Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us

Who better than a prisoner can weigh the value of a free, unchained life? Who else knows at such a personal level the cost of living under tyranny’s lock and key?

March 16, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

You have likely been as alarmed and dismayed as I have been over the scenes of slaughter and devastation in round-the-clock news coverage of the Russian assault on Ukraine in the past few weeks. Regardless of the final outcome for the peoples of Ukraine and Russia, the unrestrained tyranny of Russian President Vladimir Putin has left a permanent imprint on civil society. To purposely target civilians in a time of war is a war crime, and Putin has done so with impunity.

U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, highly touted in President Biden’s State of the Union address, are proving more painful for the people of Russia than for Putin himself. History tells us that sanctions have rarely resulted in the reconsideration of tyranny. Sergey Alekshenko, a former Russian bank official now in the U.S., recently told The Wall Street Journal that the economic sting of sanctions will be sorely felt by the Russian people, but this is Vladimir Putin’s war, not theirs. As his people suffer, Putin will still have food on his table and gas in his chauffered limousine. His strong-arm military will still be fed.

After two decades as Russian president, Putin now demonstrates that he cares little for the Russian people who are standing in long lines at banks as the Ruble collapses. Putin scoffs while tightening the chains of communist dictatorship. At this writing, he has already arrested and jailed over 8,000 Russian citizens for having the audacity to protest his war. With threats of nuclear destruction, he means to bring the Free World to heel, and it is working.

And as described in these pages a week ago, the leader of the Free World is compromised. The government of Poland has recently agreed to provide Ukraine with Russian-built war planes that Ukraine pilots could fly. It would go a long way to stopping the relentless slaughter of innocent civilians from the air. The deal required that the U.S. replace Poland’s fighter jets with American ones. The Pentagon agreed. The decision went all the way to President Biden’s desk. To the great dismay of battered Ukraine, the American President vetoed the idea fearing that it would provoke Putin. The same happened in Afghanistan resulting in American humiliation as Mr. Biden’s decision for a rapid exit was based on his fear of provoking the Taliban. Putin’s quest to bring the world to heel is manifested not only in Ukraine but in America.

As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine geared up, I had to wonder about some of the tone deaf headlines that came from America’s highest priced news media. Just as Russia began to rattle its saber at Ukraine, The New York Times ran an editorial with this headline about Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky: “The Comedian-Turned President Is Seriously in Over His Head.”

While most of the world stood by in shock at the manufactured tyranny Putin has aimed at Ukraine, it is difficult to believe that someone at the Times wrote that editorial, that an editor let it fly, and that both still have a job three weeks after printing it. Just two weeks later, the entire Free World hailed President Volodymyr Zelensky as a courageous leader and an icon of freedom.

The collective leaders of the European Union gave him a standing ovation for his compelling and impassioned plea that this fight is also their fight. Without intervention, this violently medieval conquering of Ukraine will leave a hostile nuclear-armed, Soviet-inspired communist government at the door of the European Union.

A reader recently wrote to me that, “In this troubled time, The Wall Street Journal is a resource like no other.” In a pair of recent editorials, the WSJ laid out the true nature of this war:

“A new cold war has arrived, and Biden has to meet the challenge ... For years a complacent West has erred by treating Putin like a reasonable geopolitical partner. He has made it clear he doesn’t want a place in the international order. He wants to blow it up.

“On Sunday [February 27] Mr. Putin put his nuclear forces on high alert in response to what he called threatening comments from NATO leaders ... The threats shouldn’t stop the growing support for Ukrainian resistance. The stakes of this war are very high, including for American interests. Mr. Putin is trying to restore Greater Russia and make himself the dominant European state and a global power. He wants a new world disorder.”

I do not agree with a whole lot that comes from editorials in The Washington Post, but this bit of wisdom by Max Boot gave me pause:

“We are all Ukrainians now. As Putin pursues his fantasy of rebuilding Russia’s lost empire, Ukrainian resistance is the only thing holding back a lawless new phase of world history. Their fight is our fight too.”

A Measure of Freedom

Compare Putin’s state of mind with that of President Volodymyr Zelensky. When it was suggested by U.S. officials that they could arrange a hasty exit to get him safely out of Ukraine, he said, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” President Zelensky has emerged as a global hero. Imagine what he and other Ukrainian citizens could now do with the $80 billion in advanced weapons and ammunition left behind for the Taliban in our last war. I described it in “Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility.”

I have been listening to some of our Special Forces operatives in the U.S. who report having a very hard time staying on the sidelines as innocent Ukrainians are slaughtered. The United States cannot sustain a role as the world’s democracy police, but must our retreat be so total and dramatic? In just one year, the extent to which America has shrunk from tyranny is alarming.

I am certainly no fan of war, but I believe there are effective measures this nation could take but did not. Severe sanctions targeting Russia’s energy production were not taken because they could roil the energy markets and cause some economic pain for Americans as well. If this is so, it is only because production in the U.S. has been restrained and pipelines have been shut down by progressive agendas. How do we explain this to the people of Ukraine?

