crusades deus vult

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</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">see paleo-catholic</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">an ah 11 22</font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;">When the results of 2022 midterms came in on Election Night, one saw some patterns emerging. Democrats were performing much better than expected, and many of the Republicans who were defeating Democrats in statewide races in swing states tended to be traditional conservatives rather far-right hyper-MAGA conspiracy theorists.</p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;">Hyper-MAGA, ultra-Trumpian candidates, in fact, lost key gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, while many of the GOP governors who were reelected — Ohio’s Mike DeWine, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu — were more traditional conservatives. One saw some ticket splitting in New Hampshire; Sununu was reelected by around 15 percent, while far-right MAGA conspiracy theorist Don Bolduc lost to incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hasan by 9 percent.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DeWine and Sununu are often slammed as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) by the MAGA crowd, but unlike Arizona’s Kari Lake, Michigan’s Tudor Dixon or Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano — Republican gubernatorial nominees who ran on ultra-MAGA platforms — they won.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Conservative Washington Post opinion columnist Henry Olsen had a blunt comment in his </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/22/arizona-midterm-election-denial-fraud-myth/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">November 22 column</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">: “College-educated voters just aren’t into MAGA.”</span></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><strong>READ MORE</strong>: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-2658772831/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">'College-educated voters just aren’t into MAGA': Conservative slams Arizona election deniers for GOP losses</a></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">But “weird” Republicans, The New Republic’s Graham Gallagher emphasizes in an <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/169050/masters-vance-weird-right-republicans" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">article published on November 25</a>, aren’t going away. In fact, they have achieved more and more prominence in the GOP and are making their presence felt in some right-wing think tanks such as the Claremont Institute.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The ascendant weird right will likely struggle to sell its deeply anti-patriotic vision to many voters,” Gallagher explains. “In these segments of the mostly young, online-influenced American right, the optimistic vision espoused by Ronald Reagan’s ‘morning in America’ has been discarded. The elite educated right has moved even beyond the overt pessimism of Donald Trump’s ‘American carnage’ — now, disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance is commonplace. Fed by an endless outrage cycle and a motivated and well-resourced donor class willing to pour money into increasingly reactionary think tanks like the avowedly anti-democratic <b>Claremont Institute,</b> right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a <b>new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms</b>.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gallagher points to “<b>the right-wing embrace of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin” and former Rep. Allen West’s obsession with the Medieval Knights Templar</b> as examples of how “bizarre” the “online weird right” can be. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Others include beliefs that “real men <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/11/14/the-soy-boy-conspiracy-theory-alt-right-thinks-left-wing-has-it-out-for-them-with-soybeans_partner/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">don’t eat soybeans</a>, seed oils are dangerous, meat substitutes will turn men into women and…. the best diet is all-meat.”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> And Gallagher cites some specific examples of how “weird” MAGA candidates could be in the 2022 midterms.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Blake Masters and J.D. Vance — two Republican candidates for Senate funded in part by tech billionaire and new-right linchpin </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">Peter Thiel</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> — have embraced new-right ideas and actively courted the ‘weird right,’</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">” Gallagher observes. “Vance has questioned whether women should leave violent marriages; Masters has praised domestic terrorist Theodore Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, argued against legal access to contraception, and openly said that democracy is a smokescreen for the masses ‘stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.’ Americans on balance like democracy; legal contraception is almost universally popular; and Kaczynski’s unpopularity is so widely assumed that pollsters rarely ask about him. Masters, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost his bid to unseat Mark Kelly, and Vance badly underperformed in his blood-red home state.”</span></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><strong>READ MORE: </strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/a-much-diminished-force-why-sarah-palin-no-longer-stands-out-in-the-maga-movement-she-helped-create/" target="_self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>Why 'much-diminished' Sarah Palin no longer stands out in the MAGA movement she helped create: journalist</strong></a></p></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Christian moral order”</font></strong></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jacky Eubanks is running for state representative in Michigan. On Facebook Thursday, she said. “I had the honor of being interviewed by </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Catholic journalist Michael Voris with Church Militant </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Church Militant/St. Michael’s Media discussing conservative Catholic values.”</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here’s an edited segment of that interview.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bottomline: If you have premarital sex, you deserve punishment.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Voris: You're a faithful Catholic, meaning you believe everything the church teaches.
</font></strong></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eubanks: Yes.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Voris: You see that the use of contraception is against natural moral law? It’s destructive? It’s a doorway to abortion?</font></strong></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eubanks: Yes.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Voris: The left is becoming completely uncorked, losing their minds. They're saying [post-Roe, right-wingers are] coming after your gay marriage next or coming after your birth control after that, and everything else. Well, you know what? Yeah, absolutely.</font></strong></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eubanks: Yes.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">We need to make a plain statement of fact, which is that the reason why the West is great is because Western civilization's underpinning is Christianity.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">You cannot have a successful society outside of the Christian moral border.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Things like abortion, and things like gay marriage, are outside of the Christian moral order.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They lead to chaos and destruction and a culture of death, which is what we're seeing today.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We've abandoned the Christian moral order as a nation.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Voris: How do you answer the local press person who might be your age and just sees you as some loony that you want to take away your birth control?</font></strong></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eubanks: I guess we have to ask ourselves, would that ever come to a vote in the Michigan state legislature and if it should. I guess I would have to say then that [birth control] should not be illegal.