We won’t have Michael Voris to kick around anymore

I’ve featured Michael Voris several times here — he was the front man for an organization called the Church Militant, a small mob of disgruntled TradCaths, and Voris does a YouTube show called The Vortex which is usually him complaining about the gays, the liberals, the Pope, that sort of thing.

Michael Voris has resigned. Can you guess why?

I still don’t know. He rambles on about “demons” and “moral failings” and “horrible stuff” without dishing out any details.

Here’s another Church Militant weirdo who makes an empty statement on his resignation. Near as I can tell from this evasive complaint, Voris stopped praying with the staff a few years ago. Prayer is so important! No wonder he lapsed in some mysterious way.

We do know that he was “asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause,” so there was probably something sordid going on, like that he kissed a boy or donated to a social justice organization or, you know, didn’t pray enough. As much as I would be entertained by a tale of decadence and degeneracy, I suspect that his downfall was brought about by some simple thing that the rest of the world would find quaint, but that his insane community would have been horrified by.

Wow, I guess that last election was more devastating than I thought

I thought the 2022 elections were rather good news, not great, but the Democrats did a little better than expected, and there’s some faint hope that our “liberal” party was going to wake up to the importance of talking about the issues that matter. We didn’t dig ourselves into a deeper hole, and maybe, if we keep working at it, we can someday reverse the descent that began in the 1980s.

Alas, poor Michael Voris. He has taken the outcome hard. Now he declares that the four pillars of his worldview — America, the Military, Notre Dame, and the Church — have been shattered. His hate group, the Church Militant will persevere, but he’s fighting a rear-guard action while playing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” as we slide down the slippery (lubricated with gay lube and the blood of babies) slope to Hell, all because the Republicans failed to take the senate this time.

[cue Sad Trombone and teeny-tiny violin]

Look on the bright side, Michael. He announced a while back that he’d lived the wild life in his thirties, and made a public confession.

Whatever the matter, I will now reveal that for most of my years in my thirties, confused about my own sexuality, I lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men. From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins. On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it. In a large portion of my twenties, I also had frequent sexual liaisons with both adult men and adult women.

He consecrated specifically my chastity to Our Blessed Mother. Well, there’s no point to that anymore, America is dead, the military is full of liberals, Notre Dame has become theologically insane, and the church is corrupt, so get out there and party like a mad man!

Your religiously-motivated murders must be tidy and conservative!

The day of the election, Michael Voris of the Vortex/Church Militant posted a strange video. The grey/blonde junkyard rat he uses for a toupee is noticeably tousled, and his voice is mildly agitated. He starts off by thanking god that the GOP was going to stop the evil ones, so he seems to be confident that there is going to be a Republican sweep (with reservations: the forces of darkness…have complete control of one political party and partial control over the other, and we lost the war over morality, so evident today in even the GOP, which just warmly embraces sodomy as marriage — it’s a bit of a mixed message), but his real message is simple: if conservative Catholics don’t get their way, then violence is justified.

You may notice his message here is also confused. He keeps insisting that political action is the first resort and that violence is the very last resort, but hey, if you can’t ban abortion and gay marriage, then yeah, go for it, start busting heads.

Now we are in a pitched battle in the political arena—the last remaining line before all-out civil war. If you love peace and you don’t want to see violence, then you better get involved on the political front.

And let’s be clear about this for all the phony or delusional pacifists out there: Violence in and of itself is not immoral. It depends on the circumstances, and sometimes, even, it’s necessary: self defense, the subduing of an aggressor threatening the life of your family, the Son of God in the temple violently whipping the money changers.

Wait. One of his examples is not like the others. I can agree that violence in self-defense against violence is acceptable, but if you’re the Son of God you’re allowed to be violent against capitalists? Bring on the Communist Revolution then. Except that Voris hates Communists, and that’s exactly what the Democrats are. Except also that I suspect what he really means to say is that whipping The Jews is just fine and dandy.

The idea that violence must always, at all times, always be avoided is not Catholic. Remember the Crusades? Sometimes violence must be unleashed to protect the innocent.

