred liturgy will bring forth abundant fruits of eucharistic devotion, so that the Holy Church, under this saving sign of piety, may make daily progress toward perfect unity and may invite all Christians to a unity of faith and of love, drawing them gently, thanks to the action of divine grace. But in 1983 at the start of my personal investigations into the Catholic religion, I knew nothing of any of that. The encyclical, the very first I ever read, was also a marker for me of a personal turning point. It was the first time I had ever seen Catholic eucharistic doctrine clearly and – most importantly – unapologetically stated. It came right out and said something so astounding, something so completely unlikely, that I had to admit that it left very few logical possibilities. Like C.S. Lewis’s assessment of the claims by Christ of His own divinity, this pope was either mad, bad or telling the plain truth. Something that may be much more noteworthy now in our current circumstances than it was the year I read it, is that the pope’s very first quote was not of scripture, but the Council of Trent: “At the Last Supper, on the night He was handed over, Our Lord instituted the Eucharistic Sacrifice of His Body and Blood, to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until He should come, and thus entrust to the Church, His beloved spouse, the memorial of His death and resurrection: a sacrament of devotion, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a paschal banquet in which Christ is received, the soul is filled with grace and there is given to us the pledge of future glory.” In these words are highlighted both the sacrifice, which pertains to the essence of the Mass which is celebrated daily, and the sacrament in which the faithful participate in Holy Communion by eating the Flesh of Christ and drinking His Blood, receiving both grace, the beginning of eternal life, and the medicine of immortality. I remember my thoughts upon reading this shocking statement… “By doing what? !” My acceptance from the reading of this document of the Church’s orthodox eucharistic doctrine was based in part on Pope Paul’s gracious and beautiful exposition, and in part on the sheer radical, mad unlikeliness of it. What could conceivably be the reason to say anything as wild as this if it weren’t true? The idea of transubstantiation struck me as I read that document as possibly the strangest and most earth shattering thing I’d ever heard. It shocked me out of a kind of swamp of intellectual worldliness; presenting the idea to my thirsty mind that there could indeed be fantastic realities far more wonderful than the banal and painfully uninteresting secularist worldview I had been taught to accept. It was as though someone had plausibly told me that, yes, there were fairies and magical kingdoms in real life, “just around the corner”. By the time I read it, I had been through a long, slow transition from a childhood devoted to Our Lady and confirmed in my belief in wonders, to a kind of disappointed practical atheism after three years in a diocesan Catholic parochial school. I had been taught, by both word and implication, that everything the Catholic Church had taught before Vatican II was pernicious nonsense. Where it was simply wrong it was ridiculous and where it was wrong and political it was outright wicked. What led me to read that particular encyclical is the most clearly identifiable moment of actual grace in my young life to that point. It was the first time it occurred to me to investigate, like an anthropologist, what the Church herself said about her teachings. While mulling grimly one day over all the wickedness of the Catholic Church, I was pulled up short by a single thought: “I could be wrong.” At 17 it seemed such an unlikely thing to think I was rather shocked. But stopping a moment to consider, I realised that I had only ever heard about Catholic things from people who clearly hated the Church; her enemies, in short. It hardly seemed just to convict on the testimony of these obviously biased witnesses. In order to properly and thoroughly condemn the Church, with convincing due diligence, I had to read something about it that didn’t come from her enemies. The same day, I presented myself at the reference desk of the public library and asked, “Do you have any books about Catholicism? Something official?” The librarian took me to the reference section and showed me the shelves of encyclicals, documents and histories. Saints and popes from one end of the stacks to the other. Having no clear idea what my own question meant, I just picked one at random. The description of the Holy Eucharist as the supreme Centre from which all our life as Catholics flow, and from which all other doctrines radiated, was something that was not going to come into my head for another eight years of reading. But even so, Mysterium Fidei forced me to face up to a reality I’d never dreamed of before; that this, the little unassuming wafer, was the most important thing in the world. Reading through the encyclical again, holding it up next to the current situation in Rome, makes it easier to clarify certain critical issues. Given what we are now seeing, consider the poignancy of the following passages: When dealing with the restoration of the sacred liturgy, the Fathers of the council, by reason of their pastoral concern for the whole Church, considered it of the highest importance to exhort the faithful to participate actively with sound faith and with the utmost devotion in the celebration of this Most Holy Mystery, to offer it with the priest to God as a sacrifice for their own salvation and for that of the whole world, and to find in it spiritual nourishment. This was, remember, 1965, four years before the New Mass was issued and before Cardinal Ottaviani warned the pope that it was precisely this sacramental reality that was about to be catastrophically obscured. Who, reading this passage, does not feel the urge to shout down the years, to do something to stave off the disaster that was coming: [W]e are aware of the fact that, among those who deal with this Most Holy Mystery in written or spoken word, there are some who with reference either to Masses which are celebrated in private, or to the dogma of transubstantiation, or to devotion to the Eucharist, spread abroad opinions which disturb the faithful and fill their minds with no little confusion about matters of faith. It is as if everyone were permitted to consign