Tag: jd vance
With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

On Roman streets and the worldwide web, a half-joke was making the rounds yesterday: Catholic convert JD Vance, emissary of America’s empathy-challenged hard right, was the last visitor to Pope Francis before he died and somehow… did him in.

Here at the Freakshow, we disregard conspiracy theories like these until shown hard proof. But it is a fact that a cabal of powerful right-wing American Catholics is not at all sorry to see Francis pass away – on Easter Monday, no less. These men have been licking their chops for more than a decade for a chance to conclave and install a man more of their ilk, someone who might help persuade millions of Catholics that Jesus was really a social Darwinist.

“The ultra-conservative wing of the US Catholic Church – a group made up of cardinals, bishops, priests and wealthy individuals – has spent years preparing for this precise moment,” says British investigative journalist Gareth Gore, who last year published a book on the strange and secretive Opus Dei cult, including its growing power in the heart of Washington. (I covered it for New York Magazine).

Pope Francis was one of the more progressive church leaders in recent Catholic church history. He acknowledged the effects of manmade climate change and made small – but, to the far right, significant and alarming – statements about market capitalism and the poor. Those positions are clearly aligned with Jesus’ actual teachings, but ultra conservatives have abandoned them in favor of the prosperity gospel and drill baby drill.

Francis’s support of social justice made him anathema to hard-right American Catholics like Leonard Leo and billionaires like California real estate attorney Tim Busch. Busch’s Trinitas Cellars produces red wines named after the Virgin Mary. Many Opus Dei-affiliated and other hard-right Catholics in Washington (JD Vance and Leonard Leo among them) have boarded jets west to attend gatherings at Busch’s Napa Institute School of Business.

Last year, Busch hosted a conference on “woke capitalism,” and in the past, he’s invited speakers questioning the authenticity of the civil rights movement. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops cut ties with Busch’s Napa School in part because event agendas include praying the Patriotic Rosary, a devotion invoking divine “continuance on our cause and our people” using the words of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee – that specific cause, of course, being the perpetuation of slavery.

In addition to annoying rich MAGA extremists, Francis had asked church officials to live more modestly. “We pastors must not be men with a ‘princely mindset.’” he once said. This did not sit well with rightist clergy who live for cosplaying royalty. American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke was among them. He insisted on continuing to wear trains of watered silk, scarlet gloves, and jeweled red hats – all while calling gay marriage Satanic and accusing Obama of being a totalitarian because of the ACA.

Some of the kookiest hard-right Catholic clergy are American or are operating in this country. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former pontifical vicar to the U.S. under the arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a wildly nutty letter in support of Trump in 2020, calling the election a battle between the forces of light and darkness. He also publicly called Pope Francis a “false prophet” and a “servant of Satan.”

Cardinal Burke, discussed above, defied the Pope and refused to give communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. He had considered serving as honorary president of a “gladiator school” for white religious nationalists that Steve Bannon was building in Europe. (He backed off when Bannon said he might make a documentary about pedophile priests.)

During his tenure, Francis demoted Opus Dei and expelled some of the more extreme bishops aligned with Christian nationalism and alt-right conspiracy theorists. Last year, the Pope excommunicated Vigano for “schism” citing his "refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff.” Francis had removed Burke from the Vatican’s highest court and then revoked his salary and Vatican quarters.

Gareth Gore has reported that a secret cabal long schemed to get rid of Pope Francis. They used some of the same opposition research tactics to investigate rising left-leaning leaders within the church that (Opus Dei-affiliated Catholic) Leonard Leo and his Judicial Crisis Network have applied in media and influence campaigns to stack the Supreme Court with far-right Catholics.

“While Francis was alive, the [right-wing Catholic billionaires and clergy] actively sought to discredit his papacy with smear campaigns, leaking unfounded accusations that the late Pope had covered up cases of sexual abuse – and then using the right-wing Catholic media to spread those rumours far and wide,” Gareth Gore told me. “At the same time, they were financing a campaign to influence the next Conclave, hiring former CIA and FBI agents to dig up kompromat on liberal cardinals who might follow him. Their aim was clear: to discredit Francis and his progressive agenda, and to ensure that the next Pope is a man aligned with their world view - someone who agrees with their ultra-conservative reading of the Bible. That plan is now cranking into action.”

These same men are busy today and in the weeks to come, plotting to ensure the Catholic Church gets back to the business of the Inquisition and witch burning.

Ok, I jest.

But the Catholic hard right and their allies in Washington are not too sad today. They have waited a while for this opportunity. When Gore interviewed Tim Busch for his book, the Californian was explicit about the far right outliving a progressive Pope. “I think something important is happening, something not so good,” Busch said. “I think he’s tightening the noose, but I don’t think he’s going to have enough time.”

