The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

Catholic priests and politicians who are silent about abortion often cite racism as a higher moral priority. Are they blind to the racist oppression of Roe v. Wade?

July 6, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Shortly after a U.S. Supreme Court draft was mysteriously leaked with an impression that the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned, this reactionary nation descended once again into chaos. At the time, I wrote a post making a case for why overturning a precedent like Roe v. Wade was not the legal earthquake some in the partisan news media described it to be. Catholic League President Bill Donohue sent an email to the civil rights group’s thousands of members asking them to read my post entitled, “After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul.”

It became our most-read post for the month of May, 2022, but I had long before been marked as a “prolife priest.” I had never even imagined that there are Catholic priests out there who might not champion the cause for life. I have since learned from lots of readers that they rarely if ever hear support for prolife causes in their parishes. So I set out in this post to make an argument for why Catholics — including priests — can and should be challenged to take up a well-informed defense of life.

I was a late arrival on the side of life. When I was a newly ordained priest forty years ago in 1982, I learned that my one and only niece (two others arrived later) longed for a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas. They were all the rage then, but my sister in the Boston area told me that the demand was so great it was simply impossible to find one. So I went on a mission and implored the help of a friend who managed a large department store just over the border in New Hampshire. She laughed saying that I should have listened to my sister, but I was an uncle determined not to disappoint my only niece.

A few days later, the friend called me and said that one of the chain’s stores had one that remained unclaimed so I quickly asked her to hold it for me. She wanted me to come late at night when the store was closing because she feared I might be mugged by desperate parents while carrying the semi-precious doll from the store. I felt like a thief in the night as I arrived to discover that the remaining doll was modeled after an African American infant. A flood of implications raced through my mind, but I dismissed them all and purchased the doll.

It was two weeks before Christmas, 1982. Back at my parish, I carefully opened the box, intrigued by the enormous social pressure on parents to find and buy this pseudo-human infant for their young daughters that Christmas. Inside the box, I was surprised to see what looked like an official birth certificate with the doll’s name and date of “birth” printed in nice calligraphy.

So the following Sunday at Mass, I brought the doll with me, box and all. It was the Fourth Sunday of Advent. During my homily, I opened the box and produced both the doll and the birth certificate. The parish was instantly riveted, not by the point I was making but by the fact that I had somehow actually obtained a Cabbage Patch doll. My homily called out the irony that the creators of this doll went to such great lengths to fabricate authenticity — including a birth certificate — and promote such enormous demand that mothers and fathers could not find one. Meanwhile, real human babies are quietly aborted by the millions every year across the land. The reaction to my homily was both strained and strange.

Project Rachel

As I held up the birth certificate, there were audible gasps. Some looked alarmed and uncomfortable, others mesmerized, some quite pleased, and others downright hostile. No priest likes hostility, and I was no exception. At the door after Mass, some people thanked me for bringing up a subject never before heard in their parish. Others whisked by me without eye contact. A few looked really ticked and muttered something about “politics from the pulpit.” One man who clearly did not get the point said, “a hundred bucks for the doll, Father.”

One week later at Christmas, my niece was overjoyed at her new “little sister.” Within a few years she would have two real ones, and would learn that little sisters are a mixed blessing when you are accustomed to being the only one at center stage. Today, they remain very close and each is now also a mother.

It was because of this experience — the simple act of buying a doll for my niece at Christmas — that I thought Roe v. Wade all the way through and knew that I could not be silent about what I had learned. My first lesson was how easy it was to dupe myself into comfortable moral complicity by not thinking it through. I know this is an uncomfortable subject for some, but it is not possible to fully profess the Gospel without discomfort.

Two years later, I became one of four priests in my diocese to join Project Rachel, a Catholic ministry approved by the U.S. bishops to assist women who have had an abortion with the process of repentance and reconciled Communion with their faith. It is one of the most important ministries in the Catholic community, second only to the cause of life itself.

Our culture has romanticized the Christmas story, but in the Gospel of St. Matthew it concludes with terrible tragedy. Enraged at being tricked by the Magi, Herod ordered the slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem. The story ends with a prophecy of Jeremiah which is the source for Project Rachel’s name:

“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they are no more.”

— Jeremiah 31:15 and Matthew 2:16-18

A reader of Beyond These Stone Walls recently told me of a discussion with her parish priest about abortion and Roe v. Wade, and the fact that the priest had never addressed either in a homily. She is a retired obstetrics nurse who obviously had a lifetime of thinking this through. I have heard the same critique of many priests in many states. Some respond that other social justice issues such as racism and inequality are higher moral priorities for them. They miss the crux of the matter.

There have been bold exceptions, priests who have inspired me and others in the cause of life. Among them are Father Frank Pavone, founder of Priests for Life, and Father Stephen Imbarrato, also known as the “Protest Priest.” He is the moderator of Catholic Prolife and a leader in Red Rose Rescue.

When San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone recently imposed a canonical discipline barring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving Communion, Mrs. Pelosi accused him of hypocrisy. She stated that she is in fact prolife, but her prolife activism centers on limiting the death penalty. It is spiritual blindness, and a common progressive position. But it is also one that I have shared. I was dubbed “the priest who kicked the hornets nest” when I wrote of this a decade ago. To protest the death penalty while promoting abortion is to become comfortable with spiritual blindness.

Catholic politicians like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden have compartmentalized and dulled their Catholic consciences. Like many progressive politicians, they have not thought this all the way through. The arenas of both the death penalty and abortion rights are mired in racism.

The Real Social Injustice of Racial Inequality

The list of racial disparities in America is extensive. African Americans represent only 12.5 percent of the U.S. population but 40 percent of the U.S. prison population. Many studies have shown that African American defendants often received longer prison sentences than White defendants for the same offense. They have been more likely than White defendants to be sentenced to death for capital crimes, and have been many times more likely to actually be executed in states that retain a death penalty.

