Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Convicted felon is a label bestowed like a scarlet letter solely to shame another. The real shame is when it is used selectively as cover for one’s own inadequacies.

July 10, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

The famous New England author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. In its time, it was a lurid Puritan New England soap opera that became classic American literature. In its pages, which shocked the Puritans of Hawthorne’s time, the young Hester Prynne was found to be with child, but the father was not her husband, a much older and morally ruthless Puritan man. The real father was the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the local Congregational minister. Refusing to reveal that truth, Hester Prynne was placed on display in the market square each day to be publicly shamed and shunned while adorned with a scarlet letter “A” for “adulterer” prominently on her dress. Nathaniel Hawthorne was well versed in the Puritan prejudices that shaped New England. His great grandfather was one of the three judges who presided over the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.

Today, the scarlet letter takes many other forms. We made it almost to the end of the now infamous June 27, 2024 Presidential Debate before President Joe Biden declared to the American people that Donald Trump, his opponent in the upcoming election, is a “convicted felon.” It seemed much more an act of desperation than inspiration. “What was the point of it?” a commentator asked. Everything about it told me that its only point was to lay shame upon the opposing candidate when all other rhetoric was failing.

It told us nothing about Donald Trump that we did not already know. It told us nothing about the New York trial that mysteriously transformed questionable misdemeanor charges into felonies to bestow that dubious title upon him for strictly political purposes. But it spoke volumes about the desperate state of the one who said it. It was the clearest thing said by President Biden that night, and likely the most rehearsed.

I, too, am a convicted felon, and if you are not reading this blog for the first time then you know, or at least suspect, that the term has been unjustly imposed. So I have a legitimate gripe about its use and misuse. Just about every fair-minded person familiar with this blog knows that even a cursory look under the hood of my 1994 trial leaves its outcome in serious doubt. Only those with bias and hidden agendas of their own still point to the “convicted felon” millstone around my neck.

Dorothy Rabinowitz, a longtime columnist and member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her bold series of concience-stirring revelations about some of the most notorious witch-hunts sex abuse trials of modern times. My trial was one of them. In regard to my “convicted felon” status, Ms. Rabinowitz wrote: “Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents.” (“The Trials of Father MacRae,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013).

To those who read and share my posts, I am grateful for your openminded conclusion that justice failed on the day that scarlet letter was imposed on me. And not only on me; the late Cardinal George Pell also refused to wear the “convicted felon” label before he was finally exonerated after 400 days and nights in solitary confinement in prison. Fortunately, the Australian justice system ultimately delivered him from that injustice. American courts differ from Australian courts in this respect. In modern times, American courts have developed a barrier to the pursuit of justice that grants to the justice system itself the last word and a right to finality. Experts described the dynamics behind this in an article, “Why This Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison.”

There have been thousands of proven wrongful convictions in U.S. courts during the 30 years I have spent in prison for refusing to willfully accept the Scarlet Letter label. I could have left prison 28 years ago if I accepted the deal the State of New Hampshire tried to impose upon me. There are an estimated tens of thousands still wrongfully in prison in the United States because they are unable to “prove” their innocence even when no one had to prove their guilt.

Our incarceration nation leads the world in imprisonment with five percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. So it would follow that it also leads the world in conviction errors, forty-percent of which are attributed to police and prosecutor misconduct.

Photo by Jim Heaphy (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A “Convicted Felon’ in the White House?

On the night before beginning this post, I had a long distance discussion about it with my friend, Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. He is, as most readers know, a real survivor of the very sort of crimes for which I was falsely accused. He is also a survivor of almost 16 years in a prison cell with me. In our recent discussion, Pornchai told me that my only crime was being a Catholic priest and then letting it cost me everything I had. I guess I have to let that sink in. I could have devoted my life in this injustice to building a monument of volcanic bitterness. There is plenty of that to go around where I live. “Thank God you didn’t,” Pornchai said.

So instead of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, I write. I do not just write about the state of my own injustice. I also write about injustice that has befallen others. I write about the state of our freedom, and what is at stake when we take it for granted. I write about the state of our character, about our Church, our politics, our descent into evil and our capacity for good. I write about the senseless impact of prison, and about some, like my friend Pornchai, who overcame it, became redeemed from it, and now faces the challenge of avoiding debilitating labels like the one imposed on me and Donald Trump.

