05/13/15

The Catholic Church Has Gone Socialist

Since we published our article, “Catholic Church Captured by ‘Progressive Forces,’” it is starting to dawn on many in and out of the media that Pope Francis has come down on the side of the “progressive,” and even Marxist, forces in the world today.

Writing at the Blaze.com and commenting on the pope’s friendly meeting with Cuban dictator Raul Castro, Catholic writer Stephen Herreid of the Intercollegiate Review called the pope’s dealings with Castro and other Marxists “a new Catholic scandal” as significant and terrifying as the presence of pedophiles in the church. He wonders how conservative Catholics can continue to pay respect to a pope “intent on making friends with the enemies of religious liberty.”

Francis had a one-hour meeting with Raul Castro on May 10. The day before, Castro had greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Francis will visit Cuba in September prior to his tour of the United States.

The Associated Press reported that Castro commented, after meeting with the pope, that the pontiff “is a Jesuit, and I, in some way, am too.” Castro added, “I always studied at Jesuit schools.” He also promised, “When the pope goes to Cuba in September, I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction.”

The evidence is getting too big for the major media to ignore: the pope has made common cause with the forces of international Marxism, which are associated with atheism, the suppression of traditional Christianity and the persecution and murder of Christians.

Conservative Catholics and many others are terrified of what is to come. Some fear that the Roman Catholic Church has joined the campaign for a global socialist state that could turn into an anti-Christian tyranny.

Dr. Timothy Ball, author of The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, told me during a recent interview, “I think the Catholic Church is regretting making him the pope. They did it because the previous pope was starting to deal with the problems of pedophilia and corruption in the money in the church. So the powerful Cardinals pushed him [Benedict] aside. It wasn’t a health matter at all. He just realized he couldn’t beat them…He [Francis] is bringing in these socialist ideas. He’s already expressed some of them—about inequities of wealth, redistributing the wealth, which are themes you’ve heard from Obama.”

Benedict had also been a strong opponent of Liberation Theology.

As Herreid put it in his Blaze column, “In a matter of months, Pope Francis has announced a desire to ‘quickly’ beatify a deceased liberation theologist bishop, reconciled with a Sandinista activist priest who once called Ronald Reagan a ‘butcher’ and an ‘international outlaw,’ and even invited the founder of the liberation theology movement, Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak on the need for a ‘poor Church for the Poor’ at an official Vatican event this week.”

In fact, this is the latest example of Francis welcoming advocates of Liberation Theology—a doctrine manufactured by the old KGB to dupe Christians into supporting Marxism—directly into the Vatican.

Francis received Gutierrez, considered the father of Liberation Theology, in September 2013, but in a private audience without photos. Then, on November 22, 2014, at the end of an audience granted to the participants of the National Missionary Congress of Italy, Francis warmly greeted him personally. Gutierrez, a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, is being welcomed as an official guest at the Vatican to participate in this week’s Caritas Internationalis General Assembly, whose theme is, “One Human Family, Caring for Creation.”

Caritas is a global confederation of 164 Catholic organizations. Its U.S. affiliates are Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services.

Herreid comments, “Neither Pope St. John Paul II nor his trusted friend and successor Benedict XVI were taken in by liberation theology. John Paul fought Communism throughout his pontificate, and Benedict was equally forceful against liberation theology’s interpretation of the traditional ‘preferential option for the poor’ as a preferential option for violent state-mandated wealth-redistribution.”

The Francis-Marxist alliance seems to confirm the predictions of the late Vatican insider Malachi Martin, who wrote penetrating books about the Catholic Church entitled The Jesuits and The Keys of This Blood. He believed that Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the “restructuring” of the old Soviet Union, never gave up on Marxism-Leninism but adopted the viewpoint of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci that a worldwide communist state could only be achieved gradually. It was to be a “revolution by infiltration.” He said, “Liberation Theology was a perfectly faithful exercise of Gramsci’s principles.”

Martin wrote that “The most powerful religious orders of the Roman Church—Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Maryknollers—all committed themselves to Liberation Theology.”