This is of grave concern, but all of our concern is moot if we cannot even get the subjects of our concern born in the first place. At his shocking and eye-opening site, Blackgenocide.org, Rev. Clenard H. Childress, Jr. reveals that “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” When it comes to racial disparities in abortion the political left and too many of our priests and bishops remain silent in a state of ignorant bliss. There is no more racist agenda than the one behind the abortion industry in America.

In 1992, President Bill Clinton presented what was then the accepted liberal Democratic view: that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Since then, the overall abortion rate has declined to about half of what it was in the 1980s — except among African Americans. According to Justice Clarence Thomas, Black women are today eight times more likely than White women to seek an abortion. Abortion’s impact on the size of the African American population is critical, but conveniently overlooked by the news media and the progressive political left.

I had no idea when I gave my three-year-old niece that African American-looking Cabbage Patch doll in 1982 that infants who look like that particular doll are especially in peril. In a 2019 abortion case, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas observed that in New York City that year, for the first time in history, more African American infants were aborted than born.

It is also true that Planned Parenthood of America places its origin in the work of Margaret Sanger, an activist American nurse who worked tirelessly to provide access to abortion. From her own writings, one of her motivations was an interest in eugenics, the science of selective breeding. By controlling the growth of the African American population, Margaret Sanger and others believed that the purity of American genetic heritage could be maintained.

Jason L. Riley, an African American writer and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal authored a recent op-ed entitled “Why Won’t the Left Talk About Racial Disparities in Abortion?” (WSJ, May 11, 2022). He wrote that the political left in America is quick to set off alarms anywhere racial disparities are known to exist — except for this one.

Race-based differences in SAT test scores, for example, brought calls to eliminate the SAT as a college admission test. A racial gap in arrest and incarceration rates has long vexed this nation, resulting on the left with socially destructive reactions like the “defund police” movement. In terms of sheer numbers and their impact on the African American population, abortion far exceeds other social justice concerns. The number of babies aborted by Black women each year in America far exceeds the combined numbers of Black youths who drop out of school, are sent to prison, and who are murdered on the streets of our cities.

The WSJ’s Jason Reilly cited a Pennsylvania case study about death rates. Examining premature deaths from all causes in 2018, it was discovered that abortions constituted 23.9 percent of premature deaths among the White population and 62.7 percent among the Black population. Abortion rights activists often cite these facts as a function of poverty, but even among other groups with higher poverty levels, Black women still have abortions at much higher rates than any other demographic.

The notion that not growing up at all is better than growing up in poverty is a notion only of the elite. Think of the arrogance behind such statements. If activists believe that lower incomes impact Black abortions, then the social justice issue and goal should be equality in income not controlling the population Planned-Parenthood-style through abortion.

Black lives matter. Indeed they do. Black infant lives matter too. There is no more racist agenda in America than the one keeping an entire people down through abortion.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post.

You may also like these related posts:

After Roe v. Wade: Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Covering unrelated stories of the trial of the late Cardinal George Pell and the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, Miranda Devine deserves a Pulitzer for journalistic integrity.

May 25, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I never imagined that I would be writing a post with Cardinal George Pell and Hunter Biden’s notorious “Laptop from Hell ” sharing the same title. The connections are circumstantial, but once I stumbled upon them, I knew I had my title for this post.

In both stories, the mainstream news media brought little light, but lots of heat, while exposing little truth beyond its own vile bias. In the case of Cardinal Pell’s unjust imprisonment, much of the news media in both Australia and America embraced a wildly imaginative narrative filled with holes to presume his guilt with no evidence. Being sent to prison is by no means an indication of guilt. In the case of Hunter Biden, both mainstream media and social media teamed up to cover up the explosive story before the 2020 presidential election. It was a true account that citizens of a free and open society had a right to know.

In both stories, one journalist distinguished herself as a champion of journalistic courage and integrity for pursuing and publishing the truth despite immense pressure to adhere to the media’s availability bias. That journalist is Miranda Devine who covered the Pell case in Australia while single-handedly exposing the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post.

Back in October, 2021, Ryan MacDonald wrote a post in these pages entitled, “Fr. Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell.” Ryan included in that post several pages from Cardinal Pell’s book, Prison Journal Volume 2 which was widely read across the globe.

The paragraphs that Ryan reprinted from the book were about me. I read them repeatedly, not because I like to see my name in print, but because I had a subconscious nagging sense that I was missing something. Then, just weeks ago, it struck me. In one paragraph, my name appears along with that of Miranda Devine. Why would that be important? It wasn’t at first, but in subsequent readings it leapt out at me. Here’s the story:

From the Cardinal Pell Journal

On May 15, 2019, three years to the day before typing this post, I published a carefully researched article entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Sheryl Collmer, a reader of this blog from Texas who writes for American Thinker and Catholic World Report, mailed a copy of my article to Cardinal Pell, then still in an Australian prison having lost his first appeal. From half a world away, Cardinal Pell pondered my article and then wrote about it on August 2, 2019 in the journal he kept in his cell. Here are excerpts:

“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around 15 to 20 years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.”

Cardinal Pell went on in his journal to analyze my article and why I believed his trial was scripted from another unrelated case in the United States. A sensational and distorted account of that case appeared in both the U.S. and Australia in Rolling Stone magazine by a now disgraced former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. In several paragraphs, Cardinal Pell described my 2019 article:

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine Rolling Stone, pointing out that there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence. The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited.

“In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.”

Cardinal George Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2 : pp 57-60

Cardinal Pell did not know it at the time, but I had already posted articles on the story of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s dubious article about accusations against Philadelphia priests by the anonymous “Billy Doe” in 2011, and her equally dubious account of gang rape at the University of Virginia. The most recent of my articles was, “The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone.”

