Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the 50th anniversary of the organization:

Fr. Virgil Blum founded the Catholic League in April 1973. We chose April 27 to celebrate this historic event at a Gala dinner in New York City.

Fr. Blum was a Jesuit professor of political science at Marquette University, and he made it his mission to found an organization that would allow lay Catholics to become the defenders of the faith. That was the same year that the Supreme Court legalized abortion, and although this was an issue vital to Fr. Blum, his number-one issue for the Catholic League was fighting anti-Catholicism. His own pet peeve was the battle for school choice.

Blum chose to call his new organization the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He did so because both religious and civil rights were being threatened by the onslaught of militant secularism that emerged in the 1960s. While many important battles have been won since that time, the threat continues to mount.

Blum died in 1990. For the next couple of years, the Catholic League floundered under the leadership of several persons. When I took over in 1993, it was a financial and organizational mess. Fortunately, that is no longer true.

In 1992, Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl asked me to consider running the Pittsburgh chapter of the Catholic League. I was teaching at La Roche College, now a university, in the North Hills, ten miles from downtown Pittsburgh. Wuerl knew of me by reading my op-ed articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and through my radio and TV appearances.

When I met with him at a luncheon at the Duquesne Club, there were many prominent Catholics in attendance. The guest speaker was president of the Catholic League. He took me aside and said he wanted me to be his director of communications, and that the headquarters was relocating from suburban Philadelphia to New York City, my home town. As it turned out, he never contacted me, and when I contacted him, he pretended that he never asked me to work with him.

At that point, I told Bishop Wuerl that since the Catholic League did not seem to know what they were doing, it would make more sense for me to start my own rival organization. He agreed. After I wrote about my plans in the diocesan paper, some lay Catholics found out about it and notified the new chairman of the board of the Catholic League, Fr. Philip Eichner.

Eichner was in charge of finding a new president and CEO, and he called me at the college asking if I would consider being interviewed for the position. I said no. I told him that from what I knew, the Catholic League was badly run and I wanted nothing to do with it. He was not at all defensive. Indeed, he agreed with my observation, but hastened to note that he was new and things were about to change with the relocation to New York City.

I was impressed with Eichner’s honesty and agreed to be interviewed. Those who joined him on the search committee knew of my TV appearances with Phil Donahue, Larry King, “Crossfire,” and other shows. The committee also knew of my two books and my stint as a resident scholar at The Heritage Foundation.

I started at the Catholic League on July 1, 1993. At that time we were located in the headquarters of the Archdiocese of New York. It was my great honor to have the strong support of Cardinal John O’Connor.

People asked me how I was going to jump start an organization that was losing money hand over fist, and was an organizational disaster. Do I know rich people? Not a one, I said. But I do know how to work the media and get us into the news. Once we became known—it didn’t take long—we would find it easier to grow.

The board asked me to visit the chapters around the country, and to stop by the Milwaukee office (it was still in charge of maintaining our membership rolls). When I returned, I asked the board in November 1993 to close all but two offices (in short order, those two would also close). I had to stop the financial bleeding. Quite frankly, we were not getting what we paid for.

The newsletter had to go. Instead, I decided to have a 16-page journal cataloging what we do. I chose the name Catalyst because I wanted to convey the idea that we are a forward-looking organization.

I am proud to have such a small but dedicated staff. Bernadette Brady-Egan started as vice president exactly two years to the day after I did. She is an operations specialist par excellence.

What makes me the proudest is the fact that we are one of the only grass-roots advocacy organizations left in the country. Almost all the others are funded by foundations or sugar daddies. Not us.

What the next 50 years will bring is anyone’s guess. But it is my sincere hope that the Catholic League will continue to thrive and beat back the bigots with vigor.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on media coverage of Tucker Carlson’s exit from Fox News:

The terms “far left” and “far right” have historically been used by social scientists to refer to communists and fascists, respectively. Stalin and Hitler epitomize the labels. But in today’s polarized society, the mainstream media—which is left-of-center—is dubbing Tucker Carlson “far right.” Which means he allegedly has more in common with Nazis than conservatives.

This is a bastardization of the terms.

During the French Revolution, the National Assembly organized to write a new constitution. Those who wanted the king to hold power sat to the right of the president of the assembly; those who wanted a revolution sat to the left. Hence, the terms right and left refer to traditionalists and radicals.

