Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you
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subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your
smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April twenty
first today at the age of eighty eight, at his
residence in the Vaticans Casa Santa Marta. And I read
a piece over at RedState dot com by Bill Cruse.
He writes, under the nom diphum of strife, is it Bill?
Is it? Is it pronounced strife or is it like stream? Okay, good,
because otherwise I've been saying it wrong for like ten years.
And well, welcome to the show, and my apologies. I
figured I would have had you on at some point,
but I am glad that our mute friend Stacy said hey,
you should have this guy on, and I'm like, yeah,
I really should, because I thought I really did, but
I hadn't. So welcome to the show, sir. I appreciate it,
and I've read your work for LAWI.
Speaker 2: It's great to be here, Pete. And you have some
of the best bumper music out there. I think nice.
Speaker 1: I always love the I always love the Well that's
really the producers that do that. But but I'll take
the compliment too. Why not? All right, so let's talk
a little bit about Pope Francis. He was born Jorge
Mario Burgoglia Burgoglio Burgoglio. Anyway, I think is how he
pronounces that. But so what was so unique about him?
Tell us sort of like his his bio and his rise.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, he's like I mean, obviously he's real
claim to famous. He is the pope, first pope from
the Americas, and probably I think he's the first pope
from like outside of Italy in several hundred years. So
that way, he's a standout. I don't know a lot.
I mean what I think his tenure as Archbishop of
Buenos Aires is is a big cloudy. There's a lot
we don't know about everything that happened there. So, but anyway,
he was sort of picked to be the I think
the answer to two fairly doctored air popes, John Paul
the second, and then in the sixteenth and obviously he
came in trying to add an openness, and I think
he always referred to it as he wanted to be
more of a more He wanted a more pastoral church,
one that was more open to all kinds of people.
Speaker 1: And he was the first Jesuit, right, which is.
Speaker 2: An order first first Jesuit, and I think it's probably
safe to say maybe the last one. Right.
Speaker 1: Well, it's funny you said, because when he was named,
I know a lot of Catholics who were kind of
worried about putting a Jesuit into the papacy. Why is it?
Speaker 2: I mean, well, what again, this is you're dealing with
the anequal one. This is Bill Cruise's perspective on that.
I think that where in the sixteen, seventeenth, eighteenth century
a Jesuit going into TV pope would have been very
controversial for a different reason that they are much too worldly.
It's more interested in politics, you know, that type of thing.
I think that the real fear that I think it
played out it was justified, was that the the Jesuits,
since the nineteen sixties had been heavily associated with leftist activities.
Political activities, they've been heavily associated with liberation theology. Most
of the brushfire wars going on in Central America in
the eighties, you know where there's El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua,
all had a non trivial number of Jesuits involved on
the side of the communist guerrillas. And also the Jesuits
sort of became, I mean, a lot of their more
prominent voices in the media really were pushing things contrary
to the Catholic Catechism in terms of normalizing homosexuality, accepting
homosexual marriages. They bought it heavily to the transgenderism. And
so there's a whole lot of baggage coming in with
Francis as a Jesuit that you may have resulted in
him not quite getting a fair shake. And maybe uh,
the worst inferences were drawn from some things he did
because it was all looked at through the lens that
we're dealing with a Jesuit.
Speaker 1: Right when, right when, you've got that kind of baggage
just because he is of that order, he comes in
with certain expectations that people are ard yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, and and another pope could probably may have been
able to do some of the similar things without the uh,
without the internal drama. But the fact is that because
he was a Jesuit, a lot of his actions were
colored by by that fact.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then of course he did stuff which would
also and then he did stuff that would then lead
people to like, oh see, my fears were confirmed. You
mentioned in your piece about environmental policy the role of
women in the church that the people had thought had
been settled before there was all of the immigration stuff
and that debate death penalty stuff. You also mentioned. I
have not heard anything about this. The Vatican's finances. You
say he never brought the vaticanst finances under control. What
does that mean?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the Vatican Bank has been sort of
a festering sump of corruption for quite a while. I mean,
this is the bank that managed to lose one hundreds
of millions of dollars on investing in prime real estate
in London. I don't really know how you managed to
do that. I mean, I think me and my wife
could have pulled it off and made some money on it.
