Free Republic

George Neumayr’s tireless attempts to sound the alarm on the corruption rotting the Catholic Church must not be lost in the ether.Late last week, George Neumayr, author, journalist, and senior editor for the American Spectator became the third high-profile Catholic to die in as many weeks. Neumayr suddenly perished on Thursday, Jan. 19, after contracting malaria in the west African nation of the Ivory Coast, where he was undertaking research for an upcoming project on the Catholic Church in Africa.The year began on a dismal note, with Pope Benedict XVI’s death on Dec. 31. Two weeks later, the conservative Australian...

Trump’s Catholic Tweets A peculiar article suggests Catholics at the White House don’t like them. An odd article by the Catholic News Agency (CNA) appeared this week, alleging that Catholics at the White House resent Trump’s tweets touting “two figures with polarizing reputations among Catholics: former papal nuncio to the United States Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, and the author and online polemicist Taylor Marshall.” The title of the article is, “Why White House Catholics are concerned about Trump’s Catholic tweets.”“White House Catholics” apparently refer to a couple of opportunistic Never Trump-style Catholics who snuck into the White House and are...

Bolton, the cold bureaucrat of the D.C. war machine, was prepared to kill innocent people. Trump wasn’t. Yet we’re told that it is Trump who is corrupt and unpresidential? That doesn’t make any sense. Nor does Bolton’s claim that every decision Trump made “was driven” by reelection considerations make any sense. Trump, if anything, never hesitates to place unpopular truth-telling over political optics. All Bolton’s lame complaining amounts to is that if you agree with Bolton, you are “principled”; if you disagree with him, you are “political.” But what did Bolton expect? Had he not followed the campaign? Trump repeatedly...

s Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish. Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the...

His Trump hatred has deep roots. Jim Comey’s entire shtick now consists of violating the proprieties expected of a former FBI director. But even as he turns up on late-night gag shows to profit off betrayed confidences, he presents himself as the custodian of America’s “norms.” In between complaining about how his job “sucked” at times and how he felt “pissed” off, he likes to play the holier-than-thou scold. His constant invoking of “values” is an attempt to prettify his plunge into low politics and unprincipled profiteering.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The opinions expressed in the following conversation are those of the book's author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of LifeSiteNews. September 1, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Journalist Maike Hickson conducted an interview with author George Neumayr on his new book, The Political Pope. Neumayr offers insights into communist influences on Pope Francis.  Maike Hickson: Throughout your book, you make references to Pope Francis' relationship with communism or with certain communists in particular. Could you describe for us in general his attitude toward communism? George Neumayr: He tends to speak of communism in benign terms. He told the Italian press that he wasn't "offended"...

Even lefty Seymour Hersh agrees that the Russian fable begin in the mind of Obama’s CIA director. One wouldn’t expect Seymour Hersh, a lefty journalist par excellance, to pop the Trump-Russia propaganda balloon Obama’s CIA director John Brennan released last year. But he has. Hersh has been quoted as saying that the collusion claim is a product of “disinformation” — “a Brennan operation,” as he puts it. Hersh says that Trump is not the villain but the victim in this story, and that the press has served as a shameful stenographer for Brennan to smear Trump. It has shown no...

"What have you been smoking?” said a partner in a New York law firm to me in early January after I asserted in front of a room full of Upper East Side liberals that “Trump would win the nomination.” Others hooted me for holding that “closeted Trump supporters” exist in the disaffected corners of American life and that Trump would enjoy a reverse Bradley effect. Last Christmas I ran into Newt Gingrich after Mass in Washington, D.C., and for the heck of it said to him, “So what job do you want in the Trump administration?” He looked at me...

The Obama Watch 'A New Way of Being on the Planet' By George Neumayr on 6.10.10 @ 6:09AM During the feverish excitement of the 2008 campaign, a columnist for the online San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Morford, took it upon himself to educate anti-Obama naysayers with "dysfunctional karmic antennae." They had been asking him: "What the hell's the big deal about Obama?" The question looks prescient these days, but Morford's karmic antennae at the time picked up something different. Obama -- Morford had been told by "spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual)" -- was...

