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Opinion: The Catholic Church’s Complicity In NOM-Regnerus’s Anti-Gay Hate Speech

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We have been reporting on an invalid sociological study on gay parenting carried out by researcher Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas, Austin.

Regnerus’s known total of $785,000 for the study was arranged by The Witherspoon Institute and The Bradley Foundation, where Robert P. George – (head of the anti-gay-rights, scientifically disreputable, so-called National Organization for Marriage) – holds positions of authority. Witherspoon president Luis Tellez is a NOM board member. NOM’s Robert George is a long-time Catholic Church co-conspirator in the Church’s ages-long, Unholy War Against Gays. He is a current Board member of The Catholic League, whose motormouth president Bill Donohue has a long and shameful history of verbal gay bashing.

The Regnerus study currently is being used as an anti-gay-rights political weapon in the 2012 elections. With its toxic connections to the so-called National Organization for Marriage, the Catholic Church of course has been using the invalid Regnerus study as a political weapon against LGBT-Americans — who against their wills are obliged to subsidize one of the very worst of their relentless and ruthless oppressors worldwide — the tax-exempt Catholic Church — with their hard-earned tax dollars.

Clarity still is needed as to the real source of the funding for the Regnerus study. Sure, the Witherspoon Institute gave a known minimal total of of $695,000, and the Bradley Foundation a known minimal total of $90,000, but where exactly did they find those big bucks? Could the Church possibly have been involved in getting that money to Witherspoon and/or the Bradley Foundation?  Witherspoon so far has refused to cooperate with Freedom of Information Act requests from multiple reporters for its Regnerus study-related communications.

Like NOM, and like Regnerus’s study, the Catholic Church is scientifically disreputable. When science has seemed  to contradict Catholic dogma, the Church often has lashed out maliciously at scientists and those who advance science and have faith in it. In its Unholy War Against Gays, the Church has used gay-bashing lingo from scientifically disreputable organizations like NARTH, and individual, scientifically disreputable figures like Paul Cameron. To understand how ridiculous, unscientific and out of touch with reality the Catholic Church is on all matters pertaining to human sexuality — not only on homosexuality — consider that the Catholic Catechism calls masturbation “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” A long, loud Bronx cheer please. Hard though it may be for some to grasp, the religious dogma simply does not match the science of human sexuality. Sperm are not holy, there are far more than enough sperm to go around; no sane person need worry about “wasting” sperm. We are reminded of the joke: Why does the Pope wear a bathing suit into the shower? He doesn’t want to look down on the unemployed. The Church’s obnoxious, science-bashing stupidity is implicit in the dogma of “papal infallibility,” which apparently holds that the Pope, not science, understands sexuality generally, homosexuality in particular, and has a right, based on the Pope’s anti-scientific gay bashing, to meddle in politics and civil laws around the world with a goal of maintaining and/or redoubling sexual orientation apartheid.

Ludicrous, duplicitous claims from Catholic Church and NOM officials that they “love” gay people are properly understood in the context of those two parties’ large-scale psychological domestic-and-political violence against LGBTers. It is characteristic of abusers to make fake declarations of “love” for their victims. That is not love, and nobody should be fooled by the deliberately disingenuous abusers.

For background information on the thick-as-thieves relationship between 1) the anti-gay-rights Catholic Church, and 2) the anti-gay-rights, so-called National Organization for Marriage, go here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

Notice that that last link is to a NOM Blog post reporting on Ratzinger’s appointment of Bishop Salvatore Cordileone as Archbishop of San Francisco. The NOM Blog post headline is  Bishop Cordileone, “Godfather of Prop 8”, Promoted to Abp. of San Francisco.