But Gore also believes the rightists face an uphill struggle. “The ultra-conservatives, while wealthy and powerful, are a tiny proportion of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world,” he told me. “The Conclave to elect the next Pope will be largely made up of cardinals appointed by Francis himself. While they may not necessarily share all of his views, they will see the positive impact that his progressive agenda has had on the Church, and will likely want to build on his legacy.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.



MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

Welcome to the final installment of your Freakshow guide to the extremely online Nazi influencers of Trumpworld. It’s been a sickening tour, so take your anti-nausea meds one more time, and let’s get cracking...

First, an update on Canadian racist Geoff Martin, who we covered two weeks ago. Martin, who calls himself Captive Dreamer, includes Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and other high-profile Trumpies among his fans. But you will recall that Dreamer/Geoff’s day job was office drone at Canada’s largest Christian university, Western Trinity – an institution presided over by his own father.

After Geoff was outed, his father Todd Martin renounced his spawn’s views, albeit without naming him. In a video posted online, the senior Martin said, in part: “I reject white supremacy and any ideology that elevates one group of people over another. I denounce the use of derogatory and disparaging labels and language and any attempts to dehumanize another individual or group. I strongly oppose the use of social media as a means of spreading such harmful ideas.”

(FWIW, your Freakshow author reached out to the university’s media office inquiring about whether Geoff Martin is still employed. Their reply: “As a matter of policy and in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act, we cannot disclose personal information about current or past employees. However, we can confirm that no individual by that name is employed by the university.”)

Dad’s renunciation didn’t sit well with Dreamer’s online fans. American racist influencer Mike Cernovich called Martin’s video “a degrading struggle session imposed on him.” As if the president of a university (“Christian,” no less) that advertises its “inclusivity” could maintain his position without denouncing the odious public views of his spawn.

Dreamer belongs to a pack of non-American influencers with advanced degrees who don’t all vote here but who have been drooling over the prospect of a fascist America for years. We’ll have one more quick look at two of them here before we bid them all good riddance (for our reading purposes at least – when it comes to the Trump administration, they don’t seem to be going anywhere).

The king of MAGA’s online fascists is a Romanian named Costin Vlad Almariu. Almariu, born in Bucharest in 1980, is a greasy hyper-misogynist racist, with a Yale PhD in political science, who posts a lot of photographs of oiled-up bodybuilders in Speedos. He argues that modernity has stripped (white) men - especially progressive men - of their manliness.

No “I like beer” Trumpworld frat boy’s shelf is without his best-selling 2018 manifesto, Bronze Age Mindset. The tome has been compared to a modern, non-German Mein Kampf. His ideas have even earned him an ism - BAPism, which stands for “Bronze Age Pervert” per Almariu’s Xitter handle. Bronze Age Mindset’s ironic tone and elevated vocabulary gild the savagery of his ideas (boiled down by him to “the desire to be worshipped as a god”).

Like last week’s Freak, Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, Almariu believes anyone who isn’t white is naturally inferior, and that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”

BAPists also presume self-reliant women are the cause of all modern male problems. Almariu’s personal misogyny is bottomless. He loathes us, routinely referring to us as “grils” or with the obscene insult “roasties” or, if he paid one, “prosties.” On International Women’s Day last week, he tweeted a picture of a woman eating raw tuna, with the caption: “Highly repulsive. I will generally not see a gril again after she eats in front of me. I stopped seeing a favorite prostie after I made the mistake of having delivery sushis with her at my place.”

Almariu’s 186,000 followers include Trump Junior, Vance, and many mod Nazi fellow travelers like Charles Cornish-Dale, another offshore fascist who spews into the U.S. radicalization pipeline under the username Raw Egg Nationalist on Xitter. “Yes, disgusting’” Raw Egg responded to BAP. “Eating is a big test of compatibility. How a woman holds a knife, whether she takes time eating her food, small gestures like using napkin properly, etc.”

Delicate, napkin-noticing Brit Cornish-Dale is another MAGA favorite (followed by Musk, Vance, Trump Junior, and Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen). As recently as last fall, Trump Junior was retweeting Raw Egg’s bullshit about FEMA and DEI programs.

He has an Oxford PhD (his thesis was on the religious history of an English parish), and now edits and writes a hilariously homoerotic (given Cornish-Dale’s other sentiments) magazine called Man’s World, with covers that include AI-generated classical male nude sculpture with futuristic eye beams and an apparently erect member. A British anti-hate group that outed him reports that he lives at home with his mommy in England.