Today, these terms have lost their meaning. The lead story in today’s New York Times is, “Fox News Ousts Carlson, A Voice Of The Far Right.”

What did Carlson do to merit this invidious tag? The news story says he took “far-right positions on issues like border policy and race relations.”

Carlson believes that people who break the law by crashing our border and entering the country illegally should be prosecuted. The surveys show so do most Americans. Carlson also believes that critical race theory, which teaches that every white person is a racist, is irresponsible. The surveys show most Americans agree with him. In other words, according to the New York Times, most Americans are Nazi-like creatures.

Most fair-minded observers would say that Carlson is to the right of center the way Don Lemon is to the left of center. Accordingly, if the New York Times were fair, it would brand Lemon “far left.” But that is not what they call him in today’s newspaper: he is called a “fiery political commentator.” This could also be said of Carlson, but that is not what they say about him. He is an extremist.

The New York Times is not alone in its biased reporting.

We did a study today of how the media are responding to the ousters of Carlson and Lemon. We found over 200 examples of Carlson being called “far right,” but only a few instances of Lemon being called “far left.” PBS, NBC and MSNBC referred to Carlson as “far right” but none referred to Lemon as “far left.”

No media outlet we checked was more unprofessional than the New York Times. In today’s paper it has a news story on Dong Yuyu, the “longtime writer and editor at a top Chinese Communist Party newspaper.” If anyone merits being called “far left” it would be him. But, no, he is said to have written “liberal-leaning commentaries.”

In other words, Communist Party leaders are not even “liberals,” never mind “left-wingers”—and they most certainly are not “far-left wingers.” They just “lean” to the liberal side.

To top things off, the New York Times issued an obituary today on Harry Belafonte; the entertainer died at age 96. In a lengthy account, the only reference to his politics was that as a noble civil rights crusader. The paper lied.

Belafonte loved Stalin. According to Ronald Radosh, who spent his academic life writing about communists, Belafonte was an “unreconstructed Stalinist.” Mr. “Calypso” was very upset with whites who discriminated against blacks in the United States, yet he never had anything bad to say about Fidel Castro’s oppressive communist regime. Worse, Belafonte went to the wall defending the genocidal maniac, Mengistu, in Ethiopia, the communist who instituted the “Red Terror.”

None of this was reported by the New York Times. According to “the  newspaper of record,” Belafonte, like Dong, was a liberal, not a communist. But Tucker is akin to the Nazis. Got that?

Contact Carolyn Ryan, managing editor of the New York Times: carolyn.ryan@nytimes.com

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the Nashville manifesto:

One month ago today, Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old female (who misidentified herself as a male), shot and killed six innocent people in Nashville, Tennessee. The local police said she was planning the attack “over a period of months,” and that she had studied other mass murderers. They emphasized that the attack was “calculated and planned.” Importantly, they found a manifesto that laid bare her thinking.

The Nashville police said they would make public the manifesto as soon as their investigation was completed. They have not done so. All they have said is that the Christian school, Covenant School, and the church,  were targeted; she once attended Covenant. “There’s some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school,” said Police Chief John Drake.

So where’s the manifesto? Who’s holding it back? What’s driving this decision?

According to Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, it’s not the cops who are balking—it’s the FBI. Furthermore, Nashville Council member Courtney Johnston has said the FBI has already said it would not authorize the release of the manifesto in its entirety.

This smacks of politics. It stinks to high heaven.

We know that media outlets, such as NBC, have tried to evade any mention of the transgender status of the mass murderer. We know that Jordan Budd, who runs Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, has said, “It [the manifesto] should not be published.” We know that some transgender activists have threatened violence. Is this what the FBI is giving in to?

Criminal justice professor Joseph Giacalone opines that the FBI is afraid that “there is something in there [the manifesto] that is truly damaging for the transgender community,” and that “they are hesitant to do it because they are afraid of a violent backlash against that protected class of people.”

He’s right. But that does not justify censoring the manifesto.

The public has a right to know what motivated Hale. If she indeed was an anti-Christian bigot, as many sexually confused people are, then we need to know it. Quite frankly, there is a violent element in transgender circles, and Christians need to know if others are also targeting them. Hale may have operated alone, but was she inspired by hate speech voiced by transgender activists?

If the manifesto were made public, and innocent transgender persons were threatened or attacked, the guilty should to be arrested and punished. But this is no excuse for not being transparent.