Wait again. The Crusades were about protecting the innocent? What I remember is that the Crusades were violent invasions of the Middle East justified by a welter of complex political and religious excuses that mainly ended up killing a lot of people to no good end. I interpret this to mean that violence is bad except when religious rationalizations allow you to unleash it. He’s kind of arbitrary in what he accepts as “protecting the innocent”.

But lethal violence—because of its drastic, you-can-never-come-back-from-it consequences—must never be the first resort. In fact, it must always be the last resort, and then not be allowed to turn into an orgy of dominance over the foe.

Nonetheless, violence does — must — always be an option. Welcome to a fallen world.

Violence is bad, mmm-kay, but it must always be an option. I’ll let you know when the option must be exercised. Stay tuned to the Vortex for the signal!

Remember, no orgies. Orgies are bad. The Church Militant only endorses strait-laced murders.

I would never have predicted such a fall

The Church Militant — you know, the fanatical fringe of conservative Catholicism, home to Michael Voris, etc. — has a new product to sell. For a mere $75, you can buy CDs of the Psalms and Proverbs being read aloud by…

Are you sitting down for this?

…Milo Yiannopoulos.

The comments are full of people praising the power of God to rescue such a sinner, but I’m a doubter. I don’t think he’s saved at all. He’s found another grift, is all. I’d be more impressed if he’d found a humble faith to follow, but I’m sorry, the Church Militant is a mob of extremist weirdos.

You mean there are degrees of Catholic foolishness?

The Catholic Church seems to be experiencing a few rifts of their own. The current pope has apparently been sending down decrees to bust up the practice of the old Latin Mass, which is rather interesting. Back when I was a kid I had Catholic friends who talked about how their church was changing, which, as a lackadaisical Lutheran, I didn’t get at all. Wasn’t Protestantism a bigger upheaval? My Sunday school teacher said so. But now I guess the Pope is tightening the rules even more.

The members of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church have been on edge for weeks, worried that their way of worship is under threat, and what makes their fears especially agonizing is the identity of the person leading the crackdown: Pope Francis.

The congregants — belonging to one of hundreds of U.S. churches devoted to the old Latin Mass — say they can’t understand the pope’s thinking on limiting its practice. Some say they are praying that Francis’s better judgment still might prevail. One influential church member, theologian Peter Kwasniewski, has spent day after day publishing fiery opinion pieces, calling Francis’s decree contemptuous, vindictive toward Catholic traditionalists, an atomic bomb against the faith.

“Let’s not mince words,” Kwasniewski wrote at one point on Facebook. “This is a declaration of total war.”

Now, as a more worldly atheist who has encountered too many conservative Catholics, I think I understand. I read that and what I thought, again not as a knowledgeable Catholic, that it was obvious what he’s doing: he’s cracking down on the far right Catholics because they’re absolutist, authoritarian assholes who hinder any progress. Not that I think he’s particularly progressive, he just wants to shift the church a few millimeters to the left when what they really need to do is break up and move the rubble a few kilometers, but that’s what I, in my ignorance, figured must be going on, and surprisingly, the article confirmed it for me.

His mid-July decree dramatically tightened the rules on who can celebrate the old Latin Mass, requiring, among other things, new permission from local bishops. Some of the pope’s allies say the goal is to curtail forces antagonistic not specifically toward Francis’s pontificate, but toward Catholicism’s sometimes-lurching effort since the Second Vatican Council to modernize and reform.

The story further confirms my assumption that Catholic conservatives are assholes.

But many congregants speak of an inner turmoil — of feeling at odds with the supreme authority of their religion over something so core. To them, the Latin Mass is not just a form of prayer, but also the central force for like-minded people in their community. For people who take the faith seriously. Who pray the rosary. Who believe the teaching as it was written — that homosexual acts are disordered, that contraception is wrong, that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ. Some of these are minority viewpoints even among American Catholics, and St. Francis congregants say they sometimes feel like outsiders in their own city, uneasy about sharing their convictions, other than at their church.