Devoted to the goal of “superlative male flourishing,” Cornish-Dale advocates “slonking” 36 raw eggs a day among other wackadoodle muscle-building cures. Tucker Carlson featured him in his ball-tanning documentary on men not long before Fox sacked him.

Cornish-Dale has promoted Mein Kampf, eugenics, and the great replacement conspiracy theory. In a recent issue of his magazine, he posted a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream - Panzerschokolade - a concoction of cocoa powder and speed that gave the brave frontline Nazi tank troops more energy! (see below)

Last week, Cornish-Dale posted an AI “portrait” of JD Vance, his pudgy face slimmed down and decked in mutton chops and 19th-century colonial uniform, leaning on a sword, with an Indian woman coiled at his feet.

Cornish-Dale, Almariu and Martin, all born or living abroad, are invested in the American fascist experiment and are engaged with, platformed, and retweeted by men with immense power over global affairs, national policy, and American people’s freedom of speech, assembly, and the pursuit of happiness. They radicalize American Trump racists suffering from the Obama Derangement Syndrome that has motivated MAGA since 2015.

For decades after 9/11, the U.S. government blew tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-radicalization efforts aimed at Islamic extremists. Meanwhile, this clan formed and spewed scholarly Nazism and Euro-fascist crap into the American mainstream. They are empowered by and influencing an administration that claims to see anti-Semitism on every campus and is weaponizing that accusation to deport people, all while refusing to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute.

These freaks remind us that whatever the appeasers (ADL, Bari Weiss) want to pretend, the sieg heil means exactly what it always has: jackboots, thugs, and mass murder.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.


Pete Hegseth

Bone Stupid: Trump Officials Leaked Military Secrets On Phone App

Democrats are aghast after the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic reported that he was accidentally added to an unsecure text chain in which Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and multiple other top national security and Trump administration officials discussed planning a military strike in Yemen.

The Trump administration says the text chain—in which the officials were discussing not only whether to strike the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group, but how and when they would do it—is authentic. They are looking into how Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the thread.

But the fact that the Trump administration officials were discussing classified and highly sensitive military plans on a messaging app is the real problem.

Goldberg reported that Hegseth was discussing information that, “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.”

He also reported that multiple national security lawyers said Waltz “may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information.”

From Goldberg’s report:

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

And on top of that, Goldberg reported that by using an app like Signal—where texts are set to disappear—the Trump officials could also have been violating federal record laws.

“If you read one article today, make it this one,” Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) wrote in a post on X of Goldberg’s report. “Total incompetence, yet again. And putting our national security at great risk.”

Democrats are now demanding information and threatening to launch investigations.

“Only one word for this: FUBAR,” Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), who served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq, wrote in a post on Bluesky, referring to the military slang term to describe something as “Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.” “If House Republicans won’t hold a hearing on how this happened IMMEDIATELY, I’ll do it my damn self.”

Only one word for this: FUBAR. If House Republicans won’t hold a hearing on how this happened IMMEDIATELY, I’ll do it my damn self.

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— Pat Ryan (@pkryan.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 5:11 PM

Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-CA) also said he will demand an investigation.

This article completely exposes the Trump Administration's incompetent and irresponsible methods of handling our national security.

[image or embed]

— Rep. Salud Carbajal (@carbajal.house.gov) March 24, 2025 at 5:30 PM

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who lost both of her legs while serving in Iraq, was aghast at the recklessness of the Trump administration officials.

Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in history, is demonstrating his incompetence by literally leaking classified war plans in the group chat... Hegseth and Trump are making our country less safe.

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— Tammy Duckworth (@duckworth.senate.gov) March 24, 2025 at 7:54 PM

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said, “Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally – that would normally involve a jail sentence.”

And Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) connected the incompetence of the Trump administration’s national security officials to the Trump giving co-President Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency bros access to Americans’ personal information.

“The Trump Administration, which just committed one of the biggest and most incompetent national security breaches in history, is also giving Elon Musk and his team of unvetted lackeys access to every American's personal information,” Beyer wrote, putting in stark terms just how much trouble we all are in with these fools leading the federal government.

Ultimately, there is so much irony to this story.

First, almost every member of that chain criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, citing national security concerns.

“Talk about a DOUBLE STANDARD: Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent top secret emails to Hillary Clinton’s private account and the DOJ didn't do a DAMN THING about it,” Waltz—who is responsible for adding Goldberg to the text chain in which they were recklessly discussing military operations—said in a 2023 appearance on Fox News. “No wonder Americans are losing faith in our justice system.”

“Seems like every day there are new revelations on how Hillary's private email server put national security at risk,” Rubio wrote in a 2016 tweet.

