Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis charged Donald Trump and 18 others with meddling in Georgia’s 2020 election, taking advantage of the state’s broad RICO statute. (John Bazemore / Associated Press)
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
That famous saying, attributed to the head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, is the best summary there is of the term “weaponized law.” It is also now the unofficial slogan of the Biden Regime’s Department of Justice (sic) and of the American legal system more broadly.
In a proper, Christian legal system, you start with the evidence of a crime, investigate the matter to determine the suspect, and bring charges against that person. That’s the way America’s legal system worked, or at least was understood to work, for most of the nation’s history.
But in just the last few years, it is obvious that things have changed. Instead of beginning with evidence of a crime and working to determine who committed it, American “justice” now begins with the man and goes looking for crimes with which to charge him.
“TAMMANY HALL is simply the political organization of the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, with a Bishop Hughes or a Cardinal McCloskey or Archbishop Corrigan at its head and a Fernando Wood, a William Tweed, or a John Kelly for his fugleman [mouthpiece, author]. The proper name for it is JESUIT HALL. By this name it should be called, and by none other; for name and nature should correspond, so that when the one is called the other should be understood, and that would help to guide both the mind and the action of the American people.”
I hope that paragraph got your attention. It’s a quote from a book that I just received titled Romanism and Politics: Tammany Hall The Stronghold of Romeby Joseph Hartwell. Published in 1887 in New York City, this book is representative of an entire body of literature produced in the 19th century by American Christian authors warning their fellow Americans about the dangers of what some of them called “political Romanism.” Their warnings were largely ignored; today, most of these authors and their works have been largely forgotten. But here in 2023, with an openly Romanist presidential administration and a government largely committed to furthering the policies of political and economic Romanism, it is imperative for Christians to read and understand the warnings of these authors, both to understand the source of the dangerous and tyrannical doctrines being implemented all around us in place of the liberties guaranteed to us in our Constitution and to effectively fight back against them. For fight back we must.
Just consider the disastrous situation on our southern border. One doesn’t need to do a deep statistical dive to know that what’s going on – with millions of illegal aliens flooding across our southern border as a direct result of the policies of the Biden Regime – is unsustainable and represents an existential threat to the United States as a nation. That this is being done deliberately as a matter of policy should shock every American and prompt him to ask, in whose service is this being done. Certainly, it’s not in the service of the American people. But someone wants this to happen and wants it to happen badly enough to open wide the welfare immigration spigots even though most Americans don’t want this to happen.
There are, in my opinion, a number of different interests promoting our current disastrous immigration policy. But the leader of the group is the Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS), and in particular its lobbying wing in America, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Working principally through the Democrat party, the USCCB has been able to effect changes in American immigration law that advantage it and the globalist goals of the RCCS to the harm of the American nation. Yet while the Biden Regime works 24/7 to implement the Antichrist RCCS’s immigration policies, almost no one seems to understand that these policies are, in fact, the immigration policies of the Vatican.
One can find video after video, article after article, showing massive lawlessness on our border and decrying the woeful situation. But these reports never talk about where the policies that are the source of this disaster come from. They come straight from the Vatican. That is, their source is the Antichrist system of Rome. But you will never learn this from watching the new reports.
This is where reading 19th-century Christian authors, authors who lived and wrote at the time of the inception of political and economic Romanism in the United States, can be helpful. One such author is Joseph Hartwell, a Protestant minister and author of the book that is the subject of this week’s post, and likely those of the next few weeks.
It has long been the opinion of this author that growing socialism in the United States is substantially the work of the RCCS. After watching the obviously fraudulent 2020 presidential election, one that saw the ouster of a nominally Presbyterian president and the installation of the Roman Catholic Joe Biden, it seemed even more important than before to establish the link between the manifestly evil policies of the Democrats and the work of the RCCS in America. My working idea has been this: the theft of the 2020 presidential election was just a scaled-up version of the 19th-century thug politics of Tammany Hall and other big city, Roman Catholic-controlled Democrat political machines. But while the fraud – election and otherwise – of Tammany Hall mainly affected those unfortunate enough to live in New York City, the thug politics as practiced by the Democrats in the 21st century harms all Americans.
Yet as is the case with the disaster on our southern border, while there are many good articles detailing the election fraud in 2020 and 2022, the source of that fraud, namely, the Antichrist RCCS working through the Democrats, is never discussed. Truly, Rome has done a masterful job hiding its evil activities from the eyes of the public, even from Christians who otherwise should be alert to the evils of Rome. It seems as if in 2023, even the elect are blind to the ravages of Antichrist being conducted right under their noses.
This is why it’s critical for Christians to read and understand the warnings of 19th-century authors such as Joseph Harwell, who lived when political Romanism was just beginning to be felt in America and had the liberty and courage to speak out against it. It is this author’s hope that this post will be the first of many posts covering these forgotten authors. I suppose that this will be a years-long process, perhaps one ending in the publication of a book on the subject. One certainly is needed. Lord willing, it is my goal to produce such a book. Now with that said, let’s begin our look at Hartwell’s piece.