In addition to Gutierrez, one of the speakers at this week’s Vatican conference is Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N.’s Millennium Project, an advocate of a global tax that could impose a cost of $845 billion from the U.S. alone. Sachs is speaking at a panel discussion on “Growing inequalities: a challenge for the one human family.”

Sachs previously appeared at a Vatican conference on “Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility,” which was held from May 2 – 6, 2014. It was held under the authority of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

A joint statement published after the close of that Vatican conference called for Sustainable Development Goals “to guide planetary-scale actions after 2015.”

It said, “To achieve these goals will require global cooperation, technological innovations that are within reach, and supportive economic and social policies at the national and regional levels, such as the taxation and regulation of environmental abuses, limits to the enormous power of transnational corporations and a fair redistribution of wealth. It has become abundantly clear that Humanity’s relationship with Nature needs to be undertaken by cooperative, collective action at all levels—local, regional, and global.”

This week’s Caritas conference includes consideration of a “strategic framework” for the years 2015 to 2019 that quoted Francis as calling on every Christian “to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor…”

In building “a civilization of love,” the document urges the “transforming [of] unjust systems and structures” and desires an outcome in which “Justice is attained with respect to climate change and the use of natural resources…”

Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, explained what all of this means in simple language. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” she said. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change…It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.”

The pope’s left-wing supporters at the Catholic Climate Covenant are ecstatic over his upcoming encyclical on ecology and climate change and believe it can be the catalyst for this deliberate transformation. Dan Misleh of the Catholic Climate Covenant tells his supporters that his group is creating what he calls “an educational, inspirational video” on how to stop global warming and developing new programs to help Catholics “reduce their carbon footprint.”

Members of his climate coalition include:

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: Migration and Refugee Services
Catholic Charities USA
Catholic Relief Services
Catholic Health Association of the United States
Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach
Conference of Major Superiors of Men
Carmelite NGO
Catholic Rural Life
Franciscan Action Network
National Council of Catholic Women
Leadership Conference of Women Religious
Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities
National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry
Sisters of Mercy of the Americas

12/20/14

Journalism Educator “Hates” Republicans and Loves Marxism

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A feminist professor of communications at the University of Michigan has become a laughingstock for a poorly-sourced column in a socialist newspaper about the academic basis for hating Republicans. In the article, Susan J. Douglas began with the statement, “I hate Republicans” and declares that “marrying a Republican is unimaginable to me…”

A specialist on “Gender and the Media,” she is reportedly married with a daughter.

I’ve got something that beats that. Curtis J. MacDougall, the author of a journalism textbook that I used in college, was a Marxist with a 319-page FBI file, who wrote favorably about Fidel Castro and feared Joe McCarthy. MacDougall was an activist in the communist-dominated Progressive Party.

As a young journalism student, I studied from MacDougall’s textbook, Interpretative Reporting, which encouraged a form of advocacy journalism, and “learned” that Walter Duranty of The New York Times was one of the great figures in the media. I later discovered that Duranty was a stooge of Stalin and one of the greatest liars in the history of journalism. In fact, he helped Stalin cover up the deaths of 7- to 10-million Ukrainians in a forced famine.

A modern-day MacDougall, Professor Douglas tries to sound like an intellectual and apparently wants to be taken seriously. She insists in the article that a “series of studies has found that political conservatives tend toward certain psychological characteristics,” such as “Dogmatism, rigidity and intolerance of ambiguity; a need to avoid uncertainty; support for authoritarianism; a heightened sense of threat from others; and a personal need for structure.”

She cites unnamed “researchers” as proving that “the two core dimensions of conservative thought are resistance to change and support for inequality.”

Douglas, who graduated from Elmira College in New York and received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Brown University, is not only a professor but the head of the University of Michigan communications studies department.

Since MacDougall’s textbook, Interpretative Reporting, was instrumental in training a generation of journalists, perhaps he influenced Douglas.

Now, she is trying to influence her students. But her self-declared “hate” for Republicans has backfired. She has exposed the real purpose of her “educational” pursuits.

