(LifeSiteNews) — Celebrating the first anniversary of the glorious overturning of Roe v. Wade in June, along with this year’s important U.S. Supreme Court decisions, it seems fitting to recognize the man who was the pivotal factor for these immense pro-life and conservative victories while also recalling those politicians and pundits who have failed or betrayed pro-life voters and many thousands of preborn children over many years.
Besides working in the local trenches to protect babies, their mothers, and families from the scourge of abortion, pro-lifers prayed and worked for five decades within the nation’s political apparatus lobbying, campaigning, and voting for political candidates who, while providing a necessary smidgen of pro-life rhetoric – to secure the votes of this desperate constituency – often did little to stop the daily slaughter of preborn girls and boys.
While hundreds of thousands of pro-life faithful marched for life in Washington, D.C., year after year chanting “Roe v. Wade has got to go!” and pulling the lever for many such “pro-life” Republicans, the presidents they put into office seemed to ensure this primary constituency was provided representation on the U.S. Supreme Court, but never majority power.
As Republican presidents nominated pro-life justices, Antonin Scalia (Reagan, 1986), Clarence Thomas (Bush 41, 1991), and Samuel Alito (Bush 43, 2006), they also avoided a pro-life conservative majority, nominating John Paul Stevens (Ford, 1975), Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan, 1981), Anthony M. Kennedy (Reagan, 1988), David Souter (Bush 41, 1990), and flimsy switch-hitter John Roberts (Bush 43, 2005).
Routinely, these presidents and establishment Republicans would frame these latter nominations as being regrettable “mistakes” while their committed radical pro-abortion counterparts in the Democratic party “batted 1000” on such appointments, often with the help of Republicans in the Senate who, for example, awarded 41 votes for Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993), while by comparison Democrat senators conceded only four votes for Samuel Alito.
All of this changed when Donald Trump busted down the doors in 2016, defying the entire “failed and corrupt political establishment” consisting of the “permanent state” in Washington along with its supporting “financial and media corporations.”
Trump committed to appointing pro-life justices and overturning Roe
By every rational account, Donald Trump was a hostile outsider to the establishment. In explaining why even so many of his fellow Republicans were vehemently opposed to him throughout the 2016 primary campaign, former House Speaker and Catholic convert Newt Gingrich said Trump is “not part of the club. He’s uncontrollable. You know, he hasn’t been through the initiation rites. He didn’t belong to the secret society.”
And, apparently, in “the secret society,” they established norms by which their candidates for office were not allowed to promise much of anything to their pro-life constituents. It had been standard practice that Republican candidates for president refused to say they would nominate pro-life justices to the SCOTUS, offering the alibi that “litmus tests” for such appointments were impermissible.
As observed in 2016 by ADF senior council Matt Bowman, Trump “blasted through this judicial glass ceiling” not only specifying that his SCOTUS appointments would be pro-life but also in providing a “stellar” list of candidates from whom he would nominate.
Though Trump sincerely asserted he was pro-life, the abortion issue has clearly not been in his wheelhouse of expertise. Despite this, he still dramatically raised the bar on pro-life commitments and rhetoric from previous Republican nominees during his campaign.
Breaking with the Republican branch of the “secret society,” Trump said straight out that if he was elected president, Roe v. Wade would be overturned. “That will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court … It will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.”
In his final debate against Hillary Clinton, he also provided more graphic rhetoric regarding the horror of abortion to an enormous audience describing his opponent’s position as supporting the legality of “rip[ping] the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby … Hillary can say that that’s okay, but it’s not okay with me.”
Trump’s courage and defiance vital for achieving significant conservative goals for Americans
Perhaps Trump’s most advantageous qualities have been his independence, courage to defy the government and media establishment, along with his plain speech and tangible promises.
Who will forget his moxie in the face of saturating criticisms after his third debate with Hillary Clinton? The entire legacy media was bearing down with the same talking point feigning “horrifying” outrage that Trump said he may not accept the election results. “I will look at it at the time,” he maintained.
And the next day, with the media at a fever pitch on this question, Trump defied them all further pledging, to the roar of rally participants, that “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win!”
This same courage and defiance was necessary to see through the SCOTUS nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and especially Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsberg, assuming office just one week before the 2020 election.
As Liberty Counsel attorney Jonathan Alexander celebrated with LifeSite’s Jim Hale last year, “President Trump, without any apology, not only appointed these individuals, got them nominated, [and] confirmed by the Senate, but stuck to them.”
“He could have bailed from a Kavanaugh. He could have not placed Barrett on the court when he did during that time period leading up to the election. But he promised that he would place two or three justices to the court that would ultimately rule according to the Constitution, and he followed that promise,” he said. “You must give that man the full credit, just as an individual, for sticking to his guns as a politician in an incredible manner.”