Pornchai Moontri added his belief that I would not be in prison today if I were not a Catholic priest. Then he said that Donald Trump would not have faced those charges in New York if he were not a Republican candidate for President. Mr. Moontri is right about this, and he zoomed in on the one thing that I find most disturbing about Trump’s candidacy: the elitist view that a political outsider has no business running for President of the United States. This prejudice has been evident in mainstream news media since his election in 2016. It has been nothing short of an attempt at voter nullification and egregious election interference.

I know that some of our readers do not like Donald Trump. Back in 2021, we lost some readers when I wrote “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul.” It is globally one of our most read posts and it was also recommended by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. But some of our slightly left-leaning readers concluded that any criticism of President Biden is an ipso facto an affirmation of Donald Trump. That post is a classic example of the sometimes vague boundaries between politics and morality, and why no priest should be afraid to write or speak about the latter.

I have never promoted Donald Trump, and do not do so now. That said, I have never demoted him either. But as an American, I resent all the one-sided rhetoric denouncing his candidacy based on his character. That is a matter for voters to decide, not the courts, and not the news media, and certainly not the elite holding office in Washington, DC. In 2020, it was insisted to me that the whole Hunter Biden laptop story that emerged and was covered up before the election of 2020 was Russian disinformation. I know that I ruffled feathers when I wrote “Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell.” I was lied to then, and so were you.

The clincher in my decision to write this post about Donald Trump’s legal woes came from reading the June 21, 2024 issue of the National Catholic Reporter. It is a far left-leaning “independent” newspaper that I stopped reading decades ago. Another priest gave me a gift subscription to it, and I have wondered ever since what I did of offend him. The front-page headline in the June 21 issue is “Does the Catholic Vote Still Matter?” It was followed by this highlighted text: “A majority of Catholics are trending toward voting for Donald Trump — even after conviction.” Should that fact alone be evidence that the Catholic vote no longer matters just because it doesn’t fit NCR’s ideology?

… and to the Banana Republic for Which It Stands …

I am much informed by a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Why Republicans Don’t Abandon ‘Felon’ Trump” by Michael W. McConnell (June 20, 2024). The author is a Stanford Law School professor, a retired judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He dissected the various charges lodged against Mr. Trump during this election cycle. His conclusions are an eye-opener. Only one of these cases has gone to trial, and after a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, it appears that many of the other claims perhaps never will. Of the supposed felonies for which a New York State court declared Trump guilty, Professor McConnell wrote:

“Most Democrats I know persuaded themselves of the righteousness of criminally prosecuting Donald Trump to keep him from becoming President again. How, they ask, can any respectable person defend Mr. Trump now that he is a felon? Many Republicans … believe that Democratic prosecutors are waging lawfare against Mr. Trump [and] now consider the legal crusade against Trump to be as threatening to democracy as what happened on January 6, 2021. The charges against Mr. Trump in New York were bogus.”

The article lays out in compelling terms how New York DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution was an attempt to influence voters and the electoral process. DA Bragg had also been a donor to the Biden campaign and should have disqualified himself from prosecuting the case. Instead, according to Professor McConnell he “openly campaigned on a vow to hold Mr. Trump and his family accountable.” The attention grabber for me was what followed in Professor McConnell’s article: “Mr. Bragg didn’t pursue particular crimes of concern to the public. He pursued a particular defendant who happened to be the other party’s candidate for President.”

That analysis is so vastly unlike almost all other news coverage of that trial that is shocked me, and for good reason. The “suspect in search of a crime” motif was exactly what happened to me. No one ever went to Keene, NH Detective James F. McLaughlin with a complaint about me. Instead, this sex abuse crusader targeted me for no reason other than my being a Catholic priest. Then, armed with a fraudulent claim that he himself manufactured, he manipulated — sometimes with monetary bribes and threats — dozens of troubled adolescents and young adults in places where I had been assigned. He did this relentlessly for five years until he found some who would accuse me for money. (See the “Statement of Steven Wollschlager.”)

