On today's show, we're joined by Peter Wolfgang of the Family Institute of Connecticut to discuss the recent ICE shooting of an immigrant woman in Minnesota, and the Catholic response to it. Plus, a look at some of the interventions some Catholics are making in the political sphere.
00:04:31.000Critics of Minnesota Ice Shooting Face Uphill Climb, Here's Why.
00:04:36.000And your question gets to the very first reason of here's why.
00:04:41.000In my article, I'm talking about the frame of mind that the agent may have been in who shot Renee Goode.
00:04:50.000And I'm reacting to what I saw in a New York Times video.
00:04:56.000The New York Times put out a video making the argument that Renee Goode was swerving her tires.
00:05:03.000She was swerving her tires to get away from the agent, to not run over the agent, which may well be.
00:05:10.000But two things can be true at the same time.
00:05:13.000And I'll get to your point about your question about Catholic theology and intentionality and why that's important.
00:05:20.000But just as a as a pragmatic matter, what it looked like to me when I watched the and, of course, what we really need is some sort of official finder of fact, whoever that would be.
00:05:32.000The rest of us can all speak about this on the Internet.
00:05:35.000But we really need some finder of fact to figure that out.
00:05:38.000I can tell you from my perspective, looking at those videos, what I saw and I looked at several of those videos, it may well be that Renee Goode was swerving her tires and trying not directly to run over that agent.
00:05:54.000But from other videos, it looks like she was aiming right for him.
00:05:58.000You know, she she she hit the guy and it it didn't look good from his perspective.
00:06:05.000So I think it's quite possible that even if she was swerving her tires away from his perspective, he didn't know that.
00:06:14.000I mean, she should have got out of the car the moment the agent said, get out of the car.
00:06:19.000I mean, that's that's the moment where I think she crossed a moral boundary.
00:06:23.000And I feel that way about the the anti ice protesters in general.
00:06:28.000There's a fantastic article at I think the website is is called Compact by Alicia Nieves, who actually organized these rapid response networks initially during the first Trump administration when they were meant to do something peaceful and lawful, which is just record these arrests and get these people the legal help they need.
00:06:49.000Now the ice agent, the anti ice protesters are doing something much more aggressive that I think does cross legal boundaries.
00:06:57.000So from the perspective of this of this poor ice agent, I think it looked to him like she was coming for him, that she was going to run him down.
00:07:06.000And he had already been through this once before he had been dragged.
00:07:12.000Now, why does this matter in terms of intentionality with Catholic moral teaching?
00:07:17.000Well, before you go into that, let's just make the point here, then the synthesis of what you're saying.
00:07:25.000I don't know if it helps to name the guy to use his name in this conversation, but his name has publicly been released. Jonathan Ross. Right.
00:07:33.000So important to see the argument you're making here before you go on now to the intentionality point is that he had a basically a split second to make an evaluation.
00:07:45.000And there could have been a number of things on his mind in that moment.
00:07:49.000And what was what was his thought of what was taking place at that moment in time would have dictated his response to that. Right.
00:07:57.000So let's do that. Let's do this now. Let's go into the intentionality point of this.
00:08:02.000So in in Catholic morality judges, the whole human act, and that's evaluated by three elements.
00:08:10.000There's the object. What are you doing? There's the intention. Why are you doing it?
00:08:16.000And there's the circumstances. How? When? By whom? With what effects?
00:08:21.000So taking that those guidelines, look at the perspective of the agent.
00:08:26.000I mean, was he trying to kill this woman out of out of malice? Was it gratuitous?
00:08:32.000Was she was he trying to teach a lesson to the anti ice protesters?
00:08:36.000It doesn't look that way to me at all. I mean, according to the government statistics, there have been there were ninety nine such episodes in 2025 last year of cars.
00:08:50.000There's a lot of people trying to ram ice agents. They have been through this over and over again.
00:08:55.000If anything, the ice agents have an incredible record of public safety, given how outrageously dangerous have been the activities of the protesters.
00:09:06.000And this particular agent, as we said, had had been dragged.
00:09:10.000So from his perspective, he's got a split second to think about this. Do I defend my life or do I get run over?
00:09:17.000And he had to make that call. And I think, according to Catholic morality, which judges the intentionality, how, when, by whom, with what effects, I think he made the best call that he did over the circumstances.
00:09:31.000And when we consider, you know, when we're looking at that big picture, I really don't think, according to Catholic morality, and I wrote about this in both my articles, I really don't think that the ice protesters, that is the anti ice protesters, the people against ice.