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">People believe that birth control is better, because you won't get pregnant and you won't need to have an abortion.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But I think that it gives people the false sense of security in believing they can have consequence-free sex.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that's not true and it's not correct.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sex ought to be between one man and one woman in the confines of marriage and open to what you open to life. Absolutely.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[nat am sacrif land so we cd be xian try]</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">salon:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">As mentioned in our first installment, this is all part of a broader pattern of overlap between the far-right, including the white nationalist right, with right-wing Catholicism.</span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><b> In 2017, groyper leader Milo Yiannapoulos was drummed out of many right-wing movements </b>for statements he made minimizing child sex abuse, and subsequently used his return to Catholicism as an opportunity to rebrand. </span></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>This March he headlined an anti-abortion convention in Ohio that was blessed by the local Catholic bishop</b>, and in June he will be a featured speaker at a Church Militant Resistance bootcamp<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, who was disgraced after appearing on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, likewise touted her return to the church as part of her rehabilitation.</span> "<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander found his way to a new audience at the end of 2020 with a highly public conversion to Catholicism, as did "Kent State gun girl" Kaitlin Bennett in late 2021.</span> <b>They joined a core group of far-right activists who have deployed their Catholic identity in service of their movements, including Pizzagate provocateur-turned conservative commentator Jack Posobiec,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fuentes himself. </span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As the alt-right was planning its 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the most popular places where activists did their planning was a Discord chat forum called the "Nick Fuentes forum," dedicated to exploring connections between "Unite the Right" and the Catholic Church</span>. Within it, hundreds of posters discussed traditionalist Catholicism and posted memes alternating, or combining, Crusades-era imagery with neo-Nazi and antisemitic content. </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As journalist Eric Martin reported at the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners, some posters identified themselves as "<b>Charles Coughlin Roman Catholics," for the 1930s pro-fascist priest</b> and broadcaster who helped pioneer the demagogic media style that is fracturing our democracy today. Fuentes himself has waxed nostalgic about fascist and monarchist regimes in Europe and Latin America that were grounded in Catholic teaching, and in 2018 declared on a livestream that, "in an ideal world," there would be "a global Catholic theocracy" and that "the state should enforce morality that is informed by Catholic teaching." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">More broadly online, far-right activists online began adopting phrases like </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">"Viva Cristo Rey" (Christ the King) or "Deus Vult" (God wills it) in their posts and tweets, and Catholic symbolism like medieval crosses and Crusader imagery. </span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some conservative Catholics have welcomed this development. In a 2019 article published by the Catholic right magazine Crisis, "Kids in defense of the culture," <b>American Greatness editor Pedro Gonzalez praised Fuentes' groypers. "</b>They have chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world," Gonzalez wrote. "In an age of compromise and petty principles, groypers have chosen to stand for something, armed with little more than digital slingshots. That alone is reason enough to hear them out."</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some conservative Catholics have embraced the groypers, arguing that they "have chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world."</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>But moderate and liberal Catholics were appalled. </b>"It's such a horrifying appropriation of Catholicism," noted writer and researcher D.W. Lafferty in a 2020 podcast episode produced by Where Peter Is, a moderate Catholic website that tracks the Catholic right. Lafferty described the new far-right aesthetic as<b> "Pepe Catholicism,</b>" while Georgetown University theologian Adam Rasmussen called it "<b>Catholic LARPing"</b>: a way for the alt-right to pretend they were "Knights Templar fighting the forces of darkness in the deep state."</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb, author of the papal biography "The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Church," explained during the 2020 presidential campaign, the far right's adoption of Catholic symbolism was a means for the movement to infuse itself with deeper spiritual meaning. "The populists and nationalists were looking for some kind of soul for their politics. And they found it in some symbols of the faith," Lamb said. "And they're powerful symbols. Quite often they make the whole case that the past has been lost." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"In a sense, you empty the content of the religious," Lamb noted earlier this year, "and use the externals — the rosary beads, the crucifix, some words, perhaps some prayers — but you use it as an identity marker to give your movement a sense that it has a soul or deeper intensity at a moral level." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But that influence goes both ways, and as Lamb noted in 2020, as more and more right-wing Catholics identified themselves with Trump's re-election campaign, "Trumpism," in turn, "got into the church." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As Lafferty said at the time, "What's happening on the right, I think, is unprecedented," except for the historical examples of ultranationalist fascist groups before World War II, such as Action Française in France or the Falangist movement in Spain. <b>"But fascism isn't new and the Catholic Church was often complicit in fascism," he added. "So it's not totally shocking that people can come in and do this." </b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The revelation that some highly enthusiastic and visible elements of the Catholic right are now partnering with a group whose reputation is based on snarky displays of over-the-top bigotry just marks an escalation of that trend. </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"This is a continuation of a pattern that's been happening for years," said Lafferty, "and it's only going to become more intense now that we're looking at the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned." As a faithful Catholic, he agrees with the Church's stance against abortion, he said, but he also sees the imminent SCOTUS reversal as one more "pillar of what we call 'normal' falling." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ref</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/bannon-milo-and-other-right-wing-activists-are-hellbent-on-transforming-the-catholic-church/">
</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/bannon-milo-and-other-right-wing-activists-are-hellbent-on-transforming-the-catholic-church/">https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/bannon-milo-and-other-right-wing-activists-are-hellbent-on-transforming-the-catholic-church/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="">