Now Comes Miranda Devine

After reading Cardinal Pell’s book, I set it aside happy to have been of some hope and encouragement during his unjust time of imprisonment. Cardinal Pell concluded in his journal:

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.”

Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 60

Many months after reading Cardinal Pell’s journal, I took up another book ordered for me by a friend. It was Laptop from Hell (Post Hill Press 2021), a now notorious account by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. My friend told me that the first printing sold out within weeks at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble so it was placed on backorder for me. It arrived in early March, 2022 and I began to read its shocking pages.

I immediately recognized its author, Miranda Devine, as the now famous New York Post columnist who nearly upended the U.S. presidential election in 2020. But I also knew that I had seen her name somewhere else. It turned out that it was in that passage from Cardinal Pell above. I was surprised to see both my name and that of Miranda Devine in the same paragraph.

I had not known until then that Ms. Devine wrote boldly in defense of Cardinal Pell against a tidal wave of progressive criticism in both Australia and the United States. Among her several articles on the Pell case was her last one, “Finally, Justice for George Cardinal Pell” published in the New York Post on April 7, 2020. Three weeks later I published, “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

There were several articles in the left-leaning Australian news media deeply critical of Ms. Miranda Devine for her defense of Cardinal Pell. She thus became, in my view, a champion of journalistic integrity. Such champions are few and far between now, but they keep alive the notion that fair, just, and courageous journalism is all that stands between us and the demise of democracy.

In the Bill of Rights, Freedom of the Press has long been regarded as fundamental to individual rights. Without a free media, a free society and democratic self-government would not be possible. Nonetheless, in October 2020, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and almost all network news media and social media banded together with an unprecedented decision to keep the American people from learning the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the presidential election.

I was in shock by this at the time. It was the sort of thing that happens during elections in any number of banana republics, but here it was, in a full court press, shamefully happening in the United States. As a result, the New York Post’ s Facebook and Twitter accounts were blocked and any mention of the laptop or its contents by thousands of users (including me) was censored.

Laptop from Hell got its title from a Twitter message of then President Donald Trump who read of some of its contents in the New York Post, the sole U.S. media outlet with the integrity to publish the story. Then President Trump’s Twitter account was also suspended.

I followed this story closely in October, 2020 as it was shamelessly suppressed and censored by most U.S. news and social media. The more it was suppressed, the more alarmed I became. As a 19-year-old in 1972, I was riveted to the Watergate story and the heroism of the Washington Post coverage by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The story led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and criminal charges for some senior White House staff. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for it while the names “Woodward and Bernstein” became synonymous with journalistic courage and integrity.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Now, a half century later, the same Washington Post was actively suppressing a story of government corruption of equal importance solely for political bias. The pre-election weeks of October 2020 should have caused an uproar over the revelations by Miranda Devine in the New York Post about the explosive contents of a laptop abandoned in a repair shop by the Democratic presidential nominee’s son and never retrieved. The White House and Democratic Party went into circle-the-wagons mode, and most of the news media, setting aside their primary role to be a nonpartisan check and balance on government, joined them there.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was not the only thing abandoned. Its potential impact before a hotly contested election resulted in the abandonment of the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press as well. Polls about trust and confidence in the news media were off the charts after Watergate, but reached an all-time low even before “Huntergate” when they bottomed out completely. In the most recent Pew Research Center survey of news journalists, in which I was invited to take part, American trust and confidence in the news media is under six percent.

The story told by Miranda Devine in Laptop from Hell is both utterly painful and painfully necessary. A web of lies, cover-ups and corruption drove Richard Nixon from the White House in his second term in 1974, but by covering up the Hunter Biden story in 2020, the news media interfered in a presidential election and now leaves a stunned nation with a scandal of equal measure after just one year of the Biden administration. It was not patriotism that did this. It was the opposite of patriotism. It was partisanship.

The laptop consists of thousands of emails, video clips, and other material produced by Hunter Biden, son of then Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic Nominee. The contents reveal a shocking influence-peddling scheme by Hunter Biden who received millions of dollars for arranging influence from his then Vice President father with foreign entities in Ukraine, Russia, and China.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Legislative Judiciary Committee Member Adam Schiff, and seemingly every member on the Democratic sides of the House and Senate who were asked, including fifty former intelligence officers sworn to uphold the Constitution, all agreed to knowingly propagate a massive lie: that the laptop story “had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.”

That well-rehearsed lie was repeated to the American people by the Democratic nominee as he stared into the camera during the second Presidential Debate. It should be alarming that it was President Trump, and not the news media moderator, who brought it up in the first place.

I waded into this story a bit when I posted “A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War” some months ago. It was posted just as Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine was in its early stages. I wrote in that post that if the slowly published contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop are true, the President is compromised in foreign policy regarding Russia, Ukraine and China. I was certainly not the first or the last to raise this concern. The best coverage came from the least impaired news media, The Epoch Times, and a March 23, 2022 op-ed by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke, “The Foreign Policy Ramifications of Hunter’s Emails.”

We only know about this story at all today thanks to the dogged pursuit of it by Miranda Devine and the New York Post. And in U.S. news coverage of the wrongly convicted and imprisoned George Cardinal Pell, Miranda Devine and the New York Post were singular in their expression of journalistic skepticism about the flawed case against him. Mercifully, all seven members of Australia’s High Court agreed. If there is a Pulitzer for journalistic courage and integrity, it should have Miranda Devine’s name on it.

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Note from the Editor: Please share this post. Father Gordon MacRae will mark forty years of priesthood on June 5, 2022, the Solemnity of Pentecost. Please join us here next week on June 1st for a special post as he reflects on those years in the most extraordinary circumstances. You may also like these related posts:

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

A prematurely leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft may send a polarized nation to the brink of civil war, but Roe v. Wade is not the first precedent to be overturned.