The “ lawfare” pursuit of Donald Trump was political, but it never reflected American justice. Its sole purpose was the imposition of a scarlet letter that would most likely be overturned on appeal. According to the purposes of D.A. Bragg, it need only hold up until the November election. After a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Presidential Immunity, New York State judge Juan Merchan delayed Mr. Trump’s sentencing until September 18, 2024.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, now also a “convicted felon” has been serving in the role of a senior advisor to the President during both family and staff negotiations about his future political life, negotiations in which Hunter Biden has a clear conflict of interest. The hypocrisy is stunning.

In his first term as 45th President of the United States, President Donald Trump sponsored the First Step Act. A major tenet of it was a call for the removal of “the box,” a prejudicial feature of federal job applications that kept thousands of former prisoners from finding meaningful work. Permanent “Convicted Felon” status is unjust, demeaning, useless and sometimes even baseless. Recall the words of Sheriff Beauford Puser in my post, “Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment”: “If you let ‘em get away with this, you give ‘em the eternal right to do the same damn thing to anyone of you!”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this timely post. You may also like these related titles from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Why This Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison

Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Covering unrelated stories of the trial of the late Cardinal George Pell and the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, Miranda Devine deserves a Pulitzer for journalistic integrity.

May 25, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I never imagined that I would be writing a post with Cardinal George Pell and Hunter Biden’s notorious “Laptop from Hell ” sharing the same title. The connections are circumstantial, but once I stumbled upon them, I knew I had my title for this post.

In both stories, the mainstream news media brought little light, but lots of heat, while exposing little truth beyond its own vile bias. In the case of Cardinal Pell’s unjust imprisonment, much of the news media in both Australia and America embraced a wildly imaginative narrative filled with holes to presume his guilt with no evidence. Being sent to prison is by no means an indication of guilt. In the case of Hunter Biden, both mainstream media and social media teamed up to cover up the explosive story before the 2020 presidential election. It was a true account that citizens of a free and open society had a right to know.

In both stories, one journalist distinguished herself as a champion of journalistic courage and integrity for pursuing and publishing the truth despite immense pressure to adhere to the media’s availability bias. That journalist is Miranda Devine who covered the Pell case in Australia while single-handedly exposing the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post.

Back in October, 2021, Ryan MacDonald wrote a post in these pages entitled, “Fr. Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell.” Ryan included in that post several pages from Cardinal Pell’s book, Prison Journal Volume 2 which was widely read across the globe.

The paragraphs that Ryan reprinted from the book were about me. I read them repeatedly, not because I like to see my name in print, but because I had a subconscious nagging sense that I was missing something. Then, just weeks ago, it struck me. In one paragraph, my name appears along with that of Miranda Devine. Why would that be important? It wasn’t at first, but in subsequent readings it leapt out at me. Here’s the story:

From the Cardinal Pell Journal

On May 15, 2019, three years to the day before typing this post, I published a carefully researched article entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Sheryl Collmer, a reader of this blog from Texas who writes for American Thinker and Catholic World Report, mailed a copy of my article to Cardinal Pell, then still in an Australian prison having lost his first appeal. From half a world away, Cardinal Pell pondered my article and then wrote about it on August 2, 2019 in the journal he kept in his cell. Here are excerpts:

“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around 15 to 20 years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.”

Cardinal Pell went on in his journal to analyze my article and why I believed his trial was scripted from another unrelated case in the United States. A sensational and distorted account of that case appeared in both the U.S. and Australia in Rolling Stone magazine by a now disgraced former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. In several paragraphs, Cardinal Pell described my 2019 article:

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine Rolling Stone, pointing out that there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence. The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited.

“In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.”

Cardinal George Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2 : pp 57-60

Cardinal Pell did not know it at the time, but I had already posted articles on the story of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s dubious article about accusations against Philadelphia priests by the anonymous “Billy Doe” in 2011, and her equally dubious account of gang rape at the University of Virginia. The most recent of my articles was, “The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone.”

