By DEXTER DUGGAN
The last thing fun-seeking Wisconsin families would have thought of as they headed to a local Christmas parade the Sunday before Thanksgiving was destruction and death. But that’s the wild milieu of an unrestrained society that left-wing radicals have set loose around the world, including in some recent Christmas seasons.
A maroon SUV driver raced down the street where the Waukesha, Wis., parade was in progress on the late afternoon of November 21, injuring dozens of adults and children, some critically. By November 23, a total of six died, including an eight-year-old boy. Police said the driver’s maneuvers showed he intended to hit people, then fled the scene.
The Waukesha Chamber of Commerce had posted a page online to promote attending the “58th Annual Christmas Parade” with the words “Comfort and Joy.”
The New York Post reported on November 23 that a prosecutor at the suspect’s bail hearing said, “Everything was done to get him to stop, and he just simply continued down the roadway causing death and destruction in his path.”
It turned out he was a black career criminal currently out on bail of only $1,000 for a domestic-violence charge. His race was notable simply because some dominant media were slow or reluctant to disclose that — although the race of an unknown white offender would have leapt to the top of their coverage, as it definitely did for teenager Kyle Rittenhouse in a separate Wisconsin case.
Facts about race, like many other facts, routinely are manipulated in “news” coverage these days by agenda-obsessed media determined to dictate a preferred narrative.
If a hypothetical white offender in Waukesha had been a proclaimed Donald Trump fan, that would have dominated headlines. However, some conservative media including the New York Post, UK Daily Mail, and UK Sun reported that actual suspect Darrell Brooks Jr. left just the opposite sort of trail, with vile attacks in rapper lyrics against Trump and police.
Rittenhouse had been acquitted of serious charges including homicide in a jury verdict delivered only two days earlier, on November 19, in another southeast Wisconsin location, Kenosha, for shooting three white men, two of whom died, during riots there in August 2020.
Was Brooks upset over the Rittenhouse acquittal and took his anger out on the parade? His motive had not been disclosed as of when this article was written overnight on November 23-24.
Although all three of Rittenhouse’s assailants were white, many in dominant media still played the teenager as a white racist because, as they told the story, he fired his rifle during a “racial-justice protest,” or similar words to that effect, instead of using an accurate description of rioting, looting, and arson.
Indeed, many who heard of the case confessed that, based on the coverage they saw, they thought Rittenhouse shot black people. He had been described recklessly as a vigilante on the prowl to kill protesters advocating racial justice.
The facts were that Rittenhouse helped clean graffiti off a wall earlier in the day of August 25, 2020, gave medical assistance, and had been asked to help protect a used-car lot from attack. He carried a rifle for protection.
He wore plastic gloves for the medical role, leading some vacuous critics to claim he was trying to hide his fingerprints. However, Rittenhouse’s unmasked face was plain for any person or camera to see at a time when many phones busily recorded events. Little ridges on his fingertips mattered less for evidence when he chose to go without the concealment of a commonly used mask.
As was often the case across the U.S., politicians either told police to stand down against violence by left-wing attackers, or else there was so much violence that police forces were stretched too thin to deal with it effectively. Rittenhouse actually was in a heroic role trying to serve others amid intentional left-wing chaos.
A 17-year-old son having to carry a rifle in volatile surroundings probably would worry many parents. But it wasn’t the first time 17-year-olds had done so in U.S. or world history, and when authorities for public safety won’t act or are overwhelmed, even young citizens may have to assume the responsibility.
It didn’t help Rittenhouse’s reputation, of course, that dementia-ridden presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020 quickly suggested he was part of a racist militia. “Allegedly he’s part of a militia coming out in the state of Illinois,” Biden said. “Have you ever heard the president [Trump] say one negative thing about white supremacists? Have you ever heard it?”
After the teenager’s acquittal, Fox News reported on November 23 that White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to back down from Biden’s 2020 comment. Indeed, after the acquittal, bleary Biden said he was “angry and concerned” about it — without his justifying why he was angry with the jury’s decision after more than three days of deliberation.
On November 22 pundit Bill O’Reilly told his “morning update” radio audience that although he’d been willing to give Biden a chance as his presidential term began, his subsequent performance has been frightening.
“Another three years of him will bring tragedy to this nation,” O’Reilly said. “Bank on it.”