But it just goes back to a lot of things
you could go back to I try to remember that
the person who was allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself
under Blackfriars Bridge in London was associated with the Vatican Bank.
But this has been going on for a while. And
one of the things that happened was that he bought
in a very very good man, Cardinal Pell, from Australia.
And suddenly when Pell, once again, this is my perspective,
this is not helped by court records or anything, when
Pell apparently was getting close to closing down some of
the corruptions, suddenly allegations surfaced with Pell that got him
brought back to Australia actually, you know, sentenced to prison
for sexual abuse until he was name was finally cleared,
if indeed your name could ever be cleared after that.
Then there was some interesting stories of money flowing out
the Vatican to organizations in Australia that were pushing the
narrative that Tell had sexually abused members of a choir.
I think it was something like thirty years ago, forty
years ago, and so you have all all this stuff
going on, and it's there was also a lot of
suspicion that one of the reasons that Benedict sixteenth resigned
was he worked at what was going on there and
realized that at his age he simply did not have
the energy to deal with that. I think. I think
that he wanted to be the pope and didn't want
to be the you know, the administrator of what was
going on. And then of course you have the whole
scandal with the again another Jesuit, the artist Marco Rupnik,
who is associated with some hit just horrendous cases of
sexual use of religious women, and he was dismissed from
his order. He was layisized, which means Joe made non clergy.
That order was somehow reversed, and so he's back in
a clerical state somewhere, I want to say, he's in Austria,
I think. But his artwork is still still used by
the Vatican for various holiday events, and it's still featured
in a lot of major churches, and so they've never
really come to grips on what we are going to
do about this man and his work. So I think
that on the on his promise of transparency and accountability,
he felt really really short, and I think that it
was study a classic case of the in crowd protecting
the in crowd, and he either acquiesced to it or
was leading the charge, depending on how you talked.
Speaker 1: To Yeah, you cover a lot in this piece. It's
at RedState dot com. It's called breaking Pope Francis dead
at eighty eight fair to say it was at his
legacy is a mixed bag at this point.
Speaker 2: I think, so we'll see what the next guy does.
As I at my last count this morning, it was
of the one hundred and thirty five cardinals who can vote,
because those are the ones under eighty. He has appointed
one hundred and nine. So a lot of people are
expecting a Francis the second you appear. But there's also
at a large number of people who watched the church
who say that, you know, his heavy handedness, his overbearing way,
the way he micro manage things really rubbed even people
he appointed the wrong way. And so look for a
pope who's going to be a lot more hands off
and a lot more of a traditional pope next time around,
rather than someone who is trying to turn bishops into
lower level middle managers and run the entire Catholic Church
from his office, which I think is a fair description
of how Francis ran the church.
Speaker 1: I would just like to announce I'm taking my name
out of the running for.
Speaker 2: Pope me too.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah it does. Hey Bill, I appreciate your time today,
great work at Red State, and we'll have you back
on soon. Thank you, sir. All right, So spring is
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off four eighty five. Mail orders are accepted to get
all the details at createavideo dot com. Statement from the Vatican,
Dearest brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow, I must announce
the death of our Holy Father Francis. At seven thirty
five this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis returned to
the House of the Father. His entire life was dedicated
to the service of the Lord and of his church.
He taught us to live the values of the Gospel
with fidelity, courage, and universal love, especially in favor of
the poorest and most marginalized. With immense gratitude for his example,
as a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, we commend
the soul of Pope Francis to the infinite merciful love
of the One and Triune God. The Pope was admitted
to the hospital on Friday, February fourteenth, twenty twenty five,
when he had a bout of bronchitis. For several days,
his situation gradually worsened. His doctors diagnosed him with bilateral
pneumonia on Tuesday, February eighteenth. He spent thirty eight days
in the hospital. He then returned to his Vatican residence
to continue his recovery. In nineteen fifty seven, in his
early twenties, Jorge Mario Burgoglio underwent surgery in his native
Argentina to remove a portion of his lung that had
been affected by a severe respiratory infection, and as he aged,
Pope Francis frequently suffered bouts of respiratory illnesses, even canceling
a planned trip to the United Arab It's in November
of twenty twenty three due to influenza and lung inflammation.
