You know how I keep telling you not to fall for psy-ops? Well, egg on my face, because I at least half fell for this one.
In my defense, so did Trump and most of the media on the right. On the left, of course, they were in on the plot.
This is going to get far more uncomfortable than… well, than I’m comfortable with. This is not a religious blog. In fact for a long time I kept my religion as obscured as possible, because frankly the matters we work through here are rational and we should be able to argue them rationally.
In fact religion is one of the forbidden topics on this blog. Funny how that happens, innit? And I’m very uncomfortable talking about it where I know it will make a lot of you just as uncomfortable.
So, let’s lay down some parameters for this:
First, if you are an atheist, and a lot of my friends are, don’t try to argue this as a religious matter. Take the crazy parameters of what I tell you and what I say is how it works, and assume it’s my own little psychosis, shared with millions of people, and stay with that. The consequences of this mess are still important, if you know history.
Second, if you are a protestant, you can take a minute now, find a thick cushion and scream into it: REEEEEE PAPISTS. But don’t get into it in the comments. Do me the favor of believing that I am no more stupid or insane than you; that my route to my beliefs was not just “someone said to do this”; that I studied all the materials and re-upped — twice — of my own free will, the latest one being when I’d realized I had drifted so far I was more pagan than anything else. I’m not at this point interested in a discussion of the fine points of this or that belief. I have a religion and I’m fine where I am. Let’s not get in that fight, I had enough of that on twitter, with people who claim to share my faith.
Yes, what I am talking about is how in the last few days the media has been full of “The Pope berated Trump and kissed up to Islam and Trump is talking back — with a side order of the leftists being very upset that Trump posted a meme of himself as Jesus, which might or might not be it, since I remember that meme from January 25 as being of Trump as a healer, healing America. Goofy, but not Jesus — with a lot of people a lot them sane and decent people deciding the Pope was just a Chicago Communist and so on and so on, ad fricking nauseum.
I will confess I fell for it to an extent, or perhaps I rose to the bait. In my defense, I’m recovering from ear infection from hell, which — I have these a lot — is taking me longer to recover from than any of these has before. (Yeah, yeah, over sixty, but here’s the thing: I didn’t authorize any of this!) so I was a little more liable to sudden ’tism explaining.
So when someone shared a meme saying that Catholics couldn’t disagree with the pope I felt forced to quote retweet it explaining that no: we can’t disagree with the pope when he’s speaking ex cathedra, which is usually the culmination of discussions by theologians and always on theological matters. The last time a Pope spoke Ex-cathedra was 75 years ago. It is such a process that even Francis didn’t dare try something with it. Other than that, particularly when the pope is running his mouth on politics (and I confess I thought he was) I’m as entitled to disagree with him as with Joe Schmoe on the street.
This brought the world’s stupidest answers, almost certainly from non-Catholics, one of them informing me that that was “cafeteria Catholicism” and I was being an hypocrite — no. I’m being a Catholic. The rules haven’t changed. — and another basically screaming that no, Catholics had to do everything the pope said. That one was cute. Stupid but cute.
Then I had the horrifying experience of seeing someone who identified as a priest — though I’m informed that he’s uh… how do I put this…. the lavender mafia tells him “whoa boy, too far” — tweeting “If you are against the Pope you can’t be Catholic.” For those not Catholic, this is a piece of extreme evil. Note how he phrased it. Take if for granted from me that yes, Catholics can disagree with the Pope. In fact we, cradle Catholics make a sport of disagreeing with the pope. Praying for the Holy Father often takes the form of “G-d, could you please talk some sense into that lunkhead.” Because Popes aren’t supernatural. Yes, they’re fulfilling a role, and while in that role, we believe G-d makes sure they don’t step wrong. But as people? They’re men like the rest of men. And carrying a heavy burden, which doesn’t tend to make anyone sane. The trap here was that in the comments this priest admitted you could disagree with the pope, but you couldn’t be “against him.” What he meant, actually was that if you’re against having a pope at all, you’re not a Catholic. DUH. But what he was trying to make people — including fearful Catholics believe — is that you couldn’t disagree with the pope on anything. This is such breathtaking evil that it left me sick to my stomach and means I slept very badly last night.