Thus we see that NOM is tone deaf to Italian-Americans who object to jokey, knee-jerk references to people of Italian heritage as being heads of organized crime mobs, yet at the same time, “Godfather” certainly is fitting for the Catholic Church’s political gay-basher Cordileone. On the one hand, NOM should not have referred to him as the “Godfather of Prop 8.” On the other hand — (Mr. Cordileone) — if 1) the Catholic Church of Rome’s 2)  Unholy-War-Against-GaysMob- Shoe fits you — (and that anti-gay-rights patented Catholic Church Mob Footwear certainly does fit Cordileone) — then you are accurately described as wearing it.

That the NOM-leaders-financed, invalid Regnerus study is deliberately misleading and defamatory of gays is beyond all question.  An amicus brief filed by eight major professional associations including the American Medical Association was filed specifically to define exactly what — in an ACP brief relying on the Regnerus study — misrepresented the Regnerus study, but the brief also went on to define what in the Regnerus study itself disqualifies it from being taken seriously as science. Neither NOM nor Catholic Church officials have ever seriously engaged with the rationally-articulated, science-based dismissals of the Regnerus study as science. Naturally, the verified science goes in one Catholic Church ear and out the other, as the Church races full steam ahead with its illicit political propagandizing and gay bashing based on the invalid Regnerus study.

We never should have been forced into the position of having to defend against defamation in the form of a bogus sociological study that makes no valid comparison between its test group and its control group, and still less should we have been forced into anti-defamation action by such a study funded by persons aspiring to yoke us with their gay-bashing religious dogma via our civil laws. These monsters’ actions in defaming us on the not-very-well-disguised background basis of their theocracy-based bigotry go against the letter and the spirit of the Constitution of the United States.

A few stomach-churning examples of the Church using Regnerus as a weapon against gays and gay rights will suffice.

Even as the Church fights tooth-and-nail against proposed laws to lift the statutes of limitations on the prosecution of child rape — and let us say that again, for emphasis, because it is true — the Catholic Church in the United States (and elsewhere) fights tooth-and-nail against proposed laws to lift the statutes of limitations on the prosecution of child rape — Cordileone had the towering nerve to address the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on June 14, 2012, and to tell them that the Regnerus study indicates that: “The protection of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is a work of justice and is foundational to the good of all, especially for those most vulnerable among us, our children.”

One verifiable, real-world phenomenon Cordileone’s gay-bashing propaganda leaves out of account, is that the number of children in foster care in recent decades has declined, thanks to responsible gay parents adopting children who were neglected, abused and/or abandoned by their irresponsible heterosexual parents. With its characteristic mean-spiritedness against gays, the Catholic Church is actively seeking to strengthen the stigma and the legal discrimination against those gay-headed families and their children. Cordileone outright lies about the Regnerus study, where he says that it is “one of the first studies on this topic to have a comprehensive and scientifically respectable approach.” His deliberately misleading statement about the discipline of the scientific study of gay parenting is despicable and beneath all contempt, and therefore, characteristic of Catholic Church officials’ lying, demonizing pronouncements against gay human beings. That, actually, as happens, is one of the reasons that Mussolini and the Vatican got along so well together. The Regnerus study does not — as Cordileone disingenuously alleges — have a “comprehensive and scientifically respectable approach.”  Had the Regnerus study been “comprehensive,” it would have surveyed — you know — actual children of gay parents. A gay parenting study like Regnerus’s that does not survey gay parents or their children can not in any sense be called “comprehensive.” The Godfather of Prop 8 is, as turns out, a shameless bullshit artist. Not a single scientist of good repute and without a conflict of interest in commenting on the Regnerus study has supported the Regnerus study as scientifically valid. Beyond the aforementioned AMA amicus brief, and as first reported here on TNCRM, a group of over 200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s signed a letter to the journal that published Regnerus, expressing concern over the study’s lack of intellectual integrity as well as over the suspicious circumstances of the study’s publication.