</font></div><div style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">around the fifth hour of November’s “Enough Is Enough” prayer rally, hosted by the Catholic right media outlet <b>Church Militant,</b> event emcee and fallen alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos bounded onstage to reveal a dramatic wardrobe change. Gone were the rock-star white suit and purple shoes he’d been wearing since morning, replaced by a black shirt, black suit, and heavy crucifix, which gleamed from the jumbotrons all the way to the back of Baltimore’s Pier Six Pavilion, where the concert venue jutted into the city harbor. The bleached-blond tips of his floppy hair—fashy-short on the sides and Donald Trump combover-long on top—had been shorn in a final makeover after <b>his year of ostentatious renunciation.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the podium, Yiannopoulos assumed an air of exaggerated modesty. “The path to salvation is a series of baby steps,” he told a crowd of some 1,500 predominantly white, mostly middle-aged rallygoers. “I’m glad I got to share one of them with you today.” Whooping and whistling, the audience rose in a standing ovation. And throughout the day, as Yiannopoulos interspersed homophobic slurs—like calling the Catholic bishops meeting next door “sodomites” and Covid masks “fag muzzles”—with banter about Versace loafers and demands for more flattering stage lighting, the crowd roared with laughter, all of them in on the joke.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[MOTHER JONES TOP STORIES</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">An Infamous MAGA Lawyer Is Funding Wacky Legal Defenses for January 6 Suspects]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">There were, as they say, layers to this assemblage of some of the noisiest partisans in the ongoing civil war within the American Catholic Church.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On one level, Yiannopoulos was making the most of his fall from public grace. In 2015, the right-wing, gay, British provocateur gained notoriety as one of the chief devotees of the then-fledgling alt-right, using billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer’s money and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News platform to recast the white nationalist movement as edgy rebellion. Book deals, magazine profiles, and speaking gigs rolled in until comments he’d made minimizing child sexual abuse—defending sexual encounters between adolescents and adults as “enriching” rather than abusive—were publicized. That proved too much even for Milo fans who’d reveled in his offensiveness, and in 2017, he was drummed out of the ascendant far right.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">You can also listen to Kathryn Joyce's story read aloud:]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Over the next several years, he cast about for a new home. In 2018, he published a book, Diabolical: How Pope Francis Has Betrayed Clerical Abuse Victims Like Me—and Why He Has to Go</b>, that tied his defense of the remarks he’d made—that he’d been glibly processing his own childhood sexual abuse—to the broader crisis in the Catholic Church. Soon, he was welcomed by right-wing Catholic news outlets like Church Militant and LifeSiteNews, and a popular Catholic apologetics YouTube show hosted by firebrand and now anti-vaccine activist Patrick Coffin, which together represent some of the most vitriolic critics of the pope online. In early 2021, Yiannopoulos completed the journey, announcing to LifeSiteNews that <b>returning to a traditionalist form of Catholicism had helped him become “ex-gay,” and he now planned to build a Catholic-based conversion therapy clinic in Florida, to be called the Milo Center.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As Yiannopoulos conducted a publicity tour around the alternative media universe of the Catholic right, he theatrically threw away an engagement ring he called his “sodomy stone” and quipped about the need to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.” By July, he’d become a regular columnist at Church Militant, where he paired his trademark acidity with a laser fixation on the “cult of homosexualism,” which he described as “a reimagining of a very old, pagan form of worship.” He also claimed that women who miscarry after receiving Covid-19 vaccinations have effectively aborted their children, and declared that “sometimes one feels the only good bishop is a dead bishop.” By fall, he was appearing on Church Militant’s home-shopping network, flogging an $88 “Adoring Virgin” icon—a “good Mary,” Yiannopoulos promised, unlike some less physically attractive depictions—and a CD set of him reading Psalms and Proverbs for $75.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In fact, Yiannopoulos’ high-camp style wasn’t out of place with the carnival of outrage that Church Militant has trafficked in for years. Originally founded in the early 2000s as Real Catholic TV, with a mission to rebut pop culture depictions of Catholicism like The Da Vinci Code, the organization has become increasingly political, garnering an audience of Catholics disaffected from official church leadershi</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">p. Based in Ferndale, Michigan, Church Militant has been repeatedly disavowed by the Archdiocese of Detroit—including a successful 2011 demand to remove the word “Catholic” from the organization’s name. But it styles itself as an apostolate fighting to preserve authentic Catholicism in the face of a corrupt and milquetoast hierarchy, which it typically refers to with terms like “international crime syndicate” or “monsters in miters.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Around 2018, when the church was roiled by revelations of sexual abuse by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Church Militant zeroed in on what it called the “lavender mafia” to suggest that the sexual abuse crisis stems from a gay cabal controlling the church from the Vatican on down.</b> Lately, the outlet has leveled its bombastic fury at pandemic public health measures and racial justice protesters and predicted Joe Biden’s presidency would result in an anti-Christian genocide. In 2020, the outlet’s founder, <b>former CBS News producer Michael Voris</b>—who has publicly renounced his own past same-sex relationships and mentored Yiannopoulos toward also embracing a “chaste life” (or what Yiannopoulos calls “sexual sobriety”)—warned that a “union of Rome and the Washington, DC swamp” was conspiring to oust Trump and usher in a new world order, under which faithful Catholics would be declared “illegal” and “hunted down.” Church Militant then relentlessly pushed stolen election narratives, and, as Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the outlet and its staff called them “patriots” and tweeted celebratory memes—like a diptych juxtaposing a photo of rioters hoisting a large wooden cross with the iconic image of Marines raising a flag at Iwo Jima.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Six months later, Church Militant announced plans to host a prayer rally, emceed by Yiannopoulos and headlined by former Trump adviser and right-wing Catholic Steve Bannon, who in 2018 launched an unsuccessful plan to build a “gladiator school for culture warriors” in partnership with a conservative Catholic think tank in Rome dedicated to “pushing back the tide of radical secularism.” Church Militant’s rally was to be held directly outside the November 2021 annual meeting, in Baltimore, of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), but city officials revoked the rally’s permit, arguing that the group’s presence could lead to violence. After a protracted legal battle, which included courtroom testimony from Yiannopoulos, who simultaneously offered to withdraw from the event and threatened to sue if he had to, an appeals court allowed the rally to go forward.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Not coincidently, the USCCB’s general assembly was gripped by a bitter debate about whether to recommend that pro-choice Catholic politicians like Biden be denied Communion</b>. In the big picture, the outcome was essentially predetermined; local bishops, not the USCCB, decide who can receive Communion, and the cardinal overseeing Biden’s Washington church—America’s first Black cardinal, whom Church Militant derisively calls “the African Queen”—had already declared he wouldn’t deny Biden the sacrament. Not to mention the fact that the Vatican, where Biden received Communion in October after meeting with the pope, had long made it clear it wouldn’t approve denial even if the USCCB recommended it.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Nonetheless, back in June, two-thirds of the USCCB voted to draft guidance that might open the door to such recommendations—yet another expression of the intense division that permeates the US church, like the country itself. Such internal squabbles might not appear to be that significant. But the Catholic Church—with more than 1.3 billion members worldwide and representing the largest religious denomination in the US—has unparalleled political and social power. And the open civil war within Catholicism—with its undisputed center in the United States—has implications for everything from racism to climate change, women’s rights to right-wing nationalism, and whether one accepts science-backed public health measures and democratic elections, or violently rejects both.