to oblivion doctrine already defined by the Church, or else to interpret it in such a way as to weaken the genuine meaning of the words or the recognized force of the concepts involved. Keeping Cardinal Ottaviani’s Intervention directly before our thoughts, we read with a strange kind of helpless dread… …it is not allowable to emphasize what is called the “communal” Mass to the disparagement of Masses celebrated in private, or to exaggerate the element of sacramental sign as if the symbolism, which all certainly admit in the Eucharist, expresses fully and exhausts completely the mode of Christ’s presence in this sacrament. Nor is it allowable to discuss the mystery of transubstantiation without mentioning what the Council of Trent stated about the marvelous conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood of Christ, speaking rather only of what is called “transignification” and “transfiguration,” or finally to propose and act upon the opinion according to which, in the Consecrated Hosts which remain after the celebration of the sacrifice of the Mass, Christ Our Lord is no longer present. […] And therefore, so that the hope aroused by the council, that a flourishing of eucharistic piety which is now pervading the whole Church, be not frustrated by this spread of false opinions, we have with apostolic authority decided to address you, venerable brothers, and to express our mind on this subject. [1] Those of us writing similar jeremiads now have been working to clarify that the attack from Rome on the moral doctrine of the Church isn’t about marriage. It’s about the Eucharist and to a lesser extent the priesthood. The demonic forces we know are the driving force behind this supreme moment of heresy and destruction aren’t really looking at the undermining of marriage as their primary goal; they want to get at the Eucharist. We know it is demonically inspired because their hatred is for Christ Himself in the first place and for anyone who loves and wants to serve Him second. They are men who refuse to bend the knee before the God whom they will not serve. This knowledge – that the attack is on the Body and Blood of Christ – can also help readers spot their friends in the crowd. The places where Eucharistic adoration is still offered are places where at least some flicker of the true Faith survives. The bishops and priests now talking about the supreme glory of the Eucharist, and the need to defend it from sacrilege, are lighthouses. A case in point is Bishop Mark Davies, of my own former diocese of Shrewsbury in England. In March, 2016, in the midst of the shouting from Rome, Bishop Davies spoke at his Chrism Mass said that only through the “reality of the Eucharist” could new vocations to the priesthood be found. “In treasuring this gift of priestly celibacy we need to recognize more clearly the intimate link between the Ministerial Priesthood and the reality of the Eucharist. If the Mass were ever reduced in our minds to being merely a commemorative meal and the priest as only a community leader or functionary, then the celibacy of the Catholic Priesthood might seem extravagant.” It’s almost as if someone had slipped a copy of the Ottaviani Intervention inside his morning paper. The targeting of marriage, through the instruments of creatures like the myopic and theologically tunnel-visioned Cardinal Kasper, is demonically brilliant. It’s a “stitch-up” as the English call it; a fix. You make it a matter of “mercy” (backed up by the iron fist) that no one in a state of objective mortal sin can be refused Holy Communion; you give the national bishops conferences the power to start enforcing this, and you have created a previously unimaginable situation in the Church. You have created a regime in which a refusal to desecrate the sacred species will be grounds for persecution of faithful priests, seminarians and laity. And of course, we are seeing it starting already. It’s a brilliant strategy, the magic bullet that will revert the Church to the 1976 model on every front, and very likely keep it there forever. As if the goal was to go back in time and erase the entire John Paul II/Benedict XVI period out of history. It will halt the revival of eucharistic piety among seminarians; in fact, it will reverse the general reforming trend of “conservative” seminaries that was such a feature under John Paul II and has for 30 years been the hook upon which all hopes of restoration have hung. It is easy to see what is coming next. Once certain announcements are published in parish bulletins, laity will have to consider whether they can, in conscience, continue to assist at Masses where systematic sacrilege has been formally adopted as the rule. The few bishops with sufficient spine to stand up to the pressure of both Rome and their own national conferences – newly empowered with directives to make doctrinal declarations – will be ruling embattled islands of Catholicism in a poisoned sea of systematic heresy and desecration. A dark, impenetrable and “irreversible” winter of persecution of the faithful by their own shepherds will fall. Not being a theologian I have no idea if this encyclical is, as so many of these seemingly orthodox documents of that period seem to be, rife with the usual “time bombs,” ambiguities, mushy language or even outright errors. I haven’t looked it up. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there qualified to examine it to see if it’s safe for Trad-Catholic consumption. And I have no doubt at all that there are better, more venerable, even more sublime and poignant works on the Eucharist in the canon of “official” things. From saints and Doctors of the Church and whatnot, many of which the pope cited. But whatever its flaws, Mysterium Fidei is the one I found, and I’m convinced it wasn’t an accident. O God, in Your infinite mercy, forgive and have mercy on Pope Paul VI Montini for whatever neglect or damage of which he may have been guilty. In this one case at least, a work of his was the exact right thing at the exact right time. For me at least it was the key that opened the Door to Narnia. ____________________ [1] The fact that four years before the New Mass was issued, Paul VI was pinpointing in such detail exactly what Bugnini and co. were preparing makes it all but impossible to escape the conclusion that he knew perfectly well what was coming but approved the disastrous New Rite anyway. And then did nothing but weep as the inevitable disaster unfolded.

