Supreme Delusions Enable Supreme Tyrants to Supremely Crush Dissent

Although the point has been made in over 1500 commentaries on this website dealing with Judeo-Masonic naturalism and its hold on the minds and hearts of Catholics in the United States of America no matter where they may fall along vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide during this time of apostasy and betrayal, there are times that, despite my own natural disinclination to comment once again on all that I have laid out meticulously so many times before, I suppose another effort to point out what is obvious to me but may not be obvious to those who permit themselves to get all caught up in the midst of the agitations caused by the constant conflicts between the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and the naturalist “right.”

Murthy v. Missouri, June 26, 2024

The latest absurdity is another piece of sophistry authored by a supposedly “constitutionalist” member of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, June 26, 2024, that overturned the decision of Judge Terry Doughty of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Louisiana to grant an injunction to prevent officials within the  administration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., to continue coercing Facebook and other social media outlets to censor what the White House fascists considered to be “disinformation” about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the nature of the virus itself, and the deadly effects of the “vaccines” that the administration had mandated to be given to all, although not most, Federal employees.

As a review, here is a report about Judge Doughty’s decision that was issued on July 4, 2023:

A federal judge has blocked Biden administration officials from contacting social media companies in a landmark order targeting government censorship and suppression of online postings.

US District Court Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, determined Tuesday that the White House likely colluded with Big Tech to censor protected speech during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“During … a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Doughty wrote in his 155-page order.

The judge concluded that the plaintiffs, led by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, were likely to succeed and issued a preliminary injunction limiting dozens of Biden administration officials from attempting to coordinate with social media giants to remove content.

Officials subject to the injunction include White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, employees of the Justice Department and FBI, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

The case was brought forth by Republican Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is now a GOP senator from the Show-Me State.

Schmitt and Landry alleged in their suit that the government infringed the First Amendment and cited a litany of examples as backup, including the suppression of The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden and discussion of the so-called COVID-19 lab leak theory.

“Ultimately, Defendants contend that Plaintiffs have not shown that the choice to suppress free speech must in law be deemed to be that of the government. This Court disagrees,” Doughty noted.

During proceedings in the case, top former Biden administration officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and onetime White House press secretary Jen Psaki were summoned for depositions.

At one point in his 155-page order, Doughty underscored that “each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature,” which he called “quite telling.”

In one example the judge cited, White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account meant to be Finnegan Biden, the president’s granddaughter and offspring of Hunter Biden.

“Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” Flaherty’s Feb. 6, 2021, request read. “Please remove this account immediately.” According to the ruling, the parody was zapped within 45 minutes of the request.

“This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech,” Doughty wrote. “American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country … the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey cheered Doughty’s decree, which is subject to appeal.

“The Court has granted our motion to BLOCK top officials in the federal government from violating the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans,” Bailey tweeted. “What a way to celebrate Independence Day.”

A White House official told The Post Tuesday that the Department of Justice is reviewing the injunction and “will evaluate its options.”

“This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.” (Judge restricts Biden officials from colluding with Big Tech)

Judge Doughty’s decision was courageous, and it was absolutely correct, constitutionally and morally.

As we know after eighteen years, eight months of very painful experiences, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, John Glover Roberts, Jr., has worked overtime to protect the national security state and to avoid any major confrontations over patently unconstitutional policies, executive orders and/or landmark legislation decreed, issued or passed during the administrations of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., at least in most instances..

Roberts deliberately rewrote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in order to uphold its nonexistent constitutionality because he wanted to show “deference” to then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro’s only legislative “achievement” in his first term, which is why he shifted his vote against the act’s constitutionality and then wrote the Court’s opinion in the case of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al., June 28, 2012, that was so full of tortured reasoning and fallacies that even the “moderate” (no one who supports baby-killing or perversity under the cover of law, is a “moderate”) Anthony McLeod Kennedy found without any constitutional or legal merit:

The Court today decides to save a statute Congress did not write. It rules that what the statute declares to be a requirement with a penalty is instead an option subject to a tax. And it changes the intentionally coercive sanction of a total cut-off of Medicaid funds to a supposedly noncoercive cut-off of only the incremental funds that the Act makes available.

The Court regards its strained statutory interpretation as judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health-care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements that may or may not survive the necessary congressional revision. 

The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is, does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional difficulties. It creates them. The holding that the Individual Mandate is a tax raises a difficult constitutional question (what is a direct tax?) that the Court resolves with inadequate deliberation. And the judgment on the Medicaid Expansion issue ushers in new federalism concerns and places an unaccustomed strain upon the Union. Those States that decline the Medicaid Expansion must subsidize, by the federal tax dollars taken from their citizens, vast grants to the States that accept the Medicaid Expansion. If that destabilizing political dynamic, so antagonistic to a harmonious Union, is to be introduced at all, it should be by Congress, not by the Judiciary.

The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court’s ruling undermines those values at every turn. In the name of restraint, it overreaches. In the name of constitutional avoidance, it creates new constitutional questions. In the name of cooperative federalism, it undermines state sovereignty.

The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.For the reasons here stated, we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. We respectfully dissent. (Minority Opinion, at pages 64-65 of opinion, page 190-191 of the full .pdf.)

Roberts was it again in 2015 in the case of King v. Burwell, which upheld the “individual mandate” portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act a second time while ignoring the fact that the “individual mandate” was a “penalty” not as a “tax” that had not been passed properly by the Congress of the United States of America and that the whole act itself was unconstitutional as there is no authority in the Constitution of the United States of America for Congress to take over a private industry to achieve its stated ideological ends that are, of course, inimical to the physical health of American citizens. Roberts wrote the following in his conclusion:

In a democracy, the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people. Our role is more confined—“to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). That is easier in some cases than in others. But in every case we must respect the role of the Legislature, and take care not to undo what it has done. A fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.

Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter. Section 36B can fairly be read consistent with what we see as Congress’s plan, and that is the reading we adopt. (King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015.)

Congress hath no constitutional authority to do what it did fourteen years ago when it enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and John Glover Roberts, Jr., whose first goal is always to “protect” the “image” of the Supreme Court of the United States of America (he has already succeeded in convincing Associate Justices Brett Michael Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to be the joint successors of former Associate Justice Anthony MacLeod Kennedy as fellow “moderating influences” on the Court in several recent cases, including in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, June 26, 2024), misused his judicial authority to provide a “remedy” to a law that he had upheld three years previously, something that was pointed out by the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in his blistering dissent in King v. Burwell:

The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people’s decision to give Congress “[a]ll legislative Powers” enumerated in the Constitution. Art. I, §1. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them. This Court holds only the judicial power—the power to pronounce the law as Congress has enacted it. We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct. We must always remember, therefore, that “[o]ur task is to apply the text, not to improve upon it.” Pavelic & LeFlore v. Marvel Entertainment Group, Div. of Cadence Industries Corp., 493 U. S. 120, 126 (1989).

Trying to make its judge-empowering approach seem respectful of congressional authority, the Court asserts that its decision merely ensures that the Affordable Care Act operates the way Congress “meant [it] to operate.” Ante, at 17. First of all, what makes the Court so sure that Congress “meant” tax credits to be available everywhere? Our only evidence of what Congress meant comes from the terms of the law, and those terms show beyond all question that tax credits are available only on state Exchanges. More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers. “If Congress enacted into law something different from what it intended, then it should amend the statute to conform to its intent.” Lamie, supra, at 542. In the meantime, this Court “has no roving license . . . to disregard clear language simply on the view that . . . Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.” Bay Mills, 572 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 11).

Even less defensible, if possible, is the Court’s claim that its interpretive approach is justified because this Act “does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.” Ante, at 14–15. It is not our place to judge the quality of the care and deliberation that went into this or any other law. A law enacted by voice vote with no deliberation whatever is fully as binding upon us as one enacted after years of study, months of committee hearings, and weeks of debate. Much less is it our place to make everything come out right when Congress does not do its job properly. It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility.

Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges. If Congress values above everything else the Act’s applicability across the country, it could make tax credits available in every Exchange. If it prizes state involvement in the Act’s implementation, it could continue to limit tax credits to state Exchanges while taking other steps to mitigate the economic consequences predicted by the Court. If Congress wants to accommodate both goals, it could make tax credits available everywhere while offering new incentives for States to set up their own Exchanges. And if Congress thinks that the present design of the Act works well enough, it could do nothing. Congress could also do something else altogether, entirely abandoning the structure of the Affordable Care Act. The Court’s insistence on making a choice that should be made by Congress both aggrandizes judicial power and encourages congressional lassitude.

