Shutting Down The Shutdown

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

The effort by Democrat Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) to use a federal government shutdown as leverage to pass an amnesty bill crashed and burned on January 22, when he caved to President Trump’s demand for a clean short-term spending bill. That bill then passed, but it’s good only through February 17, so we can expect considerable fireworks in early February from the Antifa Left, pro-amnesty forces, and the body of America’s Catholic bishops.
All of these groups are demanding a massive amnesty and immigration bill that will add millions more to America’s legal population, and it’s no secret that many Establishment Republicans support the desire of the unanimous Democrat minority’s efforts to pass a bill. So the standoff is far from over, and the pressure to cave next time will be totally on the president, who will undoubtedly be barraged daily with an Opposition Media propaganda campaign.
Meanwhile, one aspect of Sen. Schumer’s failed effort was not widely reported by the opposition media. Bereft of any other arguments, Schumer tried to brand Trump a racist for opposing amnesty. Nothing new there. But this time around, he generously offered Trump a Get Out Of Jail Free Card. Trump could redeem himself, Schumer cooed, by supporting legislation that would legitimize Obama’s unconstitutional DACA mandate, continued chain migration, and postpone any building of the wall that Trump promised to build as part of his efforts to restore the rule of law on our southern borders.
But unlike so many Republicans in the past, Trump doesn’t mind being called names. In fact, he borrows from the leftist bookshelf to employ one of Sol Alinsky’s favorite tactics — repeatedly and mercilessly mocking his critics to the cheers of the millions of “deplorables” that constitute his base.
The debate has opened up a rift among Democrats, with pro-abortion Cong. Luis Gutierrez complaining that the Democrat leadership apparently cares more about global warming and homosexual “marriage” than it does about allowing “people in my community to live in our country legally.”
So Gutierrez deflates Schumer’s “racism” charge and focuses the conversation again on amnesty. After all, he couldn’t be calling Schumer a racist, could he?
Rest assured, Gutierrez and his allies will be quietly working with Schumer and House Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to muster a majority for an amnesty bill. On the Senate side, pro-amnesty Senators Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) have acted as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s de facto liaison with the Democrats. The situation might boil down to an amnesty bill passed by both houses that President Trump will veto, unless he wants to ensure his legacy as a one-term president.

“Subtle” Sin

In this battle of the epithets, there’s one group that Schumer can firmly rely on to give his racism palaver a patina of credibility: the bulk of America’s Catholic bishops, who have been supplying moral support of Schumer’s accusations long before Schumer got into politics.
In their 1979 pastoral on racism, entitled Brothers and Sisters to Us, our bishops resort to the Marxist lexicon of dialectic and class conflict, asserting that “most” whites are racists, and nobody else is (this is also the message of Gutierrez: “his” people are not his constituents, but illegal Hispanics). In fact, the 1979 bishops teach us that white racists are guilty of a sin so “subtle” that most of us don’t even know we’re sinning.
In recent years, the bishops have doubled down, branding racism as “America’s original sin.” Not abortion, mind you, but “racism” — a rampant sin that infects the class consciousness of the white race, which is all the more dangerous because only bishops can detect it.
The bishops never mention the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which clearly states that a mortal sin must be “committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent” (CCC, n. 1857). According to their 1979 pastoral, that doesn’t matter, because the sin is spread so wide and deep that it permeates all of our institutions.
So the discovery of this “subtle sin” of racism is the product of a not-so-subtle Marxist analysis.
But can whites repent? Well, Karl Marx taught that the bourgeois could not alter their evil class consciousness even if they tried. As a dialectical materialist, he denied the existence of free will. Only those who were enlightened enough to embrace his revolutionary theories were capable of properly analyzing reality. Of course, the term “reality” itself was foreign to him — in fact, it was the language of the enemy. In his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, he brands philosophy as useless. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
This trumpet call is the mainspring of the Marxist dialectic, which allows the constant alteration of truth to suit the purposes of the party. When asked about ethics, Vladimir Lenin said that whatever promoted the revolution was ethical. In Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, Big Brother’s merry band of major media journalists changed the truth all the time, tossing into the Memory Hole whatever didn’t suit the “reality” of the moment.
In the Ministry of Love’s torture chamber, Inner Party member O’Brien tells Winston that it doesn’t even matter whether Big Brother exists or not. Oceania’s Deep State could survive with him or without him, so long as recalcitrant apparatchiks like Winston could be forced to admit that 2 plus 2 equals 5.
But could Winston repent? Well, we know that, in the end, he tearfully embraced Doublethink over a Victory Gin.
He loved Big Brother. But he was shot anyway, of course.

Breaking News
On Humanae Vitae

The Wanderer will be covering two great conferences on Humanae Vitae that have been scheduled for coming months. The first, in late January, will open under the auspices of the Diocese of Alcalá de Henares, just outside of Madrid, Spain, where Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla has earned widespread acclaim as a firm defender of the faith and the family.
The second, here in the United States, will take place at Catholic University of America, cosponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
There is still time to register for the Washington conference, which takes place April 4-6 on Catholic U’s campus. A registration link is available at the bishops’ website, www.usccb.org. The schedule features a blue-ribbon lineup of speakers.
Many among the faithful have been praying for a more public affirmation of Humanae Vitae on the part of our shepherds, and this conference should provide ample inspiration for activities throughout the country on the diocesan and parish levels.
And a new history of contraception’s journey from a pariah to an accepted and even celebrated part of medical practice has just been published on the Internet by the Population Research Institute in Front Royal, Va.
The work, by Professor Gustavo Herranz, of the University of Navarra in Spain, is the most reliable and detailed account available. You can find English summaries of each chapter, with links to the full book in the original Spanish, free of charge on the web at https://humanaevitaeproject.org/en/.