Pope Bob from Chicago on Friday promoted Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, who came to the US illegally in 1990 when he was 18, to become the archbishop of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston in West Virginia. Menjivar-Ayala in 2023 became the US’s first Salvadoran-born bishop, and in his current position as auxiliary bishop of the Washington Archdiocese has called on Americans to oppose Trump’s mass deportation / ethnic cleansing agenda.

The Washington Post reports (gift link) that, in a lovely bit of symmetry, Menjivar-Ayala will be replacing Bishop Mark Brennan, who years ago helped Menjivar-Ayala get his green card: “At the time, Brennan headed the priest-recruiting office for the Washington Archdiocese and saw Menjivar as a promising candidate who needed to fix his immigration status.”

It’s quite a journey for someone who as a teenager paid coyotes to smuggle him across the border in the trunk of a car, then applied for asylum and eventually became a citizen in 2006. Here’s Menjivar-Ayala speaking about his experiences at a 2025 conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

It’s no coincidence that Pope Leo XIV has elevated someone whose thoughts about borders are so different (and poetic!) from those of the current US bossman:

A border can serve as a dividing line that limits and excludes or it can become a meeting place where people exchange products, ideas and customs, giving birth to new possibilities.

Borders can either lock us in or open us to new horizons. It all depends on how we approach them.

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In an interview with US Catholic last August, Menjivar-Ayala recalled his youth in El Salvador, where he was a witness to the brutality of the US-backed government paramilitaries. He tells about meeting survivors fleeing a massacre along a river where he and his mother were planning to fish:

But we saw a group of people hurrying across the river, carrying bundles. And we said, “What’s going on?”

Up above, about 200 meters further along, was the suspension bridge—a hammock bridge, as we called it, because there were no cars, it was only for people to cross on foot. The guerrillas and the civilians were coming from one side, and the military troops were crossing from the other side. And we heard a big bombardment going on up above. And then we realized what had happened to the village up there: They had all been massacred.

In 1982, his own family was forced to leave their farm, given just three days’ notice and not allowed to take anything with them. In 1990, following the Salvadoran Army’s November 1989 massacre of six Jesuits and two women (a housekeeper and her daughter) in San Salvador, Menjivar-Ayala, then 19, decided to flee to the US to join his sister, who was already here.

He made two unsuccessful tries before he and his younger brother, 17, and two cousins tried again, but were caught and jailed in Mexico, as he told the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty in 2023 (gift link), shortly after Pope Francis named him an auxiliary archbishop for the Archdiocese of Washington. After two days in jail, they

paid a mordida — a bribe — to get released. Then, by arrangement with a smuggler, they stuffed themselves into the trunk of a car driven by an elderly American. When they felt the car stop and heard the man crank up the music on the radio, it would be their signal to be still and silent.

That is how they got past the teeming port of entry at San Ysidro, Calif., between Tijuana and San Diego. The four young men spent hours in that trunk before reaching Los Angeles, where Menjivar’s sister and a new life were waiting. In a mountainous village in El Salvador, his mother, who had been lighting prayer candles for their safety, offered up a Mass of thanksgiving.

He did what work he could get, and after two years moved to Maryland, where he worked as a janitor and doing construction while working on his English and completing a GED. He applied for asylum and began volunteering as a youth minister at his church in Hyattsville, Maryland. The parish sponsored him for a green card, as he told US Catholic last August: “At that time, that was still possible: If you had a paid religious job, you could get a religious visa. None of that exists anymore.”

(We’re happy to say that then-Bishop Menjivar-Ayala turned out to be wrong, though he was right at the time of the interview: In a rare bit of non-horrible immigration news, last fall the program was renewed by Congress and even improved a bit.)

All along the way, he was helped by people who saw a human being, not an “illegal alien,” and by 1995 he was studying for the priesthood at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami, in a bilingual program. He did pretty okay, as Tumulty reports:

He showed such aptitude there that upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he was sent for further studies in Rome, where he received a master’s degree in theology before being ordained a priest in 2004.

From there, he advanced consistently through a series of pastoral roles and positions inside the Washington archdiocese; among other things, he served as a member of its “Child Protection Advisory Board,” created in response to the horrible sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Throughout his career, he has worked with immigrant communities from all over the world, and insisted that all people deserve to be treated with dignity. In his last sermon at his church after becoming a bishop, he said, “We cannot say that we love God if we do not love those who are closer to us. […] Empathy, my brothers and sisters. Empathy — putting ourselves in the shoes of others — is to realize our common humanity.”

Menjivar-Ayala regularly invokes Bishop (and now saint) Óscar Romero, who was assassinated in San Salvador in 1980 for talking too much like Jesus when it came to helping the poor and protecting the oppressed.