Just ponder the significance of the Court’s decision to take matters into its own hands. The Court’s revision of the law authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to spend tens of billions of dollars every year in tax credits on federal Exchanges. It affects the price of insurance for millions of Americans. It diminishes the participation of the States in the implementation of the Act. It vastly expands the reach of the Act’s individual mandate, whose scope depends in part on the availability of credits. What a parody today’s decision makes of Hamilton’s assurances to the people of New York: “The legislature not only commands the purse but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over . . . the purse; no direction . . . of the wealth of society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will but merely judgment.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

*  *  *

Today’s opinion changes the usual rules of statutory interpretation for the sake of the Affordable Care Act. That, alas, is not a novelty. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U. S. ___, this Court revised major components of the statute in order to save them from unconstitutionality. The Act that Congress passed provides that every individual “shall” maintain insurance or else pay a “penalty.” 26 U. S. C. §5000A. This Court, however, saw that the Commerce Clause does not authorize a federal mandate to buy health insurance. So it rewrote the mandate-cum-penalty as a tax. 567 U. S., at ___–___ (principal opinion) (slip op., at 15–45). The Act that Congress passed also requires every State to  accept an expansion of its Medicaid program, or else risk losing all Medicaid funding. 42 U. S. C. §1396c. This Court, however, saw that the Spending Clause does not authorize this coercive condition. So it rewrote the law to withhold only the incremental funds associated with the Medicaid expansion. 567 U. S., at ___–___ (principal opinion) (slip op., at 45–58). Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State.” This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years. The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (“penalty” means tax, “further [Medicaid] payments to the State” means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, “established by the State” means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

I dissent. (King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015.)

Justice Scalia was correct, and he remains correct in death as Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., having convinced former Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy, who wrote the principal dissenting opinion in National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al., June 26, 2012  nine years ago, to join him in the case of King v. Burwell, managed to bring over two of former President Donald John Trump’s appointees, Brett Michael Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett as well as Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented in both and King v. Burwell, to join him in preserving ObamaDeathCare on the grounds that the eighteen states challenging the “individual mandate” portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act lacked the legal standing to bring the suit as they could not, in the view of Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the Court, prove that they suffered damages from the provision.

Joined by Associate Justice Neal Gorsuch, Associate Justice Samuel Alito concluded his well-reasoned dissent as follows to explain that this was just another effort to preserve a law with many provisions that were fatally flawed constitutionally:

No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats. A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again.

But I must respectfully dissent. (California v. Texas, June 17, 2021.)

As mentioned parenthetically just above, John Glover Roberts, Jr., has already convinced Associate Justices Brett Michael Kavanaugh (see Don't Place Your Bets on Brett) and Amy Coney Barrett to form a three-justice “institutionalist” bloc on the Supreme Court of the United States of America in at least some major cases, Murthy v. Missouri being the most recent example. Thus, there is the three-justice (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson) “social engineering” block, the three-justice “institutionalist” bloc and the three-justice (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neal Gorsuch) “constitutionalist” bloc. Roberts has successfully isolated the influence of this latter bloc by coopting Kavanaugh and Barrett, and this is something that readers of this site might remember that I had said would be the case over the course of time.

Anyhow. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s 6-3 majority opinion in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, which was as important a First Amendment case concerning the American concept of “free speech,” which has never been as “free” as most shallow Americanists were taught to believe, has ever been heard by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, was yet another supreme exercise in sophistry as Barrett found that the petitioners lacked the legal standing to claim that they had been harmed by the Biden administration’s monstrous Orwellian scheme to censor all dissenting views about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the harm caused by the vaccines.

The following excerpt is taken from Associate Justice Barrett’s majority opinion discussing the claims made by petitioner Jill Hines that she had been harmed by the Biden censorship scheme:

Jill Hines. Of all the plaintiffs, Hines makes the best showing of a connection between her social-media restrictions and communications between the relevant platform (Facebook) and specific defendants (CDC and the White House). That said, most of the lines she draws are tenuous, particularly given her burden of proof at the preliminary injunction stage—recall that she must show that her restrictions are likely traceable to the White House and the CDC.

A healthcare activist, Hines codirects “Health Freedom Louisiana,” a group that advocated against COVID–19 mask and vaccine mandates. In October 2020—before the start of communications with the White House and the bulk of communications with the CDC—Facebook began to reduce the reach of Hines’ and Health Freedom’s pages. Hines tries to connect Facebook’s subsequent actions against her to both the White House officials and the CDC. First, Facebook “deplatformed” (i.e., deleted) one of Health Freedom’s groups in July 2021. The last post in the group asked members to contact state legislators about health freedom legislation. Three months earlier, a White House official sent Facebook several “suggestions” that were “circulating around the building and informing thinking,” including that the platform should “end group recommendations for groups with a history of COVID–19 or vaccine misinformation.”.

A week later, Facebook replied that it had “already removed all health groups from our recommendation feature.”  It is hard to know what to make of this. Facebook reported that it had already acted, which tends to imply that Facebook made its decision independently of the White House. Moreover, Facebook and the White House communicated about removing groups from recommendation features, not deleting them altogether—further weakening the inference that Facebook was implementing White House policy rather than its own.6

Next, in April 2023, Facebook gave Hines a warning after she reposted content from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Two years earlier, White House officials had pushed Facebook to remove the accounts of the “disinformation dozen,” 12 people (including Kennedy) supposedly responsible for a mjority of COVID–19-related misinformation. Hines tries to link the warning she received to this earlier White House pressure. Again, though, the link is weak. There is no evidence that the White House asked Facebook to censor every user who reposts a member of the disinformation dozen, nor did Facebook change its policies to do so. Facebook’s 2023 warning to Hines bears only a tangential relationship to the White House’s 2021 directive to Facebook. Hines traces her remaining restrictions to the CDC. Beginning in October 2020, Facebook fact checked Hines’ posts about pregnant women taking the COVID–19 vaccine, along with posts including data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). And in March 2021, the CDC flagged several misinformation trends for Facebook, including claims related to pregnancy and VAERS data. Because Hines does not provide dates for the fact checks, we cannot know whether the CDC could be responsible. In May 2022, Facebook restricted Hines’ account for posting an article discussing increased rates of myocarditis in teenagers following vaccination. A little over a year earlier, the CDC warned Facebook against claims of “unsubstantiated links to new [vaccine] side effects,” including “‘irritab[ility],’” “‘auto-immune issues, infertility,’” and “‘neurological damage including lowered IQ.’” 54 Record 17,042– 17,043 (emphasis deleted). There is no evidence that the CDC ever listed myocarditis as an unsubstantiated side effect—but because it is an alleged side effect, it at least falls under the same umbrella as the CDC’s communication. Health Freedom’s February 2023 violation, by contrast, was for posting that vaccine manufacturers would not compensate those with vaccine-related injuries—a topic that bears little resemblance to the content that the CDC flagged. . . .

The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics. This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from “exercis[ing such] general legal oversight” of the other branches of Government. TransUnion, 594 U. S., at 423–424. We therefore reverse the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.  (23-411 Murthy v. Missouri (06/26/2024).)

This is all patent sophistry, and it is also rank intellectual dishonesty as it is irresponsible at this late date to state, as Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett did, that myocarditis is only an alleged side effect of the “vaccines” developed during former President Donald John Trump’s warped “Operation Warp Speed.” To accept the word of the discredited “public health community” about anything, including Barrett’s incredible claim that the Centers for Disease Control had no role to play in the discrediting of the Great Barrington statement, is as irresponsible as it is inexcusable.

Then again, Amy Coney Barrett has a proven track record of taking the word of “public health” officials about the “necessity” of the draconian measures undertaken in 2020 that led to lockdowns masking mandates, and social distancing mandates. These measures were used by the likes of Governors Gavin Michael Newsom (D-People’s Republic of California), Andrew Mark Cuomo (Socialist Republic of New York), Michelle Lujan Grisham (Democratic Republic of New Mexico), Gretchen Whitmer (Workers’ Socialist Plutocracy of Michigan), Philip Murphy (Aristocratic Cryptocracy of New Jersey), and JB Pritzker (Unparalleled Corruptocracy of Illinois) to shut down churches and other alleged “houses of worship.”

Although she did not author the decision of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case of the Illinois Republican Party v. J. B. Pritzker, the Governor of Illinois, concerning whether hideous Pritzker had favored the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America over its free speech clause by permitting religious services to be conducted in accordance with Pritzker’s executive orders while forbidding the Republican Party of Illinois to hold its annual state convention, Judge Amy Coney Barrett did concur with the decision written by the Seventh Circuit’s Chief Judge, Sara L. Ellis, which gave Pritzker carte blanche to do as he pleased. Here is an excerpt from Chief Judge Ellis’s decision with which Judge Barrett concurred:

The world is currently facing a major global pandemic – one of the most significant challenges our society has faced in a century. There is no cure, vaccine, or effective treatment for COVID-19. As of June 30, more than 126,739 Americans have died due to the virus, 3 including approximately 6,923 Illinois residents. 4

In Illinois, there are more than 143,185 confirmed cases. 5 Despite efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, many states are experiencing a rise in new cases. Medical experts agree that to stop the spread of COVID-19, people should practice social distancing and wear face coverings when near other people outside their homes. Federal, state, and local governments have enacted measures to reduce the spread of this highly contagious and easily transferable virus while remaining sensitive to economic concerns and citizens’ desire to resume certain activities. In Illinois, following stay-at-home orders, the Governor developed a multi-stage plan to “safely and conscientiously resume activities that were paused as COVID-19 cases rose exponentially and threatened to overwhelm [the] healthcare system.” Doc. 10-1 at 5. On May 29, 2020, the Governor issued an Order related to this plan. The Order provides that “[a]ny gathering of more than ten people is prohibited unless exempted by this Executive Order.” Id. at 6. The Order exempts free exercise of religion, emergency functions, and governmental functions. Relevant here, with respect to free exercise of religion, the Order states that it:

[D]oes not limit the free exercise of religion. To protect the health and safety of faith leaders, staff, congregants and visitors, religious organizations and houses of worship are encouraged to consult and follow the recommended practices and guidelines from the Illinois Department of Public Health. As set forth in the IDPH guidelines, the safest practices for religious organizations at this time are to provide services online, in a drive-in format, or outdoors (and consistent with social distancing requirements and guidance regarding wearing face coverings), and to limit indoor services to 10 people. Religious organizations are encouraged to take steps to ensure social distancing, the use of face coverings, and implementation of other public health measures. Id. at 9.