Viganò Doubles Down, Accuses Francis of Losing Sight of Christ Archbishop Viganò has released a new, powerful statement necessitated by the peculiar reaction of Pope Francis to the Aug 22 Testimony. Many thanks to our friends at LifeSiteNews, especially Diane Montagna, for the following translation and release of the follow-up testimony from arguably the most courageous prelate in the Church today—Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. The former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States has, as they say, doubled down. Far from backing-away and making excuses for his early actions, as we’ve all become so accustomed to seeing in these rare cases where a hierarch breaks ranks, Archbishop Viganò is digging in with a 4-page bombshell that restates his initial accusations of abuse cover-up against Francis and other powerful members of the hierarchy, and even concludes with a suggestion that Francis is beginning to act as a “substitute of our Lord.” Read the Archbishop’s words for yourselves and note well the ring of truth that resonates in every sentence. This is clearly the testimony of an honest man who has only the good of the Church in his heart—a modern-day Athanasius standing against something so much worse than Liberius. Friends, let us pray for Archbishop Viganò. He is standing alone now, and not only against the most dangerous pontificate in history, but also the forces of hell itself—forces which will do all in their power to silence this voice crying in the wilderness. Make no mistake about this: Archbishop Viganò is fighting for the very survival of the human element of the Catholic Church. He is standing against corrupt men in high places who cannot be trusted to do what is best for souls, for the Catholic faithful or indeed for Holy Mother Church herself. The enemy is not only at the gates but has now made their way to the thrones of power and the seats of the Apostles. God help us. It goes without saying that we here at The Remnant not only stand with Viganò but we thank God for him every day, we pray the Rosary for him every day, and wish him every blessing and heavenly consolation as he undergoes this passion for the sake of the Master he serves so well. God bless you, Your Excellency, and Mary keep you. We are with you! MJM _________________________________ Tit. Archbishop of Ulpiana Apostolic Nuncio Scio Cui credidi (2 Tim 1:12) Before starting my writing, I would first of all like to give thanks and glory to God the Father for every situation and trial that He has prepared and will prepare for me during my life. As a priest and bishop of the holy Church, spouse of Christ, I am called like every baptized person to bear witness to the truth. By the gift of the Spirit who sustains me with joy on the path that I am called to travel, I intend to do so until the end of my days. Our only Lord has addressed also to me the invitation, “Follow me!”, and I intend to follow him with the help of his grace until the end of my days. “As long as I have life, I will sing to the Lord, I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my song be pleasing to him; For I rejoice in the Lord.” (Psalm 103:33-34) ***** It has been a month since I offered my testimony, solely for the good of the Church, regarding what occurred at the audience with Pope Francis on June 23, 2013 and regarding certain matters I was given to know in the assignments entrusted to me at the Secretariat of State and in Washington, in relation to those who bear responsibility for covering up the crimes committed by the former archbishop of that capital. My decision to reveal those grave facts was for me the most painful and serious decision that I have ever made in my life. I made it after long reflection and prayer, during months of profound suffering and anguish, during a crescendo of continual news of terrible events, with thousands of innocent victims destroyed and the vocations and lives of young priests and religious disturbed. The silence of the pastors who could have provided a remedy and prevented new victims became increasingly indefensible, a devastating crime for the Church. Well aware of the enormous consequences that my testimony could have, because what I was about to reveal involved the successor of Peter himself, I nonetheless chose to speak in order to protect the Church, and I declare with a clear conscience before God that my testimony is true. Christ died for the Church, and Peter, Servus servorum Dei, is the first one called to serve the spouse of Christ. Certainly, some of the facts that I was to reveal were covered by the pontifical secret that I had promised to observe and that I had faithfully observed from the beginning of my service to the Holy See. But the purpose of any secret, including the pontifical secret, is to protect the Church from her enemies, not to cover up and become complicit in crimes committed by some of her members. I was a witness, not by my choice, of shocking facts and, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states (par. 2491), the seal of secrecy is not binding when very grave harm can be avoided only by divulging the truth. Only the seal of confession could have justified my silence. Neither the pope, nor any of the cardinals in Rome have denied the facts I asserted in my testimony. “Qui tacet consentit” surely applies here, for if they deny my testimony, they have only to say so, and provide documentation to support that denial. How can one avoid concluding that the reason they do not provide the documentation is that they know it confirms my testimony? The center of my testimony was that since at least June 23, 2013, the pope knew from me how perverse and evil McCarrick was in his intentions and actions, and instead of taking the measures that every good pastor would have taken, the pope made McCarrick one of his principal agents in governing the Church, in regard to the United States, the Curia, and even China, as we are seeing these days with great concern and anxiety for that martyr Church. Now, the pope’s reply to my testimony was: “I will not say a word!” But then, contradicting himself, he has compared his silence to that of Jesus in Nazareth and before Pilate, and compared me to the great accuser, Satan, who sows scandal and division in the Church — though without ever uttering my name. If he had said: “Viganò lied,” he would have challenged my credibility while trying to affirm his own. In so doing he would have intensified the demand of the people of God and the world for the documentation needed to determine who has told the truth. Instead, he put in place a subtle slander against me — slander being an offense he has often compared to the gravity of murder. Indeed, he did it repeatedly, in the context of the celebration of the most Holy Sacrament, the Eucharist, where he runs no risk of being challenged by journalists. When he did speak to journalists, he asked them to exercise their professional maturity and draw their own conclusions. But how can journalists discover and know the truth if those directly involved with a matter refuse to answer any questions or to release any documents? The pope’s unwillingness to respond to my charges and his deafness to the appeals by the faithful for accountability are hardly consistent with his calls for transparency and bridge building. Moreover, the pope’s cover-up of McCarrick was clearly not an isolated mistake. Many more instances have recently been documented in the press, showing that Pope Francis has defended homosexual clergy who committed serious sexual abuses against minors or adults. These include his role in the case of Fr. Julio Grassi in Buenos Aires, his reinstatement of Fr. Mauro Inzoli after Pope Benedict had removed him from ministry (until he went to prison, at which point Pope Francis laicized him), and his halting of the investigation of sex abuse allegations against Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor. In the meantime, a delegation of the USCCB, headed by its president Cardinal DiNardo, went to Rome asking for a Vatican investigation into McCarrick. Cardinal DiNardo and the other prelates should tell the Church in America and in the world: did the pope refuse to carry out a Vatican investigation into McCarrick’s crimes and of those responsible for covering them up? The faithful deserve to know. I would like to make a special appeal to Cardinal Ouellet, because as nuncio I always worked in great harmony with him, and I have always had great esteem and affection towards him. He will remember when, at the end of my mission in Washington, he received me at his apartment in Rome in the evening for a long conversation. At the beginning of Pope Francis’ pontificate, he had maintained his dignity, as he had shown with courage when he was Archbishop of Québec. Later, however, when his work as prefect of the Congregation for Bishops was being undermined because recommendations for episcopal appointments were being passed directly to Pope Francis by two homosexual “friends” of his dicastery, bypassing the Cardinal, he gave up. His long article in L’Osservatore Romano, in which he came out in favor of the more controversial aspects of Amoris Laetitia, represents his surrender. Your Eminence, before I left for Washington, you were the one who told me of Pope Benedict’s sanctions on McCarrick. You have at your complete disposal key documents incriminating McCarrick and many in the curia for their cover-ups. Your Eminence, I urge you to bear witness to the truth. ***** Finally, I wish to encourage you, dear faithful, my brothers and sisters in Christ: never be despondent! Make your own the act of faith and complete confidence in Christ Jesus, our Savior, of Saint Paul in his second Letter to Timothy, Scio cui credidi, which I choose as my episcopal motto. This is a time of repentance, of conversion, of prayers, of grace, to prepare the Church, the bride of the Lamb, ready to fight and win with Mary the battle against the old dragon.