In an Easter op-ed for the National Catholic Reporter last year, as Trump’s mass-deportation machinery descended upon immigrant communities and declared anyone without papers to be the “worst of the worst,” Menjivar-Ayala wrote:

Tragically, this onslaught is instead being met with silence by many — or even approval. To those of you who are silent or think this does not involve you, to those of you who are not troubled by this — or worse, who applaud it — particularly those who are Catholic, I ask you: Do you not see the suffering of your neighbors? Do you not realize the pain and misery and very real fear and anxiety these unjust government operations and policies are causing? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet? In the final teaching of his public ministry, Jesus warned that we will be judged on how we respond to others in distress (Mt 25:41-46).

Just like a common US senator who should be executed for telling soldiers to refuse illegal orders, Menjivar-Ayala urged federal officers and others working in the government to remember what Óscar Romero said in his final homily, the Sunday before he was murdered. Romero called on government agents to “reclaim your conscience and to obey your conscience rather than the command to sin. […] I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression!”

Menjivar-Ayala also appealed directly to federal agents and support staff, telling them,

“What you are doing is worth nothing if it is stained with unjust cruelty. That is not what America stands for. You too can and should speak out against this terror and infliction of suffering on people. You can refuse to be involved in oppression and these grievous assaults on human rights and dignity.

“True, if you do, there may be adverse personal consequences. Óscar Romero certainly paid a price for speaking against the state of siege in his country. It might even mean leaving your job, but that is better than being complicit with evil.”

It’s certainly not a coincidence that, in his last post to Twitter before becoming pope, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost cited Menjivar-Ayala’s op-ed and its call to “see the suffering of your neighbors” and to speak up against it.

As we’ve said before, you don’t have to be a believer to recognize the truth of what this Pope and this new archbishop are saying. In these terrible times in America, we can’t think of a better voice to be elevated to prominence.

A-fucking-men.

[WaPo (gift link) / National Catholic Reporter / US Catholic / WaPo 2023 profile (gift link)]

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Go In Peace, Ye Filthy Fuckaducks

Greetings and hello, slack-jawed American ninnyhammers of Wonkette! It is I, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, back to make the talk to you. It has been some time since we spoke, da? Let us just consult glorious Wonkette archive ... not since phony Western Christmas has Vladimir checked in. So long ago! So long ago, even Mets fans had not yet lost all hope for season. As usual, they waited until February.

Ha ha, just a little America’s pastime humor, Wonkette! Vladimir does not care for baseball. He does not, how do you say, get it? Pitcher generously tries to throw you ball, and instead of catching and keeping, you try to hit ball as far away from you as you can. Why do you not just keep baseball? Why do you not collect all baseballs in secret Swiss bank accounts while other Americans go baseball-less? If terrified Russian oligarch gives Vladimir Rolls Royce Ghost as show of appreciation for letting him make money and not skydive from window, Vladimir does not immediately put it in glorious revolutionary catapult and shoot it into Ural Mountains. What would be point?

Did you think your friend Vladimir had abandoned you? Nyet! Vladimir would never abandon Wonkette. Is only American outlet where he gets to show off humorous side. New York Times is always so serious. It is always “Mr. President, how long will you stay in Ukraine” this and “Mr. President, do you hate the men who say they are women as much as we do” that. Borrrrring!

Let Vladimir make joke. Or he will have you shot. Ha ha! More joke! Or is it? Maybe!

But Vladimir did not come here today to talk American baseball. There is much other news to be talked at to you about special military operation that is not war in Ukraine. Granted, calling conflict that has 1.2 million Russian casualties “not a war” might seem strange. But is not war! And there have not been 1.2 million Russian casualties. Glorious Russian soldiers simply napping. When they wake up, look out, Zionist Nazi government of Ukraine!

But. There is report out in stupid Western newspaper that Russian soldiers in special military operation in phony nation of Ukraine don’t have food. Is much blah blah about supply lines and difficulty of keeping them going in winter and strong Russian soldiers eating rations that expired in 2002. Pigwash! Robust Russian supply lines are better than puny Ukrainian supply lines. Russian supply lines: strong like strong Russian bear. Ukrainian supply lines: weak and girly like weak and girly Ukrainian bear.

Is simply Western lies that soldier with ironic call sign “Limpy” cut leg off dead comrade and attempted to eat it. Dead comrade had actually lost leg in poker game. Is it other soldier’s fault he did not know how to make tourniquet? If leg was eaten, and Vladimir is not saying this happened, well, what else was soldier supposed to do? Let perfectly good leg go to waste? If dead soldier were chicken, would you stop other chickens from eating leg?

Of course, if your chickens eat each other, you might have big problem! Chickens have become werewolves! Why not? It happened with rabbit in big Wallace & Gromit documentary.