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Catholics have become the brains of the religious Right in the US.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A long-overlooked reality is starting to become clear: The ideological center of the Christian right—and thus the broader American right—springs at least as much from traditionalist Catholicism as from evangelicals who have commanded most of the public attention since the Reagan era. Or as historian Gene Zubovich puts it, “Catholics have become the brains of the religious Right in the US.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The communion fight is just one of a series of Catholic-world bombshells in recent months, each of which would have been unimaginable a few years earlier</b>. Last March, East Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland, a right-wing celebrity for his pro-Trump and anti-vaccination views, helped promote a plan to build a $22 million, 575-acre separatist compound for Catholics who view themselves as a besieged remnant of the church who must “preserve the faith” for future generations. (This plan is now on pause after its founder admitted to having an affair.) In May, 50,000 people registered for Patrick Coffin’s three-day anti-vaccination conference, which featured a bishop who suggested God will protect Catholics who refuse the Covid vaccine. It also included a priest warning that accepting vaccines—which he and many other right-wing Christians see as abortion-tainted for their distant connection to a decades-old fetal stem-cell line—would represent the first step toward replacing Christianity with “Dianic witchcraft.”</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In July, a Wisconsin priest, James Altman—famous for declaring that Catholics who vote Democratic will go to hell, calling liberals “vermin,” warning parishioners to avoid vaccinations, and claiming that January 6 was a false-flag operation—was finally removed from his church and subjected to a formal review</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Altman’s subsequent media blitz netted him a speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference and more than $700,000 in donations, a chunk of which he promised to pass on to Church Militant and LifeSiteNews. Conservative Catholics launched two new coalitions for “canceled” and “persecuted” priests. Voris also assembled what he claimed were dozens of anonymous priests, unknown even to each other, into a group he called the New Catacombs, which could issue statements of dissent, ultimately fomenting a “revolution in the Church” by having so many clerics “denounce the evil in the hierarchy” that the bishops couldn’t fire them all at once.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And a retired archbishop, Carlo Maria <b>Viganò, the Vatican’s former ambassador to the United States who went into self-imposed exile after calling for Pope Francis’ resignation in 2018, wrote an open letter suggesting that Catholics should pray for the Holy Father’s deat</b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>h.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“If it’s insurrection you phony Catholics and phony Americans like so much, then insurrection is what you’ll get.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Taken together, it’s enough to prompt numerous US Catholics to say they no longer recognize their religion. Or as conservative writer Jonathan Last noted in the Bulwark last spring, “It’s pretty safe to say that the culture war has broken the Catholic Church in America.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To outsiders who haven’t followed the internal warfare prompted by the election of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to pope in 2013, all these fights must seem like a bewildering spectacle. But while Pope Francis is widely admired for his attention to poverty and the environment, and his occasional calls for moderation on “pelvic issues,” he’s harshly condemned by members of his own church. “Radical traditionalists,” who see the nearly 60-year-old reforms of Vatican II as the original sin of the modern era, view Francis as a heretical interloper. But even more mainstream conservative Catholics are also unhappy with the pope’s perceived liberalness, his focus on refugees, and his critiques of capitalist excess.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Michael Voris, who is considerably less bombastic in conversation than in his editorials, believes the fissures in the US church were 50 to 60 years in the making, and the only thing new is how public they’ve become. He sees Trump as having “taken what was already ongoing in the shadows, an under-the-radar battle,” and brought it into the open. “I really think it’s the theological tensions within the church that you’re seeing expressed,” he told me in 2020. “Those bubble up to the surface [when you’re] talking about social justice, immigration, or abortion, or whatever hot topic you want. But underneath every one of those, whichever side you choose is based on your theology.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One way to tell that these tensions have reached a boiling point is that Trump—lacking a nuanced understanding of most things but possessing a sharky instinct for blood—noticed them. Throughout his reelection campaign, Trump bypassed the already conservative church hierarchy in favor of the dissident Catholic far right. He promoted figures like podcaster Taylor Marshall, author of the 2019 anti-Francis book Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church From Within. Trump tweeted a link to an open letter that <b>Archbishop Viganò</b> had sent him, warning of a “deep church” collaborating with the “deep state” to undermine his presidency. After Trump’s defeat, Viganò joined Strickland and Marshall in addressing the December 2020 “Jericho March” in Washington, DC: an interfaith “Stop the Steal” prayer rally that was a precursor to the violence on January 6. In early January 2021, Viganò went on Steve Bannon’s podcast to say that the United States would be “wiped out” if it didn’t fight back against election theft.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>And Trump relentlessly courted that constituency by appointing Catholic conservatives to the Supreme Court, including Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced the liberal feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Although the Catholic right represents a minority of the US church, it wields an outsize influence through a well-funded network of advocacy institutions and a parallel media ecosystem. Conservative and right-wing Catholics are highly represented in the US judiciary, and dominate the Supreme Court—seven current Supreme Court justices, including all three of Trump’s scotus picks, were raised Catholic, and six of those seven represent right-wing Catholic ideology. Their prevalence is the result of a long-running conservative project orchestrated largely by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo. Leo is also president of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and founder of the Judicial Education Project (now called the 85 Fund), which funds a variety of right-wing advocacy organizations.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a recent series of investigative articles, journalist Christopher White at the liberal National Catholic Reporter detailed how right-wing Catholic donors have turbocharged conservative think tanks and academic programs—such as a <b>Catholic University of America business school named for its lead patron</b>, the elite estate attorney and hotelier Tim Busch—and funneled millions of dollars into election efforts like a voter-suppression initiative founded by Catholic-aligned anti-abortion organizations</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. In turn, as Brian Fraga reported at NCR this January, conservative Catholic groups and institutions have received millions from the “dark money” Donors Trust network, which funded both white nationalist organizations and right-wing political groups that helped organize the protests of January 6.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Fringe but high-traffic media outfits like Church Militant, and more mainstream ones like cable giant EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network), the world’s largest religious media network, with a claimed viewership of 380 million households across more than 150 countries, thrive in the Catholic media landscape. As with their secular counterparts like Fox News—which regularly borrows EWTN’s star anchor, Raymond Arroyo, as a co-host for The Laura Ingraham Show—stories born on the fringe have a tendency to creep into the center of the Catholic media universe, commanding audiences far larger than those of the original outlets.