May 11, 2022 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

KA-BOOM! For many months, the U.S. Supreme Court has been examining a case from the State of Mississippi. It is one of the most widely anticipated abortion rights cases in decades, and it could result in the termination of a federal constitutional right to abortion established in the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

In early May, a draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked to and published by Politico. It is the first time in history that a draft of a pending Supreme Court decision was leaked to the media before it made its way through the Court’s decision-making process. The leaked draft leaves a distinct impression that the Court is (or was) about to overturn Roe V. Wade. The leak was an earthquake for government, the Supreme Court, and advocacy groups on both sides of the abortion issue.

Chief Justice John Roberts immediately requested an investigation of the unprecedented leak. I hope that by the time this is posted, the perpetrator(s) and process through which it was leaked are exposed. Explosions of furor over this in Washington are not exaggerated. The integrity of justice, the Supreme Court, the Separation of Powers, and government itself are at stake.

And there was another, simultaneous explosion, a nuclear one with a mushroom cloud spreading across this divided nation. The leaked news that Roe v. Wade may now be overturned has created a tidal wave of protest outside the Supreme Court and in cities across the land. On the left, the partisan protests are taking an unfortunate tone of vile hostility toward the pro-life movement, toward politicians who have been in sympathy with it, and toward Catholics who have traditionally been a driving force behind the Right to Life.

We should be proud of our defense of life while also avoiding any rhetoric of “we won and you lost!” The only potential winners here are the unborn who may have a chance to live if this leaked document becomes our reality. That is still likely months away.

President Joe Biden, who ran for office on a pledge to unite this polarized nation, has stoked the raging fires by denouncing the Court and calling for abortion rights to now be encoded in federal law. He knows full well that this is highly unlikely in the current divided House and Senate so his rhetoric can only be interpreted as an effort to ratchet up dissent and chaos.

In 2006, as Senator Joe Biden he backed an amendment to overturn Roe. Two years later, he became Vice President in the Obama White House. I can only interpret his radical flip, and his current hostility to the Right to Life, as evidence of a widely held belief that someone else has been doing his thinking for him on this and other crucial issues facing Americans. This is not a good time for the United States to have a puppet presidency.

The leaked document does not represent a final position of the Court, but it appears to have been written for the majority opinion. Whether leaking it was an attempt at sabotage remains to be seen. But the text of Justice Alito’s majority decision draft gives much hope to the pro-life cause.

A Misguided Emphasis on Precedent

The leaked draft affirms that the Constitution makes no reference to abortion and that no such right is implicit in any of its provisions. The draft states that there is no history or tradition that protects abortion as a right with a Constitutional guarantee of due process. This mirrors the position of the late Justice Antonin Scalia who held that the only such right found in the Constitution is the one that the (7-2) majority Court in Roe invented and inserted there in 1973. The draft concludes that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, its reasoning exceptionally weak, and with damaging consequences.”

In defending Roe, a lot of ink and rhetoric have been spilled over a legal principle known as “Stare Decisis,” a Latin term literally meaning “to stand by things decided.” The legal principle compels a court to stand by precedents for matters in which the same legal points arise in litigation. You likely heard the term, “respect for precedent” a lot in the Senate hearings vetting recent nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Without exception, the precedent case referred to in these hearings was the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The ruling barred states from adopting restrictions on abortion before the third trimester which was the point at which the Court determined in 1973 to be the time of viability of life outside the womb. The scientific evidence no longer supports that determination.

The principle of “Stare Decisis” does not mean that a precedent is set in stone with no avenue for reconsideration just because it is a precedent. There have been ten cases in U.S. Supreme Court history that have widely become known as “Landmark Precedents.” One of them is Roe v. Wade which had the effect of bitterly dividing the nation into two warring camps thus giving birth to the Pro-life Movement. Each year since 1975, two years after Roe, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens descend upon Washington for the National March for Life.

Another precedent also bitterly divided the nation setting in motion the events which led to the Civil War. That case was Scott v. Sanford, an 1857 landmark decision and the one that has been most compared by judicial scholars to the flawed judgment in Roe v. Wade.

In 1846, Dred Scott, a slave living in St. Louis, Missouri, sued contending that he, his wife, Harriet, and their two daughters were legally entitled to their freedom because their “owner” brought them to Missouri which was a free state. After being tried in Missouri state courts and in federal circuit court, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856. In 1857, the Court issued its 7-2 split decision rejecting Dred Scott’s claims.

Writing for the Supreme Court majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney, like Joe Biden a self-identified Rosary-carrying Catholic, ruled that “blacks, even when free, could never be citizens of the United States” with rights to sue in federal courts. In his written decision — one that no person of just mind and well informed conscience could hold today — Justice Taney concluded that “blacks are so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Taney decision for the Court majority — which, like Roe v. Wade, was also split 7-2 — also determined that the portion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that banned slavery in territories north and west of the state of Missouri was unconstitutional. The outcome of Dred Scott v. Sanford led directly to the Civil War.

To claim today that “precedent” alone should be the determining factor in such a case is tantamount to stoking the embers of that war. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery and paved the way for the Fourteenth Amendment which recognized the rights to life and liberty for all Americans. Those who would cling to “Stare Decisis” as an impenetrable judicial boundary are left today in a misinformed judicial quandary.

As the final fate of Roe v. Wade looms, I urge readers to arm themselves with some truths beyond the hysteria of protests covered 24/7 by cable news. I would like to ask you to read at least one or more of the posts linked at the end of this one, to share them, and to pray ardently for the cause of life and the integrity of this nation.

Be prepared to duck because a political storm is rising. There is on its horizon a distinct impression that the integrity of America and the cause of life are not at all beyond hope.

