William Barr is Opus Dei
William Barr was confirmed as attorney general by the Senate on Feb 14. “High on his agenda will be what to do with the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe” according to the Washington Post.
Before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in January, Barr had completed a questionnaire. On page 4, he listed positions he’s held as director of the Catholic Information Center (2014-1017), director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (2004-2009) and director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (1994-2015).
For those who don’t read my blogs, the Opus Dei Catholic Information Center’s “members and leaders continue to have an outsize impact on policy and politics. It is the conservative spiritual and intellectual center … and its influence is felt in all of Washington’s corridors of power,” the Washington Post stated recently.
An official arm of the Catholic Church:
- “Opus Dei is an efficient machine run to achieve worldly power,” wrote investigative reporter Penny Lernoux in her book, People of God.
- “Opus Dei pursues the Vatican’s agenda through the presence of its members in secular governments and institutions and through a vast array of academic, medical, and grassroots pursuits. Its constant effort [is] to increase its presence in civil institutions of power. [T]heir work in the public sphere breaches the church-state division that is fundamental to modern democracy,” noted Gordon Urquhart, author of The Pope’s Armada: Unlocking the Secrets of Mysterious and Powerful New Sects in the Church (1995).
- “Opus Dei uses the Catholic Church for its own ends which are money and power …. Its members form a transnational elite. They seek to colonize the summits of power. They work with stealth – ‘holy discretion’ – and practice ‘divine deception,’” Robert Hutchison wrote in the introduction to his book, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei
- “Opus Dei is mostly middle- and upper-class businessmen, professionals, military personnel and government officials. Its members control a large number of banks and financial institutions,” according to Martin A. Lee, author and activist who has written books and articles on far-right movements.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center is a right-wing Catholic think tank. The EPPC is still headed by George Weigel, one of the Religious Right’s founding theocons. The EPPC board of directors includes Robert P. George, former adviser to Pres. George W. Bush. Deal Hudson, another theocon, once remarked, “If there really is a vast, right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s basement.” George founded Princeton University’s James Madison James Program. “It functions in many ways as a vehicle for conservative interests.” It is funded in part by Opus Dei. Also on the EPPC board is Leonard A. Leo, busy transforming the U.S. judiciary into the branch of government most influenced by Opus Dei.
The Becket Fund is a Religious Right legal group “redefining religious liberty” as the “primary legal and public relations strategy” to “resist the advance of LGBT equality and restrict women’s access to reproductive care.”
For further information, see my blogs:
11/13/18 Opus Dei’s Influence on the U.S. Judiciary
1/22/19 “Opus Dei’s Influence is Felt in All of Washington’s Corridors of Power”
3/22/19 Resurgence of the Catholic Political Right under Trump
I am author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America.
Comments
So here comes the nuts
next on the list abortion
From Zero Hedge
DOJ Concludes Obamacare Unconstitutional And Should Be Struck Down
In a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration's legal battle against President Obama's health care law, Justice Department lawyers now say the entire Affordable Care Act should be struck down.
307
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
Scotus disagreed
Or will an "emergency" supersede them too?
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Also
Barr was employed by the CIA from 1973 to 1977, right after he graduated from Columbia. In 1977 he got his JD from George Washington University.
I guess while he was in the CIA he was taking night classes.
Probably spying on his fellow students
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Cornell West and Robert George
Here they are together
Scroll down to see the short video.
I have listened to the full length presentation and question session they give together across the country on various college campuses.
Here is one at American University:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5dVnAIcYrU]
We have the regular deep state
embedded in our government and now we have the Catholic deep state. This is becoming like a massive game of government whack a mole. When one leaves, another (or two or four) pops up. Sigh.
A reminder, six of the nine current justices are Catholic and three are Jewish. Only about 20% of the population of the US is Catholic. Plus when RBG steps down, three of the four judges Trump is considering to replace her are also Catholic.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
So I say to no one in particular, what the heck?
Why all the Catholics? DH says from another room..."they tend to be Facists".
Boy oh boy. I grew up with Franciscans, who lived as they preached: barefoot friars. They gave all they had to the poor, and asked that we did too.
Diocesan priests have taken over a lot of neighborhood churches formerly run by the orders. The orders always had a chief or religious prelate who stood between them and Rome. The diocesan priests pretty well were a direct line to Rome. Much cleaner hierarchy.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
Meanwhile, on another front in the theocon wars,
one of two candidates running for WI Supreme Court was one of those clowns who thought that the US Supreme Court's decision overturning anti-homosexuality laws meant that bestiality was also by definition constitutionally protected. Needless to say, he didn't reason in the opposite direction -- that if sex between any two consenting adult humans wasn't protected, then neither in fact was sex between two married heterosexuals.
He was Scott Walker's chief counsel -- which tells you everything you need to know about how he conceptualizes "ethics" -- before Walker appointed him to fill an unexpected opening on the state court of appeals. Horrifically, he was re-elected to the post in 2017, when the term he was filling expired. BTW, this guy is a young punk, so when I tell you that he was writing nauseating anti-gay stuff back in law school, you need to know that was less than 15 years ago.
Most recently, the Wisconsin Realtor's Association, which had been backing him, pulled their endorsement due to bad publicity, when it turned out that he was on the board of a private christian elementary school whose policies were explicitly discriminatory (across all dimensions) against anybody that wasn't just a straight-up cis-hetero. Here's their statement:
(It's interesting to me that the school bases its curriculum on the "Ambleside" method, developed, I have learned, in the late 1800s by an Englishwoman named Charlotte Mason. I started reading the introduction to her original work, and I was startled at how forward-thinking a lot of it was -- and also, how very much contradictory to much of what passes for modern American christian homeschooling philosophy.)
It's also amusing that the response from the campaign was this:
Note the dig at "Madison". This is Wisconsin politics code for "commies, hippies, and homasekshuls". It doesn't matter that the WRA is an enormous statewide organization whose board is chosen from all across Wisconsin. It doesn't matter that they are one of the most politically reactionary actors in all of wisconsin, backing Scott Walker on every damned thing at every turn, or that WRA President Mike Theo (!!!!!) started his life as a republican hack staffer, and then saw where the real lucre was and became a real estate lobbyist down at the Capitol.
Anyway, the main point is that the guy is christofascist sumbitch who has mistaken his savage hatred for humanity for a love of god and all that is good.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
These Opus Dei folks are in for a big surprise
when they die and find themselves in the Hot Place.
Bless their hearts, they don't have a clue.
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone