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Revised and Expanded: An Inversion of Truth: Big Tech and the Deep State Go Full Bore Orwellian
The administration of President In Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., has worked overtime to impose a not-so-soft totalitarianism in the name of “fighting disinformation” and “saving democracy.” To say that the “deep state” is composed of leftist elitists who are committed to evil and who almost never speak the objective truth on any subject is to state the obvious.
The most recent assault against the Americanist concept of unlimited “free speech,” which, as has been pointed out endlessly in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos (1996-2004) and on this website since February 20, 2004, has been condemned by our true popes, is being waged by the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security (a creation of the President George Walker Bush administration in response to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, which is supposed to protect the integrity of the United States borders and to prevent actual terrorist attacks but has become an agency to permit a wantonly reckless invasion of this country by illegal immigrants in full violation of this country’s laws on the process of legal migration and an agency to investigate ordinary Americans who simply disagree with the policies of the current administration in the name of ferreting out “domestic terrorism.” The egregious Alejandro Mayorkas, who is Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, admitted in a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, April 27, 2022, that he has authorized the creation of a monstrosity that will be called the Disinformation Government Board, which will be used, of course, to attempt to stop the dissemination of actual facts about the Biden administration during the biennial farce called the midterm elections:
Conservatives on social media slammed the Biden administration after it was announced that a "Disinformation Governance Board" is being established to combat "disinformation" in the 2022 midterms.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified Wednesday that a Disinformation Governance Board had recently been created, days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased Twitter, to combat online disinformation and will be led by Undersecretary for Policy Rob Silvers and principal deputy general counsel Jennifer Gaskill.
"The goal is to bring the resources of (DHS) together to address this threat," Mayorkas said, adding that the department is focused on the spread of disinformation in minority communities
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley referred to the board as a "disgrace" and wrote a letter to Mayorkas demanding answers as to how the board will operate.
"Is there anything more dystopian than a Disinformation Governance Board run by the federal government?" Florida Republican congressional candidate Dr. Willie J. Montague tweeted, adding in a later tweet that the board is "Orwellian."
"They didn't need a 'Disinformation Governance Board' until @elonmusk threatened their control over the narrative," Texas Republican Congressman Troy Nehls tweeted.
"The libs spent the last weeks planting the seeds for the back-up plan in case the Twitter deal actually happened," Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert tweeted. "Today's news of a Biden backed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ is dystopian. They can't afford to let the truth be anything but what they say."
"Biden’s ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ is a real-world Ministry of Truth," Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham tweeted. "A conservative movement that doesn’t fight this with everything it has isn’t worthy of the name. Or the name American." Politico reported that Nina Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, will head the board as executive director.
Jankowicz suggested during the 2020 presidential election that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has been verified by multiple media outlets, was a "Russian influence op."
Jankowicz retweeted her comment on Wednesday, claiming that she was simply live tweeting the presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News. (Critics slam timing of Biden's 'ministry of truth' to police internet for 'disinformation'.)
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday defended a recently-announced Department of Homeland Security effort to combat "disinformation" on issues related to COVID-19 and elections.
Asked by Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich for more information what DHS' Disinformation Governance Board would be doing specifically, Psaki said, "I really haven't dug into this exactly, I mean, we of course support this effort but let me see if I can get more specifics."
The White House announced its support for an effort from the DHS to crack down on what it considers to be online disinformation.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified Wednesday that a Disinformation Governance Board had recently been created to combat online disinformation and Politico reported that Nina Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, will head the board as executive director.
"We know there has been a range of [disinformation] out there about a range of topics, I mean, including COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility," Psaki said, adding that she would check for additional information on what the board plans to do.
Asked by Heinrich about prior statements made by Jankowicz and how the administration can "assuage concerns" over her appointment to lead the effort fairly, Psaki responded, "It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities. I'm not sure who opposes that effort."
Psaki told reporters she was unsure of who the individual is that was chosen to head the initiative and did not have "any information" related to Jankowicz to discuss.
Amid her selection to serve as executive director for the newly announced board, Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, is facing renewed criticism for past comments she made regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Jankowicz has previously referred the laptop, which has been authenticated by multiple news outlets, as a "Trump campaign product" and suggested it was a "Russian influence op."
"Rather than police our border, Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority," Republican Sen. Josh Hawley wrote in a tweet. "They’re creating a Disinformation Board. No, really. And take a look at the views of the leftist radical running it."
"Apparently this person is the new head of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board," Washington Free Beacon reporter Chuck Ross tweeted. "Republicans did not fund the Steele dossier." (White House defends DHS 'disinformation' board: 'Not sure who opposes that effort'.)
One of ironies of the false premises of the American concept of "free speech" is that there have been, as will be reviewed below once again, endless efforts by the Federal government of the United States of America to limit so-called "free speech" even though the repression of such speech in opposition against King George III was one of the reasons that the First Amendment to the Constitution (which was actually the third to be proposed but was the first to be ratified) sought to guarantee the exercise of "freedom of speech" against government interference:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Alas, as has been pointed out on this site so many hundreds upon hundreds of times, the fact that the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than the words contained within it makes it vulnerable to being deconstructed by outright statists who believe that only those in the government are "enlightened" enough to know what "truth" is so that any criticisms leveled against them by the unwashed masses must be denounced as "dinformation." Practical atheism and totalitarianism are only the manifestations of the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles.
It is no accident at all that many younger people today accept curbs on the American concept of "free speech" because they have been miseducated in America's ideological formation in error camps (public schools) by secular, anti-Theistic curricular to believe that those only elitists of the false opposite of the naturalist "left" have "truth" and that those who oppose such "truth" must be monitored and suppressed by "big tech" and what is properly called the "deep state."
Error divides. Only Catholicism unites.
Why is this so difficult to understand or accept?
It is never possible to retard the advancement of evils by means merely natural.
True pope after true pope have pointed out this truth, but so few Catholics, whose patron "saint" must be Sisyphus, keeping believing that all one has do is to argue in naturalistic terms to opposed abortion, sodomy, and our not-so-sudden descent into barbarism and the worship of every falsehood as true a Catholicism is denounced as false.
We are living in the midst of world that is suffering the logical, inevitable, and inexorable consequences of Protestantism’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King five centuries ago and the subsequent rise of the interrelated welter of secular, anthropocentric “philosophies” and ideologies, each promising some form of “secular salvation” in fact if not in name, that can be described by using the phrase “Judeo-Masonry.” The devil has been the architect of this new world order, and he is using his minions in the false opposites of the naturalist “right” and the “left” to build the superstructure and the infrastructure of the One World Government to which the One World Ecumenical Church (that Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together and Fratelli Tutti are important building blocks) will be completely subservient.
The One World Government will probably not be named as such as supposedly sovereign nations surrender what little remains of their national sovereignty to supranational governing bodies such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Court, et al. No matter what it calls itself and what its ultimate structure will look like, though, this one world system of governance will be an instrument of preparing the way for the Antichrist. As such, therefore, it is absolutely necessary to quash all dissenting voices and to enforce what is considered to be, well, at the least for the moment, its doctrinal orthodoxy until such time as the Mister Bigs in Central Control decide in favor of a new orthodoxy to which all must submit.
In other words, the One World Government or One World System of Governance that is already very much a reality in fact but will have increasing powers in the years ahead is a secular “church” with its own hierarchy and established dogmas that are meant to control the lives of the masses and even to determine the “usefulness” of those lives and whether the “useless” must be “terminated” in the advancement of “social evolution.” This one world system of governance, therefore, will be a universal ape of the Catholic Church in what can be called the “social reign of satan” to mock the Universal Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This is an inversion of reality that sets up falsehood as true and seeks to silence, persecute and, if necessary, “eliminate” those who stand up for Truth Himself and His Catholic Church, which is not, of course, the entity that calls itself by that name but is an anti-church headed by antipope who does the work of Antichrist.
It is perhaps useful to provide a bit of historical perspective to the naked, unapologetic censorship of the legitimate news story concerning a laptop computer that the owner of a computer repair store in Wilmington, Delaware, turned over to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) in December of 2019 that belongs to Hunter Biden, the son of President In Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., that contains emails detailing the younger Biden’s influence peddling in Ukraine, Red China, Russia, and Kazakhstan from which the elder Biden, who was once known for nonstop talking but is now practicing the life of a Third Order Carthusian, profited handsomely. As interesting and predictive of our future as the censorship imposed by Big Tech (Facebook, Twitter) and the mainslime media (National Broadcasting Company, American Broadcasting, Columbia Broadcasting System, Cable News Network, MSNBC, the Consumer News and Business Channel, all major newspapers and news magazines) is, it is nevertheless useful to consider the fact that this did not occur overnight, and the use of “freedom” to destroy “freedom” is nothing new in the United States of America.
Indeed, the late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, explained the system of unofficial censorship that existed in the United States of America at the time he gave his famous commencement address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978:
Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.
In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons - maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.)
Freedom?
It is an illusion. There can be no authentic freedom for the individual or for the state that is not founded in the Kingship of Jesus Christ as it must be exercised by the Catholic Church in all pertains to the good of souls, upon which depends the entire fate of nations.
Speaking out against blasphemies committed by the motion picture and related "entertainment" industries? A crime. Defending the inviolability of innocent human life? A crime. Far-fetched? Think again, ladies and gentlemen. Think again.
Lest the very few readers who remain on this site think that this kind of contempt by one set of “naturalists” for those who disagree with them is anything “new” or that the deep state effort to portray candidate Donald John Trump as a Russian puppet four years ago and then to undermine the legitimacy and the very conduct of his presidency thereafter, permit me to provide you with a bit of historical perspective that may or may not be familiar to longtime readers of this site.
A Long History of Repressing and Censoring Political Dissent in the Land of the “Free”
As initial overview, it must be remembered that tyrants have sought to silence Catholics from the very birth of the Church on Pentecost Sunday, starting with the thugs who composed the Sanhedrin. Roman Emperors and the kings of barbaric tribes tried with all of their might to get Catholics to deny the Faith during the early part First Millennium. Mohammedans have tried to do so from the Seventh Century to this very day. Protestants and Freemasons and social revolutionaries have tried to do so with varying degrees of ferocity since 1517. The names of these perpetrators have ranged from Nero to Trajan to Diocletian to Mohammed to Luther to Henry to Cranmer to Calvin to Cromwell to Danton to Robespierre to Garibaldi and Bismarck to Lenin to Hitler to Mao to Ho to Castro to Ortega and to all of the petty little men and women, many of them apostate Catholics, who have served in our own government in the past thirty to forty years, ever eager to sell out the Faith for their thirty pieces of silver of popularity and political power.
