There was a time, not long ago, when Republicans and Democrats had more in common with each other than they had with third-parties, either on the right or the left. No more. This chart shows how far Democrats have moved left, making them almost indistinguishable from hard-core left-wing parties.
This is a shortened version of an article that appears in the July/August edition of Catalyst, our journal that is available to members.
Every now and then along comes a book on the Catholic Church that causes quite a stir. This is certainly true of Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Written by former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, it has been hailed by most left-wing critics of the Church as must-read.
The book is strewn with inaccuracies, some of which are minor (he gets Vatican departments confused), others of which are very serious (e.g., his rendering of historical events).
“The Vatican had always portrayed the so-called doctrine of priestly celibacy as eternal and irreversible, but it was neither. It is not demanded in the Gospels, nor was it as a way of life followed by the twelve apostles.” The second sentence is accurate but the first is not.
Leaving aside the snide reference to “the so-called” doctrine, priestly celibacy is not a doctrine of the Catholic Church. It is a discipline, one that was not invoked in the early Church and can be reversed today. Not to know the difference between a doctrine and a discipline would be astounding for a college student studying theology, never mind an author who professes to be an expert.
Shenon’s grasp of Church history is appalling. He speaks about “the imprisonment of Galileo in the seventeenth century because he rejected the church’s view that the sun rotated around the earth.” The fact is Galileo was never imprisoned. He spent his time under “house arrest” in an apartment in a Vatican palace, with a servant. More important, his work was initially praised by the Catholic Church: Pope Urban VIII bestowed on him many gifts and medals.
Galileo did not get into trouble because of his ideas; after all, his ideas were taken from Copernicus, a priest who was never punished (on the contrary, Copernicus’s theory found a receptive audience with Pope Clement VII). What got him into trouble was presenting his unverified claims as fact—that was the heresy.
Shenon writes that during the Inquisition, “people accused of heresy were regularly burned at the stake” on Vatican orders. Wrong again. It was the secular authorities—not the Church’s authorities—that burned heretics. In fact, the Church saw heretics as lost sheep who needed to be brought back into the fold.
The Church’s response to the Holocaust is also badly misrepresented by Shenon. The old canard about Pope Pius XII being “silent”—it has been thoroughly debunked—surfaces again. Not only did the New York Times commend Pius in two editorials for not being silent at that time, the Vatican archives underscore his heroics.
What Shenon says about Mother Teresa is despicable. He says that “Her private correspondence, made public after her death in 1997, showed she was tormented by uncertainty about the existence of heaven—and even of God. She felt no presence of God whatsoever in her life.”
To be sure, Mother Teresa confessed to having “dark nights,” times when she no longer felt the presence of Jesus in her life. When this story broke in 2007, I wrote to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, her advocate for sainthood, about this issue.
He agreed with my comment, made on TV to Mother Teresa critic Christopher Hitchens, that “there is a profound difference between ‘feeling’ and ‘believing.’” He added, “Though Mother Teresa did not feel Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist, her firm belief in the Real Presence cannot be questioned….” He offered many examples, taken from her letters and behavior, to buttress this point.
On the issue of sexuality, Shenon is just as delinquent. He accuses Pope Paul VI and Pope Benedict XVI of being opposed to “sexual freedom.” What Paul was railing against was the sexual exploitation of women by men—that would make him a feminist in some circles. Even more remarkable is Shenon’s bewilderment with Benedict for opposing sex-reassignment surgery. If this has to be explained, the man is clueless.
Shenon refuses to blame homosexual priests for most of the molestation, falsely claiming they were pedophiles. He even labels Father Marcial Maciel Degollado a pedophile. This is astonishing. There is no wiggle room for him on this. Maciel was a drug-addicted predator who fathered several children, raped at least sixty postpubescent boys, and had sex with at least twenty seminarians.
In the beginning of his book, Shenon correctly notes that the enemies of Pope Benedict XVI called him, “God’s Rottweiler.” In 2012, the New York Times called me “The Rottweiler’s Rottweiler.” I wear that nickname as a badge of honor. I will always defend him from those who seek to malign him.
The Catholic Church has a long history of accomplishments. It also has its dirty laundry. When assessing any institution, it is important to get the facts straight. What Philip Shenon has done is a disgrace. He seeks to discredit the Church, but his sloppy—even horrendous—scholarship renders him an unserious critic.
Calvin Klein ads that sexually exploit minors, and promote “kiddie porn,” do not bother the Left, but American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ad does. This tells us volumes about the way radicals think.
In 1980, Brooke Shields was featured in a Calvin Klein jean ad, saying, “You want to know what comes in between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” While some media outlets refused to air the spots, those who fancy themselves as open-minded were unmoved. It did not matter that Shields was only 15—the deep thinkers are champions of libertinism.
In 1995, Calvin Klein was back exploiting adolescents, featuring young boys and girls in sexually suggestive poses and various stages of undress. There was a picture of a boy in jockey-type underwear (with black fingernail polish) and a girl on a ladder with her underwear exposed. One of the girls was wearing a cross. After the Catholic League, along with Jewish leaders, raised a stink, the ads were withdrawn within ten days. Again, the Left was nonplussed.
Now we have a young good-looking star, Sydney Sweeney, pushing American Eagle jeans. She is an adult, and she is not photographed in a sexually provocative manner. Nor is she playing fast and loose with a religious symbol. But she still managed to set off a firestorm of criticism.
