WikiLeaks: Hillary Clinton Confidantes Mock Evangelicals and Conservative Catholics in Podesta Emails
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri and Center for American Progress fellow John Halpin mocked conservative Catholicism as an "amazing bastardization of the faith" in new emails released by WikiLeaks.
In the fresh batch of emails released as part of a reported cache of "Podesta emails," with the subject line "Conservative Catholicism," Halpin also mocks News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson for being Catholic.
"Ken Auletta's latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic. Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus," Halpin wrote in a 2011 missive to Podesta and Palmieri.
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"Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups. It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy," he added.
Palmieri, who MRCTV reports was also with the Center for American Progress at the time, added in the email chain that she believes Murdoch, Thomson, and many other conservatives are Catholic because they think it's "the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion."
"Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals," she added.
Halpin thought Palmieri made an "excellent point."
"Excellent point. They can throw around 'Thomistic' thought and 'subsidiarity' and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about," he wrote.
John Podesta, chairman of Clinton's campaign, was included in the email chain but didn't comment. The email was posted to WikiLeaks along with over 1,000 Podesta emails that were hacked. The Russian government is suspected to be behind the cyber attack.
The New Yorker article referenced in the email comes from the April 2011 issue and is titled "Murdoch's Best Friend".
"Thomson likes to remain slightly hidden. But he is perhaps Murdoch's only close friend. The two men are both from Australia, are married to Chinese women, and were born (thirty years apart) on the same day, March 11th. In restaurants, they order Australian wines and delight in discussing that country's politics. They are also both raising their children as Catholics," Auletta wrote in the piece in describing how similar the men are.
"It surprised me how important it was to both of them that their children were baptized and instructed," one family intimate noted in the piece. "This is something they did together. The four kids sat down with a priest."