That again is part of the statement from Vatican News
dot VA. In a statement from the Catholic Church, Bill,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Hello Bill, Hello Pete. First time call on your program,
A long time listener.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, sir. Welcome.
Speaker 3: A couple of small corrections, and I am if I'm wrong,
I'm I'm prepared to be counter corrections. I just should
call it one. On the last caller, he said, no
one out of Rome has been a pope in two
hundred years. I thought we had a Polish pope. A
couple of popes Ago.
Speaker 1: That would be John Paul the second in Poland, I
believe does count as Europe. But I think he said Italy. Yeah,
he said Italy, but he met but he wrote right,
he said Italy. But that was Bill Wells. He is
a writer at RedState dot com. He did say in
our conversation he said Italy, but he wrote in the
piece outside Europe and the last ones from the last
one from outside Europe, Gregory the third in the eighth century.
Speaker 3: Wow, okay. And also Trump, And I'm not a Trump critic,
I voted for him twice. But he did say he
will have all flags fly at half masts. Well, that's
totally outdated. He should have said half staff because as
an army officer about sixty years ago, I learned that
a staff is what the flag flies on. A mast
is what a flag flies on only on the ship
or on a naval base or right. I think those two.
And I think that Country Day School here in Charlotte.
I've talked to a couple of people who taught there
and so forth that there's there's is not a mass
it is or it is a mass not a staff,
And you can tell by the I don't know what
those uh, those outrigger ropes that go uh to the
crosspiece and down, they will distinguish a mast from a staff.
Speaker 1: All right, I will if I ever get a chance
to talk with Donald Trump, I will, I will pass
the correction onto him. But you are correct. Staff is
not masked and mask does not staff.
Speaker 3: Say say hi to him. For by the way, my
holy Father, my only holy Father, is God only. But
I do respect my Catholic friends.
Speaker 1: All right, Bill, I appreciate your call, sir, Thank you, yes, sir, right,
take care. I made that mistake one time in a
newscast like twenty years ago. I said flags flying at
half staff, and or sorry, I said flag flying at
half masked. And all the emails that I got, so
that's when I learned that masked is not staff and
staff is not mass. They are different things. So when
Trump said half masked, he was wrong. He was wrong.
It's half staff. That's what people told me. I swear.
That's like I got some of the worst emails after that.
I made that mistake. All right. If you're listening to
this show, you know I try to keep up with
all sorts of current events, and I know you do too,
And you've probably heard me say get your news from
multiple sources. Why well, because it's how you detect media bias,
which is why I've been so impressed with ground News.
It's an app and it's a website and it combines
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. All right, So did you hear what happened
over the weekend? Late Friday night Saturday morning, got an
order from the US Supreme Court, came downs very odd,
very odd. I didn't know they worked that late. What
no cocktail tarca to it? I get I kid. William Jacobson,
writing at Legal insurrection dot Com, says the judiciary appears
to be cracking under the weight of Democrat lawfare. He
talks about how the emergency stay issued just after midnight
Saturday morning, April nineteenth by the US Supreme Court over
the descent of Justices Alito and Thomas. The stay halted
all deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court conduct,
he says, was bizarre by any standard, reacting to a
filing that was made on Friday night, before a holiday
weekend without giving the government any chance to respond. This
is highly unusual. The conduct of numerous district court judges
has been emotional and reactive, but you don't expect that
from the US Supreme Court. Yet it happened. Alito wrote
the dissent opinion. He was joined by Clarence Thomas. Here's
what Alito wrote, shortly after midnight yesterday, the Court hastily
and prematurely granted unprecedented emergency relief. The Court ordered the government.