Again, I’m not arguing that the church hierarchy is not awful, right up to the tippy-top — they have a tremendous amount of guilt for pedophilia and genocide — but that these people who want the Latin Mass are worse. These are the Michael Voris/Church Militant types who want to roll the whole world back into the Middle Ages, like this guy:

For Jacob Bauer, 24, that meant applying the principles of the church to nearly every aspect of his family life. It meant modesty — no trips to the beach, for instance, where revealing clothing would be on display. It meant refraining from gossip. It meant a defining 2017 conversation with his eventual wife, Hannah, now 25, about how the role of women had veered off course during modern times, and how something more traditional would be best for their family. So Hannah decided to reconsider her optometry career goals and stay home to raise a family. They now have one young child and hope to have more. Hannah wants to home-school the children.

“I was given the conviction I could do that from church,” where many women were going the same route, she said.

If that’s really what she wanted, fine. It’s just funny how every time conservatives talk about gender roles they somehow magically end up deciding that the woman who was on the road to a productive career is the one who needs to drop everything and stay home with the kids. Especially when the man’s primary role seems to be hanging out on Twitter telling everyone to go to Mass.

Bauer says he just wants space for his family to follow their own beliefs, without threats, and so his response has been to think of the pope daily: To pray for him, to cite him by name, with the hope that he “sees the love a lot of us have for the Latin Mass.” On Twitter — where Bauer describes himself in his bio as a “12th, 13th, 14th, 15th-century moderate; 21st-century hyper-traditionalist” — he has been similarly civil. He has regularly extolled the virtues of the old Latin Mass but refrained from criticism of Francis.

I’m not so civil. That’s an asshole hiding behind his civility. I can see why the Pope would want to distance himself from these wackaloons.

By the way, it’s not just Catholics. The worst members of every religion are the absolute authoritarian assholes, who always seem to muscle their way into loud leadership positions.

Catholicism is sick

Really sick. I’m surprised it’s not terminal already. Behold, the Church Militant, and its spokesperson, Michael Voris, all sucking up to … Milo Yiannopoulos? Are you kidding me?

I’m simultaneously revolted and impressed by the fact that Milo has found another niche full of gullible fools. I’m sure he’s having a grand time with his new act.

Meanwhile, as Milo is fêted by Catholic fanatics, hundreds of more graves have been found at the Catholic Marieval Indian Residential school in Saskatchewan. But hey, let’s praise the repentant homosexual!

Wait, this is about tradcaths?

I almost didn’t watch this video because, well, look at the thumbnail. It’s about Lawrence Krauss? No thank you very much. But it’s not about Krauss at all, so it’s OK!

It’s actually all about these wacky Traditional Catholics with more money than sense who cunningly put together a movie, a real movie/documentary, with real scientists cleverly questioned to make statements they could splice together to imply that they supported geocentrism. So it’s about how some kooks fooled Lawrence Krauss!

The highlight for me, though, is when the creators are in a conference with Michael Voris, the whirlpool guy. And best of all, they go to a flat earth conference to tell everyone there that they were nuts to believe the Earth was flat, but they were exactly right to claim that the sun orbits around the Earth. Even fanatical Catholic science deniers laugh at flat-earthers!

Anyway, recommended — there’s also useful information about how pseudoscientists manipulate the truth to support their delusions.

Why you gotta do me like this, Anthony?

I go many long months without ever thinking of Michael Voris and his fanatical contingent of radical Catholics, but then a long-time reader has to fill me in on what he’s been up to, and I watch another of his videos. Voris is getting crazier and more extremist all the time. He’s a one-issue religious loon, and that issue is abortion. He claims that racism, nuclear war, the death penalty…none of these add up to a body count like abortion, not even close and that abortion is the great evil all the way back to the apostles — really? The Bible doesn’t make much of a big deal about it — and that Catholics who oppose the death penalty, for instance, are wasting their time because the Bible is fine with executing criminals (like, you know, the big guy who gets murdered on a cross at the start of the New Testament?). He’s a Catholic who despises the Catholicism of the church and the Pope and all that.

He also despises the Democrats, the Party of Death, who are all Marxists, and is horrified that a whole quarter of US bishops are registered Democrats. Joe Biden? Marxist? That alone should make you realize we’re not listening to a guy playing with a whole deck. No, according to Voris, he’s not happy with a Catholic being elected to the presidency, because Biden is actually a heretical gay-marrying child-killer. You see,

Biden and his party are evil, full stop. No Catholic, especially a member of the clergy, should be vague about this evil in the slightest. But if Biden captures the Catholic vote and goes on to win the White House, no doubt the champagne corks will be popping all over bishopland, but their partying will be short-lived. Marxists always kill those who got them to power. Regardless of how loyal they might have been on the path to power, thinking they would somehow be rewarded, their reward will be the wrong end of a gun barrel.

