Thursday Pile of Prep-The Unethical Rise And Then Fall of Bill O’Reilly

Mandeville, LA – Today’s Pile of Prep: most of the stories and research used to put together the Mike Church Show on the Veritas Radio Network’s CRUSADE Channel. 2016 is here and WELCOME to the All-New, Mike Church Show on the CRUSADE Channel, listen LIVE for Free (don’t cost nuthin’).

Sapientia et Veritas – “It’s not that secularism is dead as a political force. It isn’t (like the poor it is always with us). It is simply that it does not have the power to defeat the forces of Christendom. Although it is always proclaiming the Christian Faith to be dead or dying, secularism does not have the power to kill it; or, rather, if it does have the power to kill it, as it indubitably has the power to kill its disciples, it does not have the power to keep it killed.” – Joseph Pearce

The Problem With O’Reilly’s Reign Isn’t Money It’s The Death Of Ethics – The “RSTLNE” answer to why Fox News finally decided that Bill O’Reilly had to go is that his upkeep became too expensive i.e. Fox was no longer making money from him. The boilerplate media reaction to Fox axing O’Reilly is crystallized in Jeff Spross’s essay at The Week: Fox News dumped Bill O’Reilly over money. It’s that simple. Well no, Jeff, its not that simple because what came before the money being THE issue was the jettisoning of Christian ethics in business and trade. In reviewing a book on business ethics Christine M Fletcher noted “The section “Moral Dilemmas in Business” makes it clear that profit cannot take precedence over morality and that, at times, significant sacrifices may be demanded of the faithful Christian.” How then can Rupert Murdoch, allegedly a practicing Catholic and Bill O’Reilly also alleging The Faith, have cooperated in profiting from O’Reilly while women were being degraded, harassed and coerced into mortally sinful relationships? They can’t, but they did because the presence of The Church (you could say Christ)  in our financial/business affairs has completely disappeared. As Andreas Widmer points out on the Legatus site this is because today’s Catholics in business have no knowledge whatsoever of the Church’s teaching on industry.

The Spin Stopped 1,200 Miles From Actual War For “War-Reporter” Bill O’Reilly – Michael Fumento reminds those mourning the end of Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor that O’Reilly claimed for years that he was a “war-reporter” but could never actually prove that he covered war. This fits right in with the rest of the Factor “reporting” which delivered up sensationalized doses of what Fox News viewers crave: fantasy. A mythical “shining city on the hill”, triumphant battles to “save Christmas” from “political correctness” and of course to restore ‘Muricha’s undefeated streak in waging wars across the planet. As Fumento points out, what O’Reilly did affects how other war journalists are regarded and creates this video-game like attitude about the all-too-real casualties of war, never shown on Fox. “See if you can get through my article on SEAL Michael Monsoor, who won the Medal of Honor by throwing himself on a grenade when he was the only person in position to save himself, without weeping. I can’t. That’s what war is about. It’s what war reporting is about. Or supposed to be.” The “Spin” has stopped for now, until a suitable war cheerleading charlatan like O’Reilly can be found.

Big Brother Cannot Solve Big Inequality But BIG God Can – The news headlines are steadily filled with the gluttonous adventures of successful “capitalists” and “entrepreneurs”, many of them having gained so much wealth that they plan on colonizing other parts of the solar system. From time to time, this massive income inequality is questioned but usually as click-bait for a screed calling for higher taxes or other government implemented schemes to “level the playing field” but rarely if ever do we read or hear or see a call for the return of subsidiarity and Solidarity as the ultimate corrective that also saves souls. My friend John Horvat writes about this today and makes some important points on the matter which is why you won’t see John on Fox or Red State. “However, the most important dynamo for wealth distribution is the church. When people have faith, they take seriously Christ’s mandate of loving one’s neighbor out of love of God. Such ardent charity opens the floodgates of wealth and applies it to vast works. It gave rise in the past to hospitals and universities, orphanages and hospices, churches and monasteries, charitable associations and pious confraternities — all at the service of the poor. A vast social infrastructure was one of the greatest achievements of Christendom against which no other civilization can compare.” Note this post’s feature image of the Church of The Scared Heart located on the campus of VCU in Richmond VA, that makes Horvat’s point: “Lack of funds prevented further action until 1884 when Bishop John J. Keane purchased the remainder of the present block. With the announcement of a gift of $500,000 for the proposed cathedral from Thomas Fortune Ryan and his wife, Ida Barry Ryan, plans for the building were drawn up.”