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Michelle Rohn</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The English-speaking Catholic media is dominated by a few, very powerful outfits, and many of them have been very opposed [to the pope] in overt, blatant ways,” Christopher Lamb, author of the 2020 papal biography The Outsider, tells me. EWTN has given uncritical platforms to figures like Bannon (who has called the pope a “Marxist Jesuit that’s in bed with the Chinese Communist Party,” and accused him of enabling “cultural Marxism” to infiltrate the church) and Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the pope’s most outspoken critics within church hierarchy; in 2019 it even live-broadcasted a priest’s anti-Francis homily.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In September, shortly after undergoing surgery, Francis publicly said he was “still alive, even though some people wanted me to die,” and referred to EWTN, saying, “There is, for example, a large Catholic television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill of the pope.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That relentlessly critical portrayal of the pope doesn’t represent the majority of US Catholics, 82 percent of whom, according to a Pew Research poll, have favorable impressions of Francis. But the negative reporting takes its toll, says Mike Lewis, founder of the moderate Catholic website Where Peter Is, which tracks and rebuts the Catholic right: “Unlike evangelicals who can start their own churches, the Catholic Church is restrained to some degree by the hierarchy, which is restrained in theory by the pope. The only problem is there’s an increasing number of Catholics in this alt-right movement who defer in absolutely no way to the hierarchy. Or who, rather than their local bishop…look to Viganò, Burke, and Strickland as their leaders.” And “because of social media and outlets like EWTN and LifeSiteNews,” Lewis adds, “they get a disproportionate amount of attention compared to their actual authority.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The problem is that the extreme right-wing is an expression of something that is not just crazy people but is visible also in the official clerical culture of the [US] Catholic Church.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The problem is that the extreme right-wing is an expression of something that is not just crazy people but is visible also in the official clerical culture of the [US] Catholic Church,” says Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University. “There are bishops whose language is more diplomatic, but they express the same contempt for Francis, the same fascination for the neo-nationalist project.” Add to this dynamic the “intellectuals blowing on this fire,” he says, “because they think the liberal, cosmopolitan international order must be burned down. That’s their very dangerous plan…and sadly, liberal Catholics have no plan.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>At the “Enough Is Enough” rally in Baltimore,</b> all of these tensions were on prominent display. The bishops meeting at the Baltimore Waterfront Marriott were taunted by Church Militant’s rallygoers stationed a few hundred feet away and chanting, “Shame on you,” “Repent or resign,” and “Lock them up.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On its face, the rally focused on Church Militant’s suspicion—which proved to be correct—that bishops would not move to deny Biden Communion. But the complaints from those who attended were much broader, seen in protest signs reading “Covid-19 Vaccines are made from aborted babies” and “Enough Is Enough: Stop the Homo-Heresy!” Near the back of the pavilion, a New Jersey man was elaborately costumed as a “wolf in priest’s clothing,” a large cardboard millstone around his shaggy wolf neck.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Although Bannon didn’t appear—he’d been arrested the day before in conjunction with the House January 6 investigation, a development that one attendee, who wore a Star of David button reading “vaccine passport,” attributed to USCCB machination</b>s—a cast of other Catholic right dissidents was paraded before the crowd. James Altman was part of a panel of “persecuted priests,” who claimed they’d been sidelined for speaking out against liberal bishops. Patrick Coffin also made an appearance, speaking by remote feed because he refused to wear a mask on any plane that might take him to Baltimore. Radio evangelist Jesse Romero, a former member of Trump’s Catholic election advisory board, claimed that the bishops were in league with “Luciferians who want to control and depopulate the earth.” Former Newsmax host Michelle Malkin, fresh from her appearance at a white nationalist conference run by the group American Renaissance, argued that USCCB advocacy on behalf of immigrants amounted to an open-borders agenda intended to “destroy the historical American nation.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the audience, rallygoers expressed their own grievances. A Detroit man said he was there to pressure bishops to ensure that people who support abortion, gay marriage, and socialism don’t receive Communion. An Arizona attendee said his entire family had left Catholicism because lax churches had failed to catechize them properly. And a Maryland woman with a Star of David button, whose business card read “housewife, mother, peasant,” told me, “It’s really hard to watch your children going astray because there’s no voice, nobody backing you up in your beliefs.” The great divide in the church, she said, mirrored the one in the country at large, and she had little hope it would mend soon. “It’s just feeling like we’re falling apart.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But if a sense of despair hung in the air, Church Militant wanted to transform it into action. As the rally neared its sixth hour, Joseph Gallagher, the young head of Church Militant’s action arm, Resistance, called on attendees to “get dirty” fighting at the local level: by picketing bishops to reinstate “canceled priests,” bringing Yiannopoulos to college campuses to preach about “praying the gay away,” or counter-protesting at a memorial for George Floyd to highlight the “real racial injustice” of abortion. Imploring the audience to transcend social media distractions in favor of righteous extremism, Gallagher said, “I don’t want to look back and think, ‘What more could I have done to not allow this to happen?'”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While Church Militant may remain the dubious, disreputable stepchild of the broader conservative Catholic world, its influence is indicative of a larger shift. Last year, the National Catholic Reporter ran a story about how a new crop of intensely right-wing priests is dividing Catholic parishes around the country.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> One older priest was quoted as saying these young priests, immersed in right-wing politics and social media, sometimes even willing to tell parishioners who to vote for, were following “an alternative magisterium” they’d found online, on websites like Church Militant. Some parishes now face an odd reversal of the post–Vatican II era, as liberal and moderate Catholics are sent searching for a church that reflects their values, some even compelled to hold ad hoc Masses in auto-repair garages, in the face of a growing hyper-orthodoxy in their former parishes.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">While US Catholic Church membership has dropped overall by nearly 25 percent in the last 20 years and vocations for priests and nuns have fallen as well, church traditionalists crow that their seminaries are receiving more applicants than they can accept—part of a trend that could accelerate the spread of Catholic right ideas. “In a shrinking Church, the influence of its more committed members will wax, not wane,” conservative Catholic journalist Ross Douthat wrote in the right-wing Christian journal First Things last summer. “In a smaller, weaker Church, the influence of ideas that seem weird to the average Catholic today are likely to be magnified, as the Church becomes more an institution by, for, and of the weirdos.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As night fell in Baltimore, the landmark neon sign of the Domino Sugar refinery flicked on, and the final event of the day began: a mock trial of the bishops meeting next door. They were collectively charged with committing seven grave offenses, including “destroying the patrimony of Holy Mother Church.” As the dwindling crowd roared its verdict at each “charge,” Voris exhorted them, “This is for keeps. You should leave this rally…intent to make the remainder of your life’s work the purification of the church, regardless of what it costs you, regardless of what time you have to spend…It is your duty to combat that evil, and to combat it with your last breath if necessary.” Then he invited them to cross the bridge from the pier to the Marriott hotel so they might remind the priests meeting there “how hot hellfire actually is.”</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/don-jr-posts-photos-of-his-assault-rifle-bearing-ancient-symbol-of-war-with-islam-now-used-by-white-supremacists-experts/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/don-jr-posts-photos-of-his-assault-rifle-bearing-ancient-symbol-of-war-with-islam-now-used-by-white-supremacists-experts/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/trumpims-midieval-europe/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/trumpims-midieval-europe/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trumpism is rooted in twisted visions of medieval Europe</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div> John Stoehr January 05, 2022</div><div>