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Please also read and share:

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

While Russia invaded Ukraine with its nuclear arsenal on high alert, the White House and media were compromised by partisan secrets and selective reporting.

March 9, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

A lot of media angst and ink have been spilled over the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has silenced Russian media to keep his own citizens from witnessing the horror he has inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. However, the Free World has a media problem of its own. As I began this post on March 4, 2022 my account on Facebook was disabled and taken down. This is the message I received from Facebook: “Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards.” The offending post, which Facebook disabled based solely on the title and introductory quote was “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

I actually wrote that post several years ago, and shared it then on Facebook with no problem. This time I shared it on Facebook’s Catholic groups which should have a particular interest in its subject matter. Eighty years ago the government of Germany launched a moral panic accusing and arresting without evidence, 300 Catholic priests on trumped up sexual abuse charges. It was all a fraud, and after many months in prison all but six were exonerated, and even several of them were falsely accused. For unknown reasons, Facebook did not want Catholic groups to see that post. I can no longer share my posts among the fifteen or so established Catholic groups and News groups such as Catholic News Agency on Facebook. But you can. Today, it seems, that the media of the “Free” World cannot abide such a story. We will be reassessing our use of social media, so if you have suggestions, please let us know.

I very much miss Walter Cronkite, the most trusted broadcast journalist of the 20th Century. He was the longtime anchor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. I grew up with him on my TV screen from the age of nine to almost twenty-nine. Walter Cronkite guided us through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. From our living rooms, he navigated the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam. He was with us as the nation held its breath in 1969 while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he navigated a long cold war with the Soviet Empire. Yet no one I know could tell me today whether his personal politics leaned left or right.

In his career, Cronkite won five Emmys and the George Polk Journalism Award. He was a newsman and pundit in the strict sense of the term, and I wanted to emulate him. For some today, the word, “pundit” has a negative connotation confused with “spin doctor.” Its origin, however, is the word “pandit” from the Sanskrit word “pad itah” spoken in parts of India and Sri Lanka. It refers to a learned sage or scholar, someone to whom everyone else would be wise to listen.

Few stand out in the news media of today as Walter Cronkite did. I am just a minor voice in modern media, but as I began this post I was surprised to receive an invitation from the PEW Research Center to join its survey of journalists. “The views you share will tell us about experiences of journalists like you across the country.” While writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I was also invited to serve as a Wall Street Journal Opinion Leader. That may be the reason for my PEW Research Center invitation, but I hope it is also because I try to write truth without political filters. As a result of writing with that in mind, some have come to appreciate Beyond These Stone Walls as a source of truth and reflection about truth. Over the last few years, BTSW has received several citations as a reliable news source at the “In the News” section of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Our most recent Catalyst citation was for a post that demonstrated a double standard in public perceptions about accused Catholic priests. It was one of the most widely read posts of 2021 and still dominates traffic in 2022. Of interest, that post was widely read and shared by the thousands of readers at the r/Catholicism forum at Reddit. That post was “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

I was happy about its success because that post in particular strove to cover the truth without spin. Its bottom line was something challenging to the news media status quo: that to be accused means to be guilty. In that case, the accused was my own bishop. I also have an unhappy history with him due to some of his actions and policies. Ryan MacDonald laid those out in a most important post, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”

But I was proud that I set those concerns aside to take the high road in reporting on the story of allegations against my bishop. I believe him to be innocent of any such suspicion against him. However after publication of my post about a connection between former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and claims in a civil lawsuit against my bishop, I was “permanently banned” from ever again posting content at the Reddit r/Catholicism community. Then BTSW’s invitation for membership in the Catholic Media Association was rescinded without cause or explanation. The reasons for these, and the Facebook dismissal, were political and had nothing to do with the truth of what I posted.

Political Fallout at CNN

Long after posting that first story, above, its connection to former Governor Andrew Cuomo kept it in the neon lights of online interest, something I neither intended nor expected. Because the Governor’s brother, Chris Cuomo, was a lead anchor at CNN, the spotlight of investigation fell on him as well. It was discovered that he used his position as a news anchor to coach his older brother on how to navigate the news media against multiple sexual misconduct allegations. Then similar allegations were leveled at Chris Cuomo as well, among other ethics concerns.

On his way out the CNN door under a cloud, it is suspected by some in the media that he acted as a whistleblower pointing at CNN Executive Director Jeff Zucker for a long term consensual relationship with another CNN upper management employee, Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. In the end, both of them were also forced to resign from CNN under a cloud of ethical concerns amid charges of violations of their due process rights leveled by some of the remaining CNN staffers.

Allison Gollust also once briefly served as Governor Cuomo’s spokesperson. Sources at CNN today claim that Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust “pushed hard” to orchestrate and promote a series of CNN interviews between Chris Cuomo and Governor Cuomo while navigating the earlier days of the pandemic. The interviews were for the sole purpose of countering President Donald Trump’s daily news briefs about managing the pandemic. Some staff at CNN now charge that the daily Covid-19 pandemic interviews between the Cuomo brothers set the stage for the very thing for which Chris Cuomo eventually lost his job: a blurring of the borders between news and politics.

The CNN on-air interviews between Chris and Andrew Cuomo were pushed by CNN despite their straddling an ethical line because they were a boost for ratings. Since the presidential election of 2020, ratings at all three of the 24-hour cable news networks plummeted costing the networks billions in advertising dollars, but CNN and MSNBC suffered far more than Fox News. So journalistic ethics took a back seat to ratings concerns at CNN.

This is something I have long noticed. The blurring of news and opinion at all three of these networks spilled over into the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news formats. Ratings and advertising dollars at all three were lagging behind the cable news networks which in turn were lagging behind their pre-2020 election standings. It became clear that former President Donald Trump was the cause.