Results include avalanche of restrictions on abortion, repeated strengthening of religious liberty
As a result, in addition to the monumental 5-1-3 Dobbs decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade, which Justice Alito described as “egregiously wrong from the start,” other significant decisions from SCOTUS included:
- Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that strengthened religious liberty rights. By a 6-3 vote, SCOTUS ruled that a Washington high school football coach’s postgame prayers were protected speech under the First Amendment.
- Carson v. Makin in a 6-3 ruling struck down as unconstitutional a law in the state of Maine prohibiting taxpayer school choice dollars from going to religious institutions.
- New York Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen struck down a New York state law that required citizen applicants to demonstrate “proper cause” for the right to carry a firearm. The court ruled 6-3 that this law violated citizens’ right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
- West Virginia v. EPA curbed the authority of unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., ruling 6-3 that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have broad authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.
And other noteworthy SCOTUS decisions in the 2022-2023 term additionally included:
- Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard struck down affirmative action admission policies in place at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) ruling 6-3 that they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
- 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis ruled 6-3 that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects a Christian web designer’s right not to produce websites for same-sex “weddings” in a major victory for freedom of speech.
- Biden v. Nebraska where the court ruled 6-3 that the Biden administration had overstepped its authority attempting to initiate a nearly half-trillion-dollar plan to forgive student loan debt.
In addition, the Dobbs decision last year also allowed an avalanche of other previously blocked pro-life protections at the state level to come into effect, like parental consent measures, dismemberment abortion bans, fetal burial laws, and protections for babies with Down syndrome.
Abortion is now effectively abolished in the 2,000-mile stretch from the Texas border to West Virginia, and elsewhere, and at least one survey of abortion centers across the nation revealed there were 24,290 fewer legal abortions between July 2022 and March 2023, equating to tens of thousands of babies being alive today due to this epic decision from the Court.
While all of these new decisions have provided monumental results for faith, family and freedom, it must also be acknowledged that like the consistent performance of SCOTUS justices over the last several decades, President Trump’s nominees have also at times delivered disappointing results in the areas of transgender issues, COVID-19 vaccine mandates, federal funding for abortion, and also the right of a Catholic hospital to refuse participating in “transition” procedures.
GOP’s ‘secret society’ wields power through election fraud, intentionally upholding Roe
After almost 50 years of the national Republican Party accomplishing precisely nothing of any substance for their enormous pro-life constituency, the impact of Trump’s first term stands in dramatic relief from the “secret society’s” standard shell game.
National Public Radio lamented in 2020 that the 45th president established “the most conservative [SCOTUS] in 90 years,” and Politico observed his leadership “mark[s] one of the most dramatic ideological turnarounds the court has seen in such a short time span in generations” that will “ensure a conservative tilt for decades to come.”
And make no mistake, the killing of preborn children remained decriminalized by judicial fiat over those several decades because that is exactly what those in political power, including Republicans (though not all) fully intended.
As former Democrat campaign adviser Naomi Wolf told an audience at Hillsdale College in March that if one wishes to discover the intent of political policy makers, they should disregard their words and simply focus on the effects of their policies. “As a political consultant, you learn to reason backwards. You look at the effect and then you draw conclusions [regarding intent] from the effect, because the story is made up, always.”
Not only did the Republican branch of the “secret society” ensure a pro-abortion majority on the SCOTUS for several decades, but through a wide variety of election fraud techniques (also shared by Democrats), they guaranteed their establishment candidates were illegitimately escorted into the presidential nominations of their party until it was no longer feasible in 2016.
For example, during the presidential primaries in 2012, GOP officials at the state and county levels changed vote counts, threw out the votes of entire counties, violated or changed party rules, counted public votes privately, and even cancelled caucuses to prevent U.S. Congressman Ron Paul of Texas from winning the nomination over establishment representative Mitt Romney.
Maintaining Roe drove pro-life base to clinch power for the GOP, which went on to instigate foreign wars via ‘conservative’ outlets
And the reach of the establishment is not limited to political parties and the mainstream media but extends into “conservative” Washington think tanks like the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) and publications like National Review.
As Tucker Carlson observed in June, while back-and-forth politics over most issues don’t mean much in Washington, the “neo-con war agenda” does. “What actually matters,” he said, “is foreign policy: the invasions and occupations and proxy wars. The decisions that determine which global populations will thrive and which will die. The policies that come with trillion-dollar price tags.”
No one who stands against the neo-con wars, as Trump has, “is allowed to have power in this country. ‘Criticize our wars and you’re disqualified. If you keep it up, we’ll send you to prison.’ That’s the message Washington is sending” with Trump’s June indictment, Carlson said.