Unfortunately, Christians, especially Catholics, have reason to worry about the top brass in the FBI. After first monitoring traditional Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass, we recently learned that the agency was spying on mainline Catholics.

We also have to ask tough questions. Given this situation, are we to believe that if a crazed Catholic were to blow up an abortion clinic, killing six people, and law enforcement found a manifesto detailing his motive, that the FBI would censor its release? Or would it be more likely to make it public?

The ruling class is increasingly becoming the enemy of the people. We need one standard of justice for everyone. And that means, among other things, that Hale’s manifesto must be made public in its entirety, and with dispatch.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue looks at how the states deal with  school choice initiatives:

There are 13 states that are most known for their school choice initiatives: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Texas, Utah and West Virginia. Republican lawmakers are the dominant party in all 13 states; and all have a Republican governor, save for Kansas and Louisiana.

We looked at 13 of the most prominent states (including the District of Columbia) that are run by Democrats to see how they handle school choice. Compared to states run by Republicans, they don’t fare too well.

Twelve of them provide for limited school choice options: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, D.C., Maryland, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, California, Oregon and Washington. One of them—California—provides no financial assistance, either in the form of vouchers or tax credits; it also has no private school choice plan.

The Democrats say they are the party that best represents the interests of “people of color.” Yet they are the ones who oppose the very school choice programs that are overwhelmingly favored by African Americans, Asians and Hispanics.

The following section is taken from my new book, War on Virtue.

• Jesse Jackson opposes school choice. But he sent his children to the best private schools.
• Senator Ted Kennedy was ready to conduct a filibuster over a bill that would have given D.C. parents school choice. He sent his children to private schools.
• Hillary Clinton is an ardent foe of school choice. She made sure her daughter went to the prestigious Sidwell Friends School in D.C.
• President Obama, another anti-school choice politician, also sent his daughters to Sidwell Friends.
• President Biden sent his children to private schools. But he opposes school choice for others.
• Vice President Kamala Harris, an enemy of school choice, sent her stepchildren to private schools.
• Nancy Pelosi spent a small fortune sending her children to the most expensive private schools. But she argues that “private school vouchers are a bad idea.”
• Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio sent his kids to elite public schools (which he later tried to crush) and to private schools. He went so far as to say, “I am angry about the state of public education in America. I am angry at the privatizers. I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize a precious things\ we need—public education.”

San Francisco has earned a reputation as a left-wing city. Though the city is 48 percent white, only 15 percent of white children go to public schools. “For all its vaunted progressivism,” the New York Times says, “it has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country—and many of those private schools have remained open.”

Harvard education professor Paul E. Peterson wryly notes that “a fifth of all school teachers with school-age children has placed a child in a private school, and nearly three out of ten have used one or more of the main alternatives to the traditional public school.” In fact, “school teachers are much more likely to use a private school than are other parents.”

This is worse than hypocrisy.

The welfare of children is being sabotaged by the public school establishment. If the schools that public school teachers work at aren’t good enough for their own children, why are they good enough for those who can’t afford to escape them? To top things off, it is the teachers’ unions—the ones who fund the Democratic party—who are out to destroy charter schools and who oppose school choice.

As I’ve said before, it is typically those who scream the loudest about helping blacks who are their biggest enemy. Blacks don’t need the help of patronizing white liberals—they need access to the same kinds of schools that the elites can afford.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the way the media are reporting on crime in New York City:

When Rep. Jim Jordan put the spotlight on crime in New York City this week, he garnered the support of outraged crime victims. Immediately, politicians and the media responded by saying New York is a safe city. They are wrong. No media outlet was more wrong than the Associated Press (AP). Facts matter.

AP wrote that following Jordan’s hearings on violent crime in New York City, “claims spread across social media that the bad old days are back in the nation’s largest city.” To make its point, it said, “experts and city officials say crime across the five boroughs is nowhere near the levels seen in the 1990s….”

It also contended that “criminal justice experts say crime levels were significantly higher three decades ago, and that current levels are more comparable to where New York was a decade ago, when people frequently lauded it as America’s safest city.”

Here’s what AP didn’t report.

Between 2021 and 2022, overall crimes were up 27.6 percent. Felony assaults were up 13.2 percent, and rapes, robberies and transit crimes dramatically increased.

In his first year as Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg—who took over January 1, 2022—downgraded 52 percent of felonies to misdemeanors (compared to 39 percent downgraded in 2019). So of course felony statistics declined. But felony victims increased. Just as bad, Bragg sports a lousy 51 percent conviction rate for felonies he did charge.