The Governor issued the most recent executive order, EO 2020-43, on June 26, 2020. That order increases the gathering limit to fifty people but retains the exemption for free exercise of religion. See Doc. 12 at 3, 6. Plaintiffs allege that by merely “encourag[ing]” religious organizations and houses of worship to consult the IDPH guidelines, the Order treats religious speech differently. Plaintiffs contend that the Illinois Republican Party and its local and regional affiliates typically gather in groups greater than ten people for formal business meetings, informal strategy meetings, and other events. (lllinois Republican Party v. Pritzker, June 16, 2020.)

This is what I wrote in September of 2020 when then President Donald John Trump had nomination Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat on the Supreme Court of the United States of America by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has taken been assigned a seat in a very warm locale since her death, for twenty-seven dreadfully long years:

There are several aspects to this decision that reveal Judge Barrett’s susceptibility to legal groupthink.

Judge Ellis’s opinion, with which Judge Amy Coney Barrett concurred, was  premised upon the uncritical acceptance of the facts provided by the Centers for Disease Control that have been debunked by many sources, each of which has discussed the phenomena of inflating the numbers by labeling almost every death in this country as caused by “Covid-19,” killing people, whether by incompetence or malicious  intent, by the use of ventilators when there is no need to use them, the indiscriminate placement of non-coronavirus patients with those who are infected with the virus in hospital wards and nursing homes and the deliberate use of “comfort care” that has only one end: the killing of innocent human beings. To accept uncritically the gratuitous claims of healthcare officials who have been making things up as they go along is jurisprudentially irresponsible.

Moreover, Judge Sara L. Ellis used the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, February 20, 1905, as a precedent for the civil state to impose mandatory vaccinations when a vaccine for the China/Chinese/Wuhan/Covid-19/Coronavirus is development with the cells of aborted babies and that contains all manner of poisons that already causing adverse reactions among the volunteers who have receive the vaccinations in various trials (see AstraZeneca Vaccine Trials Suspended after Serious Adverse Reactions and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's. Intertwined History of Myelits and Vaccines):

“Our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘to guard and protect.’” S. Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (S. Bay II), 140 S. Ct. 1613, 1613 (2020) (Roberts, C.J., concurring) (quoting Jacobson, 197 U.S. at 38). When state officials “undertake[ ] to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,” their latitude “must be especially broad.” Id. (alteration in original) (quoting Marshall v. United States, 414 U.S. 417, 427 (1974)). Over a century ago in Jacobson, the Supreme Court developed a framework by which to evaluate a State’s exercise of its emergency authority during a public health crisis. There, the Court rejected a constitutional challenge to a State’s compulsory vaccination law during the smallpox epidemic. See generally Jacobson, 197 U.S. 11. Jacobson explained that “[u]pon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.” Id. at 27. The Court reasoned that the Constitution does not provide an absolute right to be “wholly freed from restraint” at all times, as “[t]here are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.” Id. at 26. Therefore, while “individual rights secured by the Constitution do not disappear during a public health crisis,” the government may “reasonably restrict[ ]” rights during such times. See In re Abbott, 954 F.3d 772, 784 (5th Cir. 2020). Judicial review of such claims is only available in limited circumstances. See S. Bay II, 140 S. Ct. at 1613–14 (Roberts, C.J., concurring) (where state officials do not exceed their broad latitude during a pandemic “they should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people” (citation omitted)); Jacobson, 197 U.S. at 31. If a State implements emergency measures during an epidemic that curtails individual rights, courts uphold such measures unless they have no “real or substantial” relation to public health or are “beyond all question, a plain, palpable invasion of fundamental rights secured by fundamental law.”

There is no doubt that Illinois is in the midst of a serious public health crisis, as contemplated in Jacobson. See Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church v. Pritzker (Elim II), No. 20- 1811, 2020 WL 3249062 (7th Cir. June 16, 2020) (citing Jacobson and explaining that courts do not evaluate orders issued in response to public-health emergencies by the usual standard); Cassell v. Snyders, No. 20 C 50153, 2020 WL 2112374, at *7 (N.D. Ill. May 3, 2020) (COVID19 qualifies as a public health crisis under Jacobson). Plaintiffs agree that Illinois has a compelling interest in fighting the pandemic. However, they suggest Jacobson is inapplicable because they do not assert an inherent right to gather but instead request equal treatment when others are permitted to gather. Jacobson draws no such distinction and instead provides for minimal judicial interference with state officials’ reasonable determinations. The Order undoubtedly relates to public health and safety because it minimizes the risk of virus transmission by limiting gathering size. Additionally, the Order still encourages religious organizations to limit indoor services to fifty people and implement other public health measures. Plaintiffs have not shown how this exemption is a plain invasion of their constitutional rights. The Order involves reasonable measures intended to protect public health while preserving avenues for First Amendment activities. Overall, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs have a less than negligible chance of prevailing on their constitutional claims because the current crisis implicates Jacobson and the Order advances the Governor’s interest in protecting the health and safety of Illinois residents. (lllinois Republican Party v. Pritzker, June 16, 2020. For a review of the insidious and unconstitutional nature of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, please see Antipapal Appointees Always Advance Antichrist’s Anti-Catholic Agenda.)

By accepting the gratuitous claims made by the statists in the public health community, judges such as Sara L. Ellis and Amy Coney Barrett are simply made of the same cloth as Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., and other current statists on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, as they have shown no willingness to even to look at any evidence that refutes those gratuitous claims and thus the need for making Americans prisoners in their own homes as the public health clowns keep changing their mind repeatedly.

Mind you, I do not care one whit about the Illinois Republican Party and consider its equating of political speech with the American concept of the “free exercise of religion” to be thoroughly Judeo-Masonic. However, the Pritzker case shows Amy Coney Barrett to be ready to accept draconian lockdown orders based solely on the word of those who are accustomed to instilling fear in the public and who have long desired to implement a police state in fact if not in name.

Judge Barrett’s concurrence with Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Ellis stands in sharp contrast to clear-sighted jurisprudence of United States District Court Judge William Strickman, who sits on the United States District Court for Western Pennsyvlania, which sits in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the case of County of Butler v. Wolf, September 16, 2020:

Jacobson was decided over a century ago. Since that time, there has been substantial development of federal constitutional law in the area of civil liberties. As a general matter, this development has seen a jurisprudential shift whereby federal courts have given greater deference to considerations of individual liberties, as weighed against the exercise of state police powers. That century of development has seen the creation of tiered levels of scrutiny for constitutional claims. They did not exist when Jacobson was decided. While Jacobson has been cited by some modern courts as ongoing support for a broad, hands-off deference to state authorities in matters of health and safety, other courts and commentators have questioned whether it remains instructive in light of the intervening jurisprudential developments….

The Court has reviewed {Lindsay F. Wiley & Stephen I. Vladeck, Coronavirus, Civil Liberties, and the Courts: the Case Against "Suspending" Judicial Review, 133 Harv. L. Rev. F. 179 (2020)} … and finds it both instructive and persuasive. There, the learned professors argue that Jacobson should not be interpreted as permitting the "suspension" of traditional levels of constitutional scrutiny in reviewing challenges to COVID- 19 mitigation measures…. The Court shares [these concerns] …. The Court will apply "regular" constitutional scrutiny to the issues in this case. Two considerations inform this decision—the ongoing and open-ended nature of the restrictions and the need for an independent judiciary to serve as a check on the exercise of emergency government power….

The Court closes this Opinion as it began, by recognizing that Defendants' actions at issue here were undertaken with the good intention of addressing a public health emergency. But even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered. The liberties protected by the Constitution are not fair-weather freedoms—in place when times are good but able to be cast aside in times of trouble.

There is no question that this Country has faced, and will face, emergencies of every sort. But the solution to a national crisis can never be permitted to supersede the commitment to individual liberty that stands as the foundation of the American experiment. The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a "new normal" where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures. Rather, the Constitution sets certain lines that may not be crossed, even in an emergency. Actions taken by Defendants crossed those lines. It is the duty of the Court to declare those actions unconstitutional. Thus, consistent with the reasons set forth above, the Court will enter judgment in favor of Plaintiffs. (County of Butler v. Wolf, United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, September 14, 2020.)