And this is certainly the case for the syncretist National Review, which simultaneously supports pro-life policies yet has a long history of “warmongering,” being a bastion of aggressive neo-conservative thought, including having provided a full-throated promotion of the Iraq War in 2003 and the proxy war against Russia beginning last year.
Since it is foreign policy that matters to the big donors, National Review hurled all that was left of their influence “Against Trump” in 2016, terrified that as president the outsider would “trash the broad conservative ideological consensus” which had been forged over many years to incoherently fuse 1) the massive vote-garnering use of empty pro-life rhetoric to gain power, with 2) the actual implementation of the donors’ policy priorities initiating and conducting trillion dollar wars abroad which have likely cost the people of the world well over one million lives.
Had National Review gotten their way and Trump would have been somehow defeated in 2016, in favor of a “secret society” candidate who does what he or she is told, there is exactly no chance we would be living in a post-Roe world today.
With foreign policy on the line, George Weigel’s ‘Judeo-Christian’ EPPC sought to scuttle Catholic support for Trump
This is also the case for the syncretists in the well-funded Washington think tanks who have been paid generous salaries for many years to help maintain that “broad conservative ideological consensus” by disguising the aggressions of the neo-con war agenda behind a masquerade of Catholic and otherwise Christian legitimacy.
At the top of this list is George Weigel, who violated the moral standards of a Catholic theologian in 2003 by “turning to the ‘mass media’” and “giving untimely public expression” to his theological challenges of the Church’s just war doctrine. This served to neutralize the voice of Pope John Paul II and evidently every bishop in the world as the Church’s pastors vigorously opposed the U.S.’s impending and disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Weigel’s public role also served to provide political cover for these neo-conservative-orchestrated aggressions of the Bush administration. Cardinal James Stafford characterized Weigel’s arguments at the time as “misleading,” having omitted significant moral principles in his presentation.
READ: George Weigel follows a familiar, flawed script in pushing for US involvement in Ukraine
So it was that in March 2016, with aggressive U.S. foreign policy on the line, Weigel and several other salaried colleagues at the EPPC jumped on the “Against Trump” bandwagon with everything they had, appealing to their fellow Catholics to abandon their support for Trump. They ironically argued that his election would gravely endanger the GOP’s commitment to “noble causes” such as the right to life and religious liberty.
With his EPPC colleague Mary Rice Hasson, Weigel appeared in a brief EWTN interview at the time where he told his fellow Catholics to “not be fooled,” stating Trump “does not share our core concerns. There’s nothing in his record, his character, or his campaign to suggest that he does.” He went on to call him “a charlatan screaming and yelling about what he’s going to do without any idea of how to do it.”
Hasson said she didn’t see much difference between Trump and Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton. “When it comes to the issues that matter to Catholics, life, religious liberty, marriage, he’s not with us,” and this would mean “the wrong judges, the wrong appointments, the wrong emphasis throughout an administrative policy.”
LifeSiteNews reached out to Weigel and Hasson asking if they have any comments to offer to their fellow Catholics after Trump’s decisive leadership in overturning Roe v. Wade, and if perhaps they believe they may have misjudged him in 2016. We also asked if they knew at the time that his election would have led to the end of Roe, would they have supported him?
LifeSite did not receive a reply from either of these senior fellows at the EPPC.
EPPC shows support for Ukraine war and strong opposition to Trump, the peace candidate
Curiously absent in the scholars’ list of “issues that matter to Catholics” was whether or not disciples of Jesus Christ should be concerned about their government supporting a hot war with nuclear-armed Russia, which was part of the neocon/Deep State agenda in 2016 as well.
Readers may recall candidate Hillary Clinton’s proposal to institute a “no-fly zone” over Syria that, by all reasonable accounts, would have brought about a direct confrontation with Russia. At the time, Trump warned such a policy would “lead to World War III,” and having thereafter won the presidency, the neo-conservatives’ planned war against Russia was postponed for four years until the Biden administration was installed into power in January 2021.
READ: ‘Monumental provocation’: How US and international policy-makers deliberately baited Putin to war
Now, in the 2024 race, Trump remains the most prominent peace candidate promising to have the war in Ukraine “settled in one day, in 24 hours” of his inauguration, a position that has been very well-received by attendees at his rallies.
In contrast, outlets and think tanks like National Review and EPPC continue their syncretist attempt to reassemble the “the broad conservative ideological consensus,” which espouses pro-life rhetoric while maintaining support for devastatingly bloody wars including the (already lost) conflict in Ukraine.