"Hillary Clinton put some of the highest, most sensitive intelligence information on her private server because maybe she thinks she's above the law, or maybe she just wanted the convenience of being able to read it on her Blackberry,” Rubio also said at a campaign event for his failed presidential bid in January 2016. “This is unacceptable."

Even more ironic is that just last week, Hegseth reported that the Department of Defense was going to be investigating who leaked his plan to brief co-President Elon Musk on the United States' plans for war with China—another thing that makes Americans less safe as there is no reason Musk should be privy to that information.

Given that Hegseth is discussing confidential military plans via Signal, maybe he should look in the mirror for why that information leaked.

Worst of all, as Democrats lambast the Trump administration officials and call for investigations, Republicans have been virtually silent—even though they would be screaming to the heavens if a Democratic administration had done anything even remotely similar.

As of press time, few Republican lawmakers have commented. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) posted on X, “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels—and certainly not to those without security clearances, including reporters. Period. Safeguards must be put in place to ensure this never happens again.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Semafor’s Burgess Everett that it, “Sounds like a huge screw up. I mean, is there any other way to describe it?”

We can guarantee that Cornyn would’ve had much stronger words if it had been Biden administration officials doing the same.

And Trump himself used the age-old excuse that he hadn’t heard the news in order to avoid commenting on it.

“I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. ...You're telling me about it for the first time,” Trump told reporters on Monday.

If the commander in chief did not yet know about the fact that his top aides were putting the country at risk by discussing military operations via text message, then that’s a scandal in and of itself.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Why The Trump War Plans Leak Is So Much Worse Than What Hillary Did

Why The Trump War Plans Leak Is So Much Worse Than What Hillary Did

Even in a political environment marked by daily scandal and outrage, the revelation of a reckless and stupid security breach by Trump’s top cabinet members exploded yesterday. The potentially catastrophic leak of a top-secret military operation showed why President Trump’s cabinet choices were so dangerous – as many seasoned experts warned when he named them. Only by sheer luck was a disaster avoided.

It was a simple but stunning story: The Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, as reported by him and his staff, had been included by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz in a supposedly secret mid-March group text chat -- along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and more than a dozen other high-ranking officials. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the chat, convened on the encrypted app Signal, was authentic.

The chat messages conveyed highly sensitive military and diplomatic information, including “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” that occurred two hours after he received a message on March 15.

Hegseth’s feeble attempt to deny that any “war plans” had been disclosed can only be added to the long roster of lies from him and other administration officials. A former Fox News personality and the target of numerous warnings against his arrogance, drunkenness, and inexperience before his confirmation, the defense secretary ironically assured the group chat that “We are currently clean on OPSEC" -- the military acronym for operational security.

“Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” Hegseth recently boasted. “Not anymore.” Hegseth, Waltz, and the rest of the participants in those fateful discussions should soon become subjects of a national security investigation, during which they will presumably be wired up to polygraph machines, just as Hegseth has sternly prescribed for all suspected Pentagon leakers.

As soon as she read the news, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to social media. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” quipped the irrepressible Democrat, daring her critics to bring up the old matter of “her emails” and the alleged scandal that probably cost her the presidency in 2016.

Despite Republican bleats of indignation, and angry posts urging her to “sit down” or worse, it is instructive to contrast what Hegseth and company did with Clinton’s own exhaustively investigated actions.

As reported in this space three years ago – and confirmed in a subsequent investigation by Washington Post reporter and fact-checker Glenn Kessler – Clinton actually disclosed no classified information in those fabled emails or her home server. Her innocence was confirmed not only by the Justice Department and the FBI (under Republican James Comey, who sank her campaign with his own unethical conduct), but in two subsequent State Department probes during the first Trump administration.

Among the Clinton emails that Comey used to tar her before the election, none disclosed national security information or were classified before she sent them. A typical example was a message from an aide, reminding her to send a condolence note to the president of Malawi.

Such innocuous and outdated information contrasts sharply with the real-time disclosure of a bombing mission which, if exposed, could jeopardize its success and the lives of the pilots and other military and intelligence personnel.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the Signal chat as “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”

Joining many other Democrats and some dismayed Republicans, as well as a platoon of retired military and defense experts, Reed said, “Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion, using approved, secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line. The carelessness shown by President Trump’s Cabinet is stunning and dangerous.”

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), an Army veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, offered an even more pithy reaction. “If House Republicans won’t hold a hearing on how this happened IMMEDIATELY, I’ll do it my damn self,” he wrote on X. “Only one word for this: FUBAR,” a military acronym that means “fucked up beyond all recognition.”

Which aptly expresses the condition of American national security under Donald Trump and his incompetent and highly suspect minions.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. He is the author of several books, including The Raw Deal: How The Bush Republicans Plan To Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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