00:09:47.000I don't think they have any or very little moral credibility here when compared with past protest movements.
00:09:55.000And we can, we can quibble with some of those movements, we can talk about whatever the moral failings were of some of their leadership.
00:10:02.000But when you think about Martin Luther King's early civil rights movement in the 1950s, early 1960s, when you think about the Operation Rescue pro-life protests of the 1980s, when you think about Gandhi and India in the 1940s, these were all nonviolent protests.
00:10:21.000The protesters were all taught, certainly in the case of King and Operation Rescue, to go limp when you were being arrested. And that's not what's going on with ICE.
00:10:34.000Because, okay, you make the point here that Catholic teaching allows civil disobedience.
00:10:41.000But you make the point, and you underline this quite strongly, that the anti-ICE protests aren't comparable to Martin Luther King's civil rights protests, also because of the violent nature of the anti-ICE protests.
00:10:59.000Because the Catholic-endorsed civil disobedience is predicated on a nonviolent response. Is that correct?
00:11:08.000That is correct. And I'm pretty sure that I quote, I want to say it's paragraph 2243. I don't have the article in front of me. But it's either 2242 or 2243 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which does allow for civil disobedience.
00:11:25.000Now, the very next paragraph does talk about the circumstances under which violence could happen.
00:11:32.000But they throw down something like five criteria that have to be met. And they're very stringent.
00:11:37.000And we are nowhere near that with what's going on right now.
00:11:41.000That's more like something like what's happening in Iran or, I don't know, some other country where the oppression is of magnitudes higher than whatever it is that even the anti-ICE people think that they're facing in the United States of America right now.
00:11:58.000Under normal circumstances, the civil disobedience, our faith does allow for and even encourage that under certain conditions, civil disobedience.
00:12:08.000But it must be nonviolent then. And these tactics, I think, discredit the anti-ICE protesters.
00:12:15.000And also, and this is very important, the cause. You know, fighting for racial equality is one thing or fighting to protect the unborn child, that's another thing.
00:12:27.000What the anti-ICE protesters are fighting for here is an attack on public order altogether.
00:12:35.000They're not saying the same thing. Even if we disagree with, say, Pope Leo or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops about what is the proper role of U.S. immigration policy.
00:12:48.000If you listen very closely to the Holy Father and to our bishops in the United States, they are not saying the same thing that the anti-ICE protesters are saying.
00:12:57.000What they are saying is, look, immigrants need to be, they're human beings, they need to be treated with dignity.
00:13:02.800And we could debate whether or not it's even fair to bring that up, whether or not they are being treated with dignity or not.
00:13:09.420Maybe that's, it's unfair. But the fact is, that's all that the bishops are arguing.
00:13:14.240The anti-ICE protesters, by contrast, they're arguing something different.
00:13:18.760They want ICE abolished altogether. They want to return to Biden's policy of de facto open borders.
00:13:24.680We're going to come back to Biden in a moment after a quick shout out to one of our sponsors.
00:13:32.840Peter, do hold on for the next 60 seconds.
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00:15:05.800The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order,
00:15:16.060to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the gospel.
00:15:20.820And I think you've made a cogent argument why that's not the case at the moment.
00:15:25.720What do you think, Peter Wolfgang, as a faithful Catholic, as someone who runs a Catholic organization,
00:15:32.400what do you think and what would you say to confused faithful when you see your bishops and your cardinals descending into the political square
00:15:42.680to make overtly political and partisan policy positions, portraying those positions as the official teaching of the church,
00:15:52.140with very little reference to actually what the Catholic Church teaches?
00:15:57.720You know, the late Father Richard John Newhouse, who was the founder of First Things magazine,
00:18:37.600And I don't think they always do that.
00:18:39.480You used the word confused, and I think that's right.
00:18:41.640I think they can tend to confuse the faithful.
00:18:43.860And there are certainly voices out there.
00:18:46.420We saw this a lot during the Pope Francis era, voices out there that say, if you deviate in the slightest way from anything the bishops say, you're a heretic or a dissenter.
00:19:12.920And I like the fact that you mentioned explicitly the point here about the prudential issues, because that's absolutely key to this, right?
00:19:23.360And you actually, you see here the absurdity of that late, unlamented Pope Francis going on and on about sort of anti-clericalism and the need for the laity to be involved in sort of the synodality and all the rest of it.
00:19:43.800But in fact, we haven't had a Pope as clerical as Francis since Pius XII, and arguably since before that.
00:19:55.960Here was a guy who really insisted, effectively, his de facto behaviour in the public square was that there's no such thing as prudential issues.