But paper says Russian troops are eating each other. Is not true! Now, Russian troops are eating North Koreans glorious comrade Kim Jong-un sent to help in special military operation. And he said we could. He said, “Magnificent comrade Vladimir, my men will fight to death. You would even be doing me a favor. Is very hard feeding majestic North Korean people as it is. Think of North Korean soldiers as library books you don’t have to return. Very edible library books. Ha ha, did I say edible?”

Is true, he said this to Vladimir! And even then, strong Russian soldiers not eating much. North Korean soldiers too stringy. Very little protein.

Besides, Russian soldiers do not require much food. Russian soldiers can fight for days on nothing more than dirt and army vodka. You know of army vodka, Wonkette? It is made by soaking rotten potatoes in engine grease scraped out of blown-up tanks. Is good stuff! Will put hair on your chest and chests of all your descendants. Even the women.

Is also not true that March was first month in over two years Russian soldiers did not capture Ukraine territory. Russia is always capturing Ukraine territory! Is Russian territory now! Buildings all have onion domes now, no takebacks!

Truth is, army took month off to work on NCAA brackets. Wait until April report, was big month.

Also is not true that annual May 9 parade will not have any military equipment because we needed it all for special military operation. Nor is it true we will not have military cadets marching because they are all at front being ground up into hamburger. Russia has plenty of missiles and soldiers! Whoever says otherwise is uninvited from parade. They all must attend alternate event in Siberian gulag instead.

As friend Donald says, thank you for your attention to this matter! And as we add in Russia, or else I will shoot you!

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Dave Chappelle is happy to make tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans comedy routines—”I’m team TERF,” he said in a 2021 special—but now apparently draws the line at Republicans turning those jokes into policy.

In a Wednesday interview on NPR’s Newsmakers show, Chappelle said he resents that the Republican Party’s 2024 platform “ran on transgender jokes” and was “a weaponized version of what I was doing.”  

He recalled a time when Lauren Boebert, then a GOP House rep from Colorado, took a photo with him and shared it on Instagram with the caption “Just three people who understand that there’s only two genders.” 

“She should never do that with a person like me,” Chappelle said.

But the comedian has long injected anti-trans material into his comedy shows, most notably in a multiyear, multi-special streak beginning with his 2017 Netflix special Equanimity. In that special, and in 2019’s Sticks & Stones, Chappelle called being trans similar to lying about one’s racial background: In Equanimity, he compared being trans to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who pretended to be Black. The 2021 comedy special in which he claimed to be on “team TERF,” The Closer, included Chappelle’s extended defense of J.K. Rowling, whom he stated was “canceled” for saying “gender was a fact.” 

“On behalf of the trans community, I’ll go ahead and address your weakest defenses. How much do you have to participate in my self-image? Not at all.” Dahlia Belle, a transgender comic, wrote in the Guardian shortly following the release of The Closer.

On Wednesday, Chappelle asserted that he was the subject of “rage-baiting” during this time. “I am a filthy nightclub comic,” he told NPR’s Michel Martin. “That’s all I see myself as.”

“People had drinks, and they just were gruff and said what they said back then. And it was never a big deal,” he continued. 

But Chappelle’s fixation on trans people, and anti-trans routines, extended across years and multiple specials. They were indistinguishable from, and grist for, the material of conservative streamers and right-wing edgelords. The comedian’s remarks about what would happen if LeBron James said he was a woman and dominated the WNBA were used in Donald Trump’s 2021 rally against trans rights; Candace Owens made the same Rachel Dolezal comparison last year. 

“I challenge Black cishet men to interrogate what their identity means to them,” writer and transgender rights activist Raquel Willis wrote in a 2021 social media post about Chappelle’s comedy. “Who are you without being the “head” of the household/tribe/culture?…Who could you be if you took on expanding Black masculinity and manhood without having to repress other Black experiences of the feminine, gender nonconforming, queer variety?”

Content note: sexual assault, sex trafficking, real bad misogyny

On June 9, 2024, a 26-year-old former soldier and security guard named Kyle Clifford went to the home in Hertfordshire, England, where his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt lived with her mother and sister and killed all of them using a crossbow — though not before raping and torturing Louise Hunt for several hours.

Hunt had recently broken up with him over his “views and behavior.” Not surprising, given the fact that it was later discovered that, in the run-up to the massacre, the soon-to-be family annihilator spent many hours listening to Andrew Tate.

Prosecutors argued that this should have been admitted into evidence because “the sort of violent misogyny promoted by Tate is the same type of motivation that … fuelled both the murders and the rape.” The judge, however, determined that it would be “deeply prejudicial” as Tate was “almost a poster boy for misogynists.”