The crime rate exploded in the early 1990s under Mayor David Dinkins. Why? Because, unlike his predecessor, Ed Koch, Dinkins was incompetent. As soon as Dinkins left office—he was succeeded by Rudy Giuliani—crime decreased dramatically. Giuliani did more to clean up New York City and restore civility than any mayor before him, or after him. He served from 1994 to 2001.

As I point out in my new book, War on Virtue, Giuliani is the reason why the crime rate fell by more than 40 percent in the 1990s. It was due to more aggressive, yet fair-minded, police practices. Bill Bratton, who was the police commissioner for a period during that time, later co-wrote an article explaining what happened and accurately reported that “the decline in homicides and other violent crimes between 1990 and 2000 constitutes one of the great achievements in the history of urban America.”

AP left all of this out.

Progress against crime continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. “Stop and frisk” tactics, allowing the police to act when they have reasonable suspicion, not only saved lives, but in 2012, the number of civilian complaints was the lowest it had been in the previous five years. All of these accomplishments were undone by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Marxist millionaire who undermined the police while failing to deal seriously with violent crime.

I work across the street from Penn Station. In his last few years in office,  de Blasio allowed riots to take place with impunity, destroying one business after another. The area is a disaster. The storefronts are still boarded up and the crime element is as bad as ever.

It must also be said that when the police are told to “stand down,” as they have for the past several years, crime statistics will not appear as high as they really should. In other words, we are dealing with a mirage. Couple this with the continued demonization of the police and what we have is lawlessness that is out of control.

When Giuliani and Bloomberg were mayor, those who live within 50 miles of the city would not hesitate to come into New York for shopping, plays, concerts, sports and restaurants. Now relatively few do. The decline in revenue that the city was banking on is going to become its next big problem. It’s going bust.

New York City has become a drug-infested, crime-ridden, filthy city, and no amount of media spin about it being safe can change that reality.

Contact Julie Pace, executive editor, AP: jpace@ap.org

War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class Is Killing the American Dream, published today by Sophia Institute Press, is about the making of the American dream and attempts to thwart it by the ruling class. The book addresses why virtue matters and the attacks on it, as well as chapters on racism, the family, the poor, education and crime.

Having studied why some people are a success, as measured by educational and economic achievement, I came to the conclusion that cultural factors are the key to understanding success. Virtue matters.

People do not do well in school or in the workplace because they are lucky, or even smart. They come out on top because they possess the three most important virtues that make for success: self-discipline, personal responsibility and perseverance. I call them the “vital virtues.”

There are four demographic groups that embody the vital virtues, par excellence: Asians, Jews, Mormons and Nigerians. 

These groups succeed in school and in the workplace because they exercise self-discipline, personal responsibility and perseverance. The source of the vital virtues is the same in every case: they all come from intact two-parent families. Those who come from one-parent families can succeed, but their chances are slim compared to those who come from homes where there is a father and a mother. 

The social science evidence on this is overwhelming. Why, then, does the ruling class—the elites who run our institutions—not do more to nurture the vital virtues? Worse, why are they increasingly doing everything they can to undermine them?

No group has suffered more at the hands of the ruling class than African Americans. It is not white supremacists whom they need to fear—it is the mostly white, well-educated elites who claim to be on their side. They are the real menace. They are the ones who promote policies that subvert the inculcation of the vital virtues.

Well-educated white people who claim to be on the side of blacks—but are in fact their real-life enemy—are not new.

George Fitzhugh was America’s first sociologist. He is the author of the 1854 book Sociology of the South. Like many of those on the Left today, he railed against what he perceived to be the exploitative nature of capitalism. He was also a strong proponent of slavery.

Why would a “progressive” support slavery? He said blacks were not capable of competing with white people in a capitalist economy, and it was therefore preferable for them to remain as slaves.

In his work “The Universal Law of Slavery,” written in 1850, Fitzhugh explained his view that “the Negro is but a grown up child and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian.” He noted that slavery had a positive effect. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.” Everything was taken care of for them.

Fitzhugh said something that the white “allies” of blacks would never say today, though their thinking and their behavior toward them suggests a similar outlook.

“The negro is improvident [and] would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has a right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate.”

Fitzhugh was not an anomaly. During the Progressive Era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Richard T. Ely was one of the most prominent leaders in the social-justice crusade. What he said was similar to what Fitzhugh said. “Negroes, are for the most part grownup children, and should be treated as such.”