In response to the scientific debunking of the Regnerus study, the Regnerus study’s supporters pump out yet more bunk. A Baylor Institute for the Studies of Religion letter published in support of Regnerus bears the profoundly misleading title of A Social Scientific Response to the Regnerus Controversy. The Baylor letter contains deliberate subterfuges to dismiss as irrelevant the criticisms of the Regnerus study’s most glaring and obnoxious failings — including that it makes no valid comparison between its test group and its control group — yet these gay-bashing bigots have the nerve to call their anti-gay-rights propaganda a “social scientific response.” Most if not all of the signers of the Baylor letter have conflicts of interest in signing and publicizing it. The lead signer, for example, is Baylor ISR Director Byron Johnson; he also is a Senior Fellow of The Witherspoon Institute, which funded the Regnerus study and which is heavily promoting it in anti-gay-rights political contexts. This reporter sent Johnson an e-mail asking him to acknowledge on the record his conflict of interest in signing the Baylor letter without disclosing his connection to the Regnerus study’s funding and anti-gay-rights political promotions. Johnson did not provide the courtesy of a reply.

Before I highlight a second main Catholic Church use of the Regnerus study as a political weapon in the Church’s Unholy War Against Gays, please take a look at some additional Church-Regnerus-NOM, anti-gay-rights propaganda, by seeing here, here, and then here in French, and here in Spanish — (in a publication called La Espada Catolica, The Catholic Sword — they’re apparently pining for the good old days of The Crusades, when they slaughtered Jews and Muslims all across Europe and the Middle East) —  and then here in German, and then here in Portuguese, and then here in Dutch and then here in Italian. The NOM-heads-funded Regnerus anti-gay defamation has spread all around the world, a veritable contagion of gay-bashing lies.

NOM and the Catholic Church both are seemingly very worried about the P.R. fall-out from their dishonorable connections to the invalid and defamatory Regnerus study. It is hardly a surprise that NOM’s Maggie Gallagher, a pathological anti-gay liar and professional anti-gay hate speech propagandist responds to science-based debunkings of the Regnerus study with yet more of her filthy, gay-bashing lies.

It also is hardly surprising that the disreputable Catholic League President Bill Donohue is sweating the science-based criticism of the Regnerus study. Best-selling author Anne Rice called Donohue out by name when she filmed a video announcing that she was leaving the Catholic Church, in no small measure because of the Church’s gay bashing and political gay bashing. Donohue demonstrated what low-down, hypocritical stuff he is made of, when he and his co-conspirator Timothy Dolan took to Dolan’s blog, trashed a 16-year-old girl who alleged sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, and called the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests a “phony victims group.” If SNAP is a “phony victims group,” as Dolan and Donohue want the world to believe, then why, when SNAP was involved in Church child rape victims’ advocacy in the Los Angeles Diocese, did the Church settle with the victims for $660 million?

These vile, powerful Catholic adult males who abuse their power to trash a 16-year-old girl in public have no moral standing to carry out their Unholy War Against Gays. Yet, in response to my allegations of scientific and scholarly misconduct against Mark Regnerus –presented to the University of Texas at Austin — Donohue sent an ad hominem attack against me to UT President William Powers. Dohonue discloses to UT President Powers that Robert George is on the Board of the Catholic League, yet he does not fess up about George’s connections to the funding of the Regnerus study; Donohue’s disclosure is thus a non-disclosure disclosure and an attempted misrepresentation of facts relevant to the Regnerus matter. In the letter, Donohue alleges that he is a trained sociologist, yet he makes no attempted scientific justification for Regnerus’s failure to make a valid comparison between his study’s test group and control group. A student in any Sociology 101 class would get an F for insisting that inappropriate test-group, control group comparisons are valid.

In his cowardly, dishonest and contemptible letter, Donohue scoffed at my having characterized a letter sent by the Archbishop Dolan to President Obama as threatening. Dolan’s letter to President Obama, meanwhile, which Donohue actually attached to his own letter to Powers — (as though the Dolan letter proves that Dolan made no threat to Obama) — warned President Obama that if he continued on the road to equality, he would “precipitate a national conflict between Church and State of enormous proportions and to the detriment of both institutions.”