However, cognitively impaired Biden often is absolved of responsibility for his failures by powerful defenders, which relieves him of feeling any pressure to shape up and act like the real president of the United States.
Indeed, two days before Thanksgiving, “middle-class Joe” flew off on November 23 for yet another prolonged holiday, this time to stay at a financier’s estate reportedly worth $30 million at luxurious Nantucket, Mass. Psaki said Biden had no plan on his schedule to visit grieving Waukesha.
An Embarrassing Article
A different and strange defense of Biden was posted on November 21 at the “Intelligencer” column of New York magazine by its left-wing political reporter Ed Kilgore. The embarrassing article was headlined, “Excluding Catholics from Communion was once the norm.”
Veteran Democratic activist Kilgore decided he was able to explicate Catholic Church doctrine in order to absolve the Democratic Party’s pro-abortion fanatics like Biden and Nancy Pelosi from having to obey well-established Church law — and thereby let them continue their convenient double lives of “good Catholic” and good pro-abortion Democrat.
Confusing the words “Communion” and “excommunication,” Kilgore declared that a practice known as “self-excommunication” means not receiving Communion when one is morally unworthy.
Trying to build a case by seeing some of the same letters in two different words could as well make a person declare that the midday meal must be eaten at sea, or at the International Space Station, because of the words “lunch” and “launch.”
A person declining to receive the Eucharist because he’s aware of a serious sin that first must be confessed is not in a state of excommunication according to any accurate definition. A trip to the confessional for a worthy absolution brings the problem to an end.
Intentionally missed a Sunday Mass once without a serious reason? That’s seriously wrong, but it’s not of the same order as intentionally killing, or helping someone else to kill, a completely innocent preborn person. Or millions of them.
Kilgore tries to tell us that the Church interferes with Catholics’ alleged right to Communion by putting any restriction on Eucharistic reception. Well, try this comparison. A husband and wife are in line for Communion when the hair-trigger husband pauses to brutally beat the wife bloody, then he steps right up for the Eucharist.
Is the priest interfering with the man’s “right” to consume the sacrament by withholding it until the man atones for this vicious public attack — not only with his wife, but also with God over there in the confessional? Is the Church being a bully or a meddler by saying such a plain wrong precludes Communion until there’s sincere repentance?
And if beating his wife in public requires redress, what about an abortion clinic manager, or the politician who sends tax funds to the clinic to mangle and dismember countless preborn babies? Abortion certainly isn’t the only very serious sin that brings excommunication, but it’s certainly one of them. Not “self-excommunication,” but real excommunication.
Kilgore is correct that for quite a while many Catholics declined to receive Communion regularly because of an excessive sense of unworthiness. But misplaced unworthiness isn’t the same as actual unworthiness.
And nowhere does Kilgore mention that more than a century ago a very “conservative” Pope, Pius X, actively encouraged the blessed reform of more frequent reception of the Eucharist. Either Kilgore simply is ignorant of this important fact or he omits it because that ruins his presentation about a new age of blessedness that supposedly burst forth with Vatican II and/or Pope Francis.
After detours through the brambles about topics including the interdiction of nations and penitence expressed as abstinence from marital sex, the desperate Democrat Kilgore says that Communion must not be just “a reward for exemplary behavior or rigorous obedience to Church teachings.” But this is just a Kilgore straw man.
He concludes that clerics must not regard “Communion as a church-owned property to bestow and withhold. They are not worthy recipients of this power.”
The “conservative” bishops that Kilgore berates ask nothing more than any practicing Catholics should expect.
People in the pews rightfully would be surprised if any Catholic politician who regularly advocated machine-gunning every illegal immigrant at the border was treated with deference in the Communion line, as if such a public posture should have no effect on his spiritual standing, and that the Church has no right to pass selfish judgment against him.
Full Throttle
A news release from Catholic League president Bill Donohue, headlined “Biden’s war on religious liberty spikes,” enumerates direct attacks on the Church and society at large to continue imposing and expanding the Biden administration’s embrace of the Culture of Death and Depravity, including bringing Catholic institutions to heel on abortion and transgenderism.
Donohue said: “The evidence shows that transgender rights and abortion rights are being pursued full throttle. Their success depends on the destruction of religious liberty exemptions put in place by the courts, lawmakers, and administrative agencies. More than any other entity, it is Catholic institutions that are under the most severe attack.”
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