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</div><div>When we think about medieval Europe, we tend to think about kings ruling with iron fists, about Christian crusaders purifying Jerusalem with the blood of the unbelievers, or about Greek and Roman thinking cast into darkness.</div><div>
</div><div>It wasn’t so. According to <b>The Bright Ages, a new book by Matt Gabriele and David Perry,</b> kings often worried about their legitimacy, the crusaders were pragmatists, and Greek and Roman learning and culture carried on, not because Muslim scholars preserved it, but because Rome never really fell.</div><div>
</div><div>Among a welter of stunning revelations, the book offers this too: democracy is not the product of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. It was not revived after the Middle Ages forgot the glory of Athens. It has probably been practiced for as long as groups of people struggled with each other, and with themselves, over power and resources. Even some aristocrats voted!</div><div>
</div><div>After reading The Bright Ages, I got in touch with Matt Gabriele, because so much of our current politics, especially overt white supremacy, seeks to legitimize itself by calling forth visions of some kind of noble white past. Again, not so. Matt is a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech as well as a contributor to the Editorial Board. We started by talking about cities.</div><div>
</div><div>Near the end of your book, you talk about cities. Wherever they are, there’s some form of democracy. That not only rewrites our understanding of the "dark ages," but also puts our current malaise in a more optimistic light.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>One of the core arguments about the "fall of Rome" has been de-urbanization – that Europe moved from a primarily urban, Mediterranean civilization to a rural, agricultural one. There's a kernel of truth there, but it tends to obscure that cities continued, especially where they had been, but also in new places.</div><div>
</div><div>In those cities, older forms of government persisted – ones in which people voted on things. Certainly, as we note, those who could vote were a very limited subset, but the idea that all government was autocracy is not true</div><div>
</div><div>I take your point that cities are and can be laboratories for democratic experimentation. Groups like to vote on things. Even the Crusades were often led by councils who voted. The First Crusade in 1095-1099, for example, had a group of nobles who collectively led the expedition. The Fourth Crusade of the early 13th century had a <b>council that voted on almost everything,</b> including who should be the new emperor of Constantinople!</div><div>
</div><div>READ: Journalist highlights a key 'pivot point' in the Jan. 6 investigations that leads directly to Trump]</div><div>
</div><div>Americans tend to think democracy began with us, or anyway with the Enlightenment. But your history shows it being much older. Your book notes that the earliest “national” democracy might have been Iceland.</div><div>
</div><div>Perhaps. Some "<b>Viking" (Scandinavian) communities were organized around communal decision-making</b>. Iceland (which wasn't really a "nation" in the central Middle Ages, but more a collection of loosely-connected communities) was one of them. Part of the reason behind their collective governmental organization, though, was precisely because there was no one powerful enough to claim power over the rest of the groups.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In other words, collective decision-making in medieval Europe was often very practical. Even the Carolingians – an imperial family in the 9th century – were deeply reliant on the nobility as councilors and power-brokers. The age of absolute monarchy is an early-modern thing, not a medieval thing.</span></div><div>
</div><div>It seems kings not only sought ways to legitimize power but also the consent of those they ruled over. By "those," I'm guessing elites, but also anyone with influence socially. Consent might be too strong a word.</div><div>
</div><div>READ: Journalist highlights a key 'pivot point' in the Jan. 6 investigations that leads directly to Trump</div><div>
</div><div>Yeah, I think that's fair. Kings couldn't unilaterally decide to do something and then do it, or at least if they did, they risked serious repercussions.</div><div>
</div><div>For example, the Carolingians in the 9th century. <b>Charlemagne</b> ruled an empire covering almost all of continental Europe, was crowned Roman emperor in Rome by the pope, and traded emissaries with the Byzantine ruler in Constantinople and the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet he was on the throne because his father, Pepin, engineered a coup to overthrow the ruling dynasty. Charlemagne himself faced several very serious coup attempts, his son Louis was deposed twice by nobles, and then the empire disintegrated after Charlemagne’s death in the next generation.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Medieval kings needed to keep the nobles happy, because although the title of "king" may have adhered to a family, it sure didn't adhere to a person. There was always a brother or son or cousin who could take power or whom the nobles could rally around if they weren't getting what they wanted.</b></div><div>
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</div><div>It turns out the "clash of civilizations" didn't start after 9/11.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The idea of the "clash of civilizations" is indeed a modern one (though not one that post-dates 9/11). A lot of it derives from <b>Samuel Huntington</b> and Bernard Lewis [authors of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published 1996]. But then it was retconned onto the medieval world after 9/11 to show a lineage (unbroken or simply "interrupted”) of violence between Christianity (“the West") and Islam (“the East").</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But what we try to show in the book is that this story is really problematic. The initial expansion of what would become Islam out of Arabia was by conquest, yes, but they were at times greeted as liberators in places like Egypt and the province of Palestine. The emperors in Constantinople, even though fellow Christians, were seen by many in those areas as oppressors.</span></div><div>
</div><div>In Europe, Jerusalem didn't really matter to them for a very long time. It represented a sacred past (the city of Jesus), but had no relevance until the end of time when the events of Revelation would kick in. This began to change towards the beginning of the 11th century for complicated reasons, but it's telling that the <b>First Crusade </b>in 1095, for example, was indeed large but also that so many people did not go. No kings, no emperor, some middlingly important nobles and one papal legate led the expedition.</div><div>
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</div><div>After the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christians – and even during the conquest – they were more than happy to make pragmatic alliances with Islamic rulers they encountered, playing Aleppo off against Damascus for instance, or allowing traders to pass back and forth, even across military lines in the middle of ongoing crusades. In other words, in the end, the violence of the period between religions was defined, yes, by religious identity, but it wasn't dogmatic. It was flexible and shaped by circumstances.</div><div>