If that is not a threat, what is it? Does Donohue maybe believe that the President of the University of Texas at Austin can not identify a Catholic Church threat when he sees one in print?

In his letter, Donohue further mislabels as “scurrilous” my past statement that Robert George has “a long history of telling dehumanizing lies about gay people.” Meanwhile, Robert George has said that homosexuality is “beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures.” He has argued to the Supreme Court of the United States that it should be possible to throw gay people into prison and to fine them for their intimacy. His NOM colleague William Duncan held a symposium session at Liberty University titled Homosexuals or Homo Sapiens; Who Deserves Protect Class Status? There are mountains of additional similar, verifiable “dehumanizing lies” that have been told by Robert George and his NOM co-conspirators in their foaming-at-the-mouth, Unholy War Against Gays.

George & Co. very literally say that gay people are not human, but Donohue wants UT President Powers to believe that it is “scurrilous” for me to report that Robert George has a long history of telling dehumanizing lies against gay people. Has Donohue even checked a dictionary lately for the meaning of “scurrilous”?

Donohue also lies outright in his letter to UT President Powers, where he says that “the “Fortnight for Freedom” events that were organized by the bishops had absolutely nothing to do with same-sex marriage;” Donohue is mistaking Powers for a fool, and assuming that he has no fact-checking capabilities.

My original letter to UT’s President Powers complained of the Regnerus study’s NOM-linked funders using the Regnerus study as a cudgel against gays in the bishops’ “Fortnight for Freedom” events. The justification for my mentioning that, was and remains a justified suspicion that Regnerus could be politically in collusion with his study’s funders. Whereas Donohue tells powers that the “Fortnight for Freedom” had “absolutely nothing to do with same-sex marriage, the documented truth is that in association with the “Fortnight for Freedom,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published a letter to its website that is one long hateful screed against marriage equality for gay couples. Demeaningly, the USCCB anti-gay screed forcefully deplores the fact that when equality becomes law, “same-sex sexual relationships must be treated as if they were marriage.” Though the USCCB screed demands that same-sex marriage be outlawed in order to protect “religious freedom,” the hateful screed is written in willful ignorance that whole Christian churches ordain out, married gay and lesbian ministers, and that those churches’ religious freedoms require for marriage equality to be our civil law. The screed is just absolutely shameless, lying anti-gay hate speech from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and then Donohue adds insult to injury by sending an ad hominem attack letter against me to UT President Powers in which he outright lies about the Church’s “Fortnight for Freedom,” which did in fact include heaping servings of political gay bashing.

With its blood-soaked history of persecutions of sexual and other minorities, you might suppose that the Church would have the sense to stop the persecutions, yet the Church knows no shame. With the Catholic Church’s “infallible” leader Ratzinger implicated in the unconscionable actions of shifting child rapist priests between parishes without notifying parishioners of the danger, the Church appears to believe that by scapegoating gays, it will succeed in distracting world attention from its malfeasance. Donohue is himself guilty of that brand of scapegoating of homosexuals; it is one of the reasons that Anne Rice called Donohue out by name. As is his wont when the Church is accurately criticized, Donohue retaliated against Anne by attempting to smear her, instead of apologizing for all of the Church’s wrongs inflicted on the innocent. When the Howell, Michigan, Catholic public school student Daniel Glowacki verbally gay bashed in his classroom on Spirit Day, NOM-linked attorneys of The Thomas More Law Center — (whose logo is a Catholic sword against a cross, and whose motto is “Battle Ready to Defend America“) — came to Glowacki’s defense, and NOM made a video with Glowacki as yet another of its vehicles for begging for gay-bashing blood money.  Ask yourselves, why has that organization named itself for Thomas More, who as Chancellor had some of his victims burned at the stake for the “crime” of translating the Bible into English? Why is its motto a war-mongering one, and its logo a Catholic sword with a cross?  Are they not yet satisfied with their floods of anti-gay hate speech and the anti-gay-hate crimes that stem from the social attitudes at least in part occasioned by that hate speech?