“In our bones, we know democracy is at risk,” said Joe Biden at Union Station, Washington D.C., 11/2/2022.
“Donald Trump if the Democrats don’t steal it.”
Two years ago about this time, I was sitting in a friend’s family room watching the final Trump/Biden presidential debate. My friend had asked me who I thought was going to win the 2020 presidential election and I replied to him that I thought Trump would win if the Democrats didn’t steal the election.
As things turned out, the Democrats with a little help from their friends in the Deep State, major corporations, the courts, the Covid lockdowns, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the mainstream media, major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the entertainment industry, pollsters, schools, universities, and various and sundry thugs in the Democrat party, etc. did manage to steal the election for the most incompetent and uninspiring presidential candidate in my lifetime, possibly in all of American history.
The theft of the 2020 presidential election and the ability of the Democrats and their helpers to make it stick bodes ill for the future of our republic. The successful steal, perhaps it’s better to call it a coup d’état, of the 2020 election has led many to the opinion that we cannot vote our way out of the problems currently facing our nation. Count me among their number.
But for all that, the aim of this post is not to discourage people from voting, giving up, and heading for their survival bunker in the hills. As Christians, we are called to be salt and light in a lost and dying world, and this includes carrying out our civic responsibilities the best we are able. Further, we do not know the future. Perhaps the Lord will have mercy on America for the sake of his elect and save us from the oppressive darkness we see gathering all around us. He’s done that sort of thing before, and he can do it again if he so wills. Has the arm of the Lord been shortened?
For this reason, it’s not my purpose today to fill people with dread and fear of the future. I’ll leave that to the Democrats. Rather, my aim is to realistically assess the situation facing America in November 2022 and offer a few suggestions and perhaps even venture a prognostication or two.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on July 16, 2021 (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members of one another.
Ephesians 4:25
“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”
In the same speech, Obama went on to deny that he was calling for censorship, noting, “The answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say ‘this is reliable’ and I’m still able to argue safely abut facts and what we should do about it.”
Nearly five years later, it’s fair to say that quite obviously Obama and others of his political persuasion were talking about censorship, and this became clear enough last week that even the most ardent deniers of the big government/big tech censorship complex have not excuse for missing the Biden regime’s full-bore attack on the First Amendment.
In the same press conference, Psaki voiced her displeasure that Facebook was not deplatforming spreaders of “misinformation” fast enough for her, and presumably, for her boss’s tastes. She said, “there’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of the anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook – ones that Facebook owns.”
If all that wasn’t enough, Psaki was at it again the next day. In a Friday 7/17 press conference she offered that, “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not other if you – for providing misinformation out there.”
As the saying goes, I need new conspiracy theories, because all my old ones are coming true.
Seriously, people have speculated for years that the Deep State has been behind much, if not all, of the social media censorship. But this is right in your face government censorship. We have what is, in my opinion, an illegitimate government installed through election fraud stomping on the right of American’s to freely access information on a matter that affects all our lives.
Luther at the Diet of Worms, by Anton von Werner, 1877.
And it cast down truth to the ground; and it practised, and prospered.
Daniel 8:12
Truth is cast to the ground.
I’ve thought about that quite a lot in recent years. It seems as if the lie always prospers, while truth, it if even is heard at all, is quickly dismissed as nonsense and those who speak it as fools or worse.
I was reminded once again of just how corrupt things have become after watching some of the shenanigans in the stock market last week with the big dust up over the Gamestop stock and how, supposedly, a group of small investors beat the big guys on Wall Street.
I’ll not dive into the details of what took place, but on the surface we can say that at least one major hedge fund sustained significant losses when its short position on Gamestock was blown up by investors piling into the company’s stock and driving it to over $400 per share.
For our purposes, what important to understand is that when an investor – either an individual or an institution such as a hedge fund – short sells a stock, he profits when the price goes down. If the price goes up, the short seller loses money. If the stock price goes way up, as was the case with Gamestop, the short seller loses a lot of money.
When the losses were piling up for the big guys during the week, it didn’t take long for the weeping and gnashing of teeth to begin. Billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman went on an epic rant on CNBC last Thursday, 1/28, saying, “The reason the market is doing what it’s doing is people are sitting at home getting checks from the government. This fair share, is a (bleep) concept. It’s just a way of attacking wealthy people and I think it inappropriate and we all gotta work together and pull together.”
Just how true is the narrative that a bunch of unemployed Robin Hood traders on their own drove up the price of Gamestop, thus inflicting heavy losses on some hedge funds, I cannot say for sure. I have my doubts that things are what we’re being told, but, at the very least, Cooperman seemed to accept that narrative when he went on his rant last week.
Detail from The Sack of Rome by the Visigoths by JN Sylvestre, 1890.
“At the hour of midnight, the Salerian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia” (Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 31).
With these words the English historian Edward Gibbon captured the sacking of Rome by Alaric king of the Visigoths on August 24, A.D. 410. Although the Western empire did not officially come to an end until A.D. 476, the sacking of Rome by Alaric was certainly an indication of the Empire’s fast approaching end.