</div><div>On a related note, you discuss two views. One conservative – that Islam and Christianity are antipodes. One liberal – that everybody got along just fine when given half a chance. You say that it's far more complex than either. Can you explain? You use a non-English word that's escaping me.</div><div>
</div><div>Convivencia. (It just means "living together.")</div><div>
</div><div>Convivencia is often taken to mean everyone got along by living with each other. Sometimes that's true. But they also "lived together" by hating one another at times, by asserting their group's power over other groups. In other words, individual relations between adherents of different traditions varied among individuals, and group dynamics varied from year to year.</div><div>
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</div><div>For example, we talk in the book about the taking of Toledo by Christians in 1085. Shortly afterwards, the king converted the mosque into a new cathedral, even after assuring Islamic residents he wouldn't. Yeah, he did that to punish Muslims and assert Christianity's dominance. But he also did it to spite some of the city’s Christians, who had been until then using another church as their cathedral. It was as much about asserting his own power as an outsider (against civic community), even if there was a religious element.</div><div>
</div><div>This is the complexity we're trying to show. Yes, people killed one another because of religion all the time. But there were moments when it didn't happen, when they made other choices – sometimes in ways that seem humane to us and sometimes because they were better served by doing so.</div><div>
</div><div>I want to talk about slavery, especially the creation of racial difference. You say in the book that that comes from Europeans living with "the other."</div><div>
</div><div>First, let me say we're really in debt here to amazing scholars like Geraldine Heng (especially) as well as Sierra Lomuto, Cord Whitaker, Dorothy Kim and many others. Until they began their work, really in the last decade or so, this was a marginal topic of conversation in medieval studies.</div><div>
</div><div>As a practice, slavery was common in Europe through the entire Middle Ages. The categories of who could be a slave, however, were not always coded by skin color, but rather by political or cultural identity (a conquered people) or religion (Christians in Islamic lands, Muslims in Christian lands). Its practice in Viking society and in Mediterranean society was also quite different in how enslaved people were treated and what status they had in society.</div><div>
</div><div>The creation of racial difference is a different matter, one that began (and this is an oversimplification) to emerge as religion became essentialized into the body, when, for example, Jewish identity could be carried by "blood" and so conversions (especially if forced) were thought by political and religious authorities to be fundamentally insincere and subject to "backsliding."</div><div>
</div><div>It's not that people didn't notice that people looked different from one another. They did! It's that the primary way medievals tended to separate themselves from each other was not by color (until perhaps towards the end of the period). You could have an "African" leading a monastery in early medieval England and he was revered for his learning! You could have an Ethiopian saint (Maurice) as a patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire!</div><div>
</div><div>Medieval Europeans would notice that people looked different from one another, but the primary way groups distinguished among themselves cut along different lines. Skin color could be a part of it but it was only a part.</div></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-racists-cynically-market-hate-by-hijacking-mainstream-symbolism/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-racists-cynically-market-hate-by-hijacking-mainstream-symbolism/</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How racists cynically market hate by hijacking mainstream symbolism</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos January 14, 2020</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The gun that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, showed off on Instagram this week was intended to grab people’s attention: An AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adorned with dubious Christian “Crusader” decorations, sold by a Florida gunmaker who assures buyers that they are “inspired by some of the most fierce warriors who fought in nearly 200 years of epic conflicts known as the Crusades.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In addition to the pseudo-medieval decorations, the gun (called “The Crusader”) featured a magazine decorated with a caricature image of Hillary Clinton behind bars.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A Trump Jr. spokesperson told The Hill: “The Instagram post was strictly about him using a famous meme to mock Hillary Clinton, as he and many others have done on numerous occasions and will <b>surely do again in the future, so long as it continues triggering humorless liberals.”</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">However, the gun itself and its decorations were what caught a lot of people’s attention, since the Crusades and medieval mythology are yet another field of mainstream culture that has been appropriated by the racist alt-right in recent years. The way alt-right activists deploy such symbology—ironically, with full awareness of its mainstream meaning, behind which the people wielding them cynically hide by claiming that the people offended or disturbed by their use are simply oversensitive liberals—is similar to the alt-right’s similar appropriation of such mainstream symbols as the “OK” hand signal, or the cartoon Pepe the Frog and its permutations.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As with all these ploys, it’s frequently difficult to discern the user’s motives. Is it an innocent display intended to invoke its established mainstream meaning? Or is it a surreptitious (and cynical) expression of affiliation with racist ideology?</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The ensuing confusion has a twin effect: It simultaneously creates chaos within the realm of mainstream discourse, while it provides cover for the spread of that racist ideology and its organizing.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The adoption of these symbols is meant largely as a way of<b> signaling</b> anti-Muslim sentiment in particular, but also this notion that Christianity needs to retake western civilization,” Howard Graves, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told CNN.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump’s spokesman told CNN there was no connection, saying that “Symbols on firearms depicting various historical warriors are extremely common within the 2nd Amendment community.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The gunmaker, Rare Breed Firearms, responded angrily: “It’s objectively silly and dishonest for leftwing groups, like the SPLC, to claim that this symbol on our Crusader model has anything to do with hate or an extremist ideology,” said CEO Cole Lelux. “In other words, these people have no idea what they’re talking about and should apologize for their outrageous smears.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When Rare Breed first began making the gun, it explained the religious connotations of its decorations to the Orlando Sentinel in xenophobic terms: “They believe America and much of the world is threatened by Islamic terrorism and the Crusader is a symbol of shared Christian values and the right to defend themselves, he said. The safety selector that controls the Crusader’s trigger has three settings: Peace, War and God Wills It.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump’s gun featured an etching of a Bible verse as well as the Latin phrase “<b>Deus Vult,” another medieval term meaning “God wills it</b>”—a phrase with an ominous quality, since the alt-right ideologues latching onto Crusader mythology have adopted it as their personal battle cry. It appeared on the streets of<b> Charlottesville in 2017, and still crops up regularly in far-right demonstrations involving such hate groups as the Proud Boys.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It turned up recently at the scene of the attempted firebombing of a Planned Parenthood women’s health clinic in Newark, Delaware. An 18-year-old man named Samuel Gulick spray-painted “Deus Vult” on an exterior wall before he threw a lit incendiary device into the building, police said.