Name so much as one — just one! — major gay rights organization that has a similarly violence-drenched logo and motto. Those are NOM’s anti-gay-rights Thomas More attorneys with their hate-and-war-mongering ways, and NOM’s head honchos at The Witherspoon Institute arranged for the funding of the invalid Regnerus study. The war that the Catholic Church and NOM wage unjustifiably against totally innocent gay people, is fought by the Church and by NOM as a dirty, dirty, dirty war, which those bellicose anti-gay parties wage without any sense of restraint or decency.

The Catholic Church has never adequately acknowledged its complicity in the mass slaughters of Jews and others throughout the ages. After telling its “flock” for nearly two thousand years that all Jews had to be held accountable for the death of Jesus, the Church had its “infallible” Popeexonerate” the Jews!  Mass slaughters of Jews in the Crusades, umpteen Catholic human rights abuses of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, with the Vatican having a branch called The Holy Office of the Inquisition, the Achtung! Sieg Heil! Old World Catholic Church charm of its Reichskonkordat political treaty with Hitler, plus the fact that the Vatican wished Adolph Hitler a happy birthday every year he was in power – the party in need of “exoneration” would hardly be the Jews.

The Church has yet even to settle with its victims in matters where it is irrefutably documented as being in collusion with Nazi war criminals. Vatican officials who helped known Nazi war criminals to evade justice through the ratlines to South America accepted assets stolen from Jewish as well as from gay Holocaust victims in payment for their criminal services. Yes; to assist a known war criminal to evade justice is in itself a crime. To accept fenced assets stolen from Holocaust victims to carry out the separate crime of helping war criminals to evade justice actually and truly is an additional, monstrous crime. Accepting fenced goods in payment for services is a crime. Catholic Church officials are guilty of those monstrous crimes.

Do not hold your breath, expecting the Church to acknowledge its complicity in getting gay Holocaust victims deported to be tortured and killed in concentration camps. Throughout Europe, there stand memorials to gay Holocaust victims, yet instead of acknowledging its role in those gay Holocaust victims’ tortures and murders, the Catholic Church picks up its  blood-stained sword of cutting-and-stabbing, anti-gay defamation — including the scientifically invalid Regnerus study – and very aggressively, selfishly and pitilessly wields it in repugnant, morally bankrupt attempts to skewer gay human beings and their rights along with them.

A Change.org petition asks IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman to investigate the Catholic Church for apparent violations of laws applicable to tax-exempt organizations such as the Catholic Church. The full text of the petition is extremely enlightening, and includes this: “The Church in every state very actively criticizes President Obama’s every LGBT initiative, naming him while condemning him, in ways that very evidently are negative endorsements of his candidacy, forbidden under 501(c)(3)-related law.” To sign the petition, go here.

New York City-based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT-interest by-line has appeared on Advocate.com, PoliticusUSA.com, The New York Blade, Queerty.com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide” is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.

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News

‘Antisemitic’: Trump Blasted for Attack on Jewish Democrats

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Donald Trump is attacking Jews who vote Democratic, barely days after the criminally-indicted ex-president threatened there would be a “bloodbath” if voters do not put him back in the Oval Office. His remarks, which include claiming Jews Democrats “hate” Israel and their own religion, were quickly labeled antisemitic.

“I actually think they hate Israel,” Trump on Monday told far right wing radio host Sebastian Gorka, who alleged the Biden administration and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “hate” Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

“I think they hate Israel. And the Democrat Party hates Israel,” Trump, upping the ante, responded. Gorka is his former White House aide who served briefly in the Trump administration before reportedly being “ousted.”

“I really believe they hate Israel,” Trump also said, and accused Majority Leader Schumer, a Democrat who has represented New York for the past quarter-century, of appearing to hate Israel, for “votes.”

