Honestly, I delayed this particular piece because it may be the most terrifying posts that I have made to date. We have discussed at length that if you were born in the United States in any year in the 1900’s, you believed that you were born into a Christian country. Even the progressive left promoted that idea, for different reasons obviously, but we all agreed that this was God’s Country. President Ronald Reagan was famous for referring to us as God’s Country, and Country Music, which is intentionally nostalgic, still asserts that it is God’s Country.
Where does this idea come from? First, Freedom of Religion was enshrined in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers, too, believed that this was a Christian country founded in greater part by Protestant religious dissenters. Many of our colonists had personally faced persecution in Europe for their beliefs, so our Founding Fathers enshrined the Freedom of Religion in the Constitution, believing that it would be sufficient to prevent the government from discriminating against our citizens on the basis of their religion. However, they never enshrined a Freedom of Conscience in the Constitution, and thus, corporations and society at large can, and do, discriminate against people who hold unfashionable conscientious beliefs. While this omission only affected those at the margins a few decades ago, it affects mainstream Christians.
However, it is now far worse than that. Our government, through the Justice Department, is now actively persecuting Christians for their beliefs. In one of the most frightening examples of this, Jack Hanick was arrested for becoming an Orthodox Christian and founding an Orthodox Christian television channel overseas. (Yes, he was not even living or working in this country.)
If the name sounds somewhat familiar, Jack Hanick, now 72, was once a very talented television producer, and he was the man Roger Ailes turned to build Fox News into what it is now. Fox News remains the number one news channel in the United States, and Mr. Hanick is one of the main visionaries that accomplished that feat, though he left Fox many years ago. He is a recipient of two Emmy Awards for his achievements there.
Mr. Hanick was not just a television producer. He is very intelligent and holds an anthropology degree from Harvard University. He was born into a Roman Catholic, and he claims that at his confirmation, at 12 years of age, he heard a voice that said, “One day you will have to do something very important, to which I will call you." In 2013, Mr. Hanick and his wife and one-year-old son moved to Russia to launch an independent, privately financed television network. Two years later, they all moved to Athens, Greece, where he created Hellas Net, the first television network ever in Greece. In 2016, they moved back to Russia to expand the 24-hour news channel, but Mr. Hanick claims that he heard the voice again when he was in a meeting, “This is what I am calling you to do.” One minute later, he was offered a position regarding the creation of an Orthodox Christian television channel, Tsargrad, which he accepted. Mr. Hanick and his family also converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity, ending a lifetime search for spiritual fulfillment that he had never found in the United States, despite being a devout life-long Catholic.
What did Mr. Hanick do to offend the Empire? First, he was one of the first to speak publicly about the fact that the major media organizations in the West, CNN leading the pack at the time, were not objectively providing the news. His view at that time was that journalism could not, in principle, be objective. The personal views and beliefs of the editors and reporters would necessarily be reflected in their work, and thus, if all of the media figures held a uniform left-leaning view, the news would be slanted against conservatives and traditionalists. Fox was unique in that it employed conservatives.
However, his greatest sin was founding an Orthodox Christian television network in Russia where a revolution in Christianity continues. “Neither the United States nor Satan could forgive him for that.” Now, of course, that is not what the Justice Department admits. They claim that the channel was backed by a sanctioned individual, that Mr. Hanick worked for a sanctioned individual, violating sanctions, and that Mr. Hanick lied to FBI agents that interviewed him in 2021 regarding his relationship to “Russian Oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev.” The Justice Department announcement does not mention the word “Christian” a single time, focusing on the “crime” of associating with a sanctioned individual. Mr. Hanick was arrested in London. He has not yet been extradited, and he is facing 25 years in prison in the United States (in other words he will die in prison) for his unfashionable views.
All the more frightening is that this arrest was memory-holed from the outset. It was not covered by any of the few, right-leaning media outlets that we have in this country. It was only covered by left-leaning media including, Politico, The Daily Beast, and Rolling Stone, from the perspective that it was the take-down of a powerful conservative for Russian sanctions violations (remember Russiagate?). Thus most of us missed it, and even if we would have seen it, we would likely not have understood the actual facts as they were strictly avoided by the government and our corrupt media.