Pentagon Threatened the Pope After He Criticized Trump | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Threatened the Pope After He Criticized Trump

newrepublic.com

22 pointssleepyguy11 comments

Worth remembering that the Pope is a US citizen, who now will not return to the US due to threats by his own government.

Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?

They ship troublesome priests to places where the media won't pick up on their antics. Out of sight, out of mind

For me, this is a memorable line from the 60s movie Becket with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton, which is a character study about state power, belief and love based on history of King Henry and his Archbishop, done with strong production values that with a thespian ornament distinctive of British film production houses of the decade it made.

According to the Gemeniz (reddit sourced) the line from history is "Will none of these lazy insignificant persons... deliver me from this turbulent priest?" although this was recorded hundreds of years after the fact of its utterance. The essence being that Henry being used to throwing his weight around was truly surprised that his complaint was regarded as an order.

The screenplay of Becket treats this gingerly, O'Toole gives King Henry both grief at the loss of his friend, and elation that his figurehead enjoys new status as Becket is sainted.

Are you suggesting the US invade the Vatican?

It is kind of funny. It also puts the lie to their 'respect for religion'. I can see Trump declaring himself to be pope next.

He already made the image of himself as the pope, when they were selecting the current pope.

What one has to understand is that Trump is their religion to which everyone else must be subservient.

It's interesting that democracy is so incredibly fragile. All it takes is for a minor portion of the voters to be given a bunch of lies that increase their own feelings of superiority and boom, there goes your decades long work. Frightening too.

I think the fragility is more with the people in charge, who have long abided by norms and reasonable interpretations. The current Trump admin uses every lever and argument to abuse the laws, flat out making things up so they can create a court case so they can do the thing until it is over turned.

That's another attack vector to them: the latency of the courts is such that you can essentially stall and get away with something for years. Companies do the same thing.

It took a long, concerted campaign to build up to this. This is a project that began in the late 80s, with roots even further back than that.

It was more than just "a bunch of lies", but an entire parallel media ecosystem. Fox News is the most visible part of it, but there are also newspapers, local TV channels, radio, and eventually their own social network. They spent the 60s and 70s building up the network of evangelical preachers.

In addition, they've been systematically destroying other sources: the Washington Post, Twitter, NPR. When they cannot destroy it, they devote a constant barrage of pressure on their other media to discredit it.

Plus guest appearances from a shadowy network of Russian trolls. I think it's a relatively small influence, but it has been a persistent goad in that direction.

There was a careful political plan to take over the majority of state governments and the Supreme Court. Each of those led to more ability to control the narrative and the outcome of elections.

This wasn't minor and it wasn't an accident. It wasn't exactly centrally planned, but a lot of very rich people put a lot of money in the same direction, and this is the result.

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