I do not know about you. However, I believe that Judge William D. Strickman IV’s jurisprudence in this instance is much better than that of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

It is even a little worse than this as Judge Barrett concurred with the opinion in Price v. City of Chicago, February 13, 2019, which upheld a very restrictive “buffer zone” to “protect” around abortuaries to “protect” women intent on killing their preborn babies from having to listen to sidewalk counselors and/or to receive literature from them about the evils of abortion. The decision centered around interpreting what then Chief Judge Sykes and Judge Barrett said was the controlling Supreme Court case, Hill v. Colorado, June 28, 2000, concerning buffer zones and sidewalk counselors that they were bound to apply in Price v. City of Chicago.

Although the legal arguments contained below may appear very arcane to readers unfamiliar with legal citation and what are considered to be binding precedents, even a simple glance at what follows will demonstrate yet another exercise in the sort of sophistry that governs American legal jurisprudence, so-called, in the Twenty-first Century:

In short, McCullen and Reed have deeply shaken Hill’s foundation.  Yet the case remains on the books and directly controls here. The plaintiffs urge us to follow the Third Circuit’s  lead  in  Bruni v. City of Pittsburgh, which reversed the dismissal of a challenge  to  Pittsburgh’s fixed  15-foot clinic buffer zone and  remanded  for  a  case-specific narrow-tailoring analysis  in  light  of  McCullen.  824 F.3d 353, 372–73(3d  Cir.  2016).  The court held that dismissal at the pleading stage was improper based on McCullen’s “important clarification of the rigorous and fact-intensive nature of intermediate scrutiny’s narrow-tailoring analysis.” Id.  at 372. This was so, the court held, notwithstanding circuit precedent that upheld Pittsburgh’s 15-foot buffer zone just a few years earlier.Id.at 367–73 (distinguishing Brown   v.   City   of   Pittsburgh, 586 F.3d 263 (3d Cir. 2009)). We do not regard Bruni’s approach as a viable option here.  As we’ve noted, Chicago’s bubble-zone ordinance is a carbon copy of the Colorado law upheld in Hill except for the smaller   radius   within   which   it   applies.   And Hill’s narrow-tailoring analysis was highly generalized; it did not rest on the specific facts of the case or an evaluation of Colorado’s evidentiary showing. Accordingly, a remand for a case-specific narrow-tailoring analysis would effectively deny Hill’s controlling force. It would also create a circuit split. In Brown, the  predecessor case to Bruni, the Third Circuit upheld a separate provision in Pittsburgh’s  abortion-clinic law establishing an 8-foot no-approach bubble zone within a 100-foot  radius of clinic entrances—“a  virtually verbatim copy of the Hill statute”—without requiring a factual showing from the City.586 F.3d at 273. Bruni left that part of Brown untouched.

Hill directly controls, notwithstanding its inconsistency with McCullen and Reed. Only the Supreme Court can bring harmony to these precedents. The district judge correctly dismissed the facial First Amendment challenge.

D. Due-Process Vagueness Claim

In a cursory final argument, the plaintiffs maintain that Chicago’s   bubble-zone ordinance    is unconstitutionally vague. This argument too is foreclosed by Hill, which rejected a vagueness challenge to Colorado’s bubble-zone law. 530 U.S.  at 732–33. The plaintiffs rely on Justice Kennedy’s dissenting position: “In the context of a law imposing criminal penalties for pure speech, ‘protest’ is an imprecise word; ‘counseling’ is an imprecise word; ‘education’ is an imprecise word.” Id.   at 73 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).   Perhaps he was right, but his view did not carry the day. The judge properly dismissed the due-process vagueness claim.

III. Conclusion

The road the plaintiffs urge is not open to us in our hierarchical system.  Chicago’s bubble-zone ordinance is materially identical to—indeed, is narrower than—the law upheld in Hill. While the Supreme Court has deeply unsettled Hill, it has not overruled the decision. So it remains binding on us. The plaintiffs must seek relief in the High Court. AFFIRMED. Price v. City of Chicago, February 13, 2019.)

Arguments such as these will show to even a casual reader that we have reach a point of utter madness when judges on Federal courts spend lots of verbiage to “protect” expectant mothers from any effort to change their minds about killing their babies.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett could have dissented from the Seventh Circuit’s findings and have written her reasons for doing so. However, she concurred, which might have been because she actually agreed with the tendentious line of casuistry that has nothing to do with the simple fact that abortuaries have no right to exist and wanted the Supreme Court to review the findings in Hill v. Colorado. However, Judge Barrett might have been “playing it safe” with a view to a possible future nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, which has indeed materialized. However, if this was the case in Price v. City of Chicago—and I do not know that it was the case, then I, for one, believe that it does not bode well for her decision-making process on the Supreme Court as one who trims his sails to secure his “establishment” credentials before being elevated to the high court may never find the courage to do anything other than equivocate once thereon. To speak the truth on the Supreme Court, it is a pretty nifty thing to have spoken it unequivocally before getting there as it is far easier to equivocate again and again after having learned to so in the past.

Obviously, this is a subjective judgment on my part. Granted.

However, the fact that Judge Amy Coney Barrett so readily accepted Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker’s draconian lockdown order as well as the underlying claims made by public health officials about the “necessity” of such lockdowns when a district court judge several hundred miles away came to a different conclusion in a similar case indicates a lack of intellectual curiosity on Mrs. Barrett’s part to question statist claims uncritically. Given all we know now about the way in which statists have tried to find one pretext after another for curbing legitimate liberties, including by the use of so-called “buffer zones” around baby-killing mills, Judge Barrett’s deference to our statist minders is troubling, to say the very least. (From Steeped in the Errors of Americanism and Conciliarism Through No Fault of Her Own.)

The fact Amy Coney Barrett has become a reliable institutionalist ally of John Glover Roberts, Jr., should come as no surprise to anyone who followed the lawsuits filed during the height of the plandemic in 2020 and 2021, admitting that her stubborn belief in the government narrative is tragic both for her and for the citizens of the United States of America.

Unfortunately, though, Justice Barrett is not alone as it was on Monday, June 24, 2024, the Feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, that the Supreme Court of the United States of America refused to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of a State of Connecticut statute that eliminated any religious exemptions from vaccine mandates for children:

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to a 2021 Connecticut law that eliminated the state’s longstanding religious exemption from childhood immunization requirements for schools, colleges and day care facilities.

The justices did not comment in leaving in place a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the contentious law. A lower court judge had earlier dismissed the lawsuit challenging the law, which drew protests at the state Capitol.

Connecticut law requires students to receive certain immunizations before enrolling in school, allowing some medical exemptions. Prior to 2021, students also could seek religious exemptions. Lawmakers ended the religious exemption over concerns that an uptick in exemption requests was coupled with a decline in vaccination rates in some schools.

The change allowed current students in K-12 who already had a religious exemption to keep it.

“This is the end of the road to a challenge to Connecticut’s lifesaving and fully lawful vaccine requirements," Democratic Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “We have said all along, and the courts have affirmed, the legislature acted responsibly and well within its authority to protect the health of Connecticut families and to stop the spread of preventable disease.”

Brian Festa, vice president and co-founder for the group We The Patriots USA Inc., a lead plaintiff in the case, called the decision “disappointing” but said it’s “not the end of the road for us in our fight to win back religious exemptions for schoolchildren.”

The group — which has challenged other vaccination laws, including for COVID-19 — had argued along with several parents that Connecticut violated religious freedom protections by removing the exemption. The new law shows a hostility to religious believers and jeopardizes their rights to medical freedom and child rearing, they said in court papers.

Tong's office said only one part of the case remains active. It involves a single plaintiff’s claim based on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). While the office said it was confident the claim will be dismissed, Festa said federal law is clear that schools are required to provide “a free and appropriate education” for children with disabilities who have individual education plans, even if a child claims a religious exemption to vaccinations.

We The Patriots USA also has an ongoing federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a Christian preschool and daycare that's challenging Connecticut's vaccine mandate on constitutional grounds.

“It is our practice at We The Patriots USA to battle on many fronts simultaneously, and to never put all of our eggs in one basket,” Festa said, calling the Supreme Court's decision on Monday “one setback, but far from a total defeat.” (Supreme Court rejects challenge to Connecticut law that eliminated religious vaccination exemption.)

Well meaning Americans do not realize that “success” is not to be found in a system of governance wherein no one in authority takes any cognizance of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. We are bound to be reduced to the status of being mere creatures of the anti-Incarnational, Judeo-Masonic civil state to be trampled upon underfoot by its caesars and caeserettes at their every arbitrary whim. The likes of Judge Terry Doughty are very rare. Far more common are the positivists and careerists who are to be found throughout the nooks and crannies of institutions founded without regard for pursuing the common temporal good of men in light of their eternal good, namely, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven.

Before discussing the much-maligned Associate Justice Samuel L. Alito’s very strong dissenting opinion in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, a word or two about Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s own institutionalism is in order as it was Associate White House under the notorious warmonger named President George Walker Bush that Kavanaugh played a key role in shaping the so-called Patriot Act that has turned the full national security apparatus loose on ordinary American citizens in the name of “protecting” us from ourselves. Kavanaugh also authored a legal opinion upholding the immoral practice of “enhanced interrogation” upon captured terrorists held at the American base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or in other places outside the territory of the United States of America.