And then this humbling development came my way. Just one day before Russia launched its self-aggrandizing assault on Ukraine, I had someone look at both countries in our weekly BTSW traffic report. No one from Russia came to Beyond These Stone Walls, but on the very day Russia launched its invasion, several people in Ukraine spent time with us. They were looking at a specific post: “Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.”

I could not imagine this. For those who don’t believe we are on the eve of destruction, think about why — with a nuclear-armed demagogue launching a hostile assault upon their front door — people in the Ukraine chose to celebrate freedom with Pornchai Moontri. I told him about this in a telephone conversation just before typing this post. His response was a pensive silence, as though the weight of freedom had revealed itself. Freedom is never just for those who now are free. It carries within it a mandate to restore and preserve it for others.

Recent events all around us form a somewhat surreal and ironic backdrop to what is happening in Ukraine. As Communist Russia invades this sovereign state intent on destroying the freedom of its people, many Americans took in stride the heavy hand of oppression to our north as Canadian truckers were forcibly dispersed from the right of protest and a democratic government became demonstrably less so. Some in our news media went along, openly describing the truckers as staging shameful assaults and destruction, none of which was true.

American parents in Virginia rose up this year to refute the agenda of a political party that told them they should have no say in what is taught in their schools. And in nearly socialist San Francisco, voters ousted its three farthest left-leaning school board members by upwards of 79-percent of the vote because the school board had been more interested in renaming schools with “woke” icons than opening them as the pandemic winds down.

When a father in Loundon County Virginia complained to his elected school board members that his 14-year old daughter had been sexually assaulted in a gender-confused school lavatory, he was arrested. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg described this case as “the Right’s Big Lie about a sexual assault in Virginia.” The teenage boy was wearing a skirt and identified as “gender fluid” so in her world this could not have been a sexual assault. This was just one of the intellectual distortions propagated by the school board. The “gender fluid” boy was transferred to another school where he did the same thing again.

When an increasing number of parents showed up at school board meetings asking for representative government and reconsideration of progressive content taught in schools, the U.S. Attorney General ordered the Justice Department to investigate, not the school board, but the parents. CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin chimed in recently,

“It’s really important to remember why we are talking about school boards at all; because it’s all about white supremacy, and that’s on the rise in the Republican Party.”

What might the people of Ukraine say today about the priorities for the American progressive movement promoting a totalitarian society while Ukraine’s citizens die trying to fend off communist control? I wrote of our own progressive oppression in “The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education.”

Vladimir Putin Betrays God

In 1991, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States worked to guarantee the sovereignty of Ukraine as a bridge between East and West. At that time, Ukraine had the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons with over 5,000 warheads. The United States and the United Kingdom were worried that these weapons could fall into terrorist hands, so the two Western nations, along with Russia, signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum which agreed to a transfer of these nuclear weapons to Russian control in exchange for a commitment by Washington, London, and Moscow to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and borders.

Vladimir Putin violated that pact first with his annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. At the time, both the U.S. and U.K. agreed that more should have been done to defend the pact than mere sanctions. That was but a test. Now Putin has broken that agreement on a much larger scale and he is again faced only with sanctions.

The United States may itself be partly responsible for this war. On November 10, 2021, the U.S. and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership in which the two countries agreed to pursue membership for Ukraine in NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a move that a crazed despot like Putin could not abide on his own doorstep. Now both NATO and the United States are shrinking from that agreement.

Some religious conservatives in Western Culture have excused Putin’s aggression with a misplaced respect for his positions on cultural issues like same sex marriage, transgender ideology, and progressive agendas. His respect for these issues has nothing to do with anything akin to religious fidelity. It is not in the Name of God that he acts. It is in the name of Lenin and a Marxist disdain for free peoples and independent states.

You may have seen news footage of a Russian rocket striking a communications tower in the Babyn Yar area of Kyiv. Whether a strategic strike or the height of irony is unknown. That very spot was the site of one of the most deadly massacres of Jews during the Holocaust. Ukraine’s people are deeply religious. The majority practice Ukrainian Orthodoxy with smaller numbers of Roman Catholics, Eastern Rite Catholics, and smaller Evangelical congregations. Ukraine is also one of the few European nations with a vibrant Jewish community. Its President, Volodymyr Zelensky, is one of them.

If Putin is not stopped, Zelensky will surely be killed. If that happens without intervention from the Free World, the only voice left may be that of God Himself to Cain (Gen.4:10):

“Listen to the sound of your brother’s blood calling out to me from the Earth.”

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To the Readers of Beyond These Stone Walls: Speaking of tyranny, you may know from reading last week’s post, that I posted an entirely true and well researched account of an event in Germany that violates absolutely none of the publishing standards at Facebook. Nonetheless, on March 5th Facebook announced that it is disabling and removing our account. We have filed an official appeal of that decision. Meanwhile, for the next several weeks we are barred from sharing this post or any others on our Facebook page. However, you are not so barred. So please share this post.

You may also be interested in these related posts:

Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

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

The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education

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.