He puts that in quotes not to remove a putative
class of detainees. Key, here is a class, right, a
group of people, like when you hear a class action lawsuit,
like a class of people that share you know, a
particular similar you know, either harm or claim or something
that they'ressuing that makes them all united, Like we were
all harmed by this company, So we are a class
in the lawsuit. So this is the class of detainees.
Although the order does not define this class, it appears
that the court means all members of the class that
the petitioners have sought the ACLU has sought to have certified, namely, quote,
all non citizens in custody in the Northern District of
Texas who were, are, or will be subject to the
March twenty twenty five Presidential proclamation called Invocation of the
Alien Enemies Act regarding the invasion of the United States
by Trendy at Ragua and or its implementation. Okay, so
they didn't they have not defined this unless you're just
going to go with what the ACLU has defined them,
and that was their description their definition. He says, though,
that the court did this even though it's not clear
that the court has jurisdiction. It is questionable whether the
applicants complied with the general obligation to seek emergency injunctive relief. So,
in other words, we're going to seek an emergency injunction
at a lower court in the district court before asking
for relief from an appellate court. Right, you start at
the lowest court and you work your way up. And
they didn't do that in this case. The ACLU did
not do that. When the applicants the ACLU requested such
relief in the district Court, they insisted on a ruling
within forty five minutes on a good Friday afternoon, and
when the district Court did not act within one hundred
and thirty three minutes, they filed a notice of appeal.
He says, that's you're basically depriving the district Court of
its jurisdiction. The only papers before this court were those
submitted by the applicants. The court had not ordered or
received a response by the government regarding either the applicants'
factual allegations or any of the legal issues presented by
their application. There's no there's no response from the government
because they fast like fast tracked this thing in a
way that we have not seen them do. He said.
The Alito writes that the papers before us, while alleging
that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, they
provided little concrete support for that allegation. Although the court
provided class wide relief, the District Court never certified a class,
which is what you're supposed to do in these types
of proceedings. You have to certify the class. You have
to say this is actually a class, and they didn't
do that. He says, in some literally in the middle
of the night, the court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief,
without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without
hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving
the application, with dubie factual support for its order, and
without providing any explanation for its order. I refuse to
join the Court's order because we had no good reason
to think that under the circumstances, issuing an order at
midnight was necessary or appropriate. He then says, both the
executive and the judiciary have an obligation to follow the law.
The executive must proceed under the terms of our order,
and this court should follow established procedures. He's calling out
the seven other members of the Supreme Court. No one
is above the law, and he's saying that includes US guys.
William Jacobson says, if the Supreme Court is reacting emotionally
early in the middle of the night, while ignoring all norms,
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that'll last a lifetime. All right, back to the Supreme
Court emergency stay that was issued Saturday morning, early Saturday morning,
like just after midnight, and the gentleman that we interviewed
at the beginning of the hour, Bill Wells, the writer
at RedState dot com named Strife str ei Ff. He
wrote about this also he says it's not clear this
is according to Alito's descent. Alito lays out the problems
that it's not clear if the court has any jurisdiction
on this case, and that the ACLU probably did not
even have the authority to appeal to the Fifth Circuit
Court of Appeals in the first place, much less to
the US Supreme Court. Okay, the Fifth Circuit was still
consent cohering the case when the Supreme Court intervened, even
though the Supreme Court knew that the Fifth Circuit would
be issuing a ruling momentarily. So why did the US
Supreme Court bigfoot the Fifth Circuit? The government was not
given a chance to respond to the appeal, and the
evidence in the appeal does not support emergency action. And
then Alito reminds the Court of a prior ruling in
South Bay United Pentecostal Church versus Newsome Gavin Newsome, that
is okay. There was a request an emergency appeal from
California Governor Gavin Newsom's order closing churches during the pandemic.
The church wanted an injunction, and they wanted an emergency appeal,
And the US Supreme Court said an injunction pending appeal
can only be granted when quote, the legal rights at
issue are indisputably clear, and even then sparingly, and only
in the most critical and exigent circumstances. So Alito is
throwing Robert's words right back in his face. This is
what you guys used as your rationale for not taking
up that emergency appeal. But this one goes. This one's allowed.