Now Comes Miranda Devine

After reading Cardinal Pell’s book, I set it aside happy to have been of some hope and encouragement during his unjust time of imprisonment. Cardinal Pell concluded in his journal:

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.”

Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 60

Many months after reading Cardinal Pell’s journal, I took up another book ordered for me by a friend. It was Laptop from Hell (Post Hill Press 2021), a now notorious account by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. My friend told me that the first printing sold out within weeks at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble so it was placed on backorder for me. It arrived in early March, 2022 and I began to read its shocking pages.

I immediately recognized its author, Miranda Devine, as the now famous New York Post columnist who nearly upended the U.S. presidential election in 2020. But I also knew that I had seen her name somewhere else. It turned out that it was in that passage from Cardinal Pell above. I was surprised to see both my name and that of Miranda Devine in the same paragraph.

I had not known until then that Ms. Devine wrote boldly in defense of Cardinal Pell against a tidal wave of progressive criticism in both Australia and the United States. Among her several articles on the Pell case was her last one, “Finally, Justice for George Cardinal Pell” published in the New York Post on April 7, 2020. Three weeks later I published, “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

There were several articles in the left-leaning Australian news media deeply critical of Ms. Miranda Devine for her defense of Cardinal Pell. She thus became, in my view, a champion of journalistic integrity. Such champions are few and far between now, but they keep alive the notion that fair, just, and courageous journalism is all that stands between us and the demise of democracy.

In the Bill of Rights, Freedom of the Press has long been regarded as fundamental to individual rights. Without a free media, a free society and democratic self-government would not be possible. Nonetheless, in October 2020, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and almost all network news media and social media banded together with an unprecedented decision to keep the American people from learning the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the presidential election.

I was in shock by this at the time. It was the sort of thing that happens during elections in any number of banana republics, but here it was, in a full court press, shamefully happening in the United States. As a result, the New York Post’ s Facebook and Twitter accounts were blocked and any mention of the laptop or its contents by thousands of users (including me) was censored.

Laptop from Hell got its title from a Twitter message of then President Donald Trump who read of some of its contents in the New York Post, the sole U.S. media outlet with the integrity to publish the story. Then President Trump’s Twitter account was also suspended.

I followed this story closely in October, 2020 as it was shamelessly suppressed and censored by most U.S. news and social media. The more it was suppressed, the more alarmed I became. As a 19-year-old in 1972, I was riveted to the Watergate story and the heroism of the Washington Post coverage by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The story led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and criminal charges for some senior White House staff. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for it while the names “Woodward and Bernstein” became synonymous with journalistic courage and integrity.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Now, a half century later, the same Washington Post was actively suppressing a story of government corruption of equal importance solely for political bias. The pre-election weeks of October 2020 should have caused an uproar over the revelations by Miranda Devine in the New York Post about the explosive contents of a laptop abandoned in a repair shop by the Democratic presidential nominee’s son and never retrieved. The White House and Democratic Party went into circle-the-wagons mode, and most of the news media, setting aside their primary role to be a nonpartisan check and balance on government, joined them there.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was not the only thing abandoned. Its potential impact before a hotly contested election resulted in the abandonment of the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press as well. Polls about trust and confidence in the news media were off the charts after Watergate, but reached an all-time low even before “Huntergate” when they bottomed out completely. In the most recent Pew Research Center survey of news journalists, in which I was invited to take part, American trust and confidence in the news media is under six percent.

The story told by Miranda Devine in Laptop from Hell is both utterly painful and painfully necessary. A web of lies, cover-ups and corruption drove Richard Nixon from the White House in his second term in 1974, but by covering up the Hunter Biden story in 2020, the news media interfered in a presidential election and now leaves a stunned nation with a scandal of equal measure after just one year of the Biden administration. It was not patriotism that did this. It was the opposite of patriotism. It was partisanship.

The laptop consists of thousands of emails, video clips, and other material produced by Hunter Biden, son of then Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic Nominee. The contents reveal a shocking influence-peddling scheme by Hunter Biden who received millions of dollars for arranging influence from his then Vice President father with foreign entities in Ukraine, Russia, and China.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Legislative Judiciary Committee Member Adam Schiff, and seemingly every member on the Democratic sides of the House and Senate who were asked, including fifty former intelligence officers sworn to uphold the Constitution, all agreed to knowingly propagate a massive lie: that the laptop story “had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.”