The subject of Arnold Schwarzenegger bores me. I wrote ceaseless columns on this site warning Republicans and conservatives that he would govern as a liberal and operate as a Trojan Horse for the Dems. During an appearance on the now-defunct CNN show Inside Politics, I said that he could become "the Jim Jeffords of the West Coast." For my troubles, I was dismissed as an out-of-touch, maniacal, abortion-obsessed pinhead. Now to hear the same country-club Republican jackasses who sabotaged Tom McClintock and parachuted Arnie into office whine about his liberal legacy is just boring. You made this slipshod bed; lie...

Barack Obama's dismissive remark about embittered Americans clinging to their God and guns sounded like a good description of congregants in his own church: the Malcolm-X-style black separatists who were doing cartweels as Jeremiah Wright inveighed against America. The same media that yawned at those YouTube videos find Sarah Palin's talk at her church riveting and revealing of extremism. The YouTube clips of it look positively innocuous next to the rantings of Wright, or for that matter the open radicalism of Obama. Even Palin's comment about American soldiers doing the will of God is hardly over-the-top. What should she have...

Having accepted the concept of the "Big Tent" a long time ago, the GOP can't excommunicate anyone from the party. It was a dumb idea and the GOP has paid the price for it in endless philosophical drift and inept presidential nominees. John McCain differs in degree, not kind, from the last three GOP presidential candidates. Bush Sr., Dole, Bush Jr., McCain: Where's the substantive difference? They are all intellectually lame Republicans, with little to no interest in conservative political and moral philosophy. . . . HUCKABEE, FOR ALL of his glibness, is striking much closer to the bedrock of...

Arnold Schwarzenegger's selection of archliberal Susan Kennedy, a former Cabinet secretary to Gray Davis, as his new chief of staff "is the last straw for a lot of grassroots California Republicans," says California Republican Assembly president Mike Spence to TAS. Spence describes the appointment as the equivalent of "George Bush appointing Howard Dean to be his chief of staff." Even the jaw of George Skelton (the Los Angeles Times columnist who has spent much of his career telling the California GOP to move left) dropped after the appointment of Kennedy, who is one of the state's leading abortion proponents, a...

The difference between Randy "Duke" Cunningham and many of his Congressional colleagues is one of degree, not kind. He is an extreme manifestation of a corruption pervasive in Congress, a crookedness that spreads with the size of the federal government. Had Cunningham just waited a little while and become a defense firm lobbyist, he could have received his Rolls-Royce, yacht, and Louis-Philippe commode legally. In Washington, D.C., cause and effect are never examined honestly. Politicians are expert at bemoaning a troubling effect even as they deepen its cause. So while the Democrats crank up their "culture of corruption" campaign and...

The liberals of Europe -- those champions of free-ranging Voltairean speech and scourges of fanatical religion -- are dragging journalist and author Oriana Fallaci into court for writing a book critical of militant Islam. Fallaci, who now lives in Manhattan, has been ordered to stand trial in her native Italy for The Force of Reason, a 2004 book which a mau-mauing Muslim activist has managed to convince an Italian judge skates too close to a law prohibiting "outrages against religion." Can Catholic activists in Italy invoke this law too? If so, the critics of Fallaci would find themselves in court...

PBS is a government subsidy for obnoxious, deep-pocketed progressives and a jobs program for liberal journalists. But the New York Times' story targeting Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, suggests that the left is losing its grip on PBS and getting pretty worried about it. The Times story -- titled "Republican Chairman Exerts Pressure on PBS, Alleging Biases" -- reads like a press release from the office of Bill Moyers. In the first paragraph, the Times says that "some public broadcasting leaders" -- read entrenched liberals upset with Tomlinson for scrutinizing their long-unchallenged perks and...