CNN and MSNBC had to find ways to compete with FOX News which maintained comparatively healthy post election ratings. They could only do this by appealing to their virulently anti-Trump base. So you may have noted, as I did, that at some point around mid-2021 both CNN and MSNBC returned in their prime time news and opinion formats to a daily disparagement of Donald Trump long after he left office. This also spilled over into some print journalism. As I type this post, I have in hand a resent copy of The Week magazine which decidedly leans to the usual journalistic left. The issue I am looking at, dated in mid February 2022, contains one reference to sitting President Joe Biden and five references, all negative, to former president Donald Trump.

Of interest, CNN now plans major changes. After a merger between its parent WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., former MSNBC producer Chris Licht will become chairman and CEO of CNN Global. He is reported to be planning to adjust CNN’s broadcast format to include an emphasis on hard news and less opinion especially in its prime time schedule.

A Laptop Window onto Corruption

As I write this, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a full scale invasion of Ukraine. It is frightening to watch this unfolding reminder of the old Soviet Union and its savage consumption of neighbor states. For the most part, MSNBC and CNN are taking a little break from disparaging Donald Trump, but even now I hear the occasional blame aimed at Trump's foreign policy. We are not at all well served in this partisan distortion of news, but it is even worse than you think. Vladimir Putin knows well that both the sitting President of the United States and the American news media are compromised. There is simply no other way to say this, and I know that, for some, it will label me as a pro-Trump partisan which is not at all the truth.

A few months ago, a reader gifted me with a small book entitled Laptop from Hell by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. I was interested in the book because I was fascinated by media — and social media — treatment of this story in the months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We were a nation in denial about our own addiction to partisan politics, and the news media had become our greatest enabler as it struggled for ratings and advertising dollars. Now, with the Russian thirst for war, the truth of this story is at risk of being buried forever. So please let me do my own small part in preventing this even if it is painful. It is nonetheless the truth.

Our President is compromised, and so is much of our mainstream media. In 2019, drug-addicted Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Mac repair shop in Delaware, and then promptly forgot about it. It was just six days before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Months later, just as the 2020 primaries got underway, the owner of the repair shop discovered the abandoned laptop along with a signed repair invoice from Hunter Biden who never returned to retrieve it. The laptop ended up in the hands of the New York Post, the fourth largest newspaper in the United States.

Hunter Biden was unresponsive to inquiries to ascertain that the laptop was his. He later finally owned it by stating in an interview that “I just wasn’t keeping very good track of my possessions then.” Since no one claimed it in time, the Post began to have it analyzed and discovered the entire contents of its hard drive. Miranda Devine described it as:

“A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs and voice recordings spanning a decade. The laptop provided the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine and beyond despite repeated denials. Hunter [Biden] had something to sell. He was the son of the vice president who would go on to become the leader of the free world.”

While Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden mysteriously landed a $1 million per year position on the board of Burisma, a Ukraine oil company under suspicion for corruption. Hunter Biden had zero previous experience in that industry. Miranda Devine’s account of the contents of the “Laptop from Hell” reveals a series of emails to Hunter from shady figures in Ukraine demanding that he make good on his position by bringing political pressure to bear to remove a Ukraine prosecutor who had set his sights on investigating Burisma.

Joe Biden, while vice president, then set his own sights on that same prosecutor. In an impromptu speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, Joe Biden told the story of how he had flown into Kyiv aboard Airforce-2 and threatened to withhold from the Ukraine government $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Prosecutor General Shokin was fired. Vice President Biden boasted:

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

— Laptop from Hell p. 95

In the months leading up to the presidential election of 2020, most of the mainstream media, and the powerful social media platforms at Twitter and Facebook, suppressed this story and many other related accounts covered by the New York Post. This is not about the outcome of that election. It is about trust in government and the news media to cover news without partisan political considerations. The existence of the book, Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine, and the political efforts to silence it before a national election, now place our trust in both the media and our government at risk in a time of war. As Miranda Devine points out: “Hunter Biden found himself at the center of a titanic struggle between the US and Russia over energy... How the vice president’s son got involved with such a shady operation has always been obscured.”

Truth be told, our president and much of our news and social media credibility are now compromised by this story and Vladimir Putin knows this.

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Update from Father Gordon MacRae: As reported in this post, our Facebook page was taken down on March 4th. On March 8th, after I wrote the above post, I published a short article at Linkedin entitled “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”

A few hours after it was published, our Facebook page was reinstated without explanation and is now back online. However, when we attempted to post this post on my Facebook page, Facebook refused it with a message stating that other readers may not agree with it. Welcome to the world of the Facebook Speech Police.

We also want to bring to your attention a new addition to our “Voices from Beyond” section. It was first published a few years ago in the National Catholic Register newspaper, and it was the first time mainstream Catholic media had taken up my case. The article, by Brian Fraga, is “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name.”

There is more to come next week on the terror unfolding in Ukraine. Please share this post, and please pray for the people of Ukraine and Russia who are now pawns in these current events.

Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility

In a frenzied flight from Afghanistan the U.S. left behind Americans, allies, $80 billion in weapons of war, some hard won credibility, and a leadership vacuum.

October 6, 2021

The late author, Tom Clancy was widely considered to be a master of the Cold War techno-thriller. I once wrote about his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (Putnam, 1984), which kept me awake for a few nights as a young priest in 1985. President Ronald Reagan sent it to the top of the bestseller lists when he famously described it as "Unputdownable." I wrote about Tom Clancy and that book shortly after his untimely death in October 2013. My post, which found a wide audience among his millions of readers, was “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

Tom Clancy instilled in me a high regard for history as a lens to the present. I have since digested 23 of Tom Clancy’s historical novels — some 15,000 pages — about foreign policy, its impact on history, or history’s impact on it. But it was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October that first drew me into the necessity of seeing the present with eyes that have gazed upon the past.