Trump Pardons Hammonds! Now, this is good news! On Tuesday, President Trump Oregon cattle ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had been serving sentences for arson. A Statement from the White House read as follows: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Grants of Clemency (Full Pardons) for Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., and his son, Steven Hammond. The Hammonds are multi-generation cattle ranchers in Oregon imprisoned in connection with a fire that leaked onto a small portion of neighboring public grazing land. The evidence at trial regarding the Hammonds’ responsibility for the fire was conflicting, and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges. take our poll - story continues below Will Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed to the Supreme Court? Will Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed to the Supreme Court? Will Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed to the Supreme Court? * Yes, he will be confirmed. No, he will not be confirmed. Email * Name This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Completing this poll grants you access to Freedom Outpost updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. At the Hammonds’ original sentencing, the judge noted that they are respected in the community and that imposing the mandatory minimum, 5-year prison sentence would “shock the conscience” and be “grossly disproportionate to the severity” of their conduct. As a result, the judge imposed significantly lesser sentences. The previous administration, however, filed an overzealous appeal that resulted in the Hammonds being sentenced to five years in prison. This was unjust. Dwight Hammond is now 76 years old and has served approximately three years in prison. Steven Hammond is 49 and has served approximately four years in prison. They have also paid $400,000 to the United States to settle a related civil suit. The Hammonds are devoted family men, respected contributors to their local community, and have widespread support from their neighbors, local law enforcement, and farmers and ranchers across the West. Justice is overdue for Dwight and Steven Hammond, both of whom are entirely deserving of these Grants of Executive Clemency. Well, it took long enough, but thank you President Trump. You did the right thing in this matter. And for all those who took the time to keep this story alive and urge people to petition the White House on behalf of the Hammonds, thank you! It should be noted that the protests that took place in Oregon a couple of years ago were a response to the injustice the Hammonds faced. As a result, Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was killed by Oregon State Police. Those who led the protest were all acquitted of all charges and reporter Pete Santilli had all of his charges dismissed. No doubt, Finicum would have been found not guilty as well, but that's not how tyrants work, is it? Today is a day to celebrate a wrong that has not been fully made right, but has definitely turned in the right direction! Article posted with permission from The Washington Standard

“It’s gotta be a set-up”: Neighbor of Las Vegas Shooter Claims He Didn’t Do It This report was originally published by Paul Joseph Watson at Infowars.com A caller to the Michael Savage radio show who says he was neighbors with Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock asserts that Paddock could not have carried out the massacre and that it was actually a “set-up”. The man, a former Marine who called himself Rick, says he was Paddock’s neighbor between December 2015 and June 2016 in Mesquite, Nevada. “I can tell you 100% this is not that kind of guy,” said Rick, adding that he would see Paddock every other day and that the two would go to a local bar and play slot machines. “He never even told me that he owned a gun,” continued the shooter’s neighbor, adding that Paddock did not express any religious or political opinions during their conversations. “I’m not a big conspiracy theory guy, but it don’t sit right,” said Rick, before making the extraordinary claim that the whole shooting was a “set up” and that Paddock’s body may have been left in the hotel room while other assailants carried out the shooting. The caller mentioned how some people in the crowd were warned 45 minutes before the shooting that they were going to die, suggesting that this was evidence of a wider plot and not a “lone wolf” attack. As a firearms expert, he also questioned the lack of flashes coming from the hotel windows where the shooter was supposedly firing from. Rick said he had already contacted the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to relay all the information he knew. Although the claims are intriguing, it is important to remember that after virtually every terror attack and mass shooting, friends and neighbors express shock that the culprit would be capable of carrying out such horrors, with some outright denying it to be possible. If Paddock was planning such a sophisticated operation and hoping to evade detection, he would not be blabbing details about it to his neighbors. However, the neighbor’s claims are certain to attract more attention given that no specific motive has yet to be uncovered for the shooting. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below. SUBSCRIBE on YouTube: Follow on Twitter: Follow @PrisonPlanet Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PaulJosephWatson/ ********************* Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.

Kavanaugh Accuser's Lawyer is Vice Chair of Soros Funded Org Opposing Kavanaugh Kavanaugh's accuser is being represented by Debra Katz, a Washington D.C. lawyer and the vice chair of the board of the Project On Government Oversight. POGO co-signed a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Grassley along with a variety of lefty groups demanding Kavanaugh records. This was the obstruction tactic of choice of the left for trying to secure the Court seat before they fastened on to this latest smear. Where does PGO gets its funding? From, among other sources, George Soros and his Open Society Foundation tentacles. And, to no one's surprise, she's allegedly a Dem donor. What a surprise! Debra Katz, the lawyer representing the woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, has donated thousands of dollars to Obama, Hillary and the DNC! pic.twitter.com/WK5XYTlcqL — Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) September 17, 2018 UPDATE: I've received a message from POGO stating that they wish to be described as a non-partisan watchdog and that they have a Republican board member.