As something of a history buff myself, I’ve often wondered what it was like for people who witnessed the end of their civilization. It must have been terrible and terrifying. One wonders at the horror that must have filled the hearts of the inhabitants of Jerusalem when the Babylonian army broke through the city walls in 586 B.C. and proceeded to destroy the city and burn the temple, which at that time had stood for over 300 years.
Reflecting on the excerpt above from Gibbon, what was it like for the Romans, and even non-Romans, in A.D. 410 to hear that Rome had been taken by a barbarian Germanic king?
At the time of the sacking of Rome, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa found himself confronted by many angry and puzzled questioners, many of whom were refugees from Alaric’s invasion of Italy, asking how, if Christianity were true, God could allow Christian civilization – recall that Constantine had become the first, at least nominally, Christian emperor about a century earlier – to be destroyed by a pagan barbarian king and his army?
That bishop, as you may already be aware, was none other than Aurelius Augustine, the greatest theologian of the early church.
According to one scholar,
More than any other single episode the sacking of Rome gave Augustine a reason to write the City of God. After 410 he found exiles, those escaping the disturbing events in Italy, arriving in North Africa where he was now Bishop of Hippo and asking how he could explain this collapse of a Christian Empire. It was their angry challenge that led him to begin work on a book which was to appear in episodes stretching over many years of composition (G. R. Evans, Introduction, City of God. Penguin Books, London, 2003, ix).
It seems to me that, although our present circumstances are in certain important respects different from those faced by Augustine in his day, nevertheless there are some important similarities. While Rome in the fifth century was sacked and burned by outside forces, America today is being sacked and burned – in some ways literally, in others figuratively – by forces from within. In both cases – Rome in A.D. 410; America in A.D. 2021 – the civilizations were in advanced states of decay well in advance of their sacking. One may fairly view the two events not as the beginning of their respective civilization’s collapse, but as another, more overt, step along the way to their demise.
The comparison of Rome’s sacking in 410 to the events in America over the past year – namely, the massive civil unrest carried out by BLM and Antifa and supported by the political, business, entertainment and academic establishments; the brutal Covid lockdowns in defiance of the Constitution, medical precedent, and the teachings of Scripture; and an overtly stolen presidential election – can be instructive to Christians today, because many of the same problems that plague America and the West today are the same problems that plagued Rome in Augustine’s day, and the answers he gave to his critics are just as applicable now as they were then.
Rioters wearing Trump paraphernalia breached the Capitol Wednesday as lawmakers met to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win PHOTO: MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
President Donald J. Trump, Washington D.C., January 6, 2021
As was the case with most kids who grew up in the late ‘70’s and early 80’s, I was a huge Star Wars fan. The original film, released in 1977, was such a huge hit that everyone knew it would be followed by a sequel.
The eagerly anticipated follow up, The Empire Strikes Back, debuted in 1980. Unlike so many movie sequels, this one was worthy of the original. In fact, many critics consider The Empire Strikes Back to be the best of the original Star Wars trilogy.
A lot of the things that forty years later we think of a quintessentially Star Wars were not in the first film. The Imperial Walkers, the Darth Vader theme music, Boba Fett, and Yoda all mode their debut in The Empire Strikes Back, not in the first 1977 movie.
Now you may be wondering why I’m talking about The Empire Strikes Back, a movie that came out over forty years ago, in the context of a piece about last week’s Capitol Hill riot.
My reason is this, just as The Empire Strikes Back was a movie, as the title tells us, of the Empire going on the offensive to once and for all crush the resistance of the Rebel Alliance that had blown up the Death Star, the Empire’s super weapon, so too the events of the past year, including the events of January 6, 2021, seem to be aimed at brining to a quick end the populist uprising that began in Great Britain and in America back in 2016.
After years of discussion, in June of 2016 Great Britain held a vote on Brexit, which was the popular name given to the movement to take the UK out of the European Union. The vote turned out, to the shock and horror of globalists everywhere, in favor of Brexit.
Across the pond, we here in America were faced with a similar choice in that year’s presidential election. We could support Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, who, we were told by all the experts, was and unstoppable electoral juggernaut, more than capable of crushing all resistance in her path, or we could support a very bad orange man named Donald John Trump.
Hillary supporters were the blessed, the righteous, the very elect of the Lord. The Donald’s backers? Well, we all know they were just a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic basket of toothless, uneducated, irredeemably deplorable rednecks, who, just like their leader Donald Trump, were very bad people who deserved very bad things to happen to them.
But, as was the case with Brexit, much to the shock and horror of the Masters of the Universe crowd, Queen Hillary lost and the Donald and his merry band of deplorables won.
It was at this point that the Empire – by “Empire” I mean the whole rotten basket of Deep Staters, establishment types, Clintonistas, RINO’s, Obamites, Bushies, crony capitalist billionaires, banksters, Vaticanites, Wall Streeters, globalists, etc. – began to plot how they were going to strike back, oust Donald Trump, and permanently return themselves to power.
In a nutshell, I believe this explains the last four years of nonstop shrieking from, and relentless attacks by, the establishment on Donald Trump, his supporters and about every single thing they have said and done.
Lux Lucet 