READ MORE: ‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

“I think it’s votes more than anything else, because he was always pro-Israel. He’s very anti-Israel now,” Trump continued, before declaring: “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”

Haaretz reports, “Trump’s comments follow similar comments made during a Fox News interview, where he accused Israel of ‘being loyal to a fault’ for hoping to maintain bipartisan support within the United States.”

Trump, under tremendous fire for his “bloodbath” remarks, was immediately denounced for his comments.

“Another day, another depraved antisemitic screed from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vilified the overwhelmingly majority of American Jews,” observed Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “He first called us ‘uninformed or disloyal’ in 2019 and essentially repeated it today. The feeling is mutual. 79% of Jewish voters have an unfavorable view of Trump according to @pewresearch.”

The Times of Israel’s Sam Sokol writes, “Trump said that ‘any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.’ That’s a majority of US Jews. Gentiles don’t get to decide who is a good Jew. That kind of rhetoric is in itself antisemitic.”

The Biden campaign was quick to post a clip of trump’s remarks. Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

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COMMENTARY

‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

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National security, legal, and political experts are lining up to sound the alarm about the potential national security risks swirling around Donald Trump, and those warnings are getting stronger.

One month after Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce his run for president, CNN reported on the real estate mogul’s repeated claims of great wealth. At one point Trump told supporters he was worth “well over $10 billion.” At other points Trump says, “I’m very rich,” and “I’m really rich.” CNN’s John King noted, “some voters see this as a virtue, in the sense that they think politicians are too beholden to special interests.”

Days later Politico ran with this headline: “Donald Trump’s new pitch: I’m so rich I can’t be bought.”

Fast forward nearly a decade later.

Donald Trump’s attorneys declared in court documents Monday that 30 companies all refused to secure a $464 million bond for Trump, which he owes the State of New York after losing his civil business fraud trial.

The sirens are now wailing.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

Citing a Washington Post report, MSNBC’s Steve Benen writes, “it’s now ‘expected’ that Manafort will be hired” to work on the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, “at least in part because the former president is ‘determined to bring Manafort back into the fold.'”

Manafort is Paul Manafort, Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman who in 2017, “surrendered to the F.B.I. and pleaded not guilty to charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies,” according to a New York Times report in October of 2017.

The Times also noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “announced charges … against three advisers to President Trump’s campaign,” including Manafort, “and laid out the most explicit evidence to date that his campaign was eager to coordinate with the Russian government to damage his rival, Hillary Clinton.”

In 2019, NPR reported, almost as a footnote, that “a court filing that was inadvertently unsealed earlier this year, revealed that Manafort shared polling data with a business associate who has ties to Russian intelligence services.”

In his MSNBC report, Benen noted, “the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Manafort ‘represented a grave counterintelligence threat‘ in 2016 due to his relationship with a Russian intelligence officer.”

“’The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign,’ the Senate report added.” Benen also reported: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report literally pointed to a ‘direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services,’ it was referring in part to Manafort ‘directly and indirectly’ communicating with an accused Russian intelligence officer, a Russian oligarch, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.”

Benen reinforced his thesis, writing on social media: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed to a ‘direct tie’ between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services, it was referring in large part to Paul Manafort — who’s reportedly now headed back to Team Trump.”

Add to all that this plea from The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis

“According to reports last week, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing to give Donald Trump classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy every White House extends to major-party candidates to ensure an effective transition. An excellent tradition—but not one that should be observed this year,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic in a piece titled, “Donald Trump Is a National-Security Risk.”

“Indeed, if Trump were a federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building.”

After discussing “Trump’s open and continuing affection” for authoritarian dictators, Nichols notes, “even if Trump could explain away his creepy dictator crushes and clarify his byzantine finances, he is currently facing more than half a billion dollars in court judgments against him.”

“That’s a lot of money for anyone, and Trump’s scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright-red light in the clearance process.”

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg on Monday warned: “If Trump is given access to national security briefings he will now have someone with a proven history of selling stuff to the Russians on his team to help facilitate the movement of our intel to our adversaries.”

