Mercer Bannon Trump, The Holy War, Infiltration and Subversion of the Catholic Church
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Its clear that Steve Bannon is using his Psychological Warfare PSYOP tactics, exploiting internal divisions in the Catholic Church to infiltrate, gain influence and subvert it for his own benefit.
Bannon openly campaigned to tear down American institutions, the Republican Party and the government. His white nationalism was first ignored, then tolerated and even welcomed by some. When Trump brought him to the White House as a top aide, Bannon’s appointment was cheered by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party and other white nationalist groups.
Backed by the power of enormous amounts of money from the uber-wealthy Mercers, Bannon and Breitbart were being normalized. They worked to normalize Trump.
Such was Bannon’s ability to infiltrate society with his and Trump’s morally reprehensible attitudes, they both vigorously campaigned for Alabama’s Senate candidate Roy Moore — who was credibly accused by multiple women of molesting them when they were adolescents and teens. Moore led in the polls for weeks before his defeat.
“Time Inc.’s Board of Directors has unanimously determined that this all-cash transaction, and the immediate, certain value it provides, is in the best interests of the Company and its shareholders,” John Fahey, chairman of the board, said in a statement.
The Koch brothers are Republican donors and have funded rightwing libertarian causes throughout the years. Their investment into the Time bid caused concerns that they would try to wield influence over Time‘s editorial agenda.
Great. The Koch brothers are about to be co-owners of TIME, Inc. How long til TIME, People and Sports Illustrated are pushing stories about how much better life would be if we canceled Social Security and Medicare?
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 27, 2017
With the Koch brothers buying Time Magazine the magazine will begin including weekly centerfolds of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Scott Walker.
Nobody, but nobody, buys news media properties *unless* it is to exercise some influence through or over them…not least because it usually makes little economic sense otherwise #Time#KochBrothers
Brands belonging to Meredith and Time Inc. will have a combined readership of 135 million and paid circulation of nearly 60 million, Meredith reported.
Ex-KGB Soviet Defector Yuri Bezmenov
(They are the slickest little weasels around….they created an excellent video (above) and then direct you to their propaganda website that teaches you false reasoning and other things designed to alter and manipulate your attitudes and voting behavior) (see In site Abuses at the Bar of Public Reason – Thomas Jefferson 1801)(Some one shut me down on twitter early 11/7/2018 (@lightforliberty) is currently suspended.)
85% of Russia’s spy time money and manpower goes to a slow process we call ideological subversion and (active measures).
This inquiry is running alongside four similar ones being conducted by politicians in Congress, and Mr Bannon spoke to one of them on Thursday.
He appeared in front of the House intelligence committee as part of their own, separate, investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
But he frustrated the committee when he refused to answer their questions, opting instead to answer 25 pre-written questions that had been approved by the White House
It led top Democrats to call for contempt proceedings against Mr Bannon.
“There was a refusal to answer any questions that would have brought out the full facts. That is not how privilege works. That’s how stonewalling works,” the panel’s Democratic leader Adam Schiff said.
The ultra-right populism of the president’s former top adviser is in sync with Euro-Russian reaction.
March 19 2018
But if Bannon, Trump, and Putin all agree that Russiagate is fake news, they have something else in common too: Trump’s far-right nationalism, Europe’s growing, proto-fascist nativism, and Russia’s own traditionalist, Orthodox Church–based version of nationalism, are converging—and there’s evidence they are increasingly working together, or at least in parallel. Over the past week, Bannon toured Western Europe, dispensing his rough-edged benediction on Italy’s far right. He spoke at a rally for France’s fascist-tinged National Front (“let them call you racist…wear it as a badge of honor”). He met with a leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). And he praised Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (“a real patriot and a real hero”), whose fascist-leaning, Islamophobic ruling Fidesz party leans toward Putin. Next door, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria has established a five-year cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia party.
Indeed, many of these Euro-rightists applaud Russia, whose leaders have reportedly returned their approval. And it’s worth remembering that for years Bannon has also looked favorably on Russia, not least because he apparently believes that Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia are Christian allies against the Muslim world. Bannon sees Russia as the bastion of something not too far removed from the Catholic-inspired right-wing nationalism that he himself espouses. In a 2014 speech at an event hosted by the Human Dignity Institute at the Vatican—whose text was published by Buzzfeed—Bannon went on a some length explaining the nature of his attraction to Putin’s Russia. “Vladimir Putin, when you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of his beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism; he’s got an adviser who harkens back to Julius Evola and writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian fascism,” said Bannon.
Robert Reich: America’s Most Dangerous Export October 16 2018
Fernando Haddad flags up ties after populist’s son boasted of meeting ex-Breitbart chief Oct 7 2018
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has taken a starring role in Brazil’s increasingly antagonistic presidential election, with opponents of Jair Bolsonaro flagging up the far-right frontrunner’s links to the “democracy-sabotaging” North American nationalist.
(UPDATE) Putin signs new restrictions that limit where and how Christians share the gospel.
July 08, 2016 8:00 AM Christianity Today
Update (July 8): This week, Russian president Vladimir Putin approved a package of anti-terrorism laws that usher in tighter restrictions on missionary activity and evangelism.
Despite prayers and protests from religious leaders and human rights advocates, the Kremlin announced Putin’s approval yesterday. The amendments, including laws against sharing faith in homes, online, or anywhere but recognized church buildings, go into effect July 20.
Christians in Russia won’t be allowed to email their friends an invitation to church or to evangelize in their own homes if Russia’s newest set of surveillance and anti-terrorism laws are enacted.
The proposed laws, considered the country’s most restrictive measures in post-Soviet history, place broad limitations on missionary work, including preaching, teaching, and engaging in any activity designed to recruit people into a religious group.
To share their faith, citizens must secure a government permit through a registered religious organization, and they cannot evangelize anywhere besides churches and other religious sites. The restrictions even apply to activity in private residences and online.
The Weaponization of Religion:
Bannon is weaponizing religion like he weaponizes Racisism Hate and Fear.
Billionaire investor Robert Mercer pumped $2 million into a conservative nonprofit group that used Facebook and Google to target anti-Muslim ads toward certain voters in swing states in 2016, according to tax records obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics.
The ads — three in all — mimic travel advertisements intended to stoke fears of Muslim influence in France, Germany and the United States. Most voters were never exposed to the ads because they were targeted toward people most likely to be receptive to them, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mercer spent millions of dollars in 2016 to support the campaign of President Trump and is a prominent backer of conservative causes.
The following sections taken from various parts of the article.
From: The War against Pope Francis:
In 2013, shortly after his election, while he was still surfing a wave of almost universal acclaim for the boldness and simplicity of his gestures – he had moved into a couple of sparsely furnished rooms in the Vatican grounds, rather than the sumptuous state apartments used by his predecessors – Francis purged a small religious order devoted to the practice of the Latin Mass.
The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a group with about 600 members (men and women), had been placed under investigation by a commission in June 2012, under Pope Benedict. They were accused of combining increasingly extreme rightwing politics with a devotion to the Latin Mass. (This mixture, often seen alongside declarations of hatred of “liberalism”, had also been spreading through online outlets in the US and the UK, such as the Daily Telegraph’s Holy Smoke blog, edited by Damian Thompson………
…Cardinal Burke’s combination of anti-communism, ethnic pride and hatred of feminism has nurtured a succession of prominent rightwing lay figures in the US, from Pat Buchanan through Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon, alongside lesser-known Catholic intellectuals such as Michael Novak, who have shilled untiringly for US wars in the Middle East and the Republican understanding of free markets.
…When the commission reported in July 2013, Francis’s reaction shocked conservatives rigid. He stopped the Friars using the Latin Mass in public, and closed down their seminary. They were still allowed to educate new priests, but not segregated from the rest of the church. What’s more, he did so directly, without going through the Vatican’s internal court system, then run by Cardinal Burke. The next year, Francis sacked Burke from his powerful job in the Vatican’s internal court system. By doing so, he made an implacable enemy.
2014
……… It was Cardinal Burke who invited Bannon, then already the animating spirit of Breitbart News, to address a conference in the Vatican, via video link from California, in 2014. Bannon’s speech was apocalyptic, incoherent and historically eccentric. But there was no mistaking the urgency of his summons to a holy war: the second world war, he said, had really been “the Judeo-Christian west versus atheists”, and now civilisation was “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism … a very brutal and bloody conflict … that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years … if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not … fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting.”
…The outcome was that Francis reinstated the man Burke had sacked, and appointed another man to take over most of Burke’s duties. This was punishment for Burke’s quite untrue claim that the pope had been on his side in the original row.
If God is on Our Side
He will Stop the Next War:
Bannon is Back, Infiltrating the Catholic Church, to weaponize and subvert it for his own purposes:
Its clear that Steve Bannon is using his Psychological Warfare PSYOP tactics, exploiting internal divisions in the Catholic Church to infiltrate, gain influence and subvert it for his own benefit.
When you examine Steve Bannon you will know it is not good. It is not to promote the love of Jesus Christ.
Identity Evropa is pushing its members to stealthily infiltrate Republican politics to move the party towards its agenda of banning non-white immigration. Oct 17 2018
The Catholic opposition to Pope Francis is headquartered in the United States. It is a minority within the U.S. Church, but it is well organized. Its main intellectual organ is First Things, its episcopal leader Archbishop Chaput. But just as nineteenth-century European ultramontanists looked beyond the Alps to Rome, this movement is looking beyond the Atlantic. Besides the sympathetic Catholic journalists who spread archbishop Vigano’s “testimony” on August 27, there are also more overtly partisan leaders of this movement, such as Cardinal Raymond Burke and Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist. Burke and Bannon have both become involved with a right-wing Roman Catholic organization in Rome, the Dignitatis Humanae Institute. Bannon is now one of its leaders; Burke is president of its board of advisers. The institute has been described by its founders as an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West.”
There are indeed “reactionary elements” at the Vatican. But the bigger problem might be here with the Catholic Church in America, specifically those not-so-small quarters of extreme theological, cultural, and political conservatism within bishops’ chanceries, in seminaries, and at Catholic colleges. It can be tempting to draw a parallel with the nationalist Catholic group Action Française, which Pius XI condemned in 1926. But there is no single group in the U.S. that has become as significant. Still, the “radical traditionalist Catholicism” embodied by Bannon and Burke is representative of something larger than the fringe out of which the schismatic Society of St. Pius X grew in the 1970s, itself an offspring of reactionary, anti-Vatican II French-speaking Catholicism with deep roots in the neo-fascist French political right.
Since I came to America almost nine years ago, I’ve been struck not only by the patriotism of American Catholics, but also by a nationalism unlike that of Catholics anywhere else in the world—a combination at once complicated and delicate. What to make, for example of Trumpian Catholics (like Mark Bauerlein, senior editor at First Things, for instance) who seem closer to Putinist Russian Orthodox Christians than to the political culture not just of Pope Francis, but of the average Catholic in the world? Or of Pat Buchanan, who ispraising Putinas the real defender of Christianity today? True, there are French Catholic nationalists, but laïcité, the secular soul of the French Republic, remains a safeguard; the United States doesn’t have the equivalent. The separation of church and state in the U.S. is constitutionally different from the separation in France. G. K. Chesterton famously quipped that America is “a nation with the soul of a church.”
what to make, for example of Trumpian Catholics (like Mark Bauerlein, senior editor at First Things, for instance) who seem closer to Putinist Russian Orthodox Christians than to the political culture not just of Pope Francis, but of the average Catholic in the world? Or of Pat Buchanan, who is praising Putin as the real defender of Christianity today?
By Jennifer S. Cohn
December 27, 2017
Citations updated July 20, 2018
If you don’t yet know about the Council for National Policy (“CNP”) you should read this Thread. It will help you understand what’s happening to our country.
“The Council for National Policy (CNP), is an umbrella organization and networking group for social [anti-abortion, anti-gay] conservative activists in the United States. … Nation magazine has called it a secretive organization that ‘networks wealthy right-wing donors together with top conservative operatives to plan long-term movement strategy.’” http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/council-for-national-policy/
4. In 1981, the CNP’s first executive director told Newsweek that “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party of philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.” via @ReaderAdrift
This is not about reform of the Church. It is about exploiting a real crisis with the goal of placing the Church in the hands of servants of Mammon. It is an attempt by the wealthy to buy the next pope.
Instead of handing the Church over to rich vigilantes, the obvious thing to do is listen to Scripture. Where crime has been committed, Caesar is the guy to tackle it according to Romans 13. What happened in Pennsylvania needs to happen on a global scale. Victims need to be recompensed and perps punished by the work of the state, not by rich parasites exploiting a crisis for their own benefit.
It is a decision facing thousands of clerics as Ukraine prepares to sever ties to the Russian Orthodox Church going back to 1686.
For the Ukrainian authorities it is an essential step to tackling Russia’s malign influence on its soil, four years after Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists in a conflict that has killed more than 10,000 people.
Exclusive: files reveal Trump was the target of an extensive spying operation in the late 1980s by the country’s intelligence service, with ‘friends’ from the KGB
The trio walked into the gleaming lobby and took the lift up to the executive floor. Their meeting was with Donald J Trump. For the men from behind the Iron Curtain, Trump was a celebrity capitalist. He was also, we now know, the target of an extensive spying operation conducted by Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) intelligence service – together with “friends” from the KGB.
The StB had been interested in Trump since 1977, when he married a Czechoslovakian-born woman, Ivana Zelníčková. News of the wedding reached the StB bureau in Zlín, the town in Moravia where Ivana grew up and where her parents lived. Ivana’s father, Miloš, regularly gave the StB information on his daughter’s visits from the US and his son-in-law’s burgeoning career.
Exclusive: aided by Ivana Trump’s father, intelligence service with KGB ties targeted high-level government information, files show
October 29 2018 The Guardian
The communist intelligence service in Prague stepped up its spying campaign against Donald Trump in the late 1980s, targeting him to gain information about the “upper echelons of the US government”, archive files and testimony from former cold war spies reveal.
Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) carried out a long-term spying mission against Trump following his marriage in 1977 to his first wife, Ivana Zelníčková. The operation was run out of Zlín, the provincial town in south-west Czechoslovakia where Zelníčková was born and grew up.
Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a “conspiratorial” informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.
New archive records obtained by the Guardian and the Czech magazine Respekt show the StB’s growing interest in Trump after the 1988 US presidential election, won by George HW Bush. The StB’s first directorate responsible for foreign espionage sought to “deepen” its Trump-related activity.
A former StB official, Vlastimil Daněk – tracked down to the village of Zadní Arnoštov, where he lives in retirement – confirmed the Trump operation. Addressing the matter publicly for the first time, he said: “Trump was of course a very interesting person for us. He was a businessman, he had a lot of contacts, even in US politics.
“We were focusing on him, we knew he was influential. We had information that he wanted to be president in future.”
White House Counsel Ty Cobb: “I don’t think it’s a witch hunt.”
Two misinformation campaigns spent years sowing discord in US and elsewhere Oct 17 2018
How Brett Kavanaugh Made Russian Election Interference Easier and Robert Mueller’s Job Harder
The Supreme Court nominee gutted part of a law that prevented foreign influence in US elections.
Pema LevySeptember 5, 2018 1:45 PM
In February, special counsel Robert Mueller handed down a stunning indictment against 13 Russians and three Russian companies for interfering in the 2016 election. The 37-page document laid out an expansive and well-financed influence operation to sow discord in the election and help elect Donald Trump. It included charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.
To the surprise of many, there were no election-related charges. The reason is almost certainly a 2011 ruling by Brett Kavanaugh.
From the start, Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has generated concern that the DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge, who has expansive views of presidential power, immunity, and secrecy, will protect Trump from the Russia probe if confirmed to the nation’s highest court. But little attention has been paid to a decision he wrote that already paved the way for foreign election interference and is making Mueller’s job harder—a decision that some election law experts view as sloppy and politically motivated.
Cambridge Analytica and the creation of right wing media