Tyrants never learn their lessons. Inspired by the adversary, who hates God and who hates us because our souls made in the image and likeness of God, new generations of tyrants arise to try to silence the voice of Catholics. This is why the accommodation of the Church in her human elements to the spirit of the world has made it more possible for the witches' brew of forces that has been coalescing and mutating and re-coalescing since the Sixteenth Century to be victorious in all aspects of the popular culture of most of the countries in the so-called "developed" world. The devil and his minions grow bolder when Catholics begin to speak with the voice of the world, something that the conciliar “popes” and their “bishops” have done for over sixty years now.
In particular, of course, the Protestant Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King that began five hundred three years ago on October 31, 1517, was an effort to “provide” “evangelical liberty” to those who had been “enslaved” by a supposedly “dictatorial” hierarchical Church that had “corrupted” the Gospel message for her own purposes. This “evangelical liberty,” however, quickly descended into rank libertinage to the extent that even Martin Luther himself was aghast at what the decline in morals that took place once he had “liberated” men from the true Church, the Catholic Church, and set them “free” as “equals” to decide for themselves the meaning of Sacred Scripture and to sack and pillage Catholic churches, monasteries and convents.
King Henry VIII, of course, was so intent on crushing all opposition to his taking England out of the Catholic Faith that he engaged in a bloodbath of 72,000 Catholics between 1534 and the tyrant's death in 1547, a little over three percent of the population of England at that time. The killing of over 72,000 people, the seizure of the monastery and convent lands and the other discriminatory measures imposed upon Roman Catholics in the wake of the English Protestant Revolt were undertaken done quite legally, thank you. Judges sentenced Catholics to death quite routinely. The England of the Anglican Church just went about its business as though anyone who resisted the new order of things was a disloyal extremist.
This lawless desire to crush opposition transcended the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and infected many of those who believed that the English colonies situated upon and down the Atlantic seaboard of the United States of America should break from England. Those arguing against such a break did so frequently at the very threat of their lives.
To wit, Jonathan Boucher, a Anglican preacher in England and in the Colony of Virginia in the years before the Revolutionary War in the Eighteenth Century, argued in very eloquent terms against a break of the thirteen English colonies from the British Crown by reminding his listeners that true freedom comes only from Our Blessed Lord and Saviour. Boucher made some very fine points in his sermon (On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience and Nonresistance), which should be studied if for no other reason than to realize that there was some effort made by "conservative" colonists to stem the tide of rebellion and to prevent a war for "independence," which was, after all, an act of high treason against King George III.
Boucher, who sometimes packed two single-shot pistols and kept them in his pulpit when he preached so that "patriots" would not attack him, argued against what could be called "liberation theology," urging Anglicans and other colonists to accept whatever sufferings were being imposed by King George III and to offer them up to God, stating that one should not seek to rebel from the authority which God has seen fit in His Providence to provide for the governance of men. The "disconnect" of Protestantism was such, however, that Boucher could not see that his own false "church" was born in a violent, bloody rebellion against the true authority given by God Himself over men in the form of the Church that He created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. It was incongruous to argue that a rebellion against civil authority was unjust when one's very "church" was created as a result of a rebellion against God Himself.
Similarly, Americans have long fashioned their nation to be one of laws, not of men. However, this is simply not true. This is a fantasy. This is delusional.
The laws of God have been broken on these shores by the proliferation of unbridled error under the false slogans of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" from the very beginning.
President after president has engaged in activities designed to suppress legitimate dissent and opposition.
It was within a decade of the inauguration of the first President of the United States of America, George Washington, that a Congress controlled by Federalist Party members during the administration of Washington's successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams (see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King), who was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States of America, that the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and its officials.
The sixteenth President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political opposition during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he intimidated judges, shut down newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus without an Act of Congress, held opponents in prison without trial and put civilians on trial in military courts at a time when civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of what led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannis!" as he jumped onto the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot Lincoln in the head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the next morning, Holy Saturday, April 15, 1865.
Suppression of opposition to American involvement in World War I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was so extensive that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run as former President Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was running for his first term as President against Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft, who had defeated Roosevelt, to say on the floor of the United States Senate: "It is now a crime for anyone to say anything or print anything against the government of the United States. The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr Paul Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)
Just as an aside, President Thomas Woodrow Wilson wanted to use the unconstitutional Federal Reserve System, created in an act passed by the Congress of the United States of America and signed into law by Wilson on December 23, 1913, as the means to centralize the banking and monetary systems under the authority of the government of the United States of America in order to restrict the legitimate freedom of Americans to control their own private property and to make private industry dependent upon the "direction" provided it by governmental regulators and overseers. It was for this reason as well that Wilson saw to it that Congress enacted legislation, following the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, to create our current system of confiscatory taxation on our incomes. And it was Wilson, of course, who believed that the Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico, aping the "example" established by the French Revolutionaries, could "build" or "engineer" the "better" society in Our Lady's country by the killing of thousands upon thousands of Catholics:
Wilson replied [in 1915, to Father Francis Clement Kelley, who was a representative of James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, for whom Wilson had such contempt that he addressed him as Mister Gibbons]: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'
"Having thus instructed his caller in the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries. All efforts of Catholic to succor their coreligionists across the border were to prove fruitless, as they were to prove once again in 1924, when the fiercest persecution of all was begun by Plutarco Calles. In this systematic pogrom, all public worship came to an end in Mexico an priests were methodically hunted down and executed like outlaws. It was of this travail which Graham Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory. Generally, however, the world press ignored the Calles persecution in a “conspiracy of silence” which the American hierarchy and Pope after Pope were powerless to break. (Robert Leckie American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 274.)