DeceptiCONNED: Why Chanting USA! USA! And Backing The War Party Won’t “Make ‘Muricah Great Again” – It’s been 25 years since “Blackhawk Down”, 65 years since the Korean War and 16 years since Afghanistan was invaded and yet the war-party (official “conservative-dumb”) is not tired of reviving or continuing all 3 conflicts and President Trump is helping them do it. As Pat Buchanan points out what sense does it make for the United States to still be responsible for the security of wealthy South Korea!? What can possibly be gained by re-deploying forces into Somalia!? Buchanan: “Twenty-four years after “Black Hawk Down,” the weekend brought reports of U.S. troops returning to Somalia. The promise of a Trump presidency—that we would start looking out for our own country and own national interests first and let the rest of the world solve, or fail to solve, its own problems—appears, not 100 days in, to have been a mirage. Will more wars make America great again?” No, they won’t but they will make permanent the Warfare State until we end it by leaving it’s authority through one method or another.

God To LGBTQ Promoting, Progressive Heathens: This Is Your THIRD Warning, This Year, My Asteroid Cometh! – NASA tries to justify its existence from time to time by pretending to be the sole authority on the subject of earth-killing asteroids for example. Now comes news of a monstrous, 2,000 foot wide asteroid that will narrowly miss our gravitational pull and “skim past” earth.

Hawaii Government To Expecting Moms: Have You Considered Infanticide? – The state of Hawaii’s House has just passed a bill that will require pro-life pregnancy centers to display signs that instruct women to consider their options which include “family planning and prenatal services” i.e. contraception and of course abortion. “At issue in the censorship was testimony from a former client at one center, A Place for Women in Waipio—an outreach of Calvary Chapel Pearl Harbor—who now works with Planned Parenthood. The woman had testified to the senate’s Ways and Means Committee that her experience at the center left her feeling like ‘the only thing they cared about was the baby.’“ Wow, shudder the thought that a pregnancy center focused on caring “for the baby” instead of what? the inconvenienced mother who may “get stuck” with a child she participated in helping to conceive?

Success! Trumpzilla Delivers On ONE Campaign Promise – Last Thursday a bill escaped the imperial Congress and landed on President Trump’s desk and has been signed into law. The law was signed into existence by Dear Leader Chariman MaObama via executive order but that has now been undone. This means that states can remove funding for Planned Parenthood clinics without “violating” Title X of the civil rights act.

Easter Reminder: The Gates Of Hell Have Not Prevailed-AGAIN – Joseph Pearce shows you why he is a regular contributor to this site and the Mike Church Show in “The Son Has Risen In The West”. Pearce reminds us that by the very fact that another Easter has come and gone is God’s proof for us that “the gates of Hell” have not prevailed on “the West” nor the rest of the secular world either. Pearce: “It’s not that secularism is dead as a political force. It isn’t (like the poor it is always with us). It is simply that it does not have the power to defeat the forces of Christendom. Although it is always proclaiming the Christian Faith to be dead or dying, secularism does not have the power to kill it; or, rather, if it does have the power to kill it, as it indubitably has the power to kill its disciples, it does not have the power to keep it killed.” Think of that next time a “conservative” friend or relative tells you that the end is near and evil is bringing it about: it CAN’T.

“A [r]epublic, If You Can Keep It”, It’s 2017, We HAVEN’T Kept It – Pierre Manent (excerpt above) does a novelist’s job of trying to explain the ancient roots of the [r]epublic as Shakespeare told it in Julius Caesar and other plays for the purpose of demolishing today’s warped view of what a [r]epublic is supposed to do. Isn’t that the stumbling block we keep tripping over, competing versions of what our former [r]epublic is supposed to do? Today’s [r]epublic does not serve the purpose of the Common Good unless that Good can be defined as what are the accomplishments of the government yet this is what 84% of today’s Republicans expect the [r]epublic to do. This is exactly opposite to what the [r]epublic should do if we have eternity in mind: bring Just order to Man’s affairs and then defend that order; God handles the rest. And just how does he do that? You know the answer already, The Church.