That well-rehearsed lie was repeated to the American people by the Democratic nominee as he stared into the camera during the second Presidential Debate. It should be alarming that it was President Trump, and not the news media moderator, who brought it up in the first place.

I waded into this story a bit when I posted “A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War” some months ago. It was posted just as Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine was in its early stages. I wrote in that post that if the slowly published contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop are true, the President is compromised in foreign policy regarding Russia, Ukraine and China. I was certainly not the first or the last to raise this concern. The best coverage came from the least impaired news media, The Epoch Times, and a March 23, 2022 op-ed by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke, “The Foreign Policy Ramifications of Hunter’s Emails.”

We only know about this story at all today thanks to the dogged pursuit of it by Miranda Devine and the New York Post. And in U.S. news coverage of the wrongly convicted and imprisoned George Cardinal Pell, Miranda Devine and the New York Post were singular in their expression of journalistic skepticism about the flawed case against him. Mercifully, all seven members of Australia’s High Court agreed. If there is a Pulitzer for journalistic courage and integrity, it should have Miranda Devine’s name on it.

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Note from the Editor: Please share this post. Father Gordon MacRae will mark forty years of priesthood on June 5, 2022, the Solemnity of Pentecost. Please join us here next week on June 1st for a special post as he reflects on those years in the most extraordinary circumstances. You may also like these related posts:

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

While Russia invaded Ukraine with its nuclear arsenal on high alert, the White House and media were compromised by partisan secrets and selective reporting.

March 9, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

A lot of media angst and ink have been spilled over the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has silenced Russian media to keep his own citizens from witnessing the horror he has inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. However, the Free World has a media problem of its own. As I began this post on March 4, 2022 my account on Facebook was disabled and taken down. This is the message I received from Facebook: “Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards.” The offending post, which Facebook disabled based solely on the title and introductory quote was “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

I actually wrote that post several years ago, and shared it then on Facebook with no problem. This time I shared it on Facebook’s Catholic groups which should have a particular interest in its subject matter. Eighty years ago the government of Germany launched a moral panic accusing and arresting without evidence, 300 Catholic priests on trumped up sexual abuse charges. It was all a fraud, and after many months in prison all but six were exonerated, and even several of them were falsely accused. For unknown reasons, Facebook did not want Catholic groups to see that post. I can no longer share my posts among the fifteen or so established Catholic groups and News groups such as Catholic News Agency on Facebook. But you can. Today, it seems, that the media of the “Free” World cannot abide such a story. We will be reassessing our use of social media, so if you have suggestions, please let us know.

I very much miss Walter Cronkite, the most trusted broadcast journalist of the 20th Century. He was the longtime anchor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. I grew up with him on my TV screen from the age of nine to almost twenty-nine. Walter Cronkite guided us through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. From our living rooms, he navigated the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam. He was with us as the nation held its breath in 1969 while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he navigated a long cold war with the Soviet Empire. Yet no one I know could tell me today whether his personal politics leaned left or right.

In his career, Cronkite won five Emmys and the George Polk Journalism Award. He was a newsman and pundit in the strict sense of the term, and I wanted to emulate him. For some today, the word, “pundit” has a negative connotation confused with “spin doctor.” Its origin, however, is the word “pandit” from the Sanskrit word “pad itah” spoken in parts of India and Sri Lanka. It refers to a learned sage or scholar, someone to whom everyone else would be wise to listen.