Fast forward to 1988. That is when the astute social scientist, Charles Murray, wrote a classic essay wherein he predicted the “coming of the custodial democracy.” His prediction has come true. He said “what is now a more or less hidden liberal condescension toward blacks in general, and toward the black underclass in particular, will have worked its way into a new consensus.”

Murray maintained that liberal intellectuals and policy makers would come to terms with their view that “inner-city blacks are really quite different from you and me, and the rules that apply to us cannot be applied to them.” Therefore the best that can be done is to generously supply them with “medical care, food, housing, and other social services—much as we do for American Indians who live on reservations.” This is the face of custodial democracy, treating inner-city blacks as “wards of the state.”

If the members of the ruling class truly believed that black people were just as capable of exercising personal responsibility, self-discipline and perseverance as white people, they would never give up on them. They have, which is why they are America’s most notorious racists.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the movement to buy off black America:

On April 18, Sophia Institute Press will publish my new book, War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class is Killing the American Dream. One of the subtexts to the volume is the way the ruling class treats black America. Two factors are operative: its members are riddled with white guilt and they have fundamentally given up on blacks. This explains their dedication to buying them off. Here are some recent examples.

White elites are literally buying off black Americans with lots of cash; they are simultaneously purging themselves of deep-seated guilt. Instead of working with blacks, helping to secure intact families and good schools, they are writing checks, hoping this will keep them afloat. That’s because, deep down, they are the ultimate racists: they believe blacks can’t empower themselves like every other racial and ethnic group.

California was never a slave state, but the white elite lawmakers in San Francisco, feeling the pangs of guilt, recently voted unanimously to support a plan which grants $5 million in reparations to every black person who is at least 18 years old and who has “identified” as black for the past decade. That would presumably include LeBron James. It might also induce some white boys to “identify” as black and see if they can play the identity game, too.

If this proposal were to become law, black adults would walk away with at least $97,000 for 250 years, and each family would be able to buy homes in San Francisco for a buck a piece. Another proposal being debated would offer up to $360,000 in reparations per person, provided there is evidence that the applicant is a descendant of black slaves. But what happens to those who learn that their ancestors were not slaves, but black slaveowners? Do they have to cough up some cash like whitey?

Black Lives Matter also rips off black people in the name of helping them. Totally corrupt, the Marxists outdid the most ambitious capitalists by taking advantage of corporate white guilt during the urban riots they helped to promote in 2020. No one seems to know where all the loot went, but no one denies it was a smashing profit-making venture.

A database from the Claremont Institute recently found that Black Lives Matter received $83 billion from corporate America. That’s more than the GDP of 46 African countries.

Who wrote the checks? Silicon Valley Bank—yes, that one—Allstate, American Express, Apple, AT&T, Nike, United Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, Delta Airlines, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, BlackRock, Capital One Financial, Morgan Stanley, US Bank, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and The Walt Disney Company.

From colonial times to the mid-twentieth century, African Americans suffered through the worst of slavery, racism and discrimination, and yet the black family held its own. That changed in the 1960s, at a time of low unemployment for blacks, as well as everyone else.

For reasons having nothing to do with economic need, the white ruling class instituted an array of welfare programs, and other top-down initiatives, mostly aimed at blacks, people whom they concluded could not cut it on their own. It’s been a disaster ever since.

Black Americans need safe streets, school choice and charter schools. Who’s stopping them from achieving these ends? The very same people anxious to write the checks. It doesn’t get more perverse than this.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a new law in Maryland:

Maryland is historically famous for being home to religious toleration, a commitment born of delivering justice to Roman Catholics in the 17th century. Today it has become their enemy.

In one of the grossest injustices in the modern era, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed into law a bill that created two tiers of justice in cases involving the sexual abuse of minors: one for public entities and one for private entities. This kind of disparate treatment is not likely to pass muster in the courts. We are already in conversation with counsel on this issue.

This is all about money, not justice. How can anyone fairly adjudicate claims made about an alleged offense when the offender is dead and buried? He can, of course, because the claimant is not going after an individual—he is going after an institution.

If this were about getting guilty individuals, then trial lawyers would sue live-in boyfriends; they are the most likely to abuse a minor. But there is nothing but chump change there, so why not stick it to the Catholic Church?