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Police investigators were able to identify Gulick through a combination of video evidence and his social media posts, in which he frequently used “Deus Vult” and ranted against abortion. More broadly,<b> Gulick eagerly participated in alt-right ideology, using a Pepe-esque “Groyper” cartoon as his online avatar and posting viciously anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT sentiments.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One post featured a link to an article about transgender girl, on which he commented: “Hans, get the flamethrower.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The Nazis said killing millions of Jews was a national health issue. Democrats are using the same excuse to kill American children,” Gulick wrote in another post. “When will we start shooting? Its about time we kill these genocidal demons.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His social media posts were filled with references to the Crusaders, as were those of another teenager charged last August in a strikingly similar case. Justin Olsen, an 18-year-old Ohio man, was charged with threatening federal officers for posts fantasizing about the murders of FBI agents after the 1993 tragedy involving the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. Olsen operated an iFunny page titled “Army of Christ” adorned with images of Christian Crusade knights.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>White nationalist fanboys’ love affair with the Crusades dates primarily back to 2011, when Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik published a manifesto titled “2083—A European Declaration of Independence,” adorned with Crusader imagery and demanding a “Second Crusade</b>” in which Muslims would be driven out of European nations—just before setting off a truck bomb in downtown Oslo that killed eight people, and then murdering 69 teenage campers at a socialist youth camp.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At his trial, it emerged that Breivik claimed to be a member of a modern-day group of “Knights Templar,” the 12th-century military order. According to Breivik, an April 2002 meeting of the “Knights” in London featured pseudonyms for the participants such as “Richard the Lionheart” and “Sigurd the Crusader.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">More recently, the Christchurch shooter claimed a similar kind of affiliation in his manifesto, and the weapons he used to murder 51 people in March 2019 were scrawled with references to crusading knights. Fittingly, he also notoriously flashed the “OK” white-power symbol with his hands.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Crusades have also been adopted by a broad range of alt-right activists, notably at neo-Nazi websites such as The Daily Stormer, where pro-Trump memes featuring Crusade imagery have been common</b>. The debate has even made its way into academia. As Joseph Livingstone explained in The New Republic, all of these reinterpretations are travesties of history—and the internet has played a critical role in producing them.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Hijacking vaguely understood religious belief systems for their own ends is nothing new for the American radical right. In the early 1980s, a number of neo-Nazis—choosing to reject the racist “Christian Identity” movement popular among their ranks at the time, on the grounds that Jesus was Jewish and therefore tainted—instead decided to adopt certain ancient <b>Nordic religions as their “true faith,” most notably the Odinist religion Asatru.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That trend has intensified in recent years, thanks in no small part to the increasing reach of far-right ideologies on the Internet. It’s also spread globally, and racists deploy it as a kind of cynical shield in much the same way as other appropriations from the mainstream.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Asatru recently turned up in news stories about a couple of Army National Guardsmen in Georgia</b> who were given the boot after their activities as neo-Nazis were uncovered. Active in a local chapter of Asatru Folk Assembly, described by the SPLC as “perhaps this country’s largest neo-Völkisch hate group,” the men complained that they were being persecuted for their faith.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ex-Guardsman Trent East told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he is not a racist—rather, he’s simply interested in his ancestry and worshiping as his forebears did.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The whole race thing started with me finding Asatru or Odinism or whatever you want to call it and seeing that as a better option than Christianity as a spirituality,” he said. “I’ve just never been a fan of Christianity, and so seeing a faith that was about my ethnic roots was something I could get into a little more.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, as the AJC noted, East’s social media profile—much of it deleted after he was exposed—told a very different story. It included “numerous memes and slogans popular among white supremacists, and his contacts include neo-Nazis and other extremists. After his doxxing, East opened an account on VK.com, a Russian social media platform popular among the racist far right.” He also attended a speech by alt-right godfather Richard Spencer in 2017, toting a sign bearing white nationalist slogans.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For white nationalists, disguising the vile bigotry inherent in their ideology is critical to their ongoing project to normalize their belief systems within the mainstream of society—which is why so many of them go to such lengths to deny their involvement or the existence of the innate racism in their movement.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As social media’s wide-open global distribution of ideas has taken hold, the work of camouflaging their beliefs has become increasingly sophisticated—particularly the way it hijacks popular internet behaviors such as trolling and the use of ironic language as both vehicles for ideas as well as means of intimidating and threatening their critics. This is central to the alt-right’s appeal to its targeted core demographic—namely, young white males between the ages of 12 and 30.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Talia Lavin at GQ acutely observes that Donald Trump Jr.’s exercise in indulging this mindset on his Instagram account—intentional, accidental, or otherwise—fits in neatly with the White House’s current push to war in the Middle East, one in which the underlying premise is that “war is holy”</b>: “It’s a Knight Templar with an AR-15; it’s Arabic script as a signal of enmity. That’s the signal Donald Trump Jr. was sending, with his snug Crusader gun-helmet. And it may be ensconced even deeper in the halls of power, with those formally entrusted with our nation’s security under the Trump regime.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The machinery of hate thus encompasses both the individual nebbishes—hiding in the dark corners of the Internet, ever-fearful about revealing themselves as the face of hate even as they revel in it as trolls—and their willing, if not always conscious, enablers who walk the world’s halls of power, as well as everyone in between. Mainstream observers, particularly those working in media, often feel confused by the resulting crossfire—unsure about the meanings of the wielded symbology, most likely feeling “left out”—and so dismiss the talk as functionally meaningless.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s not, particularly for the racist ideologues who organize and spread their hatefulness behind the resulting fog and smoke they throw up for the rest of us. Donald Trump Jr. may not have intended to send an encouraging, approving signal to white nationalists—it’s likely it never crossed his less-than-a-steel-trap mind—but intentions matter little in this arena.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s not how things work in the world of white nationalists. Just as with his father, these kinds of signals are received rapturously as proof that the Trumps are on their side, and that their values are shared by people at the very apex of the social ladder: thus, they feel deeply empowered. Any later denials are laughed at and excused as “what he has to do.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The key to the game, no matter who’s playing, is plausible deniability for everybody involved. The alt-right has mastered its use as a way to market and spread the movement’s hate.</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></p>