And it was that same sequel that opened my eyes about Afghanistan. The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Putnam, 1988) was set toward the end of the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the struggle of the Afghan people to be rid of that invasion force. Everything that is happening in Afghanistan today has its roots in that decade. The Taliban were never mentioned in the book, nor were al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS-K. None of them existed yet, but the seeds of all of them were firmly planted and flourishing as a result of that decade and all that followed.

On Christmas Day, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of the capital, Kabul, and other important regions. The Soviets executed the Afghan political leader and installed in his place a puppet government led by a faction more amenable to Soviet control. Wide rejection of that government by the Afghan people led to civil war. A man named Osama bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire, established a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan for rebels fighting the Soviet forces.

The 1980s also saw increased friction between the United States and the Soviet Union resulting mainly from the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, greatly increased American military capabilities. The Soviets viewed him as a formidable foe committed to subverting the Soviet system. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan called the USSR an “Evil Empire,” and vowed to root out and destroy any political movements that supported the Soviet Union. He was much aided in this effort by Pope John Paul II who single handedly saved Poland from Soviet domination.

The Rise of the Taliban

In the mid-1980s, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew throughout Afghanistan. Some ninety regions in the country were commanded by guerrilla leaders who called themselves “mujahideen,” meaning “Muslim holy warriors.” The mujahideen resented the Soviet presence and its puppet government. By the mid-1980s the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid these Afghan rebels based in Pakistan in their war to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Up to 1.3 million people died in their struggle against the occupation.

Then in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan leaving in their wake a leadership vacuum in a country wracked by civil war. From a distance, over the decade to follow, the United States continued to provide funds and weapons to the mujahideen rebels. Afghanistan was now without solidifying leadership, and nature abhors a vacuum. From the rubble of war, chaos, and a rudderless nation, the Taliban were born.

The Taliban movement was created in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by Mohammed Omar, a senior Muslim cleric (called a mullah). The name, “Taliban” simply means “student.” It refers to the movement’s roots in the fundamentalist Islamic religious schools. For many youth in war-torn Afghanistan, religious indoctrination was the only education they received.

Even that limited education was available only to young men. As the Taliban rose to power in 1994, the movement imposed a strict Islamic fundamentalism on the nation. Secondary schools for girls were closed and girls were barred from receiving education beyond a rudimentary level. Music and dancing were banned outright. Public works of art were destroyed. I wrote recently in these pages of an infamous example. In 2001, as al Qaeda was plotting against the United States, the Taliban blew up a 180 foot stone statue of Buddha that had been carved into an Afghan mountainside where it stood for 1500 years.

Many of the Taliban laws alarmed human rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. The Taliban strictly enforced ancient customs of purdah, the forced separation of men and women in public. Men were required to grow full beards. Those who did not comply, or could not comply, were subjected to public beatings.

Women were required to be covered entirely from head to toe in burkas while in public view. Those who violated this were often beaten or executed on the spot by the Taliban religious police. Women were also forbidden from working outside the home. Having lost hundreds of thousands of men to war, this left many widows and orphans in dire poverty.

As the Taliban movement grew in size and strength, it recruited heavily from the mujahideen, the anti-Soviet freedom fighters who were funded and armed in part by the United States. The Taliban gave a new national identity to the thousands of war orphans who were educated in only two fields of study: strict fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of the Quran and ancient tribal beliefs and practices — and war.

The Rise of Al Qaeda

By the late 1990s, in the absence of a government, the Taliban had taken control of all of Afghanistan with the exception of a small opposition force known as the Northern Alliance. Most other countries did not recognize the Taliban regime as a legitimate government, thus further isolating Afghanistan and its people from oversight and connection with the world community.

From that pinnacle of power, the Taliban also provided safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, formed in 1980s Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet invasion. Osama bin Laden had a single goal: to incite a global holy war called, in Arabic, a jihad. The term, al Qaeda is Arabic for “base” or “base camp.” For its founder and adherents, it would become the base from which worldwide Islamic revolution and domination would be launched.

Over the course of the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda trained, equipped, and financed 50,000 mujahideen warriors from 50 countries. Saudi Arabian nationals comprised more than fifty percent of the recruits. Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam motivated many young men to come to the defense of Afghanistan and the Muslim world against Western “infidel” influences.

When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to his original goal for al Qaeda: to overthrow Muslim or Arab regimes that he considered to be too tolerant of Western influence. Bin Laden envisioned replacing these regimes with a single Muslim empire organized around Islamic “Sharia” law. He targeted the United States and other Western nations because he saw them as obstacles to his cause by becoming political allies with the Muslim nations he considered to be corrupt.

From 1991 to 1996, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, bin Laden quietly built al Qaeda into a formidable international terrorist network with cells and operations in 45 countries. Training camps were established in Sudan, and by 1992 most of al Qaeda’s operations were relocated there. From that base, attacks on U.S. troops and U.S. interests were launched in Yemen and Somalia and at a joint U.S.-Saudi military training base in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was especially angered by the presence of U.S. military in Saudi Arabia.

Bowing to pressure from the Saudi and U.S. governments, al Qaeda and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan. He formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban while plans for a direct assault on the United States took shape. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil, were described recently in these pages in “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.”

In response, the United States declared war on terrorism, the first declaration of war against a concept instead of a country. While Taliban leaders rejected U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, the U.S. began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Taliban military positions in October, 2001. Ground troops of the Northern Alliance, meanwhile, continued their front-line offensive against Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan with help in the form of funds and weapons from the United States.

The U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan

The Taliban lost its hold on Afghanistan in November, 2001 when the Northern Alliance, aided by U.S. bombardments, captured the capital, Kabul. The Taliban surrendered its traditional stronghold of Kandahar in December 2001. A decade after the Soviets left, the United States now occupied Afghanistan and drove out the Taliban.