The real topper is this: those who sue private institutions—and we all know which private institution will be targeted—can get awarded as much as $1.5 million, but if the exact same offense were incurred in the public sector, such as in a public school, the maximum amount that can be awarded is $890,000. This amounts to religious profiling, and that is why the courts will have a field day with this issue.

This law was inspired by an attack on the Catholic Church: No other institution, religious or secular, was investigated.

On April 5, Maryland issued the “Attorney General’s Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.” The stated goal was “to make public for the first time the enormous scope and scale of abuse and concealment perpetrated by the Archdiocese of Baltimore.” Unlike most journalists who have commented on this report, we actually read it.

The 463-page report does not provide the kind of clear-eyed accounting that would be expected. Rather, it buries critical information in “Abuser Narratives” that provide varying degrees of detail on the alleged offenses by the accused.

That did not stop us from doing a deep dive into the report, matching it up with data culled from the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Here is what we found.

Who were the alleged offenders?

The report lists 156 individuals accused of molestation dating back to the 1930s. Of that number, the Archdiocese of Baltimore had already published the names of 152 of these individuals. Two were nuns, four were male teachers, five were deacons, one was briefly in the seminary in Maryland before being kicked out, and 144 were priests.

Of the 156 named in the report, 104—two thirds—are dead. Another third, 51, are alive, but to our knowledge none are still in ministry; it is unknown if one is dead or alive.

Who were the victims?

Approximately two-thirds were male; approximately a quarter were female; the rest were both male and female.

When did the abuse occur?

Most of it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s, there were zero instances of alleged abuse. Between the mid-1940s and the end of the 1950s, there were an average of 20 allegations for each of the three five-year periods.

In the first half of the 1960s, the numbers increased to under 60; they then shot up dramatically to approximately 100 in the late 1960s. In the first half of the 1970s, there were approximately 100 alleged incidents; there were almost 120 in the second half of the decade.

In the 1980s, the number of accusations declined (there were approximately 120 incidents in the decade). In the first half of the 1990s, there were approximately 20 alleged incidents.

Between 1990 and 2019, there were virtually no instances of alleged abuse.

This profile is consistent with my own research. In my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes, I found that almost all the molesters were homosexuals who preyed on postpubescent boys; they were either dead or thrown out of ministry. Almost all of the abuse took place during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

We are calling on Maryland’s Attorney General and state lawmakers to launch an investigation into the sexual abuse of minors in the public schools. When USA Today did a study of every state, awarding a letter grade based on the degree of diligence exercised in dealing with this problem, it gave Maryland an “F.”

Maryland failed in providing adequate background checks; failed in offering transparency; failed in having strong mandatory reporting of teacher misconduct; and failed in sharing misconduct information with other states.

The gig is up. We are contacting the Maryland Attorney General and all members of the legislature, asking them to launch a probe of the public schools.

Contact Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown: civilrights@oag.state.md.us

Catholic League president Bill Donohue explains why he wrote to the Director of the FBI:

Today I asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to make public those documents that are related to the FBI’s outreach program to “mainline Catholic parishes” and “local diocesan leadership.” They were targeted because of alleged “radicalization” within the Catholic Church. (A copy of my letter was sent to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.)

“This is taking the FBI into new, and disturbing territory,” I said.

We know from previous disclosures that the FBI was probing “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” (RTCs). Such Catholics may not be the typical “in-the-pew” Catholics, but to this day we have not seen any evidence that they are a threat to anyone. Now the FBI has upped the ante, going after “mainline” Catholics and dioceses.

On February 9, I made public my concerns about the FBI’s interest in RTCs. “What’s next?” Will it be a war on “Catholics who are orthodox?” It appears my worst fears have been realized.

The First Amendment provides for a healthy measure of autonomy between church and state, so when the state encroaches on religious bodies, it had better have unambiguous and very serious reasons for doing so. “I would like to know what they are in this instance,” I asked the FBI Director.

We have seen too many instances lately where the government is trespassing on the affairs of religion; it is not the other way around. Church and state separation cuts both ways. But under the Biden administration, this fundamental constitutional principle is being summarily ignored. This includes the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Catholics have a right to know what the FBI is up to. The evidence is clear: Violence against Catholic churches and crisis pregnancy centers are largely going unattended to, yet probes of innocent Catholics are being conducted. This raises important questions that go to the heart of the FBI’s legitimacy.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on attempts to bail out George Soros:

George Soros has been one of the most prominent philanthropists serving the radical left-wing agenda for decades. Everyone knows it, yet there is a coordinated effort of late to bail him out, saying his critics are “anti-Semites,” looking for a “boogeyman.” His allies are particularly miffed about reports that Soros is funding criminal-friendly district attorneys across the nation.