In other words, Thomas Woodrow Wilson really believed that it was "necessary" for the Freemsaonic/Communist Mexican government that enjoyed his favor to kill Catholics, whose "backward" beliefs were impediments to the institutionalization of "liberal values" that required him to suppress all opposition to his policies right here in the United States of America.
It was a scant twelve years after the stroke-disabled Wilson left office on March 4, 1921, that the thirty-third Freemason named Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Internal Revenue Service to audit his "enemies." He contravened the law in numerous ways as he used the legislative powers illicitly given to regulatory agencies by Congress during the Great Depression and during World War II to set the stage for Barack Hussein Obama's rule by decree and presidential fiat. Roosevelt, the fifth cousin of the Republican statist and fellow thirty-third degree Freemason, Theodore Roosevelt, the uncle of Eleanor Roosevelt, even ordered his Attorney General, Robert Jackson, to engage in domestic espionage. Roosevelt’s directive took the form of a memorandum dated May 21, 1940.
Robert Jackson, who was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America on July 11, 1941, did not like the directive as he believed that Franklin Roosevelt had authorized domestic surveillance on anyone suspected of being subversive. Jackson’s successor, however, Francis Biddle, who took office as the Attorney General of the United States of America on August 25, 1941, had no qualms about the directive, delegating the task of carrying it out to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, John Edgar Hoover, who was more than happy to run with this new expansion of his authority to investigate anyone at any time for any reason. The history of the Federal government’s surveillance since that time is one of completely unchecked growth.
Do not think for a single moment that abuses of deep state bureaucrats being exposed at this time is anything new. Illegal surveillance by the Federal government has been on the rise since World War II and the establishment of permanent intelligence agencies. Modern technology has advanced to such a point that these agencies, acting both legally and illegally, monitor every means of human communication today save for those done with an old-fashioned typewriter that has not connection of any kind to the internet or to a telephone line.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself, as noted just above, has long seen itself as a “check” upon elected officials, and John Edgar Hoover, who served as Director of the Bureau of Investigation from May 10, 1924, to March 22, 1935, and then as the founding Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from March 23, 1935, until the time of his death on May 2, 1972, believed in the suppression of political dissent dating back to his days as the head of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s “War Emergency Division’s” “Alien Enemy Bureau” one hundred years ago. Please, what is going on now, although certainly shocking to those not conversant with the darker sides of American history, is really nothing new at all.
Although Presidents Harry S. Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy each considered firing Hoover, the latter had amassed too much information on too many people. This information, most of it gathered quite illegally and/or by the improper use of Federal Bureau of Investigation field agents, was Hoover’s own kind of “insurance policy.”
President Lyndon Baines Johnson, on the other hand, knowing what kind of “insurance policy” that Hoover had on him, whetted Hoover’s appetite for domestic surveillance under the thinnest of legal pretexts, including wiretapping his own vice president, the garrulous spendthrift with taxpayer dollars named Hubert Horatio Humphrey:
Resigned to Humphrey's candidacy [in 1968], Johnson pressed his Vice President throughout the campaign not to stray too far from the Administration's position on Vietnam.
Humphrey largely complied. But at the end of September, when he showed greater flexibility than the White House on how to end the war, Johnson reacted angrily. He told Clark Clifford that he doubted Humphrey's ability to be President. He lacked the guts for the job. After Humphrey had become Vice President and expressed doubts about the war, the White House, according to a Humphrey aide, Ted Van Dyk, had arranged for wiretaps on Humphrey's office phones. Van Dyk learned this from two Secret Service agents on the vice-presidential detail. Neither Van Dyk nor Humphrey was surprised. Though Johnson in principle disliked taping and wiretaps, he secretly taped more than 7,500 of his own telephone conversations as President. Moreover, during the 1964 campaign, after a visit to the White House, Richard Russell wrote, "Hoover has apparently been turned loose and is tapping everything.... [Johnson] stated it took him hours each night to read them all (but he loves this)." The speed with which Johnson had information about Humphrey's presidential campaign suggested to Van Dyk that the White House was still tapping Humphrey's phones in 1968. Johnson apparently wanted the taps to gain advance notice and a chance to dissuade him should Humphrey decide to break away on the war. (Three New Revelations about Lyndon Baines Johnson.)
It should be noted, however, that the liberal Robert Dallek, who authored the synopsis of his own book about Lyndon Baines Johnson, did not include the following fact about Johnson’s wiretapping in 1968 that is covered in another book:
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson ordered Hoover to tap the phone of Republican vice- presidential nominee Spiro Agnew on the suspicion that Agnew was telling the South Vietnamese that they would get a better peace agreement from Nixon if he were elected president. The taps did not reveal that Agnew ever made such a deal. (Henry M. Holden, FBI 100 Years: An Unofficial History, Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2008, p. 218.)