Few stand out in the news media of today as Walter Cronkite did. I am just a minor voice in modern media, but as I began this post I was surprised to receive an invitation from the PEW Research Center to join its survey of journalists. “The views you share will tell us about experiences of journalists like you across the country.” While writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I was also invited to serve as a Wall Street Journal Opinion Leader. That may be the reason for my PEW Research Center invitation, but I hope it is also because I try to write truth without political filters. As a result of writing with that in mind, some have come to appreciate Beyond These Stone Walls as a source of truth and reflection about truth. Over the last few years, BTSW has received several citations as a reliable news source at the “In the News” section of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Our most recent Catalyst citation was for a post that demonstrated a double standard in public perceptions about accused Catholic priests. It was one of the most widely read posts of 2021 and still dominates traffic in 2022. Of interest, that post was widely read and shared by the thousands of readers at the r/Catholicism forum at Reddit. That post was “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

I was happy about its success because that post in particular strove to cover the truth without spin. Its bottom line was something challenging to the news media status quo: that to be accused means to be guilty. In that case, the accused was my own bishop. I also have an unhappy history with him due to some of his actions and policies. Ryan MacDonald laid those out in a most important post, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”

But I was proud that I set those concerns aside to take the high road in reporting on the story of allegations against my bishop. I believe him to be innocent of any such suspicion against him. However after publication of my post about a connection between former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and claims in a civil lawsuit against my bishop, I was “permanently banned” from ever again posting content at the Reddit r/Catholicism community. Then BTSW’s invitation for membership in the Catholic Media Association was rescinded without cause or explanation. The reasons for these, and the Facebook dismissal, were political and had nothing to do with the truth of what I posted.

Political Fallout at CNN

Long after posting that first story, above, its connection to former Governor Andrew Cuomo kept it in the neon lights of online interest, something I neither intended nor expected. Because the Governor’s brother, Chris Cuomo, was a lead anchor at CNN, the spotlight of investigation fell on him as well. It was discovered that he used his position as a news anchor to coach his older brother on how to navigate the news media against multiple sexual misconduct allegations. Then similar allegations were leveled at Chris Cuomo as well, among other ethics concerns.

On his way out the CNN door under a cloud, it is suspected by some in the media that he acted as a whistleblower pointing at CNN Executive Director Jeff Zucker for a long term consensual relationship with another CNN upper management employee, Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. In the end, both of them were also forced to resign from CNN under a cloud of ethical concerns amid charges of violations of their due process rights leveled by some of the remaining CNN staffers.

Allison Gollust also once briefly served as Governor Cuomo’s spokesperson. Sources at CNN today claim that Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust “pushed hard” to orchestrate and promote a series of CNN interviews between Chris Cuomo and Governor Cuomo while navigating the earlier days of the pandemic. The interviews were for the sole purpose of countering President Donald Trump’s daily news briefs about managing the pandemic. Some staff at CNN now charge that the daily Covid-19 pandemic interviews between the Cuomo brothers set the stage for the very thing for which Chris Cuomo eventually lost his job: a blurring of the borders between news and politics.

The CNN on-air interviews between Chris and Andrew Cuomo were pushed by CNN despite their straddling an ethical line because they were a boost for ratings. Since the presidential election of 2020, ratings at all three of the 24-hour cable news networks plummeted costing the networks billions in advertising dollars, but CNN and MSNBC suffered far more than Fox News. So journalistic ethics took a back seat to ratings concerns at CNN.

This is something I have long noticed. The blurring of news and opinion at all three of these networks spilled over into the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news formats. Ratings and advertising dollars at all three were lagging behind the cable news networks which in turn were lagging behind their pre-2020 election standings. It became clear that former President Donald Trump was the cause.

CNN and MSNBC had to find ways to compete with FOX News which maintained comparatively healthy post election ratings. They could only do this by appealing to their virulently anti-Trump base. So you may have noted, as I did, that at some point around mid-2021 both CNN and MSNBC returned in their prime time news and opinion formats to a daily disparagement of Donald Trump long after he left office. This also spilled over into some print journalism. As I type this post, I have in hand a resent copy of The Week magazine which decidedly leans to the usual journalistic left. The issue I am looking at, dated in mid February 2022, contains one reference to sitting President Joe Biden and five references, all negative, to former president Donald Trump.

Of interest, CNN now plans major changes. After a merger between its parent WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., former MSNBC producer Chris Licht will become chairman and CEO of CNN Global. He is reported to be planning to adjust CNN’s broadcast format to include an emphasis on hard news and less opinion especially in its prime time schedule.