They also, of course, remain utterly opposed to Trump, who both killed Roe and has promised to end the bloodshed in eastern Europe immediately upon his second inauguration. It would seem most people instinctively recognize such policies to be most consistent with Christianity and the natural moral law.
Still, ‘Donald Trump is a flawed man.’ Considerations on LGBT, the COVID vax and even his, yes, pro-abortion views
Yet none of these observations are meant to suggest that the former president is a perfect candidate for Christians or others who also recognize fundamental moral principles.
As Tucker Carlson also affirmed, “Donald Trump is a flawed man,” which is undeniably true, especially considering his bizarre support for so-called homosexual “marriage,” his active courting of LGBT voters and his close association with pro-LGBT activist groups such as the Log Cabin Republicans. This sad reality being the case, it remains unclear how any of this misguided advocacy would substantially impact policy should Mr. Trump become president once again instead of other plausible competitors for the office.
Furthermore, many have rightfully flagged the 45th President’s strong advocacy for the abortion-tainted COVID-19 “vaccines” which he proudly and repeatedly promoted as the solution to the pandemic, despite overwhelming evidence linking them to hundreds of thousands of deaths and life-changing injuries.
In response to these perceptions, former COVID official for the Trump administration, Dr. Paul Alexander, has argued that as a non-scientist the president naturally had to depend on his senior officials to provide accurate information for decision making, and that he was “badly misled on Operation Warp Speed,” was intentionally “subverted from within, and dark malevolent people used the pandemic to damage his re-election.”
An epidemiologist with expertise in evidence-based medicine and a highly competent critic of the entire COVID enterprise including the gene-based injections, Dr. Alexander highlighted how prominent White House Coronavirus Task Force member Deborah Birx admitted in her book how she and her colleagues deliberately misled the president they had a responsibility to serve.
And after publicly advocating for the former president to acknowledge what happened in this regard, Alexander posted to his substack channel in June that he had recently met with Trump and the candidate indicated that “he ‘understands’ & is listening to us & will FIX the wrongs of COVID including the vaccine.”
Finally, though the 45th president is unquestionably the far-and-away most accomplished pro-life president since the Roe decision was inflicted on the nation 50 years ago, he is not per se pro-life according to the common-sense definition of the term. To be “pro-life” simply means recognizing that it is always a grave moral violation to deliberately kill an innocent human being from the moment of conception to natural death, and the government must provide appropriate penal sanctions against all such homicidal crimes.
Since Mr. Trump at least supports the legal killing of preborn girls and boys conceived in rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is allegedly at risk, like many or most other politicians claiming the “pro-life” mantle, he simply remains significantly less pro-abortion than “the Radicals that are willing to kill babies even into their ninth month, and beyond,” as he described in a May 17 post on Truth Social celebrating his triumph over Roe.
Yet, as Republican candidates seek to fetter-out what they believe to be a fitting moral and political legislative approach to the question in the new post-Roe world, Mr. Trump’s campaign issued remarks in April holding that such legislative questions should be solely resolved at the state level. But after considerable pushback from pro-life leaders, the former president’s position positively shifted in June, conceding that the federal government does indeed have a “vital role” to play in protecting “unborn life.”
Trump pledges to ‘demolish the deep state’ and ‘the entire globalist neocon establishment’
With the approach to federal legislation objectives on abortion restrictions still taking shape between candidates and constituencies, what President Trump’s record indicates is that it is his final policy commitments that matter in the end, and he has made some significant ones for the 2024 election.
In the wake of the COVID-19 operation along with the Black Lives Matter riots, and recent cases of egregious election fraud, what emerges in great relief is the presence of a Deep State that has also evidently orchestrated a bioterrorism attack upon the people of the world, initiated what could still develop into a nuclear war with Russia, raided and terrorized innocent pro-life activists while turning a blind eye to over 130 pro-abortion terrorist attacks, indicted their chief political opponent on flimsy charges, and much more.
As the nation faces such an existential peril Mr. Trump pledged at CPAC in June, “we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers.” He went on to promise, “I am your retribution. I will totally obliterate the deep state … and we will restore the American republic to all of its radiant glory.”
In a March 16 video release, the 45th President also professed “a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third-world country and a third-world dictatorship right here at home.”
With the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and a successful reform of the SCOTUS, plus its many ongoing positive results, President Trump has exhibited the unique qualities of enormous courage, independence and defiance that are necessary should the American people have any chance to counter and peacefully defeat the “secret society” Deep State with its political and media accomplices.
For unlike GOP failures over the last five long decades, Mr. Trump has shown that despite the very highest levels of adversity from these enemies of the people, and even despite enormous personal costs, he remains fully determined and committed until the end.
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