Mind you, this is only a partial listing of abuses that have been committed in this alleged land of "laws and not men," a land where over fifty-five million innocent babies have been butchered by surgical means (hundreds of millions more by chemical means) since, most of those having taken place in the forty-seven years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. That staggering figure does not include those babies who were killed by surgical means in their mothers' wombs between 1967 and 1973 when various states, including Colorado, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Alaska, and Washington (and Washington, District of Columbia) decriminalized surgical baby-killing in some or all cases at various stages of a baby's development in his mother's womb.
A "civilized" nation of "laws." I don't think so.
The lawless imposition of policies even in violation of constitutions and civil code or statutory law and the suppression of opposition to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape, pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly-held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.
You see, good readers, those who believe in the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that must degenerate into full-blown statists who cannot ever "coexist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical principles of Modernity.
This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the United States of America have had their world view shaped by the naturalism of Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes that are contrary to the Catholic Faith and thus to the good of both men and their nations.
We Have Been Warned
Our true popes have warned us that the falsehoods of Modernity would send men and their nations into the abyss. Here are a few reminders:
This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws — in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)
For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of “naturalism,” as they call it, dare to teach that “the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones.” And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.” From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an “insanity,” viz., that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.” But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching “liberty of perdition;” and that “if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling.”
And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that “the people’s will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right.” But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?” (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)
So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only passport to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)
The entire premise of unfettered “freedom of speech,” freedom of press” and of Modernity and Modernism’s embrace “religious liberty” gives free rein to the devil, who has been using the veneer of “liberty” to sow such chaos and confusion as to make inevitable the triumph of a brutal totalitarianism. The adversary uses different means to accomplish his nefarious goals, and thus it has been and continues to be in the “free” United States of America that has never been as “free” as Americans have been convinced while they were lulled to sleep by an endless array of “bread circuses” (entertainment, good restaurants, competitive sports, etc.) while the coercive power of the civil state was being used to advance evil here and abroad in a manner that is almost unsurpassed in human history.
The putsch of the Big Tech giants to help Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., win the presidency was simply a foretaste of what life has become under the administration of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The high priests and priestesses who make Silicon Valley’s magisterial decisions about who and what to censor backed Biden in 2020 in the firm knowledge that the Biden-Harris administration would do everything imaginable to end all political dissent and “free speech,” such as it has ever been in the United States of America, by indemnifying the long-established practices of schools, colleges, universities, corporations, so-called journalists and their media outlets, and professional sports of imposing a creeds of belief and codes of speech that carry with them career-ending punishments and social shame, although the Biden-Harris administration may not settle for shame and seek to create Red Chinese and Soviet style “re-education” centers (concentration camps) for those guilty of thought and speech “crimes.” Perhaps even more immediately in our future is state-imposed version of a Red Chinese system of “social credits,” something that major corporations, including some health insurers, are using sub rosa at this time. It will probably be the case that one can view his “social credit” score on Experian, Transunion, or Equifax the same way one views his financial credit score.
In addition to the censorship of the news about Hunter Biden’s globetrotting in behalf of dollars to be shared with the “big guy” that, for reasons to be explained in “Naturally Absurd, part four,” in 2020, many Americans do not even care about even after learning of the skullduggery, we have seen the high priests and priestesses of Silicon Valley censor legitimate information that debunks the state narrative about the Chinese/China/Wuhan/Covid-19/Coronavirus plandemic and that criticizes the Marxist terrorist organization, “Black Lives Matter,” and that point out the ways in which George Soros’s many front organizations have a hand in “antifa” as a form of “community organizing. This is all just a beginning for the combined efforts of the forces of Modernity and of Modernism, whose lords worked overtime to get Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., elected and have, with the Biden administration's encouragement, aim to make us all the slaves of a new technocratic oligarchy that has about as much respect for the authentic liberty of human beings as they have for the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity, meaning none, of course.
There are several ironies in all of this.
First, as has been noted so many times before on this website, the very people who deny that there are any truths that exist in the very nature of things and/or have been revealed definitively solely by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for their infallible explication and eternal safekeeping believe that they, mere mortals whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave, are the arbiters of truth, which is, in effect, whatever it is they decide it to be at any given time. This means that all opposition to the chemical and/or surgical execution of babies, the “science” of “brain death,” the “safety” of vaccinations containing all manner of gene-altering poisons over and above the use of fetal tissue cells derived from butchered babies, statism, the “science” of “global warming” and the “necessity” of raising the cost of fossil fuels as a prelude to eliminating their use entirely, the “science” of “social distancing” and, of course, the ever-widening scope of the hedonistic demands of those engaged in perverse practices, whether natural or unnatural, in violation of the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments will be strictly restricted if not prohibited entirely.