The years of 2001-2003 were confusing for Americans as many tried to grapple with the fact that living in the greatest country on earth did not make us immune to large-scale terrorist attacks. These were also the years that Brett Kavanaugh served as associate White House Counsel for then-President George W. Bush.

In the aftermath of 9/11, many people began to believe that the government not only had a right to take drastic security measures against its own people but that our livelihoods actually depended on it. This fear gave birth to the monstrous national security state we live in today, where without just cause, civilians began being treated like criminals in our own country.

One of the most egregious acts perpetrated against the American people at this time was the PATRIOT Act. And one of its greatest supporters was Brett Kavanaugh.

According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which filed a Freedom of Information Act Request for Kavanaugh’s official government correspondence records from this era, the Supreme Court Justice nominee referred to the PATRIOT Act as a “measured, careful, responsible, and constitutional approach” in an email sent to a colleague. Anyone who knows anything about the PATRIOT Act knows that “constitutional” and “careful” are by no means accurate descriptions. The PATRIOT Act obliterated the Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to privacy and due process by giving the federal government sweeping new powers to conduct surveillance on the American people.

But his support of the legislation that signaled the downfall of American rule of law does not simply end with his favorable comments. Kavanaugh was also one of the individuals tasked with its drafting. He has been definitively credited with the line, “…the new law will update laws authorizing government surveillance.” And just this one line is rather problematic in itself. If he is the constitutionalist he has claimed to be on several occasions, then he would know that the Constitution already prohibits the government from broad, warrantless searches of this nature. This is not a protection that can simply be “updated.” And yet, his nonchalance over abolishing certain constitutional protections without a discussion of adopting an actual amendment is disconcerting.

The Torture Memos

The public’s discovery of the “torture memos” was a dark time in modern American history. We had been riding our moral high horse during the early years of the War on Terror, pretending that America was the global beacon of moral and ethical treatment. But when the memos, which were originally composed while Kavanaugh served the Bush Administration, were released in 2004, the entire world caught a glimpse of just how ugly military interventions really were.

The memos told a story of members of the Bush Administration attempting to broadly expand the legal definition of torture to justify such horrific acts as waterboarding and sleep deprivation as permissible. They also told of the administration’s quest to seek the authority to label anyone of their choosing an “enemy combatant,” thus, subjecting them to the possibility of indefinite detention in awful facilities like Guantanamo Bay. Their publication also added fuel to the already growing fire of animosity against George W. Bush who, at the time of the memo’s creation, was the employer of Judge Kavanaugh.

In 2006, when Judge Kavanaugh was being questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee as he waited to be confirmed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, he went on the record stating that he knew nothing of these memos before their public release. At several points during his hearing, he denied having anything to do with these memos specifically stating that he was “not involved” in any conversations regarding the rules governing the detention of combatants He also denied ever having seen the correspondence at all. He even told Senator Leahy:

I think with respect to the legal justifications or the policies relating to the treatment of detainees, I was not aware of any issues on that or the legal memos that subsequently came out. This was not part of my docket, either in the counsel’s office or as staff secretary.

The reason this has raised red flags for those already skeptical about Kavanaugh is that his position at the time dictated that memos and other written correspondence would have passed by his desk at some point before reaching their end recipient.

Enemy Combatants

Additionally, a year after the 2006 hearing, the Washington Post reported on a contentious meeting that had occurred in the White House in 2002. The conversation was centered on speculation as to whether or not the Supreme Court would accept the Bush Administration’s assertion that they could label an American citizen an “enemy combatant” at their discretion, allowing the person in question to be locked up for an indefinite amount of time.

As per the Washington Post’s reporting, Judge Kavanaugh was not only present at this meeting but was specifically summoned to weigh in on the matter since he was himself a former clerk for swing vote judge, Justice Kennedy. At the meeting, he voiced his concerns that Justice Kennedy and other swing voters on the Supreme Court would never side with the administration’s controversial decision. This meeting was brought up again just a couple of weeks ago, addressing the concerns some Senators still have over Kavanaugh’s insistence that he had no role in such conversations when it appears that he did.

As the New Yorker points out:

First, attending this meeting or even just contributing a reading of Justice Kennedy’s likely view would seem to constitute taking part in a discussion on detention policies, and thus to contradict Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony.

Senator Durbin, who sat on the Senate Judicial committee in 2006 sent Kavanaugh a letter in which he states, “it appears that you misled me,” but he never received a response, even after he followed up with Kavanaugh recently after he had received the Supreme Court nomination.

Metadata: Due Process for Me, Not for Thee

The 2013 Edward Snowden leaks were arguably one of the most significant events to occur over the last decade. For those who thought the government wasn’t capable of this magnitude of corruption, the blindfold was removed and the government’s true intentions were revealed. For those already skeptical, the leaks had confirmed preexisting suspicions.

In many ways, the Snowden situation drew a line in the political sand. Those who stood for freedom believed in the people’s inherent right to privacy and in upholding the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But those who supported and sustained the government’s mass surveillance of its own people made their views on individual liberty very clear. And Judge Kavanaugh was not on the right side of history.

At the heart of the Snowden situation was the question of whether or not metadata counted as government surveillance. The government, frantically scrambling to justify its actions, insisted that it was not actually data collection, since metadata did not technically provide any raw data. But metadata still gives very specific information about the type of data collected and therefore is still a violation of constitutional protections.

However, in a ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh ruled that “the Government’s metadata collection program is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment.” He also later stated that “that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.” Again, a rather odd conclusion for a staunch “constitutionalist” to support.

Congressman Amash expressed his concerns with Kavanaugh’s ruling, tweeting:

Future decisions on the constitutionality of government surveillance of Americans will be huge. We can’t afford a rubber stamp for the executive branch.

This mass surveillance of the American people not only violated the specific statutes in the Fourth Amendment that specified how individuals could be searched by the state, but it also violated the right of due process— the same due process that Kavanaugh has asked be upheld while he undergoes the confirmation process. (The Constitutional Reasons to Oppose Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.)

Brett Michael Kavanaugh was born and educated within the swampland of the greater Washington, District of Columbia, metropolitan area. He has always been and will forever be uncritically accepting of government claims concerning national security and public health. John Glover Roberts, Jr., did not have to do too much to convince him, Kavanaugh, to join him in supporting the Biden administration’s unconstitutional scheme to censor criticism of its policies in general and, in this case, the origins, nature and “protocols” issued to control the masses in the name of “public health” and is continuing to be used in the current election campaign in the name of “protecting democracy.”

Associate Justice Samuel L. Alito, joined by Associate Justices Neal Gorusch, who, as a creature of the written word that admits of no higher law above it, is a reliable friend of the lavender agenda, and Clarence Thomas, who is the senior most associate justice, wrote a blistering dissenting opinion to refute Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s contentions that the government of the United States of America did not engage in a massive campaign to violate the legitimate free speech rights of Americans opposed to the official narrative of the SARS CoV-2 virus, it origins, its treatment, and the harmful effects of the vaccines.

Even in this, however, Justice Alito began his dissent by disparaging most of the information that the government sought to censor before indicating his opposition to the censorship itself:

This case involves what the District Court termed “a far[1]reaching and widespread censorship campaign” conducted by high-ranking federal officials against Americans who ex[1]pressed certain disfavored views about COVID–19 on social media. Missouri v. Biden, 680 F. Supp. 3d 630, 729 (WD La. 2023). Victims of the campaign perceived by the lower courts brought this action to ensure that the Government did not continue to coerce social media platforms to suppress speech. Among these victims were two States, whose public health officials were hampered in their ability to share their expertise with state residents; distinguished professors of medicine at Stanford and Harvard; a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine; the owner and operator of a news website; and Jill Hines, the director of a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.

 To protect their right to do so, the District Court issued a preliminary injunction, App. 278–285, and the Court of Appeals found ample evidence to support injunctive relief. See Missouri v. Biden, 83 F. 4th 350 (CA5 2023).

If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years. Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government, see Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U. S. 443, 451–452 (2011), and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts, see United States v. Alvarez, 567 U. S. 709, 751 (2012) (ALITO, J., dissenting). The speech at issue falls squarely into those categories. It concerns the COVID–19 virus, which has killed more than a million Americans.1 Our country’s response to the COVID–19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic importance, and our dedication to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissenting views on such matters be allowed.

I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID–19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value. Some was undoubtedly untrue or misleading, and some may have been downright dangerous. But we now know that valuable speech was also suppressed.2 That is what inevitably happens when entry to the marketplace of ideas is restricted.

Of course, purely private entities like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment, and as a result, they may publish or decline to publish whatever they wish. But government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech, see National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U. S. 175 (2024), and that is what happened in this case. The record before us is vast. It contains evidence of communications between many different government actors and a variety of internet platforms, as well as evidence regarding the effects of those interactions on the seven different plaintiffs. For present purposes, however, I will focus on (a) just a few federal officials (namely, those who worked either in the White House or the Surgeon General’s office), (b) only one of the most influential social media platforms, Facebook, and (c) just one plaintiff, Jill Hines, because if any of the plaintiffs has standing, we are obligated to reach the merits of this case. See Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc., 547 U. S. 47, 52, n. 2 (2006).