It’s Not a PARTS Problem, It’s a BRAIN Problem – Research Claiming Sex-Change Benefits Is Based On Junk Science Caitlyn Jenner has perfected the art of cashing in on each step of gender transition. Jenner is wealthy and can cash in on celebrity, but a large portion of the transgender population remains lost and unaccounted for. Did they die, detransition, or commit suicide?  All we know is the attempted suicide rate for transgender people has remained above 40 percent for many years.

New Poll: We LOVE War Because We’re A War-Like People – A fresh out today, CBS poll shows that a whopping 57% of ‘Muricans approve of lobbing Tomahawk missiles into sovereign countries we are not at war with. But wait, that’s not the real news. A near unity of Republicans, 84%, say USA! USA!, the strikes in Syria are star-spangled awesome. Recall that the GOP is supposed to be the party wherein resides all our illustrious, Christian, “strict-constructionist, “constitutional”, “conservatives”. Anyone holding out hope that there remains a political solution to reigning in this out of control, menacing hulk of a “country”, take these poll results and your own personal experiences of late into account. When Richard Weaver wrote that “ideas have consequences” he was thinking about the erroneous pseudo-philosophy of phony morality and patriotism called Americanism, now fully on display and seemingly unstoppable. This Holy Week, I pray for a Divine response to our madness.

Bomb Away, It’s OK! The Chinese Understood! – der Trumpissar explains that when he accepted Ivanka’s suggestion to bomb Syria it was ok because [Chinese Prez] “he understood [what we were doing] immediately”! Well, that settles it. Getting an ok from the leader of a country that forces women to abort their babies if they are the wrong sex, that is the kind of glowing endorsement that makes America’s illegal, lethal bombing campaigns Great Again! Carry on citizen, nothing to see here, move along.

Buchanan: The War Party Is About To Claim The Hide of President Trump – “Yay, Iraq War Planners!” – Buchanan not only asks this piece’s title question but then provides that if the answer is yes, Trump will lose a significant part of the base that elected him. So into the stewing carnage of American foreign policy excess we have added the element of inexperience and machismo, some of us prayed that Trump had demonstrated enough disgust at our nation building efforts that he would at the least proceed with caution. Apparently, we got hosed or as Ross Douthat puts it: “If you were expecting Trump to actually govern as a paleoconservative, to eschew the use of force absent some immediate threat to the American homeland, to pull U.S. troops out of all their far-flung bases and leave entangling alliances behind, then the strikes against Bashar al-Assad are the latest evidence that you got played.” Played, hosed, had, conned, it’s what our democratic process and civil religion yields.

It’s April 2017 And The Immodesty Is About To Go Nuclear Because It WENT Nuclear – Venerable Bishop Sheen called out ‘Muricah back in the 1960’s while speaking to a group of young Catholics on “Youth and Sex”: “8:15 in the morning, the 6th of August, 1945, when we flew a military plane over this city, when we dropped that atomic bomb on it; that bomb on blotted out boundaries. There was no longer a boundary between the military and the civilian, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, between the living and the dead. For even the living who escaped the bomb were already half dead. So we broke down boundaries and limits and from that time on the world has said we want no one limiting me. … You want no restraint, no boundaries, no limitsI have to do what I want to do. Now let’s analyze that for a moment, is that happiness?”

The Tragedy of Post Christian, Philosophia Perennis Devoid Thinking – Read this piece from AmConMag writer Noah Millman to get a closeup view of why Philosophia Perennis is so desperately needed to corral the erroneous thinking Men are sure to engage in when NOT grounded in the eternal quest for True Wisdom i.s. Sapientia. The issue Noah, is not whether “only the Saints” can live by the Magisterial code, it is that by God’s Grace the Saints DID live the Tradition WHILE receiving the Graces needed to do so. You cannot approach Grace as zero sum, mathematics, as in if I do ______ I will receive ______ “Grace credits” but if I do ______I will have deducted ______ Grace Credits. Grace is present in the world and we are given the supply needed at Baptism, the suffering of the Christian Faithful is simply to maintain the state you enter at Baptism, using the Gospels and the Traditional Teaching as MEANS to that END. As Padré Gaetano tells us in Humility of Heart: “And has not a saint abundant reasons, from the thought of his own weakness, to live always in a state of great humility, when he knows that from one hour to another he may lose the grace of God and the kingdom of heaven which he has merited by years of laboriously-acquired virtues? “Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”

For an audio version of Jefferson’s [r]epublicanism via Project ’76 Webisode, click here

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

See Full Bio