So get ready, everyone, Joe Biden is going to dispatch commie death squads to slaughter the Catholic church hierarchy.

I guess we do need to keep an eye on the fringe Catholics, who are taking paranoia to whole new levels.

If I may make a safe prediction: the churches, all of them, including the Catholic church, will do just fine under a Democratic government. They always do. Biden won’t lift a finger to support the separation of church and state.

Hang it up, Steve Shives

Shives does this weekly YouTube satire called The Whirlpool, which mocks a certain Catholic fanatic who has a show called The Vortex. Alas, the satire doesn’t even come close to the batshit ravings of Michael Voris. Watch in wonder.

He is, in all seriousness, comparing Donald Trump to the Emperor Constantine. Like Constantine, Trump is “already emperor”, so all he has to do now is convert to Catholicism, and the Queen of Heaven (and her son, Jesus) will shower blessings and glory down upon the United States of America. So this is what you get when you combine the fanaticism of militant Catholicism with the dumbassery of MAGA zealots. Hold me, Mommy, I’m scared.

I’m sorry, Shives, you just aren’t freaky enough.

Strange people, those ancaps

A man, John Galton, was murdered in Acapulco. The proximate reason: he was growing marijuana in Mexico, and the drug cartels wanted to shut him down. The ultimate cause: he was deeply involved in the anarcho-capitalism cult.

Anarcho-capitalists (“ancaps”) believe in dismantling the state and allowing unchecked capitalism to govern the world in its place. Even within the small anarchist world, ancaps are fringe. Anarchists typically describe their movement as inherently anti-capitalist. Their philosophy describes anarchy as the rejection of hierarchical structures, which they say capitalism enforces. Anarcho-capitalists, meanwhile, see money as a liberating force. They promote a variety of libertarian causes like using cryptocurrency, legalizing all drugs, and privatizing all public institutions like courts and roads. The movement reveres the novelist Ayn Rand, whose work outlines a philosophy of radical selfishness and individualism. Her best-known character, an idealized capitalist named John Galt, appears to have inspired Galton’s name.

Peter Kropotkin wept. It’s all a fraud, with everyone involved desperately trying to con people out of money. They’re into cryptocurrency, drugs, and various paper-shuffling schemes, all of which rely on parasitizing other people’s wealth instead of generating their own, and they carry a lot of weird baggage.

They made their money off Forester’s hand-blown smoking paraphernalia and fundraised on their frequent blog posts. They adopted a dog named Rebel and a cat named Satoshi (named after the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin). The pair hosted “meat-ups” for people interested in carnivorism, an all-flesh diet popular in some right-wing and libertarian circles, particularly among libertarians with an interest in cryptocurrency.

The unofficial leader of their community of selfish expatriates, Jeff Berwick, is also a notorious con artist.

Berwick’s passport company, TDV Passports, also appears to have stumbled. The site used to sell “professional facilitation services for those seeking to establish citizenship in countries abroad.” In practical terms, that meant putting clients in touch with people who could fast-track immigration and citizenship applications. Various versions of the site charged from $12,000 for the Dominican Republic citizenship process to $40,000 in “legal fees” for U.S. citizenship. The company appears frequently on scam-reporting websites, where alleged TDV Passports customers complained of spending tens of thousands of dollars without ever obtaining immigration documents.

He’s also running a conference which will feature Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano, and charges extravagant fees for everything — it’s another scam. But what I thought most revealing was his comment on the horrifying murder of his friend:

Anarchapulco will go on as scheduled next week and might be even bigger due to the murder, Berwick says.

“We’ve received nothing but love from attendees and expect this will not affect attendance in a negative way at all,” he said. “In fact, it could increase attendance as more people are exposed to our message this week due to media coverage of this tragic event.”

I suppose you don’t have to be a sociopath to be an ancap, but it sure helps.