The Detroit News reports that Andrea Fischer Newman, a member of the UM Board of Regents, said she found Douglas’s column “extremely troubling and offensive,” and that it condoned “hatred toward an entire segment of individuals in our society based solely on their political views…”

Grant Strobl, head of Young Americans for Freedom at the school, called the Douglas piece “ugly and full of hatred.”

While the article has to be taken seriously, its dependence on clearly dubious “studies” and “research” make it practically ridiculous.

Douglas ought to be laughed out of academia.

In an earlier piece for In These Times, she also gave us a precious insight into her own ideology. She hailed Stuart Hall, the founding editor of New Left Review, as a “towering Marxist public intellectual” who had “influenced multiple generations of professors and their students…” It’s apparent she is one of them.

Indeed, she appears to thank Hall for helping establish “communication studies” as “one of the most popular majors in the United States…” She wrote, “We owe him a monumental debt.”

She notes that Hall was a follower of Antonio Gramsci, but doesn’t point out that Gramsci was an Italian communist whose writings were introduced to the United States in the mid-1950s by Carl Marzani, a publisher and Soviet KGB agent whose publishing house was subsidized by the KGB. (Interestingly, Curtis A. MacDougall’s history of the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army, was published by Marzani as well.)

Gramsci popularized the idea of destroying Western society through infiltration rather than armed revolution. It helps explain why Weather Underground terrorists such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became college professors after giving up on a communist armed revolution inside the United States.

Robert Chandler, in his book Shadow World, noted that Gramsci’s Marxist theory of cultural revolution “stressed that dominance over the existing order in the West, including religion, was rooted in education, the media, law, and a mass culture of beliefs, values, and traditions.” In order to overturn the existing order and “Marxize the inner man,” Gramsci taught that “one must create a subversive program of ‘counter-hegemony’ against its supporting culture,” in order to “negate the established modes of thought and ways of doing things.”

That appears to be Susan Douglas’s mission in academia and journalism.

Douglas’ Curriculum Vitae identifies her participation in a “Rethinking Marxism” conference in 1992, delivering a talk on “Pop Culture, Kitsch and Social Change in the 1960s: Hegemony, Subjectivity and the Rise of Feminism.”

The editors of the journal, Rethinking Marxism, also sponsor “Marxism and the World Stage” conferences, described as “celebrations of the Marxian tradition.”

Douglas’s “academic credentials” include numerous articles for such publications as The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times.

Her hate for Republicans is making news, but don’t think students in her classes haven’t been aware of the agenda she’s been pushing. Some of the comments from students who have taken her classes include:

She openly states that she hates certain members of the student body based on their political opinions. Avoid this closed minded intolerant person….
Boring and disorganized. Talks to students like they are children. I think she rates herself to get good scores.
Condones hatred and intolerance towards differing viewpoints.
Socialist feminist nut.

This controversy will serve a purpose if it renews a focus on the corruption in journalism education and why left-wing and even pro-Marxist bias in the media is getting worse.

Her book on decoding “enlightened sexism” was the subject of a talk she gave that was video recorded. An elitist who knows better than everyone else, she claims to be an expert on uncovering “subtle” forms of sexism in the media.

Her courses include:

Media, Culture, and Society
Media Theory and Criticism—introductory and advanced levels
Qualitative Methods in Media Studies
Gender and the Media
History of Broadcasting
Origins of Mass Culture: 1870-1930
Images of Women in Popular Culture: 1945-present
Analysis of Television News
Motherhood and the Mass Media
The Social History of Radio in America
History of Communications Technologies
Introduction to Mass Communications

In a University of Michigan profile of Douglas, she was asked, “What inspires you?,” and she replied, “My students inspire me. I love teaching undergraduates: their energy, their optimism, their openness to new ideas.”

But this “love” seems to have undergone a transformation into a closed mind of hate toward opposing views. She has made explicit what we know and understand to be their usually hidden biases.

Thank you Ms. Douglas for telling us openly what we always suspected to be the case. Thank you for alerting us to the Marxist revolutionaries in positions of power in journalism and academia.

Now, please tell us why you deserve to be in a position of trust and authority over students who desire a good education and want to make something of their lives.