Here’s a recent sampling of efforts to brand Soros’ critics as anti-Semitic. In the last 19 days, the following news stories were written with that objective in mind.

• “Soros…has been a frequent boogeyman for Republicans. In recent years, they have often used the phrase ‘Soros-backed’ to attack Democratic candidates. Some have said this line of attack is an antisemitic dog whistle….” Josh Israel, americanindependent, March 22
• “This is how anti-semitism takes root and spreads.” Teacher’s union chief Randi Weingarten (quoted in above story).
• “Democrats and outside experts have often described the attacks on Soros, who is Jewish, and the groups that received donations from the billionaire, as antisemitic.” cnbc, March 22.
• “Scapegoating Soros, who is Hungarian and Jewish, also perpetuates deep-rooted false ideas about Jewish people and immigrants to underscore the conspiracy theory that he is a shadowy villain orchestrating world events.” AP International, March 22.
• “Mr. Soros…has been for years a boogeyman on the right, confronting attacks that portray him as a ‘globalist’ mastermind and that often veer into antisemitic tropes.” New York Times, March 24.
• “It’s a screaming antisemitic dog whistle.” Rabbi Doug Alpert. Kansas City Star, March 31.
• “[Trump] is using anti-Jewish stereotypes and historical hatred to raise money.” USA Today Online, April 1.
• “Moreover, the repeated mention of Soros plays into antisemitic conspiracy theories….” Washington Post, April 1.
• “[Rashad] Robinson also called the Soros attacks antisemitic….” Mediaite, April 1.
• “There is a centuries old antisemitic trope Erin about the sinister Jewish puppet master…and attacks on Soros are often either explicitly antisemitic attacks or dog whistle attacks, involving that trope.” Daniel Dale, CNN reporter (quoted in above story).
• “The increasing mainstream flirtation with antisemitic stereotypes and rhetoric has made the subject of attacks on Soros harder and harder to deny.” vox.com. April 3.
• “This has nothing to do with Soros…it has everything to do with a very old, antisemitic view that even though Jews are small in number, they really control everything.” Brandeis professor Jonathan Sarna. Washington Post, April 3.
• “He’s Jewish, which brings with it all sorts of connotations if one wants to play on anti-Semitism.” Emily Tamkin. NPR, April 6.
• “Billionaire philanthropist George Soros has long been a bogeyman for the far right….The attacks, observers say, also smack of anti-Semitism.” Anuj Chopra. AFP, April 9

Not one of these persons who made the charge that Soros’ critics are driven by anti-Semitism quoted even one person to make their case!

As a critic of Soros, I have no problem being specific about my position, and it wouldn’t matter a hoot to me if his name was George O’Malley.

The following is taken from my new book, War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class is Killing the American Dream (the official launch date is April 18, though it is available now on Amazon).

“Many corrupt district attorneys—those who refuse to prosecute dangerous criminals—got their job with the help of Soros. He gave Alvin Bragg $1 million when he was running for DA in Manhattan in 2021; he gave George Gascón nearly $3 million when he ran for DA of Los Angeles in 2020. In 2022, it was reported that he gave $440 million to elect seventy-five ‘social justice’ prosecutors. The one thing he didn’t deliver was justice, especially for crime victims.

“Between 2016 and 2022, Soros gave more than $29 million to a personal network of political action committees specifically established to back radical DA candidates. By mid-2022, one in five Americans, or seventy million people, were living in a jurisdiction overseen by a Soros-backed prosecutor. Soros DAs were running New York, Chicago, Saint Louis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles as well as many smaller cities and towns. Soros also received help from his prized client, Black Lives Matter, to lead the charge to defund the police and abolish prisons.”

No doubt there are anti-Semites who have attacked Soros, but it is scurrilous to tar all his critics as bigots. Soros is guilty as charged.

One final note. Soros knows a personal thing or two about anti-Semitism. As a young man he became a Nazi collaborator. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he admitted that he helped confiscate property from Jews. He told Steve Kroft that he never regretted doing so. When asked if this was difficult, Soros said, “Not, not at all. Not at all.” Stunned, Kroft said, “No feeling of guilt?” “No” came the reply.