Our senior correspondent and resident Bigfoot expert Audre Myers reached out to me with a request:  could I, she wondered, give a shout-out (my term, not hers) to a friend’s blog?

The friend is Scoop, a regular commenter over at Nebraska Energy Observer.  Unbeknownst to yours portly, dear old Scoop has a blog with the somewhat unwieldy title Smoke of Satan & the Open Windows of Vatican II.

From what I can gather, SoStOWoVII is a Catholic blog that is—to put it mildly—skeptical of the modernizing “reforms” of Vatican II, which (to my limited Protestant understandng) abandoned the Latin Mass and began the slow wokification of Catholicism—or, at the very least, its watering down in a quest for “relevance.”  The film The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), based on the real-life chief exorcist of Rome, Father Gabriele Amorth, alludes to this modernizing impulse in the form of a stridently modern bishop who scoffs at the idea that demons—and, therefore, Evil—actually exist.

Audre recommended a particular piece from Scoop’s blog, “Voting ‘Rights’; or, more properly, Voting Regulations.”  Scoop makes the argument that far too many people who shouldn’t vote have been granted the privilege to do so—the illiterate and those who don’t pay taxes, primarily.

Calling for literacy tests to vote in the United States will quickly bring cries of “racism,” as the practice is associated with efforts to prevent black Americans from voting (which, at one point, and in some places, was true).  Of course, everything will get you called “racist” these days—heck, even just being white is enough!—so maybe we should go there.  I mean, don’t we want people to be able to think critically to—you know—be able to read if they’re going to be picking our elected representatives?

Paying taxes also seems like a bare minimum requirement, though I suspect that Uncle Sam gets his pound of flesh from even the most indigent among us.  Everyone pays sales tax, for example, and anyone with a job has some tax withheld from their paychecks.  Even if they get that money back—and then some—the federal (and, where applicable, State) government(s) make(s) interest on those withheld taxes.  That said, there are plenty of “free riders” who are suckling far more from Uncle Sam’s withered teat than they are putting into the old boy.

A better—albeit far more controversial—model would be property ownership.  People will shout “he’s a tool of the oligarchs!,” but I’m thinking here of simply owning a home, or being able to demonstrate that one has some other investment—“skin in the game,” as Scoop puts it—in the nation and their respective State.  Other countries (like Portugal and Malta) sell citizenship or generous visas for those willing to pony up with big investments, so the principle of having something invested—physically or fiscally—in the system makes some sense, and prevents a jealous Marxist backlash from those willing to enrich themselves from the public coffers.

Of course, these proposals won’t go anywhere.  What will go somewhere is Scoop’s blog, if folks are willing to give him a try.  While his particular axe-to-grind is fairly niche—I wager a good number of my readers don’t care much about the inner machinations of the Catholic Church (although they probably should, and it’s super interested to say the least)—he provides useful and engaging insights into that world.

Check him out!