Around the world, a global anti-terrorism effort was underway resulting in the arrests or deaths of over 1,000 al Qaeda operatives and another 3,000 members of peripheral terrorist networks. One third of al Qaeda’s leadership was either dead or in custody. In May, 2011, U.S. Special Forces operatives killed Osama bin Laden at a house in Islamabad, Pakistan where he had been hiding in plain sight. Al Qaeda lost a general but gained a martyr.

Twenty years later, seven months into his term in office, the administration of President Joe Biden announced an end to the 20 year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. It will be one of the great ironies of history that the U.S. left Afghanistan just as it was found in 2001 — with the Taliban in complete control. Just days after President Biden assured both nations that it is highly unlikely the Taliban will ever again rise to power in Afghanistan, they took complete control of the country in a matter of days — even before the U.S. departure was completed.

Wall Street Journal columnist and former presidential speech writer, Peggy Noonan — no fan of Mr. Biden’s predecessor — had written some flattering prose about the new tone in Washington led by an empathetic gentleman in the White House. In the aftermath of this catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, she wrote, “The Afghan Fiasco Will Stick to Biden” (WSJ, September 4, 2021):

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“August left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of ‘This isn’t how we do things.’ We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the president looking determined on the anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic decisions around showbiz exigencies. We wait for the summer fighting season to pass; we withdraw in the winter when Taliban warriors are shivering in their caves.

“We don’t leave our major air base in the middle of the night — in the middle of the night! — without even telling the Afghan military. We don’t leave our weapons behind so 20-year-old enemies can don them for military play-acting and drive up and down with guns and helmets. We don’t fail to tell our allies exactly what we are doing and how we are doing it — they followed us there and paid a price for it. We don’t see signs of an overwhelming enemy advance and treat is as a perception problem as opposed to a reality problem. We don’t get the U.S. military out before the U.S. citizens and our friends.”

— WSJ, Sep 4, 2021

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In regard to Ms. Noonan’ s sentence, “We don’t leave our weapons behind,” the London Times composed a basic inventory of what was left behind in Afghanistan in addition to a number of Americans and allies who are still there and still in jeopardy. Scattered across Afghanistan in several former U.S. military depots — and now in the hands of the Taliban — are the following:

“22,174 American armored military humvees [like the one featured atop this post], 42 trucks and SUVs, 64,363 machine guns, 358,000 military grade assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition; 162,043 military grade night vision goggles and military radios; 126,295 pistols, 176 heavy artillery weapons, 100 helicopters including 33 Blackhawks, four c-130 transport planes, 60 other fixed-wing aircraft, and lots of ammunition for a total cost of eighty billion dollars in advanced military assets.”

— London Times

There was a lot more left behind in Afghanistan. Peggy Noonan and other writers spoke of a humiliating transformation in this U.S. departure. The U.S. set a deadline for leaving, but somehow the “leaving” seemed more like an expulsion with the Taliban dictating the terms. In the end, America fled, taking only as many citizens and allies as conveniently possible while leaving many more behind. Senator Tom Cotton said that the U.S. left behind 1,000 Afghan allies who were fully veted to come to the United States, while taking 1,000 Afghan about whom the U.S. knows nothing.

The Rise of ISIS-K

Then a new terror group emerged on the scene. ISIS-K, also known as Islamic State Khorasan, managed to smuggle a suicide bomber into Hamid Kara airport in Kabul. The explosion killed ten U.S. marines, two U.S. army sergeants, and a U.S. Navy medic along with 95 Taliban soldiers. ISIS-K is a mortal enemy of the Taliban and has extreme hostility to the United States.

The “K” in its title refers to Khorasan, a once powerful Muslim territory that spanned Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Both the U.S. and the Taliban knew that ISIS-K was operating and planning attacks in Afghanistan. In May, 2021, ISIS-K bombed a Kabul school for girls. The group accuses the Taliban of growing “soft” on imposing Islamic “Sharia” law. Since then, the Taliban capitulated by banning all secondary education for Afghan girls.

In House and Senate hearnings, Generals Miley and McKenzie said that they recommended leaving between 2,500 and 3,500 troops in Kabul to maintain control over the evacuation and assure that Americans would not be left behind. They were overruled by the White House.

In response to the ISIS-K killing of 13 U.S. soldiers, President Joe Biden warned that “we will hunt you down and you will pay.” But without boots, eyes, and ears on the ground in Afghanistan now, that was easier said than done. Days later, the Pentagon and the President told the nation that a U.S. drone strike successfully killed ISIS-K terrorists. They said the reprisal was well vetted and “a righteous strike.”

It took several days for the truth to come out. The U.S. drone missile instead struck a white Toyota Corolla killing three innocent adults and seven children ranging in age from two to 15, all trying to flee Kabul and the Taliban.

Then our national attention was turned quickly once again to the other human disaster, the one at the Southern Border. While all eyes had been on Afghanistan, some 16,000 people amassed under and around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. There was some gruesome footage of men on horseback chasing down and coralling desperately fleeing Haitians. The footage was not what it first seemed, but it was nonetheless a disturbing indictment of current policy.

An embarrased President Biden reacted with a declaration that the buck stops somewhere else. He vowed that the massively overwhelmed Border Patrol “will be held responsible and will pay.” It was the same thing he said when ISIS-K killed 13 U.S. soldiers in Kabul.

Rules for leadership are universal, and America is no exception. Nature abhors a vacuum, and fills it with chaos.

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post, and if you haven’t already, please Subscribe to Beyond These Stone Walls. You may also like these related posts from Father Gordon MacRae:

Christians and The Crusades of Islamic State

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October

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