Also on Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote on X: “We cannot emphasize this enough: Trump’s mounting court fines make him a massive national security risk.”

“After multiple losses against E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Donald Trump is facing judgements that could end up costing him upwards of $600 million,” CREW reported February 29. “But these rulings are more than a financial headache for Trump, they are an unprecedented opportunity to buy influence with a leading presidential candidate and a sitting president should he be re-elected.”

Diving deeper, CREW notes, “Trump left the presidency with at least $1.1 billion dollars in debt tied to the COVID-weakened commercial real estate market, the vast majority of which would come due in a hypothetical second term in office. These rulings would make that number 50% higher.”

“Giving the highest and most powerful office in the land to someone deeply in debt and looking for ways to make back hundreds of millions of dollars he lost in court is a recipe for the kinds of corruption that aren’t theoretical when it comes to Trump. There’s a reason that you can’t get a job in the military or the financial services industry, or even referee a major sporting event, if you have a massive amount of debt. And you certainly aren’t getting a security clearance because you become too big of a target for corruption.”

Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O’Brien, an MSNBC political analyst and author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” observed, “Trump’s financial trap — he can’t come up with the cash to appeal his $454 million civil fraud judgment — may ravage his business. More directly: It intensifies his threat to national security by making him an easy mark for overseas interests.”

“There’s no reason to believe that Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, won’t have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments,” O’Brien continues at Bloomberg. “Trump is being criminally prosecuted for allegedly misappropriating classified documents and stashing them at Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida. Without a trial and public disclosure of more evidence, Trump’s motivations for taking the documents are unknown, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether he pondered trying to sell them. Monetizing the White House has been something of a family affair, after all. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been busy trading financially on his proximity to the former president, for example.”

O’Brien concludes, “the going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out, and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day. That’s going to make him easy prey for interested lenders — and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.”

READ MORE: FBI Agent Furious Over MAL Search Thought Trump Would Return Classified Docs if Just Asked

 

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News

‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

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Award-winning presidential historian Michael Beschloss sounded the alarm after Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” threat over the weekend, warning that his remarks echo those that led to the rise and installation of fascism in pre-World War II Germany and Italy.

“That’s how fascism and totalitarianism and in Germany’s case the Holocaust came to Germany, which had been a country where there were big institutions of democracy until, as you well know, the early 1930s,” Beschloss said on MSNBC Monday to “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski (video below). “In a way of Donald Trump has done us all a favor, because if you and I had been talking, Mika, let’s say 20 years ago, and they’ve been talking about what would have seemed like a very abstract and distant subject of how fascism and dictatorship might come to America, you probably would have been more wiser.”

“I would have said, you would have had some smiling person pretending to be a normal candidate like all the candidates for president who had gone before all the way back to 1789. And suddenly, after getting elected, that person would use the enormous powers of the presidency, that are given to that person, by their constitution,” Beschloss continued.

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“In a way Donald Trump has made it easier because when he tells you he’ll be a dictator for a day, we all know that dictators don’t resign after a day. When he uses the word bloodbath. Yes, it was in the context of an automobile industry speech, but he knew exactly what he was saying, When he talks about suspending the Constitution, or migrants as animals, this is him. He’s telling you what this choice is,” He continued, adding there is no “precedent for this.”

“I hate it when people treat this race as if it’s just one more presidential campaign. And there was lots of jokes, you know, both sides, you know, flaws and both candidates. Yes, these are two old candidates. One of those that is mentally stable, Joe Biden, whom I saw give a great speech at the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday night. Donald Trump, if you look at one of his speeches of these rallies, this is not someone who seems to have all his marbles.”

Beschloss says, “it’s important to know as we talk about this campaign, as it unfolds, we have never seen anything remotely like this in American history: a major party candidate is saying, you elect me, there’s going to be dictatorship, bloodbath, violence, retribution against my political enemies, that equals what we saw in Italy, in Germany and other places. If Americans do not get that if they choose that voluntarily, then this country has changed in a way that I do not understand.”

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