I remember reading the chapter in the wildly popular book Freakonomics years ago about abortion and crime. According to studies cited in Freakonomics, an increase in abortion rate correlates with a decrease in crime rates over time.

“Yes, of course,” I thought. “If one kills unborn children, then they most certainly cannot grow up to be criminals. They also cannot grow up to be mothers and fathers, nurses, teachers, friends, and grandparents.” The Freakonomics logic makes perfect sense, in other words. But only when seen through the Malthusian lens of the dismal science. Life is terrible if you’re poor—or so the probably misguided view of economics’ underpinnings goes—so the best course of action is just to spare as many as possible from the nightmarish fate of being born.

Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun’s arrest by the Chinese Communist Party puppets in Hong Kong nails one more scalp to the Communist Wall of Religious Persecution. Communists (and their fellow travelers worldwide) hate religion. Communists hate God. This is nothing new, and it will never change. Even before Cardinal Zen was thrown into a Communist dungeon in what was once one of the most vibrant and Catholic-friendly cities in East Asia, Communists have been gunning for anyone who believes in a higher power than the Party.

Veteran Hollywood actor and practicing Catholic Mark Wahlberg’s new movie, “Father Stu,” has been garnering a great deal of press. The film is about a hard-drinking, hard-living man who has a change of heart, gets right with God, and goes on to do good work in his community and beyond.

Now, making a movie about a faith-filled Catholic priest is, in theory, a wonderful thing to do. Regardless of its cinematic merits, or lack thereof, the fact that “Father Stu” was funded by the lead actor himself, Mark Wahlberg, indicates that Wahlberg wanted to convey a Catholic message to as wide an audience as possible. A big-ticket movie potentially reaches hundreds of millions, even billions of people worldwide. By portraying a Catholic priest in (what Wahlberg must have thought, at least, to be) a positive light, Wahlberg was surely trying to proselytize at least as much as he was just trying to make a movie. “Father Stu,” therefore, can be read as an act of outreach, a way of spreading the Gospel in a world often hostile to Jesus and His Church.

From the first malign tinkering with the Mass in the 1960s until July 16, 2021, the Novus Ordo regime was parasitic on the authentic liturgies of the Church. A fiction veiled the dependency. The “hermeneutic of continuity” (a new dogma, by necessity, even though the Second Vatican Council is always said to have been merely pastoral) excused the rupture by pretending that what was different was the same.

When Pope Francis issued his motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, the fiction was dropped. The hermeneutic of continuity ended on that July day. The Novus Ordo regime—what I have been calling Newchurch—left the company of the Catholic Church the moment Traditionis Custodes went into effect. Newchurch removed itself from the protective canopy of the Mass and installed itself as a separate, false church in opposition to the Bride of Christ.

Joe Biden and the Democrats pitched her as a Black woman. But that is a canard. Ketanji Brown Jackson is a Trojan horse for anti-humanism. 

During the nomination hearings for the Biden administration’s Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senate Judiciary Committee member Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) asked Judge Jackson what should have been an easy question.

On Tuesday, March 22, after Judge Jackson had deflected two of the Senator’s previous questions relating to a ruling by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the “enduring” significance of differences between the two sexes, Senator Blackburn put the matter in the simplest of terms:

“Can you provide a definition for the word, ‘woman’?”

Judge Jackson answered, “No. I can’t.”

Gorgias Wiggle is a curious little man. Like Paris Hilton, he is famous for being famous. And his fame is exponential, a force of nature. Wiggle holds many titles and Beltway offices, and universities throw honorary titles at him the way revelers on Mardi Gras floats throw doubloons. Accolades stick to Wiggle like refrigerator magnets. He possesses uncommon fortune in getting himself appointed to councils and roundtables and posts. It’s a kind of pseudo-intellectual simony, if you will. Wiggle’s name is always available for branding—if the price is right. Life has been very kind to Gorgias. He has made himself all things to all people, with the usual results in a fallen world.

But the sophistry required to climb the ladders propped up on either side of the Acela tracks is not Gorgias Wiggle’s main talent. The speechifying and summer seminar appearance-making pay the bills, to be sure. And thank God for that. But the general punditry is all just a sidebar. Wiggle’s sophistry is much more focused, and he has been nothing if not consistent in practicing it. Wiggle’s job title is “conservative Catholic.” That is where he really makes his mark. Wiggle is the face of the “conservative Catholic” genre, the ambassador of the brand.

“Something Told Me to Keep Going”

Chatham County, Georgia, police officer Joseph Robertson was on duty in the middle of December, 2021, when he got a call about a two-vehicle crash on a dead-end road. He was on the scene within minutes.

When he arrived he immediately ascertained that the driver of one of the vehicles was unhurt. He then ran to the second vehicle, which was on fire. Officer Robertson broke the rear window with his baton and reached inside of the burning wreck, which by that point was engulfed in flames and billowing smoke.

Vladimir Putin sent his Russian Federation troops into Ukraine in the last week of February 2022. Within a matter of days, Putin, his ministers, and then everyone in Russia had been hit with devastating sanctions. Indiscriminately, every single participant in the Russian economy was cut off from credit and reduced to using a currency spiraling into worthlessness. Russian mothers, children, the handicapped, the elderly—Washington wants them all dead.

As Ludwig von Mises Institute Director Jeff Deist and economist Bob Murphy point out on a recent Mises podcast, the sanctions against Russia are metastasizing rapidly. Valery Gergiev, the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic, has been fired. A Canadian youth hockey league and the Paralympics are banning Russians entirely.  A Russian soprano singer named Anna Netrebko was kicked out of the Metropolitan Opera in New York for not denouncing her country’s president. Russia has been banned from participating in the World Cup. The United States Department of Justice has already created a “task force” to seize the private property of Russian citizens whom Washington has decided—on what standard it is not known—are “oligarchs”.

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
the Titanic sails at dawn
and everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”

—Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

In a February 23, 2022, Washington Examiner piece titled, “China’s support for Russia turns Ukraine into battleground for new world order,” foreign affairs reporter Joel Gehrke writes:

China has given “tacit approval” for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine, in the judgment of U.S. officials, as part of a joint effort to undermine the institutions that American and allied leaders established to minimize conflict in the decades following World War II.

“Russia and the PRC also want a world order,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Wednesday. “But this is an order that is and would be profoundly illiberal. ... It is an order that is, in many ways, destructive rather than additive.”

About this time five years ago, American leftists were screaming—literally bellowing up at the sky—that they were moving to Canada. “Donald Trump is a fascist!” they cried. “Tyranny is taking over the United States!”

One after another, Democrats took to Twitter to announce their imminent departure for our neighbor to the north. The USA is a dictatorship—Yukon ho!

Whoops.