00:20:04.700I will tell you what are your essential political beliefs to be.
00:20:10.000And there's very little difference between that kind of behaviour and a religious cult.
00:20:18.240We have about like four or five minutes left.
00:20:22.640The one thing I want to quickly hit in the rest of this segment is your argument here that it's actually the Catholic left itself that is responsible, along with Joe Biden, for the present situation that ICE is trying to work against.
00:20:39.420Would you make that argument for the war room posse so they can see this and consider this?
00:20:45.220Because the left, the Catholic left, I've seen that you have been under heavy attack on social media by some proponents of Catholic progressives.
00:20:55.120They seem to be oblivious or deliberately oblivious to the fact that they are largely responsible for the present situation.
00:21:02.060Well, there's a phrase that I'm sure war room viewers are well familiar with, Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS.
00:21:13.960And, you know, I've often said the people, and I see them on my newsfeed, complaining day and night about President Trump, everything President Trump has done.
00:21:22.120And look, you know, President Trump is not above criticism.
00:21:26.860You know, my attitude towards him is transactional.
00:21:30.900I'm not, I don't hang on his every word.
00:21:33.660I think he's delivered for the Catholic faithful in many ways.
00:21:40.100But what I've, so, you know, he's not above criticism.
00:21:42.620But what I would say to the Trump derangement syndrome, and particularly to the Catholic left, is instead of, like, raging day and night about how people like me or any of the rest of us who voted for Trump, how did we do that?
00:33:40.300So here was an Islamic theologian, who basically said, you heard her there, the subtitles were there, who was saying that it is legitimate for Muslims, conquerors, to take women as prisoners and then to rape them.
00:34:07.260Yet, when you said almost, what, eight years ago, little more than that, on January the 2nd, I think it was, 2018, when you said that Muslims were rapist hordes entering Europe, you were, the state authorities, I mean, I know they dropped, I think, the case a couple of weeks afterwards,
00:34:32.440but they opened immediate prosecution against you on hate crime grounds.
00:34:41.400You were banned on Facebook, you were banned on, or they took your post down on Facebook, you were provisionally banned on Twitter.
00:34:49.400That just indicates how much times have changed over recent years.
00:34:53.320Just tell us your perspective, because, of course, the AFD is on like 25, 30 percent in the polls now in Germany, and it's doing very, very well.
00:35:03.360Eight years ago, it was a very different situation, and it took a lot of courage to come out here and say what you said.
00:35:10.920Just tell us a bit about what happened then and what's happening now.
00:35:14.400So, I think one has to start with the context of the tweet I made at that very day, that was New Year's morning, I think it was 1st or 2nd of January, I think it was 1st, or even the 31st of December.
00:35:35.580So, it was at the very moment when everyone was about heading to celebrate New Year's, and we in Germany had experienced a disaster a year ago at New Year's,
00:35:51.940because we had hundreds of Muslims celebrating in Cologne, surrounding women, almost raping, you know, sexually, go after them, and, you know, being violent and everything.
00:36:08.740It was a huge disaster the year before.
00:36:13.220And then, the next year, so from 2017 to 2018, the same thing was about to happen again.
00:36:24.740So, lots of Muslims from all over the place were travelling in trains towards Cologne, because they wanted to celebrate again, because they very much enjoyed what they did the year before.
00:36:37.880And at the very moment, when all those Muslims were travelling in trains towards Cologne, the police made sure that they did not reach Cologne.
00:36:49.760So, they picked them out of the trains, because they perfectly knew what was their plan.
00:36:56.000And so, at the same time, while those Muslims were taken out of the trains to not enter Cologne, at the very moment, the police in Cologne and the region were sending out New Year's wishes on Arab language.
00:37:17.640So, wishing you all the best for the new year, and hope you enjoy the night and have a nice party, something likewise, in Arab.
00:37:29.160So, they were addressing those whom they, at the same minute, were trying to not have this party again, and to make sure that it did not happen again in Cologne.
00:37:41.540And so, I just made a statement on this, and I was kind of strongly asking myself, putting it out on X, then Twitter, back then, asking why the hell is the police addressing those sex offenders, who in hundreds were trying to reach Cologne,
00:38:05.620why are they addressing them, why are they addressing them in Arab language, and wishing them all the best for the new year?
00:38:13.560They should have sent out a different message, like, don't even try, don't even, how do you dare to go to Cologne?
00:38:24.000Just go back wherever you are, but don't even try to get there.