Second, the very people who have denounced Holy Mother Church for censoring heretics, correcting erroneous theological opinions and censoring books, publications, motion pictures, magazines and journals that pose threats to the good of souls have always been censorious. Believe me, I know this from my three decades plus of college teaching, not including a brief return to the classroom in 2014 that was cut short because I refused to be “neutral” on matters of right and wrong and thus follow slavishly the dictates of a computerized program written by our new censors who believe in all that passes for “truth” in an era of falsehood masquerading as truth, an era in which vice is portrayed as virtue.
Censorship and the manipulation of language has been one of the foundational building blocks of the entire anti-Incarnational era of Modernity. Alas, the embrace of such censorship by the entire welter of the forces of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry is but an inversion of the fact the Catholic Church has long taught that error has no rights and that whatever is injurious to men and that it is thus illegitimate to bring forth ideas and beliefs that tickle the ears and make men believe the old lie of the serpent, namely, that they can be like unto God, knowing good and evil.
Pope Leo XIII explained in Officiorum Ac Munerum, January 25, 1897, that the Catholic Church not only believes in censorship of the sort of theological heresies and philosophical errors upon which the modern nation-state is founded but has the right to demand that Catholics obey her injunctions prohibiting the reading and distribution of material propagandizing in behalf of those heresies and errors.
Here the entirety of Pope Leo XIII’s introduction to Officiorum Ac Munerum that precedes specific canonical remedies to be imposed against various publications and books:
Of all the Official Duties which We are bound most carefully and most diligently to fulfill in this Supreme Position of the Apostolate, the Chief and Principal Duty is to watch assiduously and earnestly to strive that the Integrity of Christian Faith and Morals may suffer no diminution. And this, more than at any other times, is especially necessary in these days, when men's minds and characters are so unrestrained that almost every Doctrine which Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind, has committed to the custody of His Church, for the welfare of the human race, is daily called into question and doubt. In this warfare, many and varied are the stratagems and hurtful devices of the enemy; but most perilous of all is the uncurbed freedom of writing and publishing noxious literature. Nothing can be conceived more pernicious, more apt to defile souls, through its contempt of Religion, and its manifold allurements to sin. Wherefore the Church, who is the custodian and vindicator of the Integrity of Faith and Morals, fearful of so great an evil, has from an early date realized that remedies must be applied against this plague; and for this reason she has ever striven, as far as lay in her Power, to restrain men from the reading of bad books, as from a deadly poison. The early days of the Church were witnesses to the earnest zeal of St. Paul in this respect; and every subsequent age has witnessed the vigilance of the Fathers, the commands of the Bishops, and the Decrees of Councils in a similar direction.
Historical Documents bear special witness to the care and diligence with which the Roman Pontiffs have vigilantly endeavored to prevent the unchecked spread of heretical writings detrimental to the public. History is full of examples. Anastasius I solemnly condemned the more dangerous writings of Origen, Innocent I those of Pelagius, Leo the Great all the works of the Manicheans. The decretal letters, opportunely issued by Gelasius, concerning books to be received and rejected, are well known. And so, in the course of centuries, the Holy See condemned the pestilent writings of the Monothelites, of Abelard, Marsilius Patavinus, Wycliff and Hus.
In the fifteenth century, after the invention of the art of printing, not only were bad publications which had already appeared condemned, but precautions began to be taken against the publication of similar works in the future. These prudent measures were called for by no slight cause, but rather by the need of protecting the public Morals and welfare at the time; for too many had rapidly perverted into a mighty engine of destruction an art excellent in itself, productive of immense advantages, and naturally destined for the advancement of Christian culture. Owing to the rapid process of publication, the great evil of bad books had been multiplied and accelerated. Wherefore Our predecessors, Alexander VI and Leo X, most wisely promulgated certain definite Laws, well suited to the character of the times, in order to restrain printers and publishers within the limits of their duty.
The tempest soon became more violent, and it was necessary to check the contagion of heresy with still more vigilance and severity. Hence Leo X, and afterwards Clement VII, severely prohibited the reading or retaining of the books of Luther. But as, owing to the unhappy circumstances of that epoch, the foul flood of pernicious books had increased beyond measure and spread in all directions, there appeared to be need of a more complete and efficacious remedy. This remedy Our predecessor, Paul IV, was the first to employ, by opportunely publishing a list of books and other writings against which the faithful should be warned. A little later the Council of Trent took steps to restrain the ever-growing license of writing and reading by a new measure. At its command and desire, certain chosen Prelates and Theologians not only applied themselves to increasing and perfecting the Index which Paul IV had published, but also drew up certain Rules to be observed in the publishing, reading, and use of books; to which Rules, Pius IV added the Sanction of his Apostolic Authority.
The interests of the public welfare, which had given rise to the Tridentine Rules, necessitated in the course of time certain alterations. For which reason the Roman Pontiffs, especially Clement VIII, Alexander VII, and Benedict XIV, mindful of the circumstances of the period and the dictates of prudence, issued several Decrees calculated to elucidate these Rules and to accommodate them to the times.
The above facts clearly prove that the Chief Care of the Roman Pontiffs has always been to protect civil society from erroneous beliefs and corrupt morals, the twin causes of the decline and ruin of States, which commonly owes its origin and its progress to bad books. Their labors were not unfruitful, so long as the Divine Law regulated the commands and prohibitions of civil government, and the Rulers of States acted in unison with the Ecclesiastical Authority.
