Houston, Texas – Registration for our National Conference, to be held in Atchison, Kansas on July 11-13, is now live at our Corac website. Our theme this year is, as noted above, Courage Under Fire. We have had some difficult times over the last decade. I maintain that those people who have stood their ground defending truth and memory while ideologues try to silence and destroy them are the great heroes of our time. Courage is contagious – and we are going to need lots of it to withstand the assault on truth and memory coming from the godless left in its death throes. That is why this conference was designed to specifically highlight people who have not just talked the talk under fire…but walked the walk regardless of consequences.
I like to have one speaker at conferences who can bring you up to snuff on issues of public controversy, so you are better prepared to deal with the smog of confusion the ideologues try to pelt you with. Kansas State Sen. Mike Thompson is a wonderful, pro-life leader who has been a good friend since Joe and Connie Brickner, the regional coordinators, first introduced this great friend of theirs to me almost a decade ago. Significantly, Thompson was also the chief meteorologist for two of Kansas City’s major TV stations for over two decades. Even more significantly, he (along with Chicago’s John Coleman) were the most prominent major market meteorologists to push back against the overblown claims of the climate change hysterics. He will give a presentation solidly based in sound science that will help you when dealing with folks who want to use climate alarmism to scare you into embracing Marxism.
The travails of my friend, David Daleiden, over the last decade in his battle with abortionists and the California political establishment are well known – and inspirational – to all of us. The fruit of his labor has been to expose the feet of clay of what everyone treated as a two-ton gorilla – Planned Parenthood – to all, including its closest political allies. I am hoping that by the time the Conference comes, the United States will have ended the practice of sending your tax dollars to subsidize the baby-killers at Planned Parenthood. Daleiden is quietly, but intently, working on opening up a new front in this battle. Pray that he will be able to announce it with us in Kansas.
Joseph Strickland, the Bishop Emeritus of Tyler, Texas was removed without canonical cause by Pope Francis – a move that would have been void had Bp. Strickland not offered his resignation in humble obedience. (Update: I have been informed that Bp. Strickland never resigned – even after he was forcefully removed. If so, then his removal remains canonically invalid. I will be talking with him this week, so will confirm this.) Everybody knows that Bp. Strickland was removed because of his orthodoxy, his fidelity to the one Magisterium of the Church. He insisted, with St. Paul, that this is Christ’s Church – not that of any particular Bishop or Pope with an agenda. Yet Strickland knows that God is not mocked, that He directs us to obedience to lawful authority – and that when that lawful authority is abused, Christ will put things to right in His own good time. A quarter of a century ago I was telling my director Priests that they should prepare for a time when it would be very difficult to balance their legitimate duty of fidelity to the Magisterium with their legitimate duty of obedience to their superiors. That time has come – and Bp. Strickland has done as fine a job of publicly living that balancing act of any cleric I have known. I am proud to have “America’s Bishop” as a key speaker here.
Our first national conference in South Dakota a few years back was glorious – more like a joyful family reunion than anything else. I visited the main venue in Atchison a week and a half ago. I love the room. It is intimate and inviting, with a large break-off room for demonstrations, vendors, and visiting. We also have Benedictine College in town and you will have opportunities to see the beauty and majesty of that campus. For a while, we had considered using Benedictine facilities for the venue. Chatting with Kansas City Abp. Joseph Naumann, he told me he had already submitted his mandatory resignation letter to Rome, having turned 75. That meant that Rome could leave him in place for years – or it could replace him at any time. Rome just did replace him. If we had not moved the venue, we could be dealing with the Vatican exercising a veto over our conference right now. Personally, I think the Vatican replaced Naumann because of his vigorous pushback against the blasphemous Black Mass near the state capitol in Topeka. I may be cynical, but it seems there is no bold act of orthodoxy this Vatican is willing to allow to go unpunished. So we protect our people. It is a sorrow to see Abp. Naumann go. Whatever his replacement turns out to be, Naumann has been, perhaps, the most full-throated defender of life among American Bishops. He has been a champion of the faith – and will be deeply missed.
We had a blast a few years back. We’re going to have an even bigger celebration this time. Come help us make the world safe for people of faith again! And get infected with a critical dose of courage, to boot!
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I have been utterly astonished at the commentary on the reciprocal tariffs President Donald Trump is mounting.
My biggest shock during the manufactured Covid Crisis was that most medical professionals and doctors turned out to be little more than glorified cable installers. They are not serious scientists conversant with the underlying principles of medicine and wellness: they are just technicians who do whatever the government tells them without understanding why the principles underlying the edicts are sound or incoherent. They’re just technicians.
I am equally shocked to see that some of the biggest names in finance are equally illiterate in what they claim to be their field of expertise. Even the most conservative commentators often prefaced their remarks by saying, “No one knows what will happen…” I’m sorry. I DO know what will happen.
I did not hear anyone who claimed this would be a disaster explain why it was very good for other nations to put up huge barriers against our products but very bad for us to do the same to them. The tariffs Trump proposed are not even truly reciprocal. Few are even half as high as the barriers other countries have put on our products.
Ever since, at least, the dot-com bubble collapsed under Bill Clinton, our economy has been propped up with gimmicks, smoke, and mirrors. The only true wealth there is are the goods and services produced by people. You can prop things up with certain shell games and gimmicks but the longer you do so, the harder the collapse.
In the roaring ‘20s, the financial device of the corporation became one of the biggest financial crazes in history. Everybody who was anybody wanted their own corporation. As it turned out, most of these corporations were mere paper entities, producing nothing. But because all the right, sophisticated people were buying and selling these paper entities to each other, it created the illusion of wealth creation because of the velocity of money changing hands. This served to pump the apparent economy like a balloon, without adding any substance. That is what financial gimmicks almost always do. It gets larger while getting weaker and more incapable of weathering shocks. Eventually, it pops. The dot-com bubble was much the same. Had it not been for safeguards enacted after the Great Depression to prevent a recurrence, it might have had the same effect. Structurally, we have been pumping air (using financial gimmicks) throughout the economy for over a generation.
The modern Gatsby’s have been making great fortunes from all these gimmicks – and so naturally want to protect their stash. But it has been the middle class that has paid the price as manufacturing has been offshored, paper trades have trumped actual productivity, people have been priced out of home ownership – and what is now being called Main Street has borne the burden for all this gamesmanship. You want to know one of the reasons the elite classes hate Elon Musk? Because he made his fortune by building things that people actually want to buy and can use – instead of just a dizzying array of all the paper shuffling that the wealthy left prefers.
I was in the seventh grade when I started seriously studying societies that had undergone sudden catastrophic collapse. I was despairing as I saw that, in every case, almost no one knew the doom that was coming until it was already on them. But then I realized, that in every case, there were only two major classes involved – the elite rulers and the dependent class. America had a great secret weapon: its largest class was an industrious, self-reliant middle class. This class could be buffaloed and bullied for a time, but a point would arrive when it said enough, and collapse would be avoided or deeply mitigated.
Well, the devil (being much smarter than me) saw the same thing. The titans of Wall Street have been engaged in a war on the middle class for over a generation. The biggest single assault on the middle class came with the manufactured Covid Crisis. The grandees in the media and the government had made common cause with the titans of Wall Street to decimate the thrifty, self-reliant middle class. Did they know they were doing the devil’s work? Maybe a few did, but most were perfectly content to just build their fortunes or powerbases regardless of the larger implications to remake American society into two classes – rulers and ruled dependents. It’s happening all over Western Europe right now. There but for the grace of God (who sent us our own orange Cyrus) we would already be. We dodged that bullet twice – in a field in Pennsylvania last summer and on election day last fall.
So what will the establishment of some form of actual fair trade bring?
- A lot of short-term volatility as the air is blown out of the paper trades and gimmicks used to make our economy look bigger than it is.
- A major correction to the badly overvalued stock market. In healthy times the stock market roughly matches the progress of the gross domestic product (GDP). The stock market has exploded to over ten times its value just 30 years ago. Do you believe, for a minute, that we produce over 10 times the hard goods and services we did 30 years ago? Do an overlay of the GDP growth over the past 30 years with the stock market growth and it will tell the tale. Even that is deceptive – for ever since Obama, we have adopted gimmicks to artificially inflate GDP. The only other time in American history when there was this sort of growing disparity between GDP and stock market value was the run-up to the Great Depression (and, less dramatically, the run-up to the dot-com bubble under Clinton).
- Using tariffs as leverage, Trump is doing a controlled deflation of the illusions of wealth, while taking great pains to re-empower the middle class. As we adjust, what remains will be strong and steady as a rock rather than flimsy and airy as a balloon.
I rejoiced when Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs because, for the first time in over 30 years, I saw the possibility that we might be able to avoid catastrophic global economic collapse. Just the possibility. There will be a lot of other steps, all of which will be opposed by the bankrupt establishment like a pack of snarling vampires in the sunlight, which will be needed to set the world aright financially. But make no mistake: most of the “experts” have no clue what they’re talking about. They are like the old commercial by the soap opera star which began, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV…” These are not experts, but they play at it on TV. All of them are feeding on the middle class – and are outraged that the buffet is being shut down. They will have to get honest work now as their illusions of being titans of the universe are being deflated along with their gimmicks. Smug but clueless media mavens hardest hit.
But I am honestly surprised that so many genuine conservatives lack any serious facility with the foundational principles behind our federal republic or our aspirational free-market economy.
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If you have not yet seen my radio/podcast interview with FBI whistleblower, Marcus Allen, you should check it out now. You might then follow it up with my interview with one of my favorite Priests in the country, Fr. Avram Brown, Pastor of St. Isidore Parish in Yuba City, California.
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As some of you know, I am friends with a lot of nuns and religious orders throughout the country. One story that is vastly unreported, in religious press as well as secular press, is the veritable war the Vatican is waging against orthodox orders and contemplative orders. I hope that, after the next conclave, this persecution will lift like morning fog.
If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim
The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)
18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552
Dallas, Texas 75252
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