00:38:28.640So, there was a perfect context for this coming, and then, I mean, then the whole, you know, jet storm started, and the legal process came in process.
00:38:43.460Okay, but you were vindicated, because we just played the video clip of the Muslim scholar, of the Islamic scholar, and there, that was afterwards, right?
00:38:55.480But that was, she was saying exactly what you had said in your tweet.
00:39:00.140And that's perhaps where things would have left, had it not been for the fact that there is something going on now,
00:39:05.440with the US administration, that is really starting to take seriously to the political persecution of the right now.
00:39:12.500We heard J.D. Vance's speech to Munich at the Defence Conference a year ago.
00:39:17.980We've seen the same thing repeated in the United States' strategic security document of a couple of weeks ago,
00:39:28.520always underlying the point that the immigration here in continental Europe is undermining America's allies' ability to be allies to the United States.
00:39:38.440Specifically, Denver, if you wouldn't mind putting up that tweet now on the screen, and we'll just talk about this.
00:39:46.860What we saw, I think, just a couple of days ago here, is the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, I think, Sarah Rogers,
00:39:57.700quoting you and attaching that, the headline there that you can see from the Muslim scholar.
00:40:09.000This sort of thing, this sort of support from the White House, from an American administration, would have been unthinkable back in 2018.
00:40:20.740Tell me, if you will, because the AFD has already been registered by the German security services as, I think, a domestic terrorist threat.
00:40:32.080Tell me now, tell me now what, in fact, let's just have a quick ad read and I'll come back with the question,
00:40:39.140because I want to know how American interest in the domestic German political situation is starting to make a difference in your favour.
00:40:49.160That's really where I'd like to know now, because the administration is really starting to answer many people's prayers.
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00:42:44.280Back to Beatrix von Stork. Beatrix, tell me, how is American interest making a difference now for the AFD in Germany?
00:42:56.840Well, this has a heavy impact on what has been done by the administration and what has been done by Elon Musk, one must say,
00:43:05.220because at that time I was forced to delete my tweet on that Twitter to have access to my account again.
00:43:14.560And I was pursued. So there were critical complaints to possible incitement, to hatred.
00:43:22.860They have been filed with the Cologne Public Prosecutor's Office.
00:43:27.760So there was a huge press echo and everything. I was forced to put that tweet down and so forth.
00:43:36.600So this has not changed. So first of all, on X, we have free speech back.
00:43:44.100Now they are trying to go after X, of course, but still it has gotten much better than ever since.
00:43:51.700And of course, every move the U.S. administration is doing is helping us, at least those globalist elites,
00:43:59.720they start to understand that they have a heavy enemy in their fight to take down free speech.
00:44:08.600I think the U.S. national security strategy puts it out very clearly, fristically, I would say,
00:44:14.420that free speech is essential to democracy and that the United States is only willing also to, well,
00:44:21.900protect allies when they stick to the same values.
00:44:26.740And democracy and free speech is the center value we should all share.
00:44:33.260And so this has kind of an impact for us. It's very, very important.
00:44:37.600But, of course, still, our legal forces are going against us.
00:44:44.060You know, we are brought to court still for, you know, calling our Minister for Economy an idiot.
00:44:53.220So then they will come, they will search your house, they will confiscate your iPhone or whatsoever,
00:45:01.860and your computer, it's still a disaster, but it's very helpful what is coming from abroad the ocean.
00:45:13.080Can you tell me what, because I guess you're going to be right at the center of these moves as deputy leader,
00:45:19.200could you tell me what the present state of play is with regards to the debate about finally eliminating the cordon sanitaire,
00:45:32.260which blocks the AFD from participating in coalition governments?
00:45:40.800You did mention, I think you were picked up in the Washington Post,
00:45:44.000you did mention that if you aren't banned, if the AFD isn't banned,
00:45:49.200you will eventually have to be involved, because there simply won't be any other majorities.
00:45:55.580Tell me, I know that I have started to pick out, in fact, we covered this on the show last Friday,
00:46:00.600that there are soundings now coming out from the CDU itself.
00:46:04.140Some people are coming out and saying that this cordon sanitaire not only hasn't worked,
00:46:09.440it's actually made the AFD more popular with people.
00:46:12.800What is the current state of play there?
00:46:16.720Well, I would say there are different levels of issues you can start off with.
00:46:24.280So first of all, of course, everyone basically publicly is saying,
00:46:29.180well, we will stick to the firewall, the cordon sanitaire, it will never be given up.
00:46:34.100But we know this on the regional level, on the local level, already is not functioning,