With the inquiry focused in this way, here is what the record plainly shows. For months in 2021 and 2022, a coterie of officials at the highest levels of the Federal Government continuously harried and implicitly threatened Facebook with potentially crippling consequences if it did not comply with their wishes about the suppression of certain COVID–19-related speech. Not surprisingly, Facebook repeatedly yielded. As a result Hines was indisputably injured, and due to the officials’ continuing efforts, she was threatened with more of the same when she brought suit. These past and threatened future injuries were caused by and traceable to censorship that the officials coerced, and the injunctive relief she sought was an available and suitable remedy. This evidence was more than sufficient to establish Hines’s standing to sue, see Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 561–562 (1992), and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.

That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send. (23-411 Murthy v. Missouri (06/26/2024).)

There is no need to go into further details of how Alito eviscerated Barrett’s majority opinion except to note the following excerpt near the end of his powerful dissent:

Finally, Facebook’s responses to the officials’ persistent inquiries, criticisms, and threats show that the platform perceived the statements as something more than mere recommendations. Time and time again, Facebook responded to an angry White House with a promise to do better in the future. In March, Facebook attempted to assuage the White House by acknowledging “[w]e obviously have work to do to gain your trust.” 30 Record 9365. In April, Facebook promised to “more clearly respon[d] to [White House] questions.” Id., at 9371. In May, Facebook “committed to addressing the defensive work around misinformation that you’ve called on us to address.” 9 id., at 2698. In July, Facebook reached out to the Surgeon General after “the President’s remarks about us” and emphasized its efforts “to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.” Id., at 2690. And of course, as we have seen, Facebook repeatedly changed its policies to better address the White House’s concerns. See supra, at 7, 10, 13.

The Government’s primary response is that Facebook occasionally declined to take its suggestions. Reply Brief 11; see, e.g., supra, at 10. The implication is that Facebook must have chosen to undertake all of its anti-misinformation efforts entirely of its own accord.

 That is bad logic, and in any event, the record shows otherwise. It is true that Facebook voluntarily undertook some anti-misinformation efforts and that it declined to make some requested policy changes. But the interactions recounted above unmistakably show that the White House was insistent that Facebook should do more than it was doing on its own, see, e.g., supra, at 11–12, and Facebook repeatedly yielded—even if it did not always give the White House everything it wanted.

Internal Facebook emails paint a clear picture of subservience. The platform quickly realized that its “handling of [COVID] misinformation” was “importan[t]” to the White House, so it looked for ways “to be viewed as a trusted, transparent partner” and “avoid . . . public spat[s].” Committee Report 181, 184, 188. After the White House blamed Facebook for aiding an insurrection, the platform realized that it was at a “crossroads . . . with the White House.” Id., at 294. “Given what is at stake here,” one Facebook employee proposed reevaluating the company’s “internal methods” to “see what further steps we may/may not be able to take.” Id., at 295. This reevaluation led to one of Facebook’s policy changes. See supra, at 8–10.

Facebook again took stock of its relationship with the White House after the President’s accusation that it was “killing people.” Internally, Facebook saw little merit in many of the White House’s critiques. One employee labeled the White House’s understanding of misinformation “completely unclear” and speculated that “it’s convenient for them to blame us” “when the vaccination campaign isn’t going as hoped.” Committee Report 473. Nonetheless, Facebook figured that its “current course” of “in effect explaining ourselves more fully, but not shifting on where we draw the lines,” is “a recipe for protracted and increasing acrimony with the [White House].” Id., at 573. “Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration,” such as the EUU. S. dispute over “data flows,” that did not “seem like a great place” for Facebook-White House relations “to be.” Ibid. So the platform was motivated to “explore some moves that we can make to show that we are trying to be responsive.” Ibid. That brainstorming resulted in the August 2021 rule changes. See supra, at 13, 19–20.

In sum, the officials wielded potent authority. Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Facebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield.

For these reasons, I would hold that Hines is likely to prevail on her claim that the White House coerced Facebook into censoring her speech.

 * * *

For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to ad[1]dress this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent. (23-411 Murthy v. Missouri (06/26/2024).)

Justice Alito’s dissent notwithstanding, the Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri, June 26, 2024, gives the administration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., a greenlight to proceed with its current censorship plan against former President Donald John Trump and all subsequent totalitarian schemes of social control if the decrepit, corrupt, venal, and incompetent stooge of the left who has sold his soul to the Red Chinese just as surely as he sold it to the devil himself when announcing his support for the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, is reelected to a second term on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.

A secular commentator noted as much:

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri dropped Wednesday, shattering the hopes of conservatives that maybe, just maybe, the Judicial Branch would stand up for the First Amendment rights of ordinary Americans against the egregious abuses of the executive bureaucracy.

But no. The Court instead ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing because the Biden White House allegedly backed off of its censorship campaign after the 2022 midterms (it didn’t). The ruling essentially allows the federal government to continue trampling on the First Amendment rights of ordinary Americans by deputizing social media companies to do what federal agencies cannot do directly: police what Americans are allowed to say online.

If this result shocks you, if you’re surprised and outraged that the Supreme Court, which you thought was dominated by a solid conservative majority, you shouldn’t be. If you thought the supposedly conservative majority on the Court was going to check the worst impulses of the executive branch and restore the constitutional rights of Americans, you shouldn’t have. If you reposed your hope for the survival of the American republic in five or six black-robed justices who would stand athwart the tyranny of the administrative state and the collapse of our political institutions, you can say goodbye to all that. The Supreme Court is not going to save America.

And just to be clear, neither is Donald Trump. In fact, the Court’s ruling makes it all the more likely that Trump won’t even get the chance, because it gives the Biden administration a greenlight to ramp up a speech suppression campaign ahead of the November election through “censorship by surrogate,” in the memorable phrase of constitutional law attorney Jonathan Turley.

But whatever happens in November, the Court’s failure to protect the free speech rights of Americans against censorship by the government should be a wake-up call for all of us. Our institutions are rotten, they do not function as intended, and we cannot rely on them to protect us or maintain our constitutional system of government. This is as true of the Supreme Court as it is of Congress and the Executive Branch. (The Supreme Court Is Not Going To Save You.)

All I can say is that no one who bothers to read my commentaries over the decades would ever think for a moment that any institution of the Federal government has had the ability to “save us” as our institutions our rotten because the founding principles from which they sprang are rotten.

The problem is not this or that administration or this or that composition of Congress or the Supreme Court.

The problem is the Constitution itself, which makes no provision for Christ the King and His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls. That is the problem, and the rot we are seeing at this time is only the manifestation of the perfection of the founding principles’ inherent degeneracy.

First Principles First

The remote cause for all human problems, both personal and social, is Original Sin. The proximate cause of human problems, both personal and social, is Actual Sin. Human beings are wounded by Original Sin. Those of us who are baptized suffer from the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin (the darkened intellect, the weakened will, a disordering of the balance between our higher rational faculties and lower sensual passions). Those who are unbaptized suffer all of the ravages of Original Sin in their immortal souls that are captive to the devil and his minions. There is no legal, political, constitutional, electoral, interdenominational, nondenominational, secular, philosophical, ideological, naturalistic way to solve problems that are caused by the sin of Adam and the sins of us all.

Men will descend into the depth of madness and violence over the course of time as men and their societies move more and more away even from the vestigial influences of Catholicism in the world. Is it any accident that the chief Marxist in the presidential race, Bernard John Sanders, and the man who the mucky-mucks in the Democratic Party “establishment” believe can stop his “big mo” (see Bush, George Herbert Walker, 1980: Now they will be after me, howling and yowling at my heels. What we will have is momentum. We will look forward to Big Mo being on our side, as they say in athletics.” He lost to Ronald Reagan—George Herbert Walker Bush and the "Big Mo"), Michael Rubens Bloomberg, are unbaptized men of Jewish origin who are, despite their differences, militant supporters of baby-killing?

It is indeed true that there were social problems during the era of Christendom in Europe. The difference between then and now is simple: most men understood that they were sinners in need of cooperating more fully with the graces won for them on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, and that flow into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. Men knew that they had to amend their lives, that social order depended upon order within their own souls.

Is there any such understanding today?

Consider Pope Pius XII's concise description of the difference between Christendom and Modernity, contained in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939:

It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her waste; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of settling them, for they had then an effective moral sense of the just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the unlawful, which, by restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way open to an honorable settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis which has overthrown the sound principles of private and public morality. (Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939.) 

The errors of pluralism divide people needlessly into warring camps as a permanently-established political class, composed of competing sets of naturalists, each of which believes that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation is, at best, a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order. So many Americans live from election to election, always believing that “change,” whether it be in the direction of "progress" for naturalists of the “left” or in the direction of “constitutionalism” or “liberty” or “limited government” for naturalists of the “right.”

Although divisions on some matters will always occur until the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead on the Last Day at the Second Coming of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it is also true that men today have been needlessly divided about matters pertaining to First and Last Things, oblivious to the fact that they have been given a spotless mother, Holy Mother Church, to serve as their mater and magister (mother and teacher) in this passing, mortal vale of tears. Most men today believe that they are automatons, either independent of any concept of God or “free” from the “dictates” of a hierarchical church.