It violates our rules. The lower court is already hearing it,
even though they probably shouldn't even be hearing it either,
let alone us. And then you just bigfoot them and
take it and give the emergency appeal without giving one
of the parties in the case an opportunity to reply,
to respond to the appeal. I got to tell you
the way it looks, there's a word for the way
this looks. It looks like corruption. That's what it looks like,
because I haven't seen any of the legal rationale for it.
But that's it is not good. Apparently American citizens being
prevented from gathering to worship was not a problem. But
you get a bunch of illegal alien gang bangers facing deportation,
which they've been ordered deported, and that's that's worthy of
us breaking all of our our norms over right. In
a related story, an American citizen was held in a
Florida jail at the request of the US Immigration and
Customs Enforcement So this is an American citizen held in
a Florida jail at the request of ICE, despite the
county judge being able to see a US birth certificate
in court. This is from the Hill dot Com. The
guy's name is Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez. Not kidding. He
was born in the United States, and he was detained
last week in Florida by the state's Highway Patrol and
was charged with illegally entering Florida as an unauthorized alien
under a state law. This is not federal. This is
a state law that has been temporarily blocked now by
a judge. Leon County Judge Lashawn Riggins said that despite
the charge against Lopez Gomez being dropped, she did not
have the authority to release the twenty year old because
Ice asked the Leon County jail to hold him, which
is true. She would not have that authority to release
him if there's been an ICE detainer put on him
and the state of Florida says you have to cooperate
with Ice. The judge looks at Lopez Gomez's birth certificate,
which had been waived earlier in court by a supporter.
I think that's I think they spelled waved incorrectly. I
think they literally mean waved it around, like held it up.
And the judge said, in looking at it and feeling
it and holding it up to the light. The court
can clearly see the watermark to show that this is
indeed an authentic document. So I was not aware. But
the judge is apparently a document expert as well. He
knows how to detect this kind of thing on the fly.
Lopez Gomez was heading from Georgia and was pulled over
in Florida by a highway patrol trooper. So this is like,
oh my gosh, what an abuse. Holy cow, right, he's
going to get deported now, he's going to get shipped
to El Salvator. He's an American citizen. This is everything
we warned you about. Way down at the end of
the story, I feel the need to point out he
was released. So he was released, So is that evidence
that the system worked? So somebody comes in, he's charged
with being an unauthorized alien. Ice says, hey, hold on,
forty eight hour detainer, right, hold on to him. We're
going to check into it. And then apparently they discover, oh, no,
he is an American citizen. So yeah, he's free to go.
Which isn't that the way that's supposed to go? Now,
maybe it should never have gotten to that point. Maybe
they should have been better in communicating.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Again, I'm not one who believes that Govcode gets all
of this stuff right, but I do bristle at the
idea that people who break every single rule and procedure
to enter now and I'm not saying this guy did,
but in the larger context of the you know, first
they came for the illegal aliens and we didn't give them.
You know, trials like these are they're they're these are
different proceedings. Somebody enters the country illegally, they go through
deportation proceedings. These are not criminal charges, right, these are
it's administrative and you can't prove you're in the country legally.
Then you get sent home and that's it. And particularly
with the guy down in Os Salvador, the Marilyn Man. Oh,
by the way, we went over last week, the tattoos
on his fingers, you know, and MS thirteen h represented
there in the in the the icons, in the graphics.
His wife posted some pictures onto social media showing like
he's just a loving dad look at you know, and
have all these pictures, and she blacked out his finger tattoos.
Why would you do that? She scribbles them out like
with the like the digital marker or whatever, you know,
where you can like edit a photo and scribble out
stuff to like black it out. And that's what she did.
She blacked out because he's got his hands around her,
hugging her, and you can see the tats on his knuckles,
and so she she scribbled them out, which I'm sure
indicates nothing at all. Nothing all right, that'll do it
for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I
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thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.