Here I must explain some inside Catholic baseball. Those of you who are Catholic can beat me up behind the bleachers after school for it. The thing is, before I explain what I figured out was going on, I must explain that not all Catholic priests/bishops/cardinals are in any way the same politically. And there is, particularly in the US, a strong current of leftist Bishops. If you hear anything from the American Council of Bishops, assume they’re dyed in the wool leftists, and the Catholics are rolling their eyes along with you.
I will confess I thought the Pope had indeed run his mouth, and I was grieved not for the Pope insulting the President, which I didn’t think had any effect on Catholic Americans, really. But because I thought it would do damage to the church.
People! I didn’t see the half of it.
To begin with, the Pope was not in fact criticizing Trump or speaking about Trump at all. And his comments on Islam were carefully targeted at a regional branch.
I knew that the comments in context didn’t feel right to refer to the thing in Iran. Friends and I tried to figure out why he would say that stuff now, and the only thing we could figure is that he was trying to somehow protect the Catholics in Iran — there are 20k or so of them — from retaliation by the mullahs. But it didn’t quite fit.
… We were wrong. We were wrong, because the pope didn’t say any of it, not in the context of Trump and Iran. The thing is that the leftists who created this psy-ops forgot this Pope not only could read English, but read American media.
This is the thing we need to make sure it’s known far and wide. Yes, even you who just screamed “Papists” into the cushions. Because even you — and the atheists — want to ruin this psy-ops. Trust me on this.
This is the article: Pope Leo says remarks about world being ‘ravaged by a handful of tyrants’ were not aimed at Trump: report. Vice President Vance later thanked the pope for clearing the record.
Unbeknownst to us because the media doesn’t report it, this came in the context of the pope traveling to Africa, specifically if I understand correctly (I might not) to Nigeria and countries bordering Nigeria. If you don’t know this, Nigeria is the place where Catholic school children, nuns, etc. keep getting kidnapped by Islamic terrorists. The church there is under attack right now. it is one of those times when martyrs are made, and quite frankly it is a thing of beauty and great courage for Pope Leo to go striding in, trying to give hope and call attention to what is happening there. He has no armies, no temporal power (nor should he) but he has the power to call the eyes of the world to situations. John Paul II used this to call attention to communist abuses, and Leo is trying to use it to call attention to poor, bleeding Africa. He’s risking MARTYRDOM to do this, in the serene belief that his martyrdom in Africa would bring the world’s eyes to the situation. It is admirable, heroic, and worthy of John Paul II.
What our media made of it is an utter scandal and horror, and if the Pope isn’t furious at it, he’s more than human. Or perhaps less.
I figured out the psy-ops and the reason they’re all in on this yesterday, after being very disquieted by the exchanges on Twitter, so I’m going to lay it down as I believe it happened. (Note, that while the enemy is wounded and at bay, they are still more organized than us and are GOOD at using the resources they have for deception.)
Imagine you’re a leftist in America, and you’ve miscalculated. Part of letting in Latins by the bucket full is that you knew — KNEW — all of them would vote for the left forever, and the more left the better. They also thought they had control of the Papacy by installing an old Argentinian leftist as Pope. Because the left absolutely believes Catholics will blindly do what the Pope tells them. (Frankly they also think Baptists and even Mormons — MORMONS! — will do so.)
Anyway, imagine their shock when Catholic immigrants (who by and large are actually against illegal immigration) were horrified by the left’s lurch into all gay, trans and sex sex sex all the time, not to mention insane feminist girl bossing, and … well, became more Catholic.