A Laptop Window onto Corruption

As I write this, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a full scale invasion of Ukraine. It is frightening to watch this unfolding reminder of the old Soviet Union and its savage consumption of neighbor states. For the most part, MSNBC and CNN are taking a little break from disparaging Donald Trump, but even now I hear the occasional blame aimed at Trump's foreign policy. We are not at all well served in this partisan distortion of news, but it is even worse than you think. Vladimir Putin knows well that both the sitting President of the United States and the American news media are compromised. There is simply no other way to say this, and I know that, for some, it will label me as a pro-Trump partisan which is not at all the truth.

A few months ago, a reader gifted me with a small book entitled Laptop from Hell by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. I was interested in the book because I was fascinated by media — and social media — treatment of this story in the months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We were a nation in denial about our own addiction to partisan politics, and the news media had become our greatest enabler as it struggled for ratings and advertising dollars. Now, with the Russian thirst for war, the truth of this story is at risk of being buried forever. So please let me do my own small part in preventing this even if it is painful. It is nonetheless the truth.

Our President is compromised, and so is much of our mainstream media. In 2019, drug-addicted Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Mac repair shop in Delaware, and then promptly forgot about it. It was just six days before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Months later, just as the 2020 primaries got underway, the owner of the repair shop discovered the abandoned laptop along with a signed repair invoice from Hunter Biden who never returned to retrieve it. The laptop ended up in the hands of the New York Post, the fourth largest newspaper in the United States.

Hunter Biden was unresponsive to inquiries to ascertain that the laptop was his. He later finally owned it by stating in an interview that “I just wasn’t keeping very good track of my possessions then.” Since no one claimed it in time, the Post began to have it analyzed and discovered the entire contents of its hard drive. Miranda Devine described it as:

“A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs and voice recordings spanning a decade. The laptop provided the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine and beyond despite repeated denials. Hunter [Biden] had something to sell. He was the son of the vice president who would go on to become the leader of the free world.”

While Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden mysteriously landed a $1 million per year position on the board of Burisma, a Ukraine oil company under suspicion for corruption. Hunter Biden had zero previous experience in that industry. Miranda Devine’s account of the contents of the “Laptop from Hell” reveals a series of emails to Hunter from shady figures in Ukraine demanding that he make good on his position by bringing political pressure to bear to remove a Ukraine prosecutor who had set his sights on investigating Burisma.

Joe Biden, while vice president, then set his own sights on that same prosecutor. In an impromptu speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, Joe Biden told the story of how he had flown into Kyiv aboard Airforce-2 and threatened to withhold from the Ukraine government $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Prosecutor General Shokin was fired. Vice President Biden boasted:

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

— Laptop from Hell p. 95

In the months leading up to the presidential election of 2020, most of the mainstream media, and the powerful social media platforms at Twitter and Facebook, suppressed this story and many other related accounts covered by the New York Post. This is not about the outcome of that election. It is about trust in government and the news media to cover news without partisan political considerations. The existence of the book, Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine, and the political efforts to silence it before a national election, now place our trust in both the media and our government at risk in a time of war. As Miranda Devine points out: “Hunter Biden found himself at the center of a titanic struggle between the US and Russia over energy... How the vice president’s son got involved with such a shady operation has always been obscured.”

Truth be told, our president and much of our news and social media credibility are now compromised by this story and Vladimir Putin knows this.

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Update from Father Gordon MacRae: As reported in this post, our Facebook page was taken down on March 4th. On March 8th, after I wrote the above post, I published a short article at Linkedin entitled “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”

A few hours after it was published, our Facebook page was reinstated without explanation and is now back online. However, when we attempted to post this post on my Facebook page, Facebook refused it with a message stating that other readers may not agree with it. Welcome to the world of the Facebook Speech Police.

We also want to bring to your attention a new addition to our “Voices from Beyond” section. It was first published a few years ago in the National Catholic Register newspaper, and it was the first time mainstream Catholic media had taken up my case. The article, by Brian Fraga, is “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name.”

There is more to come next week on the terror unfolding in Ukraine. Please share this post, and please pray for the people of Ukraine and Russia who are now pawns in these current events.