By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Regnery Publishing has emerged as a leading publisher in providing Catholic as well as conservative best-sellers. The Wanderer has already reviewed Henry Sire’s Dictator Pope, which has since become a Regnery classic. This time around, we look at several Regnery offerings that are also worth our while.
John Zmirak’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Catholic Church explores the history of the Church as well as its current vicissitudes. Zmirak has a keen eye and a sharp tongue, and he brooks no nonsense as he surveys the past 2,000 years with a clearly Catholic eye. On Calvary, the Good Thief knew the day and the hour, and asked for forgiveness — one of many good arguments, Zmirak argues, for the Church’s magisterial teaching permitting capital punishment.
That timeless doctrine was recently reversed by Pope Francis, who upped the ante just before Christmas by declaring that those on the Throne of Peter who had maintained the magisterial doctrine — meaning every Pope before Francis — had suffered from “a mentality of the time — more legalistic than Christian — that sanctified the value of laws lacking in humanity and mercy.”
Was the Holy Father preparing us for more changes in the Catechism — and more scathing condemnations of those who disagree, even former Pontiffs? Only time will tell.
Zmirak takes on another popular canard, the claim that the Crusades were somehow un-Christian. No way, he writes, they’re “something to be proud of.” After all, those noble efforts saw Catholics lay and clerical uniting to save Europe (that is, Christendom) from a Mohammedan conquest.
Alas, given today’s atheist European Union leaders and a Vatican endorsing Cardinal McCarrick’s celebration of Catholic-Muslim accommodation, Europe will take a pass this time around. Thus it’s likely that only Europe’s stalwart Catholic nations will escape Muslim domination in another couple of generations — but only if they stay Catholic.
Zmirak’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration drills into the realities of immigration that the Fake News Complex knows well, but won’t tell. “A nation without borders is not a nation,” as President Ronald Reagan famously put it, and the United States is at a crossroads, as leftists on both sides of the border attempt to subvert the world’s greatest nation without firing a shot.
Zmirak and his co-author Al Perrotta call this book “An America First Manifesto.” This makes perfect sense. Most of today’s immigrants come from notoriously corrupt countries. Their billionaire elites have told their impoverished subjects that their poverty is America’s fault, so they have the right to invade our country and take back everything we have stolen from them.
And that adds up to a lot: Zmirak and Perrotta identify the programs for illegal aliens that cost the U.S. taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars a year. If that isn’t bad enough, immigrants, both legal and illegal, don’t spend their earnings (legal and illegal) here; they send them to their home countries — some to sustain the families they left behind, others to pay for a nice home they can return to.
In Guatemala, for instance, fully 40 percent of the population — six million people — derive their living from dollars sent back home from family members in the United States.
Fake Science And Real Science
Regnery also offers an instant classic from the provocative pro-life crusader Austin Ruse. Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s skewed statistics, fuzzy facts, and dodgy data is simply indispensable for anyone dealing with leftist professors, journalists, agitators, and provocateurs. Ruse has been at the forefront of opposition to the transgenderites, whose ideology is seeping into every zip code through a quiet campaign led by school unions, superintendents, and school boards who have rammed home policies that force us to call boys girls, girls boys. Obey — or else.
Ruse patiently explains how the “experts” have faked their “science” to lie their way into prominence, then to power. Whether dealing with sodomites or environmental whackos, we are confronted with outright lies that are imposed by force when necessary, but persuasion if possible. These revolutionaries are seldom confronted with the facts — after all, who among their allies in politics, the media, the educrats, or — especially — the scientific community, is going to tell us the truth? American institutions will submit or pay a heavy price.
The Boys Scouts of America was railroaded into accepting not only homosexual members, but sodomite scoutmasters. It’s hardly surprising that this organization, founded on solid Christian principles of character, honesty, and service, has now spiraled into bankruptcy.
While Ruse exposes the frauds of the scientific community, the inveterate visionary George Gilder offers a breathtaking insight into real science and technology with After Google — a study which dispels so many myths and truisms in the current cultural worldview that it must be called revolutionary. Google owns the world? Wrong. It’s over. Our identities will be owned by whoever owns the machine? Dead wrong. But how does Gilder know?
To answer this question, this gifted author digs into the technology, the companies, the entrepreneurs, the investors, the math, the gear…and the future. Want to know how much disc space Google devotes to you so you’ll get instant answers? (It’s huge.) How did the disc space race produce the collapse of our privacy? (It won’t last.) What in blazes do Einstein, Karl Marx, Eric Voegelin, and William F. Buckley Jr. have to do with Google, anyway? (Check out how consciousness and psychology and matter itself play their role in the process.)
OK, we’ve lost our privacy completely. If Google, Facebook, and Amazon don’t have our every secret, the CIA does. Turnkey tyranny lies just around the corner — and once a budding tyrant successfully turns that corner, we’re toast — Right?
Wrong. Gilder introduces us to the blockchain, which this very tech-unsavvy reviewer will describe as a technology that simply prevents every effort to hack it. One (imperfect) example of the blockchain is Bitcoin, an international digital currency, but others are speedily (and I mean at the speed of light) competing to perfect it.
The blockchain allows individuals to have easily available documents, contracts, records and communications and everything else that are reliable, legal, and total impenetrable by malefactors, including the corrupt governments and international criminals who run about 80 percent of the member countries of the United Nations.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a consortium of global food companies led by Walmart has implemented IBM’s blockchain technology to manage their supply and distribution networks, solving in seconds issues that used to take days.
Who can understand every dimension — social, technological, financial, industrial, business, intellectual, historical — that Gilder addresses so ably here? Probably only Gilder. But whatever angle interests you the reader, you’ll find lucidly and thoroughly explained, while you learn more than you might ever have wanted to know about the world behind your screen. A terrific book.
Briefly Noted . . .
The intrepid professor and analyst Stephen Baskerville digs deep into The New Politics of Sex (Angelico Press). Ideologues always adapt their power lust to the temper of the times, and these days that means the sexual revolution. Their target? The family. Their tools? The courts, the government, and the social institutions they’ve commandeered. A very solid in-depth study.
In Excommunicated From the Union (Fordham University Press), historian William Kurtz gives a fascinating rendition of the role of Catholics, especially Irish and German immigrants, in the Recent Unpleasantness, known in the North as the Civil War and the South as the War Between the States. The book sets the stage for the work of Cardinal Gibbons, who wanted Woodrow Wilson to enter World War I so Catholics could prove their patriotic allegiance to their new country. A fascinating work.
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