The Las Vegas Security Guard Credited With Finding Shooter, Mysteriously Vanished Into Thin Air By now, we have all heard of Jesus Campos. He’s the heroic security guard that allegedly located the Las Vegas shooter, Steven Paddock. But the narrative surrounding him has changed wildly since the authorities mentioned him, and now, he’s mysteriously vanished into thin air. Of course, this leads many to believe that Campos didn’t even exist, to begin with. His mere existence appears to have been fabricated by the very authorities who are cramming lies down our throats about this massacre for the sake of political agendas. There are two conflicting timelines of Campos’s injury, but what the media has so far made clear, is that they want the public to believe Campos was walking down the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino’s 32nd floor hallway, when Stephen Paddock spotted him on a camera he’d allegedly set up in a room service cart, just outside his suite. Once he saw Campos, Paddock reportedly fired nearly 200 rounds through his suite door, wounding Campos in the leg. Moments later (6 minutes actually, according to the newly revised timeline regarding Campos) Paddock allegedly opened fire on a crowd killing more than 50 and injuring nearly 500. But Campos has been a mysterious subject since being wounded in the first moments of Paddock’s assault. After speaking to hotel and law enforcement officials, Campos was scheduled to appear on local Las Vegas television for an interview but went missing just moments before he was supposed to be on the air. David Hickey, a spokesman for the Security, Police, and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA), Campos’s union, said he got a text that Campos had been taken to an urgent care facility, UMC Quick Care. But UMC Quick Care says none of their clinics filled out an intake request for a patient by that name, and Campos has been silent since the text; vanishing into thin air. He also isn’t listed on the registry that shows the names of licensed security guards in Nevada. “Right now I’m just concerned where my member is, and what his condition is. It’s highly unusual,” Hickey told media. “I’m hoping everything is OK with him and I’m sure MGM or the union will let (media) know when we hear something,” he said. In the meantime, authorities still have not released a conclusive timeline for the shooting they desperately want us to believe was committed by Paddock. And, according to the latest reports, are still looking for a motive for the shooting.

The Eerie Silence In a recent communication between Randy Credico, an Assange supporter, comic and radio producer, and Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, Assange’s fear of arrest and extradition to the US was confirmed by the leader of the Russia-gate frenzy. Credico received the following response from Schiff after meeting the Congressman’s staff, in which Credico was trying to connect Assange with Schiff: “Our committee would be willing to interview Assange when he is in U.S. Custody and not before.” Dennis Bernstein spoke with John Pilger, a close friend and supporter of Assange on May 29. The interview began with the statement Bernstein delivered for Pilger at the Left Forum last weekend in New York on a panel devoted to Assange entitled, “Russia-gate and WikiLeaks”. Pilger’s Statement “There is a silence among many who call themselves left. The silence is Julian Assange. As every false accusation has fallen away, every bogus smear shown to be the work of political enemies, Julian stands vindicated as one who has exposed a system that threatens humanity. The Collateral Damage video, the war logs of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Cablegate revelations, the Venezuela revelations, the Podesta email revelations … these are just a few of the storms of raw truth that have blown through the capitals of rapacious power. The fakery of Russia-gate, the collusion of a corrupt media and the shame of a legal system that pursues truth-tellers have not been able to hold back the raw truth of WikiLeaks revelations. They have not won, not yet, and they have not destroyed the man. Only the silence of good people will allow them to win. Julian Assange has never been more isolated. He needs your support and your voice. Now more than ever is the time to demand justice and free speech for Julian. Thank you.” No Place to Hide: Edwa... Glenn Greenwald Best Price: $1.49 Buy New $3.70 (as of 06:30 EDT - Details) Dennis Bernstein: We continue our discussion of the case of Julian Assange, now in the Ecuadorian embassy in Great Britain. John Pilger, it is great to talk to you again. But it is a profound tragedy, John, the way they are treating Julian Assange, this prolific journalist and publisher who so many other journalists have depended on in the past. He has been totally left out in the cold to fend for himself. John Pilger: I have never known anything like it. There is a kind of eerie silence around the Julian Assange case. Julian has been vindicated in every possible way and yet he is isolated as few people are these days. He is cut off from the very tools of his trade, visitors aren’t allowed. I was in London recently and I couldn’t see him, although I spoke to people who had seen him. Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, said recently that he regarded what they are doing to Julian now as torture. It was Correa’s government that gave Julian political refuge, which has been betrayed now by his successor, the government led by Lenin Moreno, which is back to sucking up to the United States in the time-honored way, with Julian as the pawn and victim. Should be a ‘Constitutional Hero’ But really it comes down to the British government. Although he is still in a foreign embassy and actually has Ecuadorian nationality, his right of passage out of that embassy should be guaranteed by the British government. The United Nations Working Party on Unlawful Detentions has made that clear. Britain took part in an investigation which determined that Julian was a political refugee and that a great miscarriage of justice had been imposed on him. It is very good that you are doing this, Dennis, because even in the media outside the mainstream, there is this silence about Julian. The streets outside the embassy are virtually empty, whereas they should be full of people saying that we are with you. The principles involved in this case are absolutely clear-cut. Number one is justice. The injustice done to this man is legion, both in terms of the bogus Swedish case and now the fact that he must remain in the embassy and can’t leave without being arrested, extradited to the United States and ending up in a hell hole. But it is also about freedom of speech, about our right to know, which is enshrined in the United States Constitution. If the Constitution were taken literally, Julian would be a constitutional hero, actually. Instead, I understand the indictment they are trying to concoct reads like a charge of espionage! It’s so ridiculous.That is the situation as I see it, Dennis. It is not a happy one but it is one that people should rally to quickly. DB: His journalistic brethren are sounding like his prosecutors. They want to get behind Russia-gate freaks like Congressman Adam Schiff and Mike Pompeo, who would like to see Assange in jail forever or even executed. How do you respond to journalists acting like prosecutors, some of whom used his material to do stories? This is a terrible time for journalism. JP: You are absolutely right: It is a terrible time for journalism. I have never known anything quite like it in my career. That said, it is not new. There has always been a so-called mainstream which really comes down to great power in media. It has always existed, particularly in the United States. The Pulitzer Prize this year was awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for witch-hunting around Russia-gate! They were praised for “how deeply sourced their investigations were.” Their investigations turned up not a shred of real evidence to suggest any serious Russian intervention in the 2016 election. Like Webb The Julian Assange case reminds me of the Gary Webb case. Bob Parry was one of Gary Webb’s few supporters in the media. Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series contained evidence that cocaine trafficking was going on with the connivance of the CIA. Later Webb was hounded by fellow journalists and, unable to find work, he eventually committed suicide. The CIA Inspector General subsequently vindicated him. Now, Julian Assange is a long way from taking his own life. His resilience is remarkable. But he is still a human being and he has taken such a battering. Probably the hardest thing for him to take is the utter hypocrisy of news organizations—like The New York Times, which published the WikiLeaks “War Logs” and “Cablegate,” The Washington Post and The Guardian, which has taken a vindictive delight in tormenting Julian. The Guardian a few years ago got a Pulitzer Prize writing about Snowden. But their coverage of Snowden left him in Hong Kong. It was WikiLeaks that got Snowden out of Hong Kong and to safety. Professionally, I find this one of the most unsavory and immoral things I have seen in my career. The persecution of this man by huge media organizations which have drawn great benefit from WikiLeaks. One of Assange’s great tormentors, The Guardian‘s Luke Harding, made a great deal of money with a Hollywood version of a book that he and David Lee wrote in which they basically attacked their source. I suppose you have to be a psychiatrist to understand all of this. My understanding is that so many of these journalists are shamed. They realize that WikiLeaks has done what they should have done a long time ago, and that is to tell us how governments lie. DB: One thing that disturbs me greatly is the way in which the Western corporate press speculate about Russian involvement in the U.S. 2016 election, that it was a hack through Julian Assange. Any serious investigator would want to know who would be motivated. And yet the possibility that it might be the dozen or so pissed-off people who went to work for the Clinton machine and learned from the inside that the DNC was all about getting rid of Bernie Sanders…this is not a part of the story! Eight Hundred Thousand Disclosures on Russia JP: What happened to Sanders and the way that he was rolled by the Clinton organization, everybody knows that this is the story. And now we have the DNC suing WikiLeaks! There’s a kind of farcical element to this. I mean, none of this came from the Russians. That WikiLeaks is somehow in bed with the Russians is ludicrous. WikiLeaks published about 800,000 major disclosures about Russia, some of them extremely critical of the Russian government. If you are a government and you are doing something untoward or you are lying to your people and WikiLeaks gets the documents to show it, they will publish no matter who you are, be they the United States or Russia. DB: Randy Credico, because of his work and his decision to devote a very high-profile series to the persecution of Julian Assange, recently found himself under attack. He went to the White House Press Roast and, after having a nice discussion with Congressman Schiff, he yelled out “What about Julian Assange?” The room was packed full of reporters but Randy was attacked and dragged out. It was if everyone there was embarrassed to recognize that one of their brethren was being brutalized. JP: Randy shouted some truth. It is very similar to what happened to Ray McGovern. Ray is a former member of the CIA but extremely principled. I might suggest he is a renegade now. DB: It was hysterical to watch these four armed guards who kept shouting “Stop resisting, stop resisting!” and they are beating the hell out of him! JP: I thought the image of Ray being hauled off was particularly telling. These four overweight, obviously ill-trained young men manhandling Ray, who is 78 years old. There was something highly emblematic about that for me. He stood up to challenge the fact that the CIA was about to hand over leadership to a person who had been in charge of torture. It is both shocking and surreal, which of course the Julian Assange case is as well. But real journalism should be able to get through the shocking and the surreal and get to the truth. There is so much collusion now, with all these dark and menacing developments. It is almost as if the word “journalism” is becoming blighted. DB: There has certainly been a lot of collusion when it comes to Israel. Then the word “collusion” is quite appropriate. JP:That’s the ultimate collusion. But that’s collusion with silence. Never has there been a collusion like the one between the U.S. and Israel. It suggests another word and that is “immunity.” It has a moral immunity, a cultural immunity, a geopolitical immunity, a legal immunity, and certainly a media immunity. We see the gunning down of over 60 people on the day of the inauguration of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. Israel has some of the most wickedly experimental munitions in the world and they fired them at people who were protesting the occupation of their homeland and trying to remind people of the Nakba and the right of return. In the media these were described as “clashes.” Although they did become so bad that The New York Times in a later edition changed its front page headline to say that Israel was actually killing people. A rare moment, indeed, when the immunity, the collusion was interrupted. All the talk of Iran and nuclear weapons is without any reference to the biggest nuclear power in the Middle East. DB: What would you say have been the contributions that Julian Assange has made in this age of censorship and cowardice in journalism? Where does he come into the picture? JP:I think it comes down to information. If you go back to when WikiLeaks started, when Julian was sitting in his hotel room in Paris beginning to put the whole thing together, one of the first things he wrote was that there is a morality in transparency, that we have a right to know what those who wish to control our lives are doing in secret. The right to know what governments are doing in our name—on our behalf or to our detriment—is our moral right. Julian feels very passionately about this. There were times when he could have compromised slightly in order to possibly help his situation. There were times when I said to him, “Why don’t you just suspend that for a while and go along with it?” Of course, I knew beforehand what his answer would be and that was “no.” The enormous amount of information that has come from WikiLeaks, particularly in recent years, has amounted to an extraordinary public service. I was reading just the other day a 2006 WikiLeaks cable from the U.S. embassy in Caracas which was addressed to other agencies in the region. This was four years after the U.S. tried to get rid of Chavez in a coup. It detailed how subversion should work. Of course, they dressed it up as human rights work and so on. I was reading this official document thinking how the information contained in it was worth years of the kind of distorted reporting from Venezuela. It also reminds us that so-called “meddling” by Russia in the U.S. is just nonsense. The word “meddling” doesn’t apply to the kind of action implied in this document. It is intervention in another country’s affairs. WikiLeaks has done that all over the world. It has given people the information they have a right to have. They had a right to find out from the so-called “War Logs” the criminality of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They had a right to find out about Cablegate. That’s when, on Clinton’s watch, we learned that the NSA was gathering personal information on members of the United Nations Security Council, including their credit card numbers. You can see why Julian made enemies. But he should also have made a huge number of friends. This is critical information because it tells us how power works and we will never learn about it otherwise. I think WikiLeaks has opened a world of transparency and put flesh on the expression “right to know.” This must explain why he is attacked so much, because that is so threatening. The enemy to great power is not the likes of the Taliban, it is us. DB: And who can forget the release of the “collateral murder” footage by Chelsea Manning? JP: That kind of thing is not uncommon. Vietnam was meant to be the open war but really it wasn’t. There weren’t the cameras around. It is indeed shocking information but it informs people, and we have Chelsea Manning’s courage to thank for that. DB: Yes, and the thanks he got was seven years in solitary confinement. They want to prosecute Assange and maybe hang him from the rafters in Congress, but what about Judith Miller and The New York Times lying the West into war? There is no end of horrific examples of what passes for journalism, in contrast to the amazing contribution that Julian Assange has made. Click here to listen to this interview.