Every one is aware of the subsequent course of events. As circumstances and men's minds gradually altered, the Church, with her wonted prudence, observing the character of the period, took those steps which appeared most expedient and best calculated to promote the salvation of men. Several prescriptions of the Rules of the Index, which appeared to have lost their original opportuneness, she either abolished by Decree, or, with equal gentleness and Wisdom, permitted them to grow obsolete. In recent times, Pius IX, in a Letter to the Archbishops and Bishops of the States of the Church, considerably mitigated Rule X. Moreover, on the eve of the Vatican Council, he instructed the learned men of the Preparatory Commission to examine and revise all the Rules of the Index, and to advise how they should be dealt with. They unanimously decided that the Rules required alteration; and several of the Fathers of the Council openly professed their agreement with this opinion and desire. A Letter of the French Bishops exists urging the necessity of immediate action in "republishing the Rules and whole Scheme of the Index in an entirely new form, better suited to our times and easier to observe." A similar opinion was expressed at the same time by the Bishops of Germany, who definitely petitioned that "the Rules of the Index might be submitted to a fresh revision and a rearrangement." With these Bishops many Bishops of Italy and other countries have agreed.
Taking into account the circumstances of our times, the conditions of society, and popular customs, all these requests are certainly justified and in accordance with the maternal affection of Holy Church. In the rapid race of intellect, there is no field of knowledge in which Literature has not run riot, hence the daily inundation of most pernicious books. Worst of all, the civil laws not only connive at this serious evil but allow it the widest license. Thus, on the one hand, many minds are in a state of anxiety; whilst, on the other, there is unlimited opportunity for every kind of reading. (Officiorum Ac Munerum, January 25, 1897.)
Well, the new censors believe that anyone who is a believing Catholic must be censored and their works either confiscated or made inaccessible to public view. We have now discovered that this censorship has the the full backing of the civil state. The civil state, along with the caste of high tech’s high priests and priestesses, means business and they are being relentleslly unapologetic in their quashing of our voices and, in the case of those of us who understand the conciliar church to be a false religious sect headed by figures of Antichrist, will be effected with the full approval of the “big guy” at the Casa Santa Marta.
To Remain Calm in the Midst of the Agitation
In the midst of all this, however, we must remain ever in the hands of Our Lady and ever reliant upon her Most Rosary as the consecrated slaves of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. This is a time for Catholic heroes who are willing to pray and to fast for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order, and for the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter.
Although it may sound trite as I have repeated this endlessly in my writing over the past few decades, this is the time that God has known from all eternity that we would be alive. The graces His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal Divine Son won for us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday in atonement for our sins and that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, are more than sufficient for us to prosper under the yoke of overt persecution and censorship.
Remember, the Sanhedrin demanded that the Apostles be silent about the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They refused to do and rejoiced that we were deemed worthy to suffer for sake of His Holy Name.
What are we afraid of now?
Remember, the first Catholics were told by Roman emperors and their minions to make sacrifices to idols and abandon the Catholic Faith. According to Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, nearly eleven million Catholics gave up their lives in order to avoid even the appearance of doing apostatizing.
What’s wrong with us?
Remember, Catholics in England and Ireland hid priests in priest-holes and were willing to lose everything they hand, including their lives, to remain faithful to the true Church during the persecutions of King Henry VIII and his own daughter and granddaughter, Elizabeth I, whose mother, Anne Boleyn, was Henry’s illegitimate daughter.
We are afraid of the Red Chinese-bought and paid for high priests and priestesses of Silicon Valley?
To quote the “big guy” whose wallet got very fat from Chinese Communist Party front companies, “Come on, man.”
Remember, Catholics suffered during the French Revolution, under Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Germany, and the suffered at the hands of the Soviet Bolsheviks, the Chinese Maoists, the Cuban Castroists and the Mexican Freemasons.
With Our Lady and Saint Joseph so near to us every day, why are we so agitated and afraid?
Why?
Consider Dom Prosper Gueranger's inspiring tribute to Saints Philip and James the Less, whose feast is celebrated today, May 1, 2022. in those traditional Catholic chapels adhering to the General Roman Calendar of 1954, to provide us with apostolic courage in these times when believing Catholics are being subjected to the sorts of statist assaults that characterized the Catholic life during most of the first three centuries of Holy Mother Church:
Two of the favored witnesses of our beloved Jesus’ Resurrection come before us on this first day of May. Philip and James are here, bearing testimony to us, that their Master is truly risen from the dead, that they have seen him, that they have touched him, that they have conversed with him, during these forty days. And, that we may have no doubt as to the truth of their testimony, they hold in their hands the instruments of the martyrdom they underwent for asserting that Jesus, after having suffered death, came to life again and rose from the grave. Philip is leaning upon the cross to which he was fastened, as Jesus had been; James is holding the club wherewith he was struck dead.
Philip preached the Gospel in the two Phrygias, and his martyrdom took place at Hierapolis. He was married when he was called by our Savior; and we learn from writers of the second century that he had three daughters, remarkable for their great piety—one of whom lived at Ephesus, where she was justly revered as one of the glories of that early Church.
James is better known than Philip. He is called, in the sacred Scriptures, Brother of the Lord, on account of the close relationship that existed between his own mother and the Blessed Mother of Jesus. He claims our veneration, during Paschal Time, inasmuch as he was favored with a special visit from our Risen Lord, as we learn from St. Paul. There can be no doubt, but what he had done something to deserve this mark of Jesus’ predilection. St. Jerome and St. Epiphanius tell us that our Savior, when ascending into heaven, recommended to St. James’ care the Church of Jerusalem, and that he was accordingly appointed the first Bishop of that City. The Christians of Jerusalem, in the 4th Century, had possession of the Chair on which St. James used to sit, when he assisted at the assemblies of the Faithful. St. Epiphanius also tells us that the holy Apostle used to wear a lamina of gold upon his forehead as the badge of his dignity. His garment was a tunic made of linen.
He was held in such high repute for virtue that when the people of Jerusalem called him “The Just;” and when the time of the Siege came, instead of attributing the frightful punishment they then endured, to the deicide they or their fathers had committed, they would leave it to be a consequence of the murder of James, who, when dying, prayed for his people. The admirable Epistle he has left us bears testimony to the greatness and uprightness of his character. He there teaches us, with an eloquence of an inspired writer, that works must go along with our Faith, if we would be Just with that Justice which makes us like our Risen Lord.
The bodies of Saints Philip and James repose in the Basilica of the Holy Apostles at Rome. These Relics are counted as one of the richest treasures of the Holy City, and there is reason to believe that this first of May is the real anniversary of their Translation. For a long period, the Church of Rome kept special Feasts in honor of four only of the Apostles: SS. Peter and Paul, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Andrew (Peter’s Brother): the rest were united in the solemnity of the 29 of June, and a vestige of this is still to be found in the Office of that Day, as we shall see later on. The reception of the Bodies of SS. Philip and James, which were brought from the East, somewhere about the 6 Century, gave rise to the institution of today’s Feast; and this led gradually to the insertion into the Calendar of the special Feasts for the other Apostles and Evangelists. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Saints Philip and James, May 1.)
The Divine Office provides us with the official hagiography of these glorious Apostles:
Philip was born at Bethsaida, and was one of the twelve Apostles that were first called by Christ our Lord. It was from Philip that Nathanael learned that the Messias had come who was promised in the Law; and by him also he was led to our Lord. We have a clear proof of the familiarity wherewith Philip was treated by Christ, in the fact of the Gentiles addressing themselves to this Apostle, when they wished to see the Savior. Again, when our Lord was about to feed the multitude in the desert, he spoke to Philip, and said, “Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?” Having received the Holy Ghost, he went into Scythia, which was the country allotted to him, wherein to preach the Gospel; and he converted almost the entire people to the Christian Faith. Having, finally, reached Hierapolis, in Phrygia, he was crucified there for the name of Christ, and then stoned to death on the Kalends of May (May 1st. The Christians buried his body in the same place; but it was afterwards taken to Rome, and, together with the body of the Apostle St. James, was placed in the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles.
James, the brother of our Lord, was called “the Just.” From his childhood, he never drank wine or strong drink; he abstained from flesh-meat; he never cut his hair, or used oil to anoint his limbs, or took a bath. He was the only one permitted to enter the Holy of Holies. His garments were of linen. So assiduous was he in prayer, that the skin of his knees was as hard as that of a camel. After Christ’s Ascension, the Apostles made him Bishop of Jerusalem; and it was to him that the Prince of the Apostles sent the news of his being delivered out of prison by an Angel. A dispute having arisen in the Council of Jerusalem concerning the Mosaic Law and Circumcision, James sided with Peter, and, in a speech which he made to the Brethren, proved the Vocation of the Gentiles, and said that the absent Brethren were to be written to, and told not to impose the yoke of the Mosaic Law upon the Gentiles. It is to him that the Apostle speaks in his Epistle to the Galatians, when he says: But other of the Apostles I saw none, saving James, the brother of the Lord.
Such was James’ holy life, that people used to strive with each other to touch the hem of his garment. At the age of ninety-six years—of which he had spent thirty governing the Church of Jerusalem in the most saintly manner—as he was one day preaching, with great courage, Christ the Son of God, he was attacked by stones being thrown at him; after which, he was taken to the highest part of the Temple, and cast headlong down. His legs were broken by the fall; and, as he was lying half dead upon the ground, he raised up his hands towards heaven, and thus prayed for his executioners: “Forgive them, O Lord! for they know not what they do.” While thus praying, he received a blow on the head with a fuller’s club, and gave up his soul to his God, in the seventh year of Nero’s reign. He was buried near the Temple, from which he had been thrown down. He wrote a Letter, which is one of the seven Catholic Epistles. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saints Philip and James, May 1.)
Saint Philip the Less, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, considered it a an honor to gain the martyr's crown during the reign of Nero.
Why are afraid of the likes of Joseph "I can't pronounce the word "kleptocracies" Biden, Jr.. and his Orwellian cast of thousands?
Why?
This is the month of May, the month of the fairest flower of our race, Our Lady, who wants to remember that the final victory belongs to her Immaculate Heart and that it is up to us to try to plant a few seeds by means of the graces won for by her Divine Son during His Passion and Death and that flow into our souls through her loving hands as the Mediatrix of All Graces to plant a few seeds for the great victory of her, Our Immaculata!
Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
Saints Philip and James, pray for us.