Why am I telling you this horrible, horrible, deeply disturbing story? Because just recently, Andrew Tate — the violent, (alleged) sex trafficking misogynist who was in prison in Romania until the Trump administration freed him (no sex trafficker left behind!) and who makes a large portion of his money teaching men how to trick women into making them money as cam girls and allegedly inspired Kyle Clifford to violently murder three women — shot to the very top of Substack’s New Bestsellers list. Tate joined the site earlier this month and has since racked up 1.1 million followers … which is pretty incredibly depressing.

As a result, Substack ended up trending on social media yesterday, with many people (fairly!) saying that they would no longer support any site hosted on the platform. Who is a website hosted on the platform? Wonkette is a website hosted on the platform. Many users already left Substack when it was revealed that they hosted several anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi sites (and made money off of them, too). It’s likely that more will leave now.

I’m a big fan of free speech — even beyond the idea that it’s only illegal if the government censors speech, which is factually true. And this isn’t like, complaining that Bari Weiss’s “Free Press” sucks. (Bari Weiss’s Free Press sucks.) But there’s a difference, a big one, between permitting speech and platforming it, and an even bigger difference between that and making money off of it. Substack takes 10 percent of every subscription, so they’re technically making money off of Andrew Tate, an (alleged, but also self-confessed) sex trafficker and rapist who makes his money off of teaching young men how to be garbage human beings who think women are obligated to serve them.

There’s an argument that could be made for allowing all speech, no matter how vile, but there’s not really one for allowing (and benefiting from) monetization. Nearly every content creation site that allows for monetization allows for this.

On YouTube, creators who reuse content, who make automated, repetitive content, or who engage in hate speech or even serious profanity cannot make money off of their videos. The site has also banned several users entirely … including Andrew Tate. TikTok bans hate speech, bullying, and hateful ideologies and will demonetize or ban users who engage in this. Users like, again, Andrew Tate, who is also banned from TikTok. Even Meta, which, grossly, specifically allows users to “call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality,” says they ban “hateful conduct” against protected classes and still restrict hate speech on monetized content. Andrew Tate is also banned from Meta. Twitch also bans hate speech and will demonetize content creators who violate that policy. Andrew Tate is also banned from Twitch.

Hell, even The Site Formerly Known As Twitter will take away users’ ability to monetize their feed, though less for hate speech than for, uh, getting mad about people using AI to post fake child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) of them. That would, for the record, be just about the only site other than Substack that has not banned Andrew Tate (well, since Musk has been in charge, anyway, he was banned before that).

It is worth noting that while it’s not very substantial, Substack at least has a policy against inciting violence against protected classes.

Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.

We can’t know what Tate is publishing on his Substack, as it is for paid subscribers only (unlike Wonkette, which will always be free), but we do know he has a long and storied habit of encouraging violence against women — who are, in fact, a protected class.

He has bragged about breaking a woman’s jaw. Once, when describing how he would react if a woman complained about him cheating on her, he said, “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.” He has said that women should “bear some responsibility” for being raped. He’s also been accused of raping and strangling at least two women he’s dated.

In fact, he directly told one of these women “I love raping you.”

On top of that, for several years now teachers have said that they and their female students now have to deal with sexual harassment and bullying from boys as young as 11 who idolize Tate. That might not directly be “violence” but it seems highly unlikely that it won’t get to that level eventually, as these boys grow up. Even when he’s not actively encouraging violence against women, he’s promoting hatred of them in a world in which nearly 9 out of 10 women who are murdered by men are murdered by men that they know, in which we’ve seen myriad men go on mass murder sprees simply because they hate women. Indeed, an Andrew Tate admirer in the UK was sentenced to six years in prison a couple years ago after plotting an attack on his university.

If we can’t see his posts, we can’t know what kind of violence he is encouraging against women, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of that policy. Given that we know, for a fact, that this is one of his areas of interest, it would really behoove Substack to follow in the footsteps of practically every other platform on earth and kick his ass off.

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Substack is not a publicly traded company. If it were, one could say it had an obligation to its stockholders to not do anything that would damage the brand so severely. However, they should feel some obligation to the world at large to not promote and make money off of someone who encourages violence against women (or anyone!), as well as to their other users who stand to lose subscriptions and money as people defect. (That’s us again, hi.)

Unfortunately, we are not in really a position to leave because (inside baseball!) we have 22 years of posts that would need to be transferred to a new site — something that took many months and tens of thousands of dollars the last few times we’ve done so. It would be a whole lot better for us if the platform would just not host and make money off of neo-Nazis and violent misogynists. It’s not actually that hard. If practically every other site on earth can do it, we think Substack can manage.

But if you’d like to continue (Or start! Always feel free to start, any time!) supporting us without supporting Substack, you can donate through Paypal, join our Patreon, or buy our merch.

We appreciate you. This bullshit, not so much.

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