America's Immigration Voice. Candidate Donald Trump may have promised to extricate us from Middle East wars, once ISIS and al-Qaida were routed, yet events and people seem to be conspiring to keep us endlessly enmeshed. Friday night, a drone, apparently modeled on a U.S. drone that fell into Iran's hands, intruded briefly into Israeli airspace over the Golan Heights, and was shot down by an Apache helicopter. Israel seized upon this to send F-16s to strike the airfield whence the drone originated. Returning home, an F-16 was hit and crashed, unleashing the most devastating Israeli attack in decades on Syria. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu says a dozen Syrian and Iranian bases and antiaircraft positions were struck. Monday's headline on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page blared: "The Pentagon and State Department have already condemned Iran and thrown their support behind Israel. The question now is whether the Trump administration will go further. ... Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (has) affirmed that the U.S. seeks not only to ensure its allies' security but to deny Iran its 'dreams of a northern arch' from Tehran to Beirut. A good way to achieve both objectives would be back Israel's response to Iran's aggression--now and in the future." Op-ed writers Tony Badran and Jonathan Schanzer, both from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, The FDD is an annex of the Israeli lobby and a charter member of the War Party. Chagai Tzuriel , who heads the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, echoed the FDD: "If you (Americans) are committed to countering Iran in the region, then you must do so in Syria--first." Our orders have been cut. Iran has dismissed as "lies" and "ridiculous" the charge that it sent the drone into Israeli airspace. If Tehran did, it would be an act of monumental stupidity. Not only did the drone bring devastating Israeli reprisals against Syria and embarrass Iran's ally Russia, it brought attacks on Russian-provided and possibly Russian-manned air defenses. Moreover, in recent months Iranian policy--suspending patrol boat harassment of U.S. warships--appears crafted to ease tensions and provide no new causes for Trump to abandon the nuclear deal Prime Minister Hassan Rouhani regards as his legacy. Indeed, why would Iran, which, with Assad, Russia and Hezbollah, is among the victors in Syria's six-year civil war, wish to reignite the bloodletting and bring Israeli and U.S. firepower in on the other side? In Syria's southeast, another incident a week ago may portend an indefinite U.S. stay in that broken and bleeding country. To recapture oil fields lost in the war, forces backed by Assad crossed the Euphrates into territory taken from ISIS by the U.S. and our Kurd allies. The U.S. response was a barrage of air and artillery strikes that killed 100 soldiers. What this signals is that, though ISIS has been all but evicted from Syria, the U.S. intends to retain that fourth of Syria as a bargaining chip in negotiations. In the northwest, Turkey has sent its Syrian allies to attack Afrin and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened Manbij, 80 miles to the east, where U.S. troops commingle with the Kurd defenders and U.S. generals were visible last week. Midweek, Erdogan exploded: "(The Americans) tell us, 'Don't come to Manbij.' We will come to Manbij to hand over these territories to their rightful owners." The U.S. and Turkey, allies for six decades, with the largest armies in NATO, may soon be staring down each other's gun barrels. Has President Trump thought through where we are going with this deepening commitment in Syria, where we have only 2,000 troops and no allies but the Kurds, while on the other side is the Syrian army, Hezbollah, Russia and Iran, and Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Clearly, we have an obligation not to abandon the Kurds, who took most of the casualties in liberating eastern Syria from ISIS. And we have a strategic interest in not losing Turkey as an ally. But this calls for active diplomacy, not military action. And now that the rebels have been defeated and the civil war is almost over, what would be the cost and what would be the prospects of fighting a new and wider war? What would victory look like? Bibi and the FDD want to see U.S. power deployed alongside that of Israel, against Iran, Assad and Hezbollah. But while Israel's interests are clear, what would be the U.S. vital interest? What outcome would justify another U.S. war in a region where all the previous wars in this century have left us bleeding, bankrupt, divided and disillusioned? When he was running , Donald Trump seemed to understand this. COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his books and are available from Amazon.com. Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of His latest book, published May 9, is

Foolish Religion Author Gary Wills: ‘The Religion of the Qur’an Is a Religion of Peace’ Outside of specialists and seekers, the only reason why there is general interest in the Qur’an among non-Muslims is to seek an answer to the question of whether or not it justifies and encourages Islamic terrorism. With What the Qur’an Meant: And Why It Matters, religion author Garry Wills is here to reassure us: What did the scripture of Islam tell me about the duty to kill infidels? Some people are sure it is there, though it isn’t. Then what does it say about Shari’ah law? Not a thing (p. 7). That would be good to know, were Wills a reliable witness. Unfortunately, he proves to be just the opposite: Wills laments “Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch calling for a ban on the Qur’an” (p. 58). I have never called for such a ban, and oppose in principle the banning of any book. Wills, not surprisingly, does not offer any quotation from me to back up his false claim. His manifest unreliability on this point casts a shadow on his primary assertions about the Qur’an. Wills seems determined to put the best possible face on the Qur’an, which requires him to ignore a great deal of Qur’anic incitement and hatred. For example, he quotes 5:51 -- “You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as