A video of the ad says, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.” She is shown crossing out “genes,” inserting “jeans.” She opines, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.”
She hit the Left’s hot button. Their idea of freedom allows for “kiddie porn,” but not any hint of what nature ordains. The very word “genes” was enough to ignite charges of eugenics. Moreover, her critics took note that she is a blue-eyed blond white woman, as if that is a bad thing. A female woke professor from London, Dr. Sarah Cefai, commented that the ad “obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the modern right.” She names no one.
It is the Left, not the right, that has long had an obsession with eugenics. During the Progressive Era, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Richard T. Ely was one of its most prominent leaders. “Negroes,” the left-leaning progressive said, “are for the most part grownup children, and should be treated as such.”
Not long after, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, operationalized his ideas. She believed that the best way to get rid of poverty was to get rid of the poor, especially blacks. This was the motivation behind her birth control agenda. Her friends in Marxist circles defended the white supremacist.
The Left likes to blame eugenics on conservatives, citing Hitler as their right-wing leader. But his party, known as the Nazis, was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (not exactly a right-wing name), and it had nothing to do with conservative thinking. Conservatives believe in minimal government; those on the Left, socialists and communists, believe in maximum government control.
The Left hates the word “genes” because it reminds us of the role nature plays in directing human behavior. That bothers them. Their quest for social engineering is predicated on the idea that by manipulating the environment, we can determine behavioral outcomes. Nature gets in the way of their grand totalitarian design.
American Eagle’s sales and stock are soaring, thanks to the humorless woke mob. Congratulations to Sydney Sweeney for braving the storm, and to American Eagle for doubling down.
Let American Eagle know of your support: linemedia@ae.com
Young Muslim radicals running for mayor in big cities are the talk of the town in left-wing circles, and within the Democratic Party. Left-wing activists are thrilled by the news, but Democrats are split: some hope the two extremists win, but more moderate Democrats are afraid this will turn off most Americans, making it hard to win elections in the future.
New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is ahead in the polls in the New York City mayoral race, and Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh is the one to beat in the race for mayor of Minneapolis. Both call themselves democratic socialists, and both are highly critical of the human rights record of the United States. Yet neither says a word about the human rights record of their African ancestors.
Mamdani
Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents. He refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which is understood as a call for an uprising against the supporters of Israel. He says, “That’s not language that I use.” But his supporters do, and he will not call them out for doing so. He says he believes in “universal human rights,” though his record does not show it.
In March 2025, Mamdani responded to the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and Palestinian activist who was arrested by ICE officers on March 8. He said Khalil’s arrest “is a blatant assault on the First Amendment and a sign of advancing authoritarianism under Trump.”
In 2021, Mamdani said that his answer to the homeless is to jettison the practice of “people access housing by purchasing it on the market and toward a future where we guarantee high quality housing to all as a human right.”
In a 2020 tweet marking Pride Month, Mamdani criticized the so-called human rights struggles faced by those in the LGBT community. He said that “it’s more important than ever to reckon with how our queer family – especially our Black & trans family – still don’t enjoy basic human rights, and how they suffer from police violence at epidemic proportions.”
Mamdani likes to flag his ties to Uganda, but does not want to call attention to its human rights record. Instead, he basks in luxury.
He recently jetted off to his family’s opulent compound in the tony Ugandan neighborhood of Buziga Hill for his wedding. The three-day event saw the family estate turn into a party house among the lavish homes owned by billionaires and the upper crust of society in Uganda. Homes in the neighborhood easily fetch one million dollars. For his wedding, Mamdani had special forces commandos providing security to keep the riffraff out of the invitation-only soiree.
Fateh
Fateh is the son of Somali immigrants, and the first item on his platform states, “with Donald Trump back in the Oval Office, the progress towards equity and justice that our communities have worked so hard to create is in jeopardy.”
In 2023, when the Minnesota State Senate debated legislation that would give drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, Fateh came to the defense of the illegals. He noted that the real threats to national security “look like the members [white Republicans] that sit in the front rows.”
In 2021, Fateh was part of a group of Minnesota lawmakers, led by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), calling for the Department of Justice to investigate how local law enforcement prepared for the trial of Derek Chauvin, the policeman charged with the death of George Floyd. Fateh and his colleagues accused the police of using “extreme and unnecessary force,” even going as far as deploying “‘less-lethal’ munitions and chemical weapons indiscriminately.” According to the letter, this amounts to the police failing to “uphold civil and human rights.”
Fateh likes to brag about Somalia being “his home,” yet he has nothing to say about its human rights record.
In 2020, he gave a speech in which he referred to Somalia as his home several times. “I understand that our Somali communities are all connected to each other, here in Minnesota and back home, and I ask for your support. There’s always been a link between our community here as well as back home and I’m running to bridge that gap and unite all of us and represent all of us because when we succeed here, we succeed everywhere.”
Human Rights in Uganda and Somalia
Freedom House is a well-respected organization that details the state of human rights in every nation in the world. It studies political participation, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and the like. It awards a score for “Political Rights” and “Civil Liberties,” and an overall score.
The composite score for Uganda was 34 out of 100. For Somalia, it was 8. That is why they were both deemed “Not Free.” The United States had a composite score of 84 and was deemed “Free.”
How can it be that Mamdani and Fateh are so condemnatory of human rights in the United States, which is a free country, yet keep their mouths shut about egregious human rights abuses in their ancestral homes? Maybe they should trade places with the Ugandan and the Somali people. That would be a win-win.
