Michael Voris Attempts…

…to mainstream a Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist by conducting an hour long challenge-free, wink-and-nod, chuckle-about-those-silly-critics infomercial for E. Michael Jones, who has been obsessing about the Jew Menace for years as well as giving a welcome for the egregious Robert Sungenis as an intellectual ally to do the same.

This is not too surprising since I reported on this poisonous pal-liance in January when a reader wrote:

I thought you might be interested to know that Marc Brammer, the Opus Dei supernumerary who funds RealCatholicTV, is starting a new think tank, the Institute for New Media, for which he plans to hire E. Michael Jones.

Yes, that E. Michael Jones. The one who claims St. Paul’s authority when he calls Jews “enemies of the entire human race.” Brammer’s fondness for him perhaps helps to explain why he funds videos like Voris’s SSPX-style rant claiming the Jews are a race, not a religion.

Brammer made this announcement in a radio interview in October 2011–you can hear him mention Jones at 45:55:

http://rpconradio.com/our-guest-marc-brammer-senior-director-at-moodys-analytics-new-york-ny-to-discuss-his-institute-for-new-media/

It sounds like Brammer, at the time of this interview, was already planning his exit strategy from RealCatholicTV. If you continue listening after 45:55, you will hear him explain that the Institute for New Media will not quote the Bible or the Catechism, and so–he says this explicitly–it will not need to be under the jurisdiction of abishop. At about 54 minutes in, he says that this institute will be in the form of an Internet content-delivery platform, a la RealCatholicTV.

I recommend listening to the interview in its entirety, as Brammer describes his Opus Dei membership, his friendship and financial support of Voris, and his planned new institute in great detail. Among other things, he claims to have a mandate from the Vatican to first “purify” the Church and then change the world. He also says that his new institute will explore how to reform capitalism, and he sees a connection between Islamic banking and Catholic social teaching.

About 50 minutes into the interview, Brammer goes into detail about why it is not in his interest to be in a bishop’s jurisdiction. He believes he can have more influence on people without having to work within the institutional church.

Some of us see the development of a completely unaccountable lay “ministry” that delivers itself of crackpot opinions about Jews and labors to make sure that the bishop cannot rein it in as not an altogether happy development in American Catholic life. But of course, my reader’s concern is only explicable by the one size fits all “It’s a Conspiracy by Damn Libruls to Silence the 100% Orthodox Truthtellers” template. It couldn’t possibly be that demagogic Conservative Folk Heros like Voris pose a danger to the Church’s witness.

Just to be clear, this interview was not due to Voris just happening to run across Jones and thinking he’d be a good chat. This interview is due to the fact that he was a partner with Brammer and Brammer was, at the time of shooting, business partners with Jones. [Update: With the birth of ChurchMilitant, Voris has “severed” formal ties with Brammer and Jones. You know, like he “obeyed” his bishop by getting “Catholic” out of the name of his apostolate–eventually. Now we are to pretend this puff piece doesn’t exist, according to ubiquitous Voris shill Christine Niles, who parachutes into every blog thread that dares to blaspheme the Dear Leader of the Cult].

Let us be clear about what is happening here. Michael Voris, Folk Hero to the Utterly Undiscerning, is working hard in this video to mainstream somebody

whose all-explaining theory of everything blames Jews for every problem that Christendom has had over the past 2000 years;
whose rhetoric has been condemned by both the Abp of Prague for his outreach to “political extremists, Lefebvrites, nationalists, anti-Semites, Islamists and neo-Nazis.” and by the Catholic League for “outrageously blam[ing] the Jews themselves for the Holocaust and pogroms.” ;
who has appeared on an Iranian TV show that endorses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authentic and charges Jews with harvesting Gentile organs;
who is BFF with Holocaust Denier’s like Willis Carto and moving in virulently anti-Semitic circles;
who treats as a respected thinker Robert Sungenis (Sungenis, who is published multiple times by Jones’ Culture Wars, gives Jones’ an enthusiastic thumbs up, and is himself hot on the trail of the Jew conspirators with such hard hitting stories as

Jim Stone shows Israel Behind Fukashima Disaster
The European Jewish Union Exonerating Everything Jewish
Jewish Child Molesters
Mossad Involvement in 9/11
Jewry’s push for War with Iran
Jewish Atzmon Says Merah Was a Mossad False Flag Agent
and, last but not least, E. Michael Jones: Who is the World’s Real Enemy? (Guess who?)
(For a full catalog of Sungenis’ vast corpus of crazy statements about the Jews, go here.)

That is who Voris is here attempting to mainstream.

It will be interesting to see how long fanboys of Voris’ dangerous demagoguery will go on defending this or drinking this poison because “He has some good things to say you know”. Sadly, a lot of Trads (though not all) see anti-semitism as a feature, not a bug. What worries me is how many non-Traddy conservative Catholics, who regard Voris as a Bold Truthtelling Folk Hero, will embrace this poisonous puff piece for Jones *because* it is morally repellent in a confused attempt to spit on PC pieties. This is, after all, what Voris trades in: defiantly telling “liberals” to drop dead and exulting in whatever offends liberal sensibilities. The problem is, when you start navigating by “what offends my enemy” rather than “what pleases God” you sooner or later wind up spitting on something good, merely because it is important to your enemy. The dignity of the human person–including the Jewish human person–is good. Anti-semitism is evil. It is not part of the Tradition. It is merely old sin. To recap:

Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church’s preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God’s all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.

5. We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man’s relation to God the Father and his relation to men his brothers are so linked together that Scripture says: “He who does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8).

No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.

The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. On the contrary, following in the footsteps of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, this sacred synod ardently implores the Christian faithful to “maintain good fellowship among the nations” (1 Peter 2:12), and, if possible, to live for their part in peace with all men,(14) so that they may truly be sons of the Father who is in heaven.

No thanks to Brammer’s, Voris’, Jones’ and Sungenis’ “purification” of the Church and their work of mainstreaming Jones’ kooky and dangerous ideas. I’ll take the Holy Spirit’s work instead.