Personal and social disaster cannot but be the result of such a brew of error. Men resort more and more to violence today because they do not know of the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. They do not know that they have a Blessed Mother who made possible their salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the father at the Annunciation. They do not realize that the supernatural helps they need to overcome all sin in their lives and to pray for the conversion of those who are promoting evil in society flow through the loving hands of that same Blessed Mother, who gave the Rosary with her own blessed hands to Saint Dominic de Guzman so that we could be more closely united to her Divine Son, Christ the King, through the mysteries contained in her psalter, the Rosary.

Most men today do not realize that there is nothing that any of us can suffer, whether personally or socially, that is equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross and that caused those Seven Swords to be thrust through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. They tend, therefore, to dwell on their own pain, whether real or imagined, and to stew in their own juices as they conjure up hatred for their fellow human beings, each of whom is made in the image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and for whose salvation we must pray fervently as one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy.

Living in a world that has been deprived of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, most men today are "catechized" by television or the internet or what passes for "entertainment" in popular culture. They are tossed about from one thing to another without having any clear, coherent understanding of their identity as redeemed creatures and that each of us will have to make an accounting of our lives at the moment of our Particular Judgments. Men who lack the Catholic Faith, you see, must descend more and more into a coarseness of life and culture that produces a class of neo-barbarians who are not only at the gates but who are well inside of the fort of the city.

As been noted exhaustively on this site for the past sixteen years—and for more than a decade before that in printed journals (and for decades in my college classrooms), the descent into neo-barbarism just did not happen suddenly. It has been gradual, almost imperceptible at times. Having ridden the shock waves of the Protestant Revolution, which was a violent and very blood revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church as they order their own lives and the laws of their nations in accord with His Deposit of Faith, men descended by steps into theological relativism, religious indifferentism and the worldliness that feeds on an ethos of naturalism and an unbridled licentiousness that passes for what libertarians tell us is “civil liberty.”

The result of this has been the rise of what can be called the incessant and ever-escalating battle between the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and “right,” which, no matter differences in approach are based in the same fundamental error from which flow their idiosyncratic variations on a naturalist theme of human self-redemption:

I refer to the “false opposites” of the "left" and the “right” because, despite their differences over  the powers "government" over that of the "individual," both the “left” and the “right” reject Catholicism as the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

The adherents of the “left” and the “right” believe that it is neither prudent or necessary to acknowledge that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother has changed human history. Such adherents also reject any suggestions that both men and their nations must be subordinate to Christ the King and the authority of His true Church on all that pertains to the good of souls and that the civil government has an obligation to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End.

No matter the differences between “conservatives” and “liberals,” my friends, they both have one mind and one heart in the belief that man does not need the teaching and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church to guide them in their private and social lives. This is, of course, the triumph of the Judeo-Masonic spirit of naturalism that was dissected so well by Pope Leo XIII. It matters little as to who is or is not a formally enrolled member of the “lodges” when most Catholics and non-Catholics alike are infected with the ethos of naturalism.

Similarly, any civil leader who believes that can, either by himself or with others, pursue genuine order without the help of Our Lady and the use of her Most Holy Rosary is a fool. We must give public honor to Christ the King and to Our Lady, she is the Queen of both men and nations.

No one on the public stage does this as even most Catholics who are said to be “pro-life” even though they believe that at least one "exception," if not three, can be made to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment, to the protection of innocent preborn and are complete supporters of the vivisection of human beings under the aegis of the medical industry’s manufactured, profit-making myth called “brain death” and of “palliative care” have no understanding of the necessity of pursuing the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End. The vicious cycle of agitation between “left” and “right” in recent years that has broken out into violence at times (see Overthrow the Social Reign of Christ the King, Live In A World Awash With Hatred and Blood for a commentary after the shooting of United States Representative Stephen Scalise (R-Louisiana) on June 14, 2017, by a supporter of Bernard John Sanders, James Hodgkinson) will continue until the “left” vanquishes the “right” when older voters die off and are replaced by the younger voters who have been programmed to be ideological “leftists” and ahistorical enemies of truth. Such neo-barbarians have quite an ally in the person of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has signaled his own support for international socialism on many occasions.

This is why the “left” will triumph for a time until the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as is it impossible to fight the forces of darkness with the very evils from which they arose in the first place.

As the anti-Catholic Russian nationalist Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn noted at Harvard University on June 6, 1978:

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation at first by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "communism is naturalized humanism.'     

This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. (This is typical of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century and of Marxism). Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.   

The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.)  

Solzhenitsyn, who is should be pointed out, was a Russian nationalist and thus had a bias against the Catholic Church and her teaching authority, especially as pertains to Papal Primacy and to her constant condemnation of contraception, which he, Solzhenitsyn supported in the name of “population control,” explained forty-one years that his condemnation of socialism did not mean that he could recommend the Western culture of consumerism and materialism as the model for his own country should Communism end there (as it supposedly did on December 25, 1992, as the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was lowered and the tri-color flag of Russia was raised up a flagpole in its place):

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being.

Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?  (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts .)

The Nobel Laureate gave this address nearly eleven months after riots had broken out in the Borough of Brooklyn in the City of New York, New York, when the inept utility company, Consolidated Edison, suffered an outage at a power plant in Astoria in the Borough of Queens on Wednesday, July 13, 1977. Solzhenitsyn was saying in his address, in effect, that Americans are in trouble if the only thing keeping the masses from rioting and looting is Consolidated Edison, known colloquially in New York and environs as “Con Ed.”

Things are even worse forty-seven years later as men has grown so accustomed to grave evils that are protected under cover of the civil and celebrated throughout the nooks and crannies of what passes for popular culture that it is nearly impossible to convince men steeped in a plethora of empty pleasure-seeking to see the world through the eyes of the true Faith, something that Pope Pius IX discussed one hundred sixty years ago in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864:

But, although we have not omitted often to proscribe and reprobate the chief errors of this kind, yet the cause of the Catholic Church, and the salvation of souls entrusted to us by God, and the welfare of human society itself, altogether demand that we again stir up your pastoral solicitude to exterminate other evil opinions, which spring forth from the said errors as from a fountain. Which false and perverse opinions are on that ground the more to be detested, because they chiefly tend to this, that that salutary influence be impeded and (even) removed, which the Catholic Church, according to the institution and command of her Divine Author, should freely exercise even to the end of the world -- not only over private individuals, but over nations, peoples, and their sovereign princes; and (tend also) to take away that mutual fellowship and concord of counsels between Church and State which has ever proved itself propitious and salutary, both for religious and civil interests.

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.)

Why do we waste our time on the “injurious babbling” of naturalism?

How is it possible not to see that the members of the false opposites of the organized crime families of the naturalist “left” and of the naturalist “right” believe that material well-being is the ultimate raison d’etre of civil government, differing only as to whether the “free market” or the coercive redistribution of wealth mandated by the confiscatory taxing and regulatory powers of the civil state are the best way to do so?

How is it possible not to understand that nations that are reduced to the secular or naturalistic lowest common denominator must be doomed to the fate described by Pope Pius Leo III in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900?

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

The leftist dissenters from the 1960s and their progeny, both biological and ideological, have become the “hierarchy” of a secular “church,” if you will, with its own set of “doctrinal” orthodoxies and the ability, especially by virtue of the digital-based communications into which most people have plunged themselves so readily, to punish, excommunicate, disenfranchise, imprison, and (perhaps one day in the not-too-distant future) execute social heretics as enemies of the civil state and thus of their authoritarian concept of “democracy.” The day may be coming when the elitists who control Western governments will declare large groups of “deplorables” to be either noncitizens, nonpersons, or both, meaning that illegal aliens will have more legal “rights” than those native-born citizens who are stripped of their citizenship.

As Pope Leo XIII noted in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, “popular sovereignty” is a falsehood that leads to the sort of instability and, as he noted exactly fifteen years later in Tametsi Futura Prospicentibus, to practical atheism as the lower common denominator of social discourse, a phenomenon that was but the logical consequence of the Protestant Revolution in the Sixteenth Century:

But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law.

24. Amongst these principles the main one lays down that as all men are alike by race and nature, so in like manner all are equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over other men. In a society grounded upon such maxims all government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people, and the people, being under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler. It does choose, nevertheless, some to whose charge it may commit itself, but in such wise that it makes over to them not the right so much as the business of governing, to be exercised, however, in its name.

25. The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a State becomes nothing but a multitude which is its own master and ruler. And since the people is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all rights and of all power, it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God. Moreover. it believes that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion; or to inquire which of the very many religions is the only one true; or to prefer one religion to all the rest; or to show to any form of religion special favor; but, on the contrary, is bound to grant equal rights to every creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form of religious belief.

26. And it is a part of this theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred to private judgment; that every one is to be free to follow whatever religion he prefers, or none at all if he disapprove of all. From this the following consequences logically flow: that the judgment of each one’s conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks.

