Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.

To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.

Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.

Steve meant so much to us.

We will miss him terribly.

DrBopperTHP: "Radical Traditionalist Catholics"

The 'Synagogue of Satan'
by Mark Potok


From a makeshift pulpit inside an Indiana Quality Inn, a baby-faced priest angrily denounces the Jews, saying they mean to "destroy all Christian nations."

In offices in State Line, Pa., an intense, bespectacled man tirelessly recounts how the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia "predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry" and warns of the Jews' role in the coming "New World Order."

At a gathering near the Philadelphia airport, men in priests' collars and brown monk's robes rage against the "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy to destroy the Catholic Church, the "Marxist-Jewish" scheme to wreck American schools, and even an elaborate 9/11 plot, "predicted by the Blessed Virgin Mary 84 years ago."

For most Americans, the world of "radical traditionalist Catholicism" is so remote and little-known -- it entered the nation's consciousness, just barely, with revelations about the strident anti-Semitism of actor Mel Gibson and his father, Hutton -- that it may seem wholly irrelevant to the modern world. Is it really important what a group of people, many excommunicated and most gathered behind the walls of their monasteries and other institutions, think about the Jews? That many believe there was no Holocaust? That some say every pope since 1958 has been illegitimate, and a few even insist the real pope has been kidnapped?

The fact is, it does matter. As explained in a remarkable and sweeping story by the Intelligence Report's Heidi Beirich, the best estimates suggest there are 100,000 radical traditionalists in America, a number that appears to be growing. And while the size of this movement is dwarfed by the 70 million mainstream Catholics in this country, these energetic men and women are having an influence.

For one thing, the open anti-Semitism that characterizes the movement is leaking into other subcultures, some of them especially dangerous.



Navy officer under investigation for extremist activities
Navy Times
Published on March 19, 2007

Lt. Cmdr. John Sharpe Jr. looks like a naval officer sent straight from central casting in Hollywood: A fit-looking, gregarious 1993 Naval Academy graduate with short blond hair and eyeglasses, he looks just his part as public affairs officer aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.

But in his off-duty hours, Sharpe operates Web sites that have landed him in a brewing controversy in this singularly Navy town. Accused of being an anti-Semite, he was temporarily relieved of his duties March 7 and is now under investigation for allegedly violating Navy regulations against supremacist activities. An editorial in The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot on March 15 slammed Sharpe, calling his ideas "crazy" and "dangerous."

Sharpe and his Web sites are on a "dirty dozen" list of anti-Semitic organizations compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a national organization based in Montgomery, Ala. [...]

Heidi Beirich, a law center investigator who has focused on Sharpe, said he is a "radical traditionalist Catholic" who believes that Jews, Masons and others have conspired to undermine the Roman Catholic Church for the past 300 years.

She called a 2005 speech she saw Sharpe give "quite the anti-Zionist screed," and said she witnessed him selling books at a gathering of a group, known as "American Renaissance," that welcomes activists to "help the cause of whites," according to its Web site.

Sharpe admits to attending the gathering but claims little knowledge of the group, describing it as perhaps "the white man's version of the NAACP." [...]

Beirich scoffed at Sharpe's apparent ignorance of American Renaissance.

"Literally next to him, in the next booth, was a guy selling ‘White Power' T-shirts," Beirich said. "You had to be an idiot not to know where you were."

Labels: religion, wingnuttery