A century ago, the Klu Klux Klan was the most prominent anti-Catholic organization in America.
Political cartoon of the Klan fighting the Pope, brought to you by the kind of deep research only skimming a Wikipedia entry can provide.
The Klan stood ready to defend America against sinister conspiracy of the Bishop of Rome and his swarthy, dual-loyalty followers with vowels at the ends of their names.
I was thinking you have to go pretty far to style up the Pope’s hat more than in real life, but no, this 1943 Klan-affiliated cartoon is actually parodying the Papal Tiara, only used for coronations and which was abandoned by Pope Paul VI in 1964. Also, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that we had bigger foreign rulers to worry about than the Pope in 1943…
Well, times change and the Klan is a dead letter. Today, thanks to modern efficiency and social justice, the fight against the dread hand of Rome is carried out by none other than the FBI.
As part of its effort to identify extremists in the Catholic Church, the FBI recruited at least one “undercover employee” to “develop sources among the clergy and church leadership,” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) revealed Monday.
Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a subpoena demanding FBI director Christopher Wray testify and provide more information to Congress about the federal agency’s intelligence-gathering initiative targeting Catholic Americans.
“This shocking information reinforces our need for all responsive documents, and the Committee is issuing a subpoena to you to compel your full cooperation,” Jordan claimed in the letter.
“Americans attend church to worship and congregate for their spiritual and personal betterment,” the letter added. “They must be free to exercise their fundamental First Amendment rights without worrying that the FBI may have planted so-called ‘tripwire’ sources or other informants in their houses of worship.”
The weaponization committee demanded that the FBI turn over information related to its investigation of Catholics after a former FBI agent leaked a memo entitled, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.” The memo, issued by the bureau’s Richmond field office, relied on information compiled by the biased Southern Poverty law Center about alleged “extremist” Catholic communities that prefer the Latin Mass and hold to conservative social teachings.
Presumably also “extremists” who believe that there are two biological sexes, or that dare to disagree with the policies of Obama the Lightbringer (PBUH).
Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The State.
Is your church FBI approved, comrade?
Tags: Catholics, Democrats, FBI, Social Justice Warriors
My take on this is that “they” are doing this because they’ve been operating in the liminal spaces where nobody pays attention to them for so long that they’ve internalized the fact that nobody notices what they do, so they can get away with anything.
The problem with that is that they’re now impinging upon areas of public life where people can’t help but notice what they’re doing, and they think the same rules apply. Most people are still in that state where they can’t quite bring themselves to believe the brazen nature of what’s going on before their eyes, but once they do? Hooo-boy, but I don’t think it’s going to work out too well.
I had a bunch of friends on the Seattle PD, guys I knew who got out of the Army and went up there as cops. Most of them were solid guys, but they had the consistent and entirely delusional belief that they could do no wrong. Having had numerous run-ins where I had to intercede on behalf of Hispanic and black soldiers who got into trouble up there, I knew that there was at least enough of a problem with racism in the Seattle PD that it was noticeable to a lot of people. I’d tell the guys I knew that they’d better do something about it all, or they were going to end up on the bad end of things, because people were getting fed up with the BS. They all said I didn’t know what I was talking about…
I kept telling them that it was all going to be the same as it always was, and then one day, they’d go into work… And, everything would be different.
Turns out, that day was the aftermath of the George Floyd BS. Most of the guys I knew over there in Seattle are gone, now–They either transferred out or retired, and the ones I’ve talked to since then all admit I had a better handle on the reality of things than they did. You could sense the anger with the police department even back during the 1990s, and it only got worse over the last 20 years.
I see the same thing happening with the Feds, these days. I don’t think they realize what the hell they’re doing, or that there’s even the potential for there to be a pivot point, one where they’re suddenly no longer able to do things as they always did. There’s a critical moment, a cusp… Once you push hard enough to reach that point? Things will never, ever be the same.
And, the idiots keep on pushing, pushing, pushing… I wonder who they think is going to keep them safe from the enraged public? Is someone building gated communities for the cops, the security people? Do they think they’re going to be safe, living out among the people they’re abusing? Or, are they going to wake up and realize that they’re vulnerable, living the way they are?
You think they’d figure it out, but… They usually don’t. Not until it’s too damn late. Think about Nicolai Ceaucescu, standing there on that reviewing stand in Timisoara, that day. The day everything changed, forever.
There’s a Timisoara moment in store for the crooked bastards here. They just don’t seem to recognize that it could happen to them. It’ll likely be rather like what happened to Khadafy, meeting his end out in the desert, buggered by someone’s bayonet.
I wonder what goes through the minds of the field agents (or is all this lunacy run from Washington). What must a hard working agent think when the boss says that today we need to keep an eye on Catholics, and people that use words like red-pilled and based. And if you don’t file enough reports you’re failing as an agent. Just wonder if there’s a morale problem or a just following orders attitude. I was heartened by the news that the Boston field office refused to investigate the 150 people listed on the manifests of the bus operator that took the group to the January 6 speech. The question was “based on what?” And that’s Boston, with a long history of FBI corruption.