Catholics increasingly, in fact, despite the leftist council of bishops and a lot of corrupt clergy, vote GOP. The left is so furious at this they spent most of the auto-pen’s presidency raging about “rosary extremism” and setting the FBI to spy on traditional Catholics (the worst thing they do is choose too lacy a veil) and and and–
But none of that had the effect they wanted. Promoting the priests who agree with them didn’t have the effect they wanted. Pouring money into NGOs with Catholic in the name (It’s complicated. A lot of them have no affiliation with the church. I always check) had no effect. And all these people where the younger generations are actually having a bunch of kids were slipping through their fingers.
So they started a psy-ops to get Catholics back in the fold.
There are two ways of scaring an ethnic or cultural group back into voting for the Democrats lockstep. Or at least in the Dem minds there’s two ways:
1- Make them believe they’re obligated to.
2- Make them afraid of voting any other way.
Note that they’ve been running a psyops with Jews too, having become afraid too many of them were escaping the Democrat plantation after the Democrats revealed their true anti-semitic colors after 10-7. I don’t know if they were, but I know the left thought they were, because the psyops using chowder-heads and foreign bots and foreigners and bots to post vile anti-semitic things while pretending to be on the right was supposed to scare Jews of voting any way but for Dems. I don’t know if it worked.
So, they started one for Catholics.
Was Axelrod’s visit to the Vatican part of the psyops? I can’t think of any other reason for that gutter-crawler to visit the Vatican. Did he actually have an audience with the Pope? I don’t know. The reporting on it was of that kind where it might be that. Or he might have seen the Pope’s third undersecretary. I don’t know. Either of them is possible. For connected people — and Obamanites are that! — getting a few minutes audience with the Pope is not hard. And it doesn’t matter what he said, if anything, the important thing was to have the record.
Their plan was as follows: Seize on the first set of remarks the Pope made that could be twisted as referring to Trump and used it to A) make those blindly lockstep obeying Catholics to turn against Trump.
B) In case that didn’t work, make sure to leak the Axelrod visit and paint the Pope as a dyed in the wool lefty and use it to smear ALL Catholics, bringing up one of America’s oldest bigotries, and get people on the right attacking Catholics as Catholics, so that Catholics in self defense would be locked into voting for Democrats.
It worked like a charm. With the trio of crazy lefty bishops chiming in: ’60 Minutes’ accused of using left-leaning Cardinals to bait Trump into feud with Vatican. Raymond Arroyo labeled the media strategy ‘pope-a-doping,’ saying it was designed to provoke a White House-Vatican clash.
And then the outright reprehensible priest on twitter and others like them.
It all rolled along until the Pope chimed in. Incidentally, this is the speech he gave and where he gave it: APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF POPE LEO XIV
TO ALGERIA, CAMEROON, ANGOLA AND EQUATORIAL GUINEA.
A friend who has family (Baptist family) in Cameroon says they are impressed with Leo and think he did good by coming there. Note the thing about Islam was basically saying “you Muslims in Cameroon, we can live with you, don’t fall for the propaganda from Nigeria telling you to start kidnapping and killing Christians.”
I’m beyond furious that a Pope’s actual noble and heroic mission, trying to look after his flock has been preverted into this. And that few people who were wound up into hating the Pope and Catholics in general, and running their mouths on it are going to see or believe the Pope’s explanation.
I’m asking you, yes, even the atheists, to stop conversations about this cold with the truth.
The reality of all this is that the left is indeed desperate. They offer nothing people want to vote FOR. They only have fear to herd people in. And they are despicable and unprincipled beyond belief.
I’m going to ask all of you — all of you, I don’t care who you are — that when a psy-ops like this rolls along, seemingly on oiled gears, trying to break the right to pieces and scare pieces of it back into the left? Stop. Stop and think about it. “Who does this benefit?” “For whom does this work?” “What does this do?” are the questions you should ask yourself first and foremost. And hold back your most intemperate comments until others have time to do the footwork and figure out what’s going on.
They’ve tried to scare Jews and Catholics. We were the low hanging fruit. I don’t know how they’re going after the other groups in the right, but I can promise you they are. There will be more of this.
Remember this. Remember what they’re trying to do and don’t fall for it.
And meanwhile, please spread the truth.