27. Now, when the State rests on foundations like those just named — and for the time being they are greatly in favor — it readily appears into what and how unrightful a position the Church is driven. For, when the management of public business is in harmony with doctrines of such a kind, the Catholic religion is allowed a standing in civil society equal only, or inferior, to societies alien from it; no regard is paid to the laws of the Church, and she who, by the order and commission of Jesus Christ, has the duty of teaching all nations, finds herself forbidden to take any part in the instruction of the people. With reference to matters that are of twofold jurisdiction, they who administer the civil power lay down the law at their own will, and in matters that appertain to religion defiantly put aside the most sacred decrees of the Church. They claim jurisdiction over the marriages of Catholics, even over the bond as well as the unity and the indissolubility of matrimony. They lay hands on the goods of the clergy, contending that the Church cannot possess property. Lastly, they treat the Church with such arrogance that, rejecting entirely her title to the nature and rights of a perfect society, they hold that she differs in no respect from other societies in the State, and for this reason possesses no right nor any legal power of action, save that which she holds by the concession and favor of the government. If in any State the Church retains her own agreement publicly entered into by the two powers, men forthwith begin to cry out that matters affecting the Church must be separated from those of the State.

28. Their object in uttering this cry is to be able to violate unpunished their plighted faith, and in all things to have unchecked control. And as the Church, unable to abandon her chiefest and most sacred duties, cannot patiently put up with this, and asks that the pledge given to her be fully and scrupulously acted up to, contentions frequently arise between the ecclesiastical and the civil power, of which the issue commonly is that the weaker power yields to the one which is stronger in human resources.

29. Accordingly, it has become the practice and determination under this condition of public polity (now so much admired by many) either to forbid the action of the Church altogether, or to keep her in check and bondage to the State. Public enactments are in great measure framed with this design. The drawing up of laws, the administration of State affairs, the godless education of youth, the spoliation and suppression of religious orders, the overthrow of the temporal power of the Roman Pontiff, all alike aim to this one end — to paralyze the action of Christian institutions, to cramp to the utmost the freedom of the Catholic Church, and to curtail her ever single prerogative.

30. Now, natural reason itself proves convincingly that such concepts of the government of a State are wholly at variance with the truth. Nature itself bears witness that all power, of every kind, has its origin from God, who is its chief and most august source.

31. The sovereignty of the people, however, and this without any reference to God, is held to reside in the multitude; which is doubtless a doctrine exceedingly well calculated to flatter and to inflame many passions, but which lacks all reasonable proof, and all power of insuring public safety and preserving order. Indeed, from the prevalence of this teaching, things have come to such a pass that may hold as an axiom of civil jurisprudence that seditions may be rightfully fostered. For the opinion prevails that princes are nothing more than delegates chosen to carry out the will of the people; whence it necessarily follows that all things are as changeable as the will of the people, so that risk of public disturbance is ever hanging over our heads.

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.

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 way 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 anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity that makes no place for Christ the King and His true and that is premised upon a belief that men can pursue the common temporal good solely by the use of their own unaided powers must result in a dictatorship of the apparatchiks that is exercised in the name of “the people” under the banners of “equality.” We have gone from arguing the inarguable (supernatural and natural truths over which contingent beings have no authority and which are defied by those contingent beings to the detriment of themselves and their nations) to making that which is false so inarguable that all truth, supernatural and natural, must be suppressed.

As I have noted so many times before, the only path out of this tragic state affairs is through the Sorrowful and Immaculate of Mary as there is no secular, interdenominational, nondenominational, religiously indifferentist, constitutional, or political way in which to extricate ourselves from pluralism’s chaotic abyss, something that Pope Pius XI pointed out in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another. . . .

Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man's personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.

22. It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: "Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit." (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14)

23. The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. "From whence are wars and contentions among you?" asks the Apostle St. James. "Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?" (James iv, 1, 2)

24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.

25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism -- the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ -- becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)

26. Perhaps the advantages to one's family, city, or nation obtained in some such way as this may well appear to be a wonderful and great victory (this thought has been already expressed by St. Augustine), but in the end it turns out to be a very shallow thing, something rather to inspire us with the most fearful apprehensions of approaching ruin. "It is a happiness which appears beautiful but is brittle as glass. We must ever be on guard lest with horror we see it broken into a thousand pieces at the first touch." (St. Augustine de Civitate Dei, Book iv, Chap. 3)

27. There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)

28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

That last paragraph, number twenty-eight, says it all. The gist of the two hundred thirty-seven articles linked at the top of this article can be summarized in the following words written by Pope Pius XI ninety and one-half years ago:

They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Sadly, many Catholics continue to waste their energies and consume their time and efforts (if not money!) in vain sterile efforts to find a remedy for the ills of Modernity without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. This is why I am not watching the so-called debate this evening as I have nothing to learn from it whatsoever. It is nothing other than a pure Judeo-Masonic sideshow.

Neither liberalism nor socialism and its variants are the foundation of social order. Catholicism, though not a guarantor of order given the vagaries of fallen human nature, is alone the only means that can provide men and their nations with the foundation for a just social order.

here is no naturalistic, electoral, political, or legal way out of the mess in which we find ourselves. We are witnessing the manifestation of the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles, a degeneration that includes social decadence and nihilism.

We must stand firm on behalf of our Catholic Faith at all times and in all situations as we recall the following words from Pope Pius XII’s Christmas Message to the world’s Catholics on December 24, 1943:

The path of humanity in the present confusion of ideas has been a path without God, indeed against God; without Christ, indeed against Christ. With this we do not want or intend to offend the wanderers; they are and remain our brothers.

However, it is appropriate that Christianity also considers that part of the responsibility, which falls to her in today's trials. Or haven't many Christians also made concessions to those false ideas and directions of life, so often disapproved by the magisterium of the Church?

Every lukewarmness and every rash bargaining with human respect in the profession of faith and its maxims; every pusillanimity and vacillation between good and evil in the practice of the Christian life, in the education of children and in governing the family; any hidden or manifest sin; all of this, and what more could be added, was and is a mournful contribution to the disaster which today is ravaging the world. And who would ever have the right to consider himself innocent of any fault? Reflection on yourselves and your works and the humble acknowledgment of this moral responsibility will make you perceive and feel in the depths of your soul how dutiful and holy a prayer and an action that appeases and implores the mercy of God and help to save the brothers; giving that honor back to God. (Pope Pius XII, Christmas Radio Message to the Peoples of the Whole World, December 24, 1943.)

We must make reparation for our own sins, which have worsened the state of the world-at-large and that of the Church Militant on earth far, far more than we might be willing to understand or to accept, which is why it is necessary for us to offer up all our works, prayers, and sufferings to the Throne of the Most Blessed Trinity by surrendering ourselves freely as the consecrated slaves of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

We may not live long enough to see a happy resolution to the problems that afflict the world because of the sins of men who are either contemptuous of the laws of God or reject them outright. However, it is our duty to pray ceaselessly for the conversion of all men to the true Faith and to exhort them according to time and circumstances of our dealings with others to develop a profound love for Our Lady, the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, and a total consecration to her Divine Son through her Immaculate Heart.

Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary is the key to getting us out of the mess that the world is in now, something that Pope Pius XII noted in Ingruentiam Mallorum, September 15, 1951:

We do not hesitate to affirm again publicly that We put great confidence in the Holy Rosary for the healing of evils which afflict our times. Not with force, not with arms, not with human power, but with Divine help obtained through the means of this prayer, strong like David with his sling, the Church undaunted shall be able to confront the infernal enemy, repeating to him the words of the young shepherd: “Thou comest to me with a sword, and a spear, and with a shield; but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of armies . . . and all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear, for this is his battle, and he will deliver you into our hands” (I Kings 17, 45-47)

16. For this reason, We earnestly desire, Venerable Brethren, that all the faithful, following your example and your exhortation should respond solicitously to Our paternal exhortation, uniting their hearts and their voices with the same ardor of charity. If the evils and the assaults of the wicked increase, so likewise must the piety of all good people increase and become ever more vigorous. Let them strive to obtain from our most loving Mother, especially through this form of prayer, that better times may quickly return for the Church and society.

17. May the very powerful Mother of God, moved by the prayers of so many of her sons, obtain from her only Son — let us all beseech her — that those who have miserably wandered from the path of truth and virtue may, with new fervor, find it again; that hatred and rivalry, which are the sources of discord and every kind of mishap, may be put aside, and that a true, just, and genuine peace may shine again upon individuals, families, peoples, and nations. And, finally, may she obtain that, after the rights of the Church have been secured in accord with justice, its beneficent influence may penetrate without obstacle the hearts of men, the social classes, and the avenues of public life so as to join people among themselves in brotherhood and lead them to that prosperity which regulates, preserves, and coordinates the rights and duties of all without harming anyone and which daily makes for greater and greater mutual friendship and collaboration. (Pope Pius XII noted in Ingruentiam Mallorum, September 15, 1951.)

We must trust in Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and pray that our fidelity will bear good fruit for ourselves and for the whole world as we await the day when the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart will made manifest and as her Divine Son, Christ the King, takes His rightful place among men and their nations once again after a true pope has taken his place on the Throne of Saint Peter.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Irenaeus, pray for us.