allies” (p. 114) -- but he nonetheless concludes, after ten pages of tu quoque arguments and other legerdemain, that “the Qur’an is fraternal in its treatment of other faiths” (p. 124). Wills never mentions Qur’an 9:29, which commands Muslims to wage war against Jews and Christians and subjugate them as inferiors under the rule of Sharia. Wills is no more trustworthy when he deals with the question of violence in the Qur’an. He renders one key passage in this way: “Fight then until there is no more persecution, and worship [at the shrine] is devoted to God” (2:193; p. 133). Whence the bracketed interpolation “at the shrine”? Wills doesn’t give any source for it; apparently it comes from none other than Garry Wills himself. By adding “at the shrine” to this verse, Wills restricts the call to fight to the area around the Sacred Mosque in Mecca. He ignores the fact that some Islamic authorities see this passage as calling for nothing less than unlimited warfare against non-Muslims. The prominent Twentieth Century Indian Islamic scholar Muhammad Ashiq Ilahi Bulandshahri explains the passage this way: The worst of sins are Infidelity ( Kufr) and Polytheism ( shirk) which constitute rebellion against Allah, The Creator. To eradicate these, Muslims are required to wage war until there exists none of it in the world, and the only religion is that of Allah. Wills doesn’t mention the existence of such interpretations, even to dismiss them. Likewise, when he claims that the Qur’an has “not a thing” to say about Sharia, he appears unaware that the Qur’an is one of the sources of Sharia. The Qur’an’s declarations that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s (2:282), that a daughter is to receive a smaller part of an inheritance than a son receives (4:11), that thieves are to have their hands amputated (5:38), and that those who “wage war against Allah and his messenger” are to be crucified or have a hand and foot amputated on opposite sides (5:33) are part of Sharia in all its various expressions. Because these stipulations are found in the Qur’an, they cannot be questioned or set aside. Throughout his book, Wills’ assurances that the Qur’an is not really as bad as “right-wing Islamophobes” say, or that the Bible contains material that is just as bad or worse, dissolve under close scrutiny. Again and again it turns out that Wills has ignored key passages in order to make his case. He asks why the Qur’an is “so ferocious to ‘hypocrites’ and apostates” (p. 124). Then he offers a quotation from the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews saying that “if we sin again on purpose” there is “only a terrifying judgment to come” (p. 126). Wills concludes: “The Qur’an is not as absolute as this, because it always leaves room for God’s inexhaustible mercy and forgiveness” (p. 126). That sounds wonderful, and certainly pleasing to multicultural ears to learn that the Qur’an is more merciful than the New Testament. Until one realizes that, in his discussion of apostasy in the Qur’an, Wills has omitted all mention of the primary Qur’anic passage on this topic: take our poll - story continues below Whom do you consider to be the most corrupt Democrat Politician? Whom do you consider to be the most corrupt Democrat Politician? Whom do you consider to be the most corrupt Democrat Politician? * Dianne Feinstein Maxine Waters Adam Schiff Chuck Schumer Kamala Harris Kirsten Gillibrand Keith Ellison Cory Booker Email * Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Completing this poll grants you access to Freedom Outpost updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper (4:89). To “emigrate in the cause of Allah” is to leave one’s home and join up with the Muslims. This passage envisions some of the disbelievers becoming Muslim, and then turning away again, whereupon the Muslims are told to “kill them wherever you find them.” God’s inexhaustible mercy, indeed. Wills’ peaceful fantasy Qur’an raises one massive question that the author does not and cannot answer: if the Islamic holy book is really as peaceful and benign as Garry Wills makes it out to be, why do so very many Muslims worldwide misunderstand it? The Islamic State (ISIS), in its heyday, quoted the Qur’an frequently -- odd behavior if the group actually was ignorant of, indifferent to, or in violation of the book’s core tenets. ISIS quoted the Qur’an extensively in threats to blow up the White House and conquer Rome and Spain; in explaining its priorities in the nations it is targeting in jihad; in preaching to Christians after collecting the jizya (a Qur’an-based tax, cf. Qur’an 9:29); in justifying the execution of accused spies; and in its various videos. ISIS also awarded $10,000 prizes and sex slaves in Qur’an memorization contests. One of its underground lairs was found littered with weapons and copies of the Qur’an. Children in the Islamic State study the Qur’an and get weapons training. One Malaysian Muslim said that the Qur’an led him to join the Islamic State. A Muslima in the U.S. promoted the Islamic State by quoting the Qur’an. An Islamic State propagandist’s parents said of him: “Our son is a devout Muslim. He had learnt the Quran by heart.” A Muslim politician from Jordan said that the Islamic State’s “doctrine stems from the Qur’an and Sunnah.” How would Garry Wills explain all that? He can’t; he has just explained all Qur’anic violence and intolerance away, leaving the manifest fact that all too many Muslims worldwide think that the Qur’an says exactly what he claims it does not say an unanswered conundrum. Wills’ naïve, inaccurate, misleadingly sunny view of the Qur’an, of course, accords with that of his fellow Leftist Catholic, Pope Francis. Francis has proclaimedpreposterously that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” Wills’ book accords well with the present-day Catholic Church’s head-in-the-sand posture toward Qur’an-based Islamic jihad violence and the Muslim persecution of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. It isn’t remotely accurate, but it feels good, and for the Catholic and Leftist establishment today, that seems to be all that matters. Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer