vigano archbishop
===
see ed fucking martin
Carlo Maria Viganò, who used to be a far-right full-on MAGA Catholic archbishop, is now a far-right full-on MAGA former archbishop, having been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church in July. Viganò has been one of the most frenzied right-wing critics of Pope Francis, who he called a “servant of Satan.”
Viganò apparently intends to continue using his platform to rile up right-wing activists. He released a raving rant against the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games, which set off more than a few religious-right activists. Viganò’s statement went much further than claims of blasphemy, anti-Christian bias, and “wokeism.” He also promoted false far-right conspiracy theories claiming that the wife of French President Emanuel Macron and former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama are actually men:
It is no coincidence that the one sponsoring this revolting carnival is an emissary of the World Economic Forum, Emanuel Macron, who passes off a transvestite as his own wife with impunity, just as Barack Obama is accompanied by a muscular man in a wig. It is the reign of mystification, of falsehood, of fiction erected as a totem, in which man is disfigured precisely because he was created in the image and likeness of God.
Viganò’s statement was irresistible to BlazeTV’s Sara Gonzales, who called it “the take that everyone needs to be talking about.” She called attention to Viganò’s remarks in the Monday episode of her “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered” show. “He brings up both Big Mike [the snide term used by far-right activists who claim Michelle Obama is a man] and Macron, the president of France’s ‘wife,’ question mark?”
The ridiculous claims about Michelle Obama, often accompanied by falsified documents and faked photos, were featured in a Teen Vogue investigation into such misogynist and anti-trans disinformation in March, which noted that “baseless, lurid, purposely rude theories about Michelle Obama being ‘a man’” have been circulating online for at least a decade as “part of an attempt to discredit both her and President Obama.”
The thoroughly debunked claim about Macron’s wife has been given new life online this year by far-right pundit Candace Owens.
On her show, Gonzales showed a video clip of Michelle Obama dancing on The Ellen Show and claimed that the video shows something “shaking” in her pants—an obsession in some corners of the internet—with Gonzales repeatedly showing the clip and asking her producers to “zoom in.”
Asking why these conspiracy theories or drag queen performances matter, Gonzales returned to Viganò’s statement, which says “Tolerance cannot be the alibi for the systematic destruction of Christian society.” Responded Gonzales, “Well said.”
Viganò built a following in the MAGA movement with his near-religious devotion to Trump. In 2020, Vigano published an open letter praising Trump as a leader in the struggle between “the children of light and the children of darkness.” The letter was rife with conspiracy theories.
After Trump lost the election, Viganò appeared on the weekly prayer call of Stop the Steal activist Ed Martin on the eve of a Nov. 13 Stop the Steal rally. Vigano suggested that Trump’s opponents were “forces of evil” and that “the kingdom of darkness has sought to subvert the outcome of the presidential elections.” A month later, Vigano participated in an ecumenical pro-Trump rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war.
Reuters reported that after his excommunication, Viganò released a diatribe against Francis for representing an “inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly” church, none of which Viganò means as a compliment.
rww 8 24
===
nancy let
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum, raised an :{important question}: last December: “What kind of capitalism do we want?” He posited that there were three potential forms:
- Shareholder capitalism—which currently dominates Western corporations and is focused on maximizing short-term profits;
- State capitalism—otherwise known as “democratic socialism”—which trusts the government with setting the direction of the economy; or
- Stakeholder capitalism—a system in which corporations serve the interests of all their stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and local communities.
Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in part to promote the benefits of stakeholder capitalism. During a speech in July, President-elect Joe Biden :{said that:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: “It’s way past time to put the end to the era of shareholder capitalism. The idea [that] the only responsibility a corporation has is its shareholders—that is simply not true …They have a responsibility to their workers, their community, to their country.”
Recognizing that the coronavirus pandemic had exposed “inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions of multiple systems—from health and financial to energy and education,” the World Economic Forum launched :{an initiative called:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:“The Great Reset” in June 2020 to extol the principles of stakeholder capitalism. Klaus :{wrote}: that the initiative’s goals would have three main components.
- Governments should improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements, and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy.”
- Investments should advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.
- Innovations of the :{Fourth Industrial Revolution:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: should be harnessed to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.
Of course, those on the far left who are :{committed}:to viewing corporations as the enemy have responded to this initiative with derision. But they have a point. For the most part, the Great Reset relies on voluntary efforts from corporations to reform themselves, asking the government to merely “create the conditions” for change. While such efforts may be laudable, they have never been sufficient. Some form of regulatory oversight is necessary.
On the far right, however, the Great Reset has become grist for massive QAnon-like conspiracy theories used by various groups to promote their own self-interests. For example, Justin Haskins is often :{referred}: to as “a leading authority on the Great Reset” in right-wing media. He not only :{writes}: for publications like Breitbart, he is the :{editorial director}: and a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian public policy think tank :{founded}: in 1984 to deny the science of climate change. That is the backdrop on which Haskins distorts the message of the Great Reset, transforming it into a socialist plot to implement the Green New Deal, when in fact it is anything but socialist.
In short, the Great Reset is a proposal to completely alter the entire global economy, moving it more toward collectivism and away from capitalism. According to its most ardent supporters, the purpose for the “Great Reset” is three-fold: (1) repairing the global economic damage caused by the coronavirus; (2) stopping a coming climate change catastrophe; and (3) using the two previously mentioned “crises” as an opportunity to advance socialist ideals, including the destruction of capitalism and individual rights.
Another major proponent of a conspiracy theory about the Great Reset is Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,aformer Vatican ambassador to the United States and an outspoken adversary of Pope Francis. In October, he :{penned a letter}: to Donald Trump warning that “the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity.”
A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is aglobal élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations…
The purpose of the Great Resetis the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gateswith the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups…
As is now clear, the one who occupies the Chair of Peter has betrayed his role from the very beginning in order to defend and promote the globalist ideology, supporting the agenda of the deep church, who chose him from its ranks.
According to Viganò, the “deep state” has now been joined by the “deep church,” headed by the Pope he :{attempted}: to unseat.
Tucked away in Viganò’s letter is a reference to another conspiracy theory recently :{promoted}:by televangelist Pat Robertson about Biden merely being a placeholder for a Harris presidency. The archbishop wrote that, “It is obvious that those who manipulate [Biden] already have someone worse than him ready, with whom they will replace him as soon as the opportunity arises.” It should come as no surprise, then, that Christian nationalists have once again joined far right Catholics in spreading lies.
[vid]
if all of this talk about a globalist conspiracy crafted by the elites sounds familiar, that’s because it has always been the foundational message coming from Steve Bannon, who :{joined:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: Archbishop Viganò in attempting to undermine Pope Francis. Bannon is now using his Youtube channel :{to promote:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: a slightly different, but even more sinister take on the Great Reset.
In Bannon-land, the great reset is an opportunity for the elite cabal to “depopulate” the earth to 500 million, then genetically engineer humankind using “the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering.” He explains that the Democrats are attempting to “steal this election” because “if they can thwart the will of the people in this country,” they’ll be able to achieve the great reset by taking down populist movements in other countries as well.
As you can see, whether your agenda is to deny climate change, challenge the Pope, or warn of an impending apocalypse, the Great Reset can be twisted into a conspiracy theory to meet your needs, regardless of how many lies that requires.
===
mojo
pray for death of francis?!
...
One way to tell that these tensions have reached a boiling point is that Trump—lacking a nuanced understanding of most things but possessing a sharky instinct for blood—noticed them. Throughout his reelection campaign, Trump bypassed the already conservative church hierarchy in favor of the dissident Catholic far right. He promoted figures like podcaster Taylor Marshall, author of the 2019 anti-Francis book Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church From Within. Trump tweeted a link to an open letter that Archbishop Viganò had sent him, warning of a “deep church” collaborating with the “deep state” to undermine his presidency. After Trump’s defeat, Viganò joined Strickland and Marshall in addressing the December 2020 “Jericho March” in Washington, DC: an interfaith “Stop the Steal” prayer rally that was a precursor to the violence on January 6. In early January 2021, Viganò went on Steve Bannon’s podcast to say that the United States would be “wiped out” if it didn’t fight back against election theft.
And Trump relentlessly courted that constituency by appointing Catholic conservatives to the Supreme Court, including Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced the liberal feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Although the Catholic right represents a minority of the US church, it wields an outsize influence through a well-funded network of advocacy institutions and a parallel media ecosystem. Conservative and right-wing Catholics are highly represented in the US judiciary, and dominate the Supreme Court—seven current Supreme Court justices, including all three of Trump’s scotus picks, were raised Catholic, and six of those seven represent right-wing Catholic ideology. Their prevalence is the result of a long-running conservative project orchestrated largely by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo. Leo is also president of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and founder of the Judicial Education Project (now called the 85 Fund), which funds a variety of right-wing advocacy organizations.
In a recent series of investigative articles, journalist Christopher White at the liberal National Catholic Reporter detailed how right-wing Catholic donors have turbocharged conservative think tanks and academic programs—such as a Catholic University of America business school named for its lead patron, the elite estate attorney and hotelier Tim Busch—and funneled millions of dollars into election efforts like a voter-suppression initiative founded by Catholic-aligned anti-abortion organizations. In turn, as Brian Fraga reported at NCR this January, conservative Catholic groups and institutions have received millions from the “dark money” Donors Trust network, which funded both white nationalist organizations and right-wing political groups that helped organize the protests of January 6.
Fringe but high-traffic media outfits like Church Militant, and more mainstream ones like cable giant EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network), the world’s largest religious media network, with a claimed viewership of 380 million households across more than 150 countries, thrive in the Catholic media landscape. As with their secular counterparts like Fox News—which regularly borrows EWTN’s star anchor, Raymond Arroyo, as a co-host for The Laura Ingraham Show—stories born on the fringe have a tendency to creep into the center of the Catholic media universe, commanding audiences far larger than those of the original outlets.
Michelle Rohn
“The English-speaking Catholic media is dominated by a few, very powerful outfits, and many of them have been very opposed [to the pope] in overt, blatant ways,” Christopher Lamb, author of the 2020 papal biography The Outsider, tells me. EWTN has given uncritical platforms to figures like Bannon (who has called the pope a “Marxist Jesuit that’s in bed with the Chinese Communist Party,” and accused him of enabling “cultural Marxism” to infiltrate the church) and Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the pope’s most outspoken critics within church hierarchy; in 2019 it even live-broadcasted a priest’s anti-Francis homily.
In September, shortly after undergoing surgery, Francis publicly said he was “still alive, even though some people wanted me to die,” and referred to EWTN, saying, “There is, for example, a large Catholic television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill of the pope.”
That relentlessly critical portrayal of the pope doesn’t represent the majority of US Catholics, 82 percent of whom, according to a Pew Research poll, have favorable impressions of Francis. But the negative reporting takes its toll, says Mike Lewis, founder of the moderate Catholic website Where Peter Is, which tracks and rebuts the Catholic right: “Unlike evangelicals who can start their own churches, the Catholic Church is restrained to some degree by the hierarchy, which is restrained in theory by the pope. The only problem is there’s an increasing number of Catholics in this alt-right movement who defer in absolutely no way to the hierarchy. Or who, rather than their local bishop…look to Viganò,Burke, and Strickland as their leaders.” And “because of social media and outlets like EWTN and LifeSiteNews,” Lewis adds, “they get a disproportionate amount of attention compared to their actual authority.”
“The problem is that the extreme right-wing is an expression of something that is not just crazy people but is visible also in the official clerical culture of the [US] Catholic Church.”
“The problem is that the extreme right-wing is an expression of something that is not just crazy people but is visible also in the official clerical culture of the [US] Catholic Church,” says Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University. “There are bishops whose language is more diplomatic, but they express the same contempt for Francis, the same fascination for the neo-nationalist project.” Add to this dynamic the “intellectuals blowing on this fire,” he says, “because they think the liberal, cosmopolitan international order must be burned down. That’s their very dangerous plan…and sadly, liberal Catholics have no plan.”
At the “Enough Is Enough” rally in Baltimore, all of these tensions were on prominent display. The bishops meeting at the Baltimore Waterfront Marriott were taunted by Church Militant’s rallygoers stationed a few hundred feet away and chanting, “Shame on you,” “Repent or resign,” and “Lock them up.”...
==
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/jan-6-christian-nationalism/
In the midst of the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested man in Viking horns who's come to be known as the QAnon Shaman, stopped his fellow marauders in the Senate chamber to pray. "Thank you Heavenly Father for gracing us with this opportunity … to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs," he said. "Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn."
The prayer, caught on video by New Yorker reporter Luke Mogelson, was just one moment among hundreds that day illustrating how deeply the insurrection was intertwined with Christian nationalism. Across the sea of protesters in and outside the building, t-shirt and ball-cap slogans proclaimed it: "Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president"; "God, Guns, Trump"; or, on the sweatshirt of a man helping construct the rough gallows erected on the Capitol lawn, "Faith, Family, Freedom." (The gallows itself was quickly covered in handwritten notes — "as if it were a yearbook," observed lawyer and author Andrew Seidel — reading "Hang them high" and "In God We Trust.")
Elsewhere, protesters carried gigantic portraits of Jesus and replica statues of the Infant of Prague, or chanted about the blood of Jesus washing Congress clean. A long-haired blond man sang praise songs into a microphone plugged into a stack of amplifiers he was wheeling on a hand-truck. A Nebraska priest performed an exorcism on the Capitol building to banish the demon Baphomet, who he
was "dissolving the country" in order to "bring it back as something different." One rioter later indicted for breaking into the Capitol was actually a cast member in a touring production of "Jesus Christ Superstar." Another,Leo Brent Bozell IV, came from a long line of Christian right activists: His father, L. Brent Bozell III, founded the right-wing Media Research Center and his grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., wrote speeches for Joseph McCarthy and a manifesto for Barry Goldwater.
"It was evident to anyone watching that there was this religious character to what was going on, both in the Trump movement writ large but particularly in the leadership of the 'Stop the Steal' movement," said religious studies scholar Jerome Copulsky, co-director of a new website,**Uncivil Religion**, dedicated to collecting "digital artifacts" of Jan. 6 religiosityand exploring what it means for, say, violent protesters to dress up like Captain Moroni — a legendary warrior from the Book of Mormon — or sing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" alongside fellow protesters carrying Confederate flags. "It wasn't just the Stop the Steal rally, then the assault," Copulsky continued. "People really wanted to display their religious commitments, literally wearing them on their sleeves."
The Uncivil Religionproject developed from a Twitter hashtag, #CapitolSiegeReligion, created by author and religious historian Peter Manseau and based on his sense that the religious subtext (and text, and blaring headline) were "*the* story of what happened" on Jan. 6. In Manseau's view, religion wasn't an incidental element, but had been the driving motivation that had brought many people to the Capitol. Much of that had begun much earlier, with Christian right leaders — both official and self-declared — framing the 2020 election, and the rest of America's polarized conflicts, as an all-or-nothing showdown between good and evil.
Some were national names, like Samaritan's Purse president Franklin Graham, who in August 2020 warned in a Christian Broadcasting Network interview that if Trump lost, churches would close down and Christians would be attacked. But that message was echoed so widely, in both religious and secular conservative media and across numerous niche religious right communities, that allegations about the "stolen" election became nearly inseparable from messages of apocalyptic faith.
Much of that was on display on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, when a large-scale interfaith prayer protest, the Jericho March — widely seen as a forerunner to Jan. 6 — brought together a number of religious right factions to pantomime the biblical Battle of Jericho in praying to "bring down the walls of the Deep State." The carnivalesque full-day rally — organized, as journalist Sarah Posner reported, by two then-current employees of the federal government — featured anodd fusion of charismatic evangelicalism,Christian Zionism and right-wing Catholicism. There was contemporary Christian praise music and Virgin of Guadalupe iconography; a rendition of "Ave Maria" that concluded with the singer whooping "Giddy up"; and the female pastor of a New England pro-cannabis church wearing Catholic vestments while blowing on a Jewish shofar.
Emceeing the event was evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas, author of a bestselling biography of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a key figure in building an alliance between conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Metaxas had become increasingly extreme throughout the Trump era. The week of the Jericho March rally, he told TurningPoint USA founder Charlie Kirk that the 2020 election was like "somebody is being raped or murdered … times a thousand," and that conservatives would need "to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood" to keep Trump in office.
That December rally featured several notable names on the Catholic right, including a bishop from Texas who refused:{ to acknowledge Biden as president-elect, a nun who had }
:{ a fiery pro-Trump address at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, most prominently}::{, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a}::{ dissident Catholic figure who had once been the Vatican ambassador to the U.S. but fell into disgrace after }::{calling for Pope Francis' resignation in 2018.}::{ }::{Since then, Viganò has turned into a sort of alternative pope for disaffected Catholic traditionalists at odds with their more moderate pope, and in 2020, he published an open letter to Trump warning that a "deep church" was working with the "deep state" to use the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests to undermine his presidency. After Trump tweeted a link to the letter, Viganò attracted so much support on the broader right that when he appeared, via video, at the Jericho March — praying "for the conversion of public officials who have become accomplices in public fraud" — an audience largely composed of evangelical Protestants cheered alongside his Catholic fans}::{.}:
Evangelical speaker Lance Wallnau, who in 2016 famously compared Trump to the biblical figure of Cyrus — a "heathen" king who nonetheless served as the instrument of God — also sounded the theme of intra-religious conflict. "This is the beginning of a Christian populist uprising. There is a backlash coming," he said. "And you're going to see this wrecking ball of a reformation hit the church as well … because it's going to divide between those who are awake and those that are asleep. … There is a great awakening coming, and this is the spark that is starting it right now."
Not all speakers at the Jericho March were religious leaders in the traditional sense. Stewart Rhodes, the devoutly Christian founder of the militia group the Oath Keepers, was on hand to urge police and military members to prepare to fight Chinese "proxies" in the U.S., who he claimed were working to install Joe Biden as their "puppet."
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, freshly pardoned by Trump for lying to federal investigators, appeared in a flag bandana to talk about spiritual war and lead the crowd in an "Our Father." And conspiracy-theory talk-show host Alex Jones delivered a barn-burning near-sermon, proclaiming, "This is the beginning of the great revival before the Antichrist comes. World government, implantable microchips, Satanism — it's out in the open. The Bible is fulfilled, Revelation is fulfilled."...And there was Ali Alexander, the bombastic founder of the Stop the Steal movement, who appeared frequently on stage alongside Metaxas, vowing that if Biden was installed as president, Alexander and his supporters would return to "occupy D.C. full of patriots," adding, "We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us."
In the following weeks, Alexander repeatedly underscored the religious dimensions of his mission. In late December, he...https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/stop-steal-organizer-ali-alexanders-pre-january-6-calls-violence-weve-got...told the Epoch Times-affiliated NTD television network, "We are in a fight of good versus evil, of light versus the darkness, and a global order over sovereign citizens. … I believe that this is ametaphysical fight and we are channeling all energy in heaven and on earth towards a favorable outcome."
On New Year's Eve in 2020, Alexander announced on Twitter that he was converting to Catholicism,in part, he explained, because he'd become convinced that the Catholic Church had been "infiltrated" by an "earthy [sic] order that works in concert with Satan himself against the Church," and that he had been personally called to join the battle. And when the Jericho March returned to Washington on Jan. 5, for a slate of protest events leading up to the following day's MAGA march, Alexander spoke again, whipping the crowd into a ...
**That has remained central to the legacy of Jan. 6, as religious leaders have used the rhetoric of faith to minimize and redirect responsibility for the violence of that day: whether it's people like****:{Wallnau:(style="opacity:1;transition:color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s"):}::{ }:or South Carolina televangelist****:{Mark Burns}: blaming "antifa soldiers" for perpetrating a false-flag operation to smear Trump supporters**;:{ Mike Huckabee }:suggesting, in email newsletters over the last six months, that Nancy Pelosi may have orchestrated the attack, and casting indicted Jan. 6 protesters as political prisoners; or former Vice President Mike Pence, in a December interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, downplaying the very attack in which an angry mob called for his execution.
The rest of its legacy is more diffuse, but no less troubling:Metaxas
that the creation of COVID-19 vaccines is akin to experimenting "with the bodies of Jews we murdered in the concentration camps," or Viganò writing that COVID exists merely as a "psycho-pandemic"; Wallnau calling "wokeness" the religion of the Antichrist and, on the eve of the Jan. 6 anniversary...that if America is to be one nation under God, it must have only one religion. More systematically, there's the fact that much of the religious organizing energy that went into Stop the Steal has now transferred itself, as Posner... , into:{ mobilizing the Christian right on behalf of voter suppression initiatives:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.
A year later, none of the religious fervor that helped drive Jan. 6 has vanished, says Copulsky. "It's built into the fabric of American life. There's a radicality to it, but this didn't come out of thin air. And it's not going to go away. It's incumbent on religious leaders and organizations to think about what that means....
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/confrontational-christian-nationalists-are-pushing-anti-vaxxer-extremism-report