Remembering
James Robison

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Elon Musk Tweets to Trump: No More Federal ‘Bribes’ for Churches That Traffic Immigrants. Vance Calls Out Bishops for Profiteering

By John Zmirak Published on January 27, 2025

Thanks to Elon Musk, we’ve just seen a historic moment of real importance to our country — and one which is in the genuine best interests of Christians, especially my fellow Catholics. Before I share it, let me point to a few historic precedents to give you a sense of scale:

Remember when we found out that we’d been lied into the first Gulf War, that the “eyewitness” to Saddam Hussein’s soldiers tossing babies out of incubators was in fact spreading fake news? As Jason Jones wrote here:

[S]he was lying. Every word she spoke was crass propaganda, invented by PR professionals to manipulate Americans into launching a foreign war. Here’s how history remembers that testimony:

The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old girl who was publicly identified at the time by her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to support Kuwait in the Gulf War.

In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah’s last name was Al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيرة الصباح) and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah’s testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.

How about when we learned that we’d been lied into the second Gulf War, goaded by the threat of “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed, which the Bush administration had conjured out of thin air, and dodgy intelligence the CIA’s own specialists had rejected? Bush’s team’s real motives were to reshape the Middle East — by bombing it till it turned into Switzerland — and to ship $138 billion in taxpayers’ cash to companies like Halliburton.

Or when the Biden administration accidentally admitted it wasn’t seeking “victory” in the futile war in Ukraine, but only to create a quagmire that bled Russia while enriching U.S. defense companies?

This is a moment like that.

Elon Musk Red-Pills Trump on the Bishops’ Immigration Ponzi Scheme

Elon Musk, the czar of Trump’s waste-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, finally got hold of the information we here at The Stream have been trumpeting for years: That religious nonprofits and bodies that favor de facto open borders are profiteers — hireling shepherds, not actual charities but hungry federal contractors eager for more social dysfunction for which they can charge the taxpayer for managing. This is true of many church-based immigration groups, but especially true of my own Catholic church. I proved that in a column whose title speaks for itself: “America’s Catholic Bishops Made Back All $3 Billion in Sex Abuse Settlements by Trafficking Illegal Immigrants at Taxpayer Expense.”

Musk posted Friday on X:

Vice President J.D. Vance got the memo. He parried a reporter who cited the bishops of his own church denouncing Trump’s deportation plans with some inconvenient facts. Namely that those same bishops rake hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars from our broken immigration system:


That’s the Kuwaiti Incubator moment in the Catholic bishops’ attempt to whip up hysteria over Trump’s plan to return the 10+ million illegal immigrants whom the Biden regime waved in, letting more than 250,000 migrant children disappear in the process into the hands of sweatshops and the sex industry. The bishops didn’t make a peep about that, perhaps because their nonprofits such as Catholic Charities are complicit in these kids’ tragedy. As The Stream already reported, according to Catholic children’s advocate Elizabeth Yore, Catholic Charities is

probably the number one or two NGO that is handling the trafficking of children. Sexual predators go where vulnerable children are. You can’t tell me that there aren’t hundreds, if not thousands, of sexual predators who are posing as sponsors for these vulnerable children.

Would You Trust a Bishop with Your Kids?

The bishops have an abysmal track record on protecting children. How bad? Some $5 billion worth of bad, since that’s the sum of payments these prelates have had to pay out over 20 years (it would have been more but many went bankrupt) to victims of clerical sex abuse, which those bishops enabled and kept secret.

So when America’s Catholic bishops puff up their chests and say that if Donald Trump wants to remove economic migrants brought here illegally by the lawless Biden regime, he’ll have “go through us,” we know what to think: It’s as if the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter, or Halliburton, were urging us into war.

But I hope and pray that Trump, urged on by Musk, does “go through” the bishops, like a chainsaw through a rotten tree. I hope it gets exposed that the bishops playing tiny violins over the return home of illegal immigrants are singing for their supper, that they keep the lights on and pay the butcher’s bill for their predator priests by trafficking migrants — unknown numbers of them children who in turn are subject to sexual abuse by cartels and U.S.-based perverts.

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I hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi initiates a RICO case against the USCCB for the sex abuse it ignored for decades and for the human trafficking it’s engaged in right now on the public’s dime. The bishops would lose their eligibility even to bid for federal contracts, and the whole house of cards that is the “bishops conference” would collapse like the Berlin Wall.

That would be a good thing for faithful Catholics who find themselves marginalized or persecuted by Pope Francis’s lavender appointees, and for every Catholic citizen. Our ancestors weathered real, vicious, unjustified anti-Catholicism when we arrived on these shores, especially charges that we’d put the whims of the pope or the self-interest of our church above the Constitution and laws of the United States. We spent the past two centuries proving such charges false. Now our bishops, like compulsive gamblers mortgaging their house at the casino’s ATM, are throwing away all that good will and actually … doing exactly what our ancestors were falsely accused of. The sooner these hireling shepherds are investigated by the Department of Justice and cut off from Uncle Sam’s bounty the better for everyone, especially vulnerable migrants and their helpless children.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.