paleo-catholic

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disambig, maybe for converts?

--> GENERIC FOR HARD CORE PROMOTE 2ND ON CHARTER okLA

see catholic info ctr, opus dei

MERRI OK

see deus vult

see JDV

see natcon, ali alex RW violent rhet; fuentes groyper anti-semite

1/20 new tag PPP pence, pompeo perry, ie high ranking trump dominionist/ paleo-catholic

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drucker

During an appearance on his show last week, Kent hinted that the Jewish state was behind the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kent also sought refuge with Candace Owens, a blatantly antisemitic influencer on the far right, and her podcast audience. Kent also appeared at a Washington gala of Catholics for Catholics, where he was celebrated — and where Owens delivered a keynote speech. The group has been dismissed as a fringe organization by mainstream Catholic leaders.

-=-=

10/09/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Angry that Bad Bunny has been chosen to perform at the Super Bowl, Turning Point USA will be hosting an alternate "All-American Halftime Show."
Racist far-right commentator Isabella Moody is desperately trying to get a position as a host of the "Her Take" podcast.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville responds to those who are upset that "Israel [is] killing all these innocent people in Gaza": "What about the ten thousands Christians that have been killed this year in Nigeria by Islamic terrorists?"
Nick Fuentes declares that "if you're not Catholic, you're going to Hell": "Catholics are Christians, protestants are heretics."
Finally, Joel Webbon says that "if you fire into a crowd of liberals, you've got about a hundred percent chance of hitting exclusively child predators."

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no lnx

The “weirdos” shaping Trump’s second term

Politics

The “weirdos” shaping Trump’s second term

A liberal writer explains her journey through intellectual MAGAland.

by Zack Beauchamp

Aug 14, 2025,

Key Speakers At Conservative Political Action Conference

Michael Anton, current director of policy planning at the State Department, speaking during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 2, 2023. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Zack Beauchamp

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.

If you’ve been following American politics in the Trump era, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of “the New Right.” It’s a loose movement of radical intellectuals who share a basic hostility to American liberal democracy. They all think the system is rotten, that it needs to be fundamentally overhauled, and that Donald Trump can be a vehicle for putting something better in its place.

But why do they think that? How much influence do they really have? And what would a response to their rising prominence look like?

In an upcoming episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast, I spoke about all of this with Laura Field — a political theorist who spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world. Her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking.

We talk about who these people are and how they replaced the “old” conservatism with something more aggressive and authoritarian. We also talk about how they are influencing the Trump administration, and why ordinary Americans should care what a handful of thinkers are putting out on obscure Substacks and YouTube channels.

Part of our conversation is transcribed below, edited and condensed for clarity. The full interview contains much more, and you can listen to it on Monday. We’ll update this link with the embed when the episode is out.

And, if you just can’t get enough of Zack and Laura content, you can come to our Vox-sponsored panel at the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference — held in DC on Friday. There’s already a waitlist, so sign up soon.

You’re someone who is liberal but found yourself as a professional academic and intellectual in conservative spaces — and that’s pretty unusual because there tends to be a lot of self-segregation away from that world. What pulled you into it and what was it like being an insider-outsider in the conservative world of ideas?

I wanted to go into medicine and be a doctor in the developing world. I was very, very liberal and sort of a save-the-world type. I had to take some required courses in political philosophy, and one was a wonderful course on ancient political philosophy and early modern thought. It was mind-blowing.

The right today uses this language of being “red-pilled,” where you see through the lies that we are told by the regime. They use this extreme language, but something sort of parallel happened to me, just reading Plato with these really great teachers.

I fell in love with these books and the tradition of political philosophy and literature that these teachers were so good at explaining. My politics didn’t change dramatically, but some of those circles were quite adjacent to the people who were the leaders of the avant-garde of defending Trumpism: the West Coast Straussians, call them the Claremont Institute people.

When that started happening, I was really quite alarmed.

You use “new right” as an umbrella term for all of these different pro-Trump factions. What makes the new Right a cogent grouping, not just a random smattering of people who all like Trump? What connects them and what differentiates them from the old right?

I’m talking about the MAGA new right, [in contrast] with the Reagan-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is propped up by fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism.

The new right turns against a lot of that. Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys, says that Trumpism and the new right is all about economic nationalism — turning against the free market orientation of the establishment — as well as closed, secure borders. So that’s the anti-immigration strain and America-first foreign policy.

I think that there’s also just a hardcore social conservatism at the core of a lot of this — at least spiritually.

The new right has shared principles: preoccupation with gender, strong support for Trump, a general disinterest in the traditional norms of democratic politics, and a commitment to unremitting culture war against the left. But there are huge divisions. If you were to divide the new right into camps, what would you say the fault lines are?

I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives. Then I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, manosphere-fascist types. Each of these groupings are different.

The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American founding. They have this very grandiose vision that’s beyond even your ordinary patriotism. It’s that this is the best regime of all time. They’re also at the very cutting edge of the culture war. So America is the best regime of all time, but we’ve completely lost the plot. The liberals and liberal way of thinking have taken over to such a degree that we need a counter-revolution. They’re the [type] who defended January 6.

Michael Anton, who you mentioned earlier, is now a Trump administration official, a high-ranking one. He’s one of the key leaders in that faction.

Yeah. And then there’s the national conservatives. They’re a little more vanilla, with just nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and certainly Christian nationalism. They’re a big tent.

The tensions are clearest when we are talking about the post-liberals, who are the most highbrow of the New Right. They tend to be Catholic intellectuals: people like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, and writer Sohrab Ahmari. These are serious Catholics who are more committed to social conservatism and really want to shape the morals of the country in a much more traditional Catholic direction. But they’re also interestingly much more sincere about the left-oriented [redistributive] economics.

The new right as a whole speaks as if they want to help the working class, and create new populist programs. But I think that the people who are closest to Trump haven’t really followed through. They’ve got the tariffs, but otherwise economically, they’re still doing the big tax cuts. They’re still beholden to donors. So that’s been a big fissure, because the post-liberals are almost open to socialism.

A lot of other fissures come in terms of how accepting they are of the hard right. Ahmari has been quite outspoken against the Proud Boys and the manosphere, Bronze Age Pervert and those guys.

I think another interesting divide, which came about just after the election, was DOGE vs. MAGA. DOGE came in and did the destructive part of getting rid of the so-called administrative state. But a big part of the new right wants to harness the state and weaponize it for their own purposes.

Why does any of this matter for our politics?

The knee-jerk reaction to think “who cares” is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre — weirdos. That’s why it’s alarming to see them wield so much power, to see JD Vance have that clout.

I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP. It’s not just JD Vance who’s some weirdo who’s gotten to the top. It also seems to matter a lot to young people. These kinds of movements can build energy, and young men are influenced by these circles.

A lot of these people I’m writing about are in the intellectual spheres. They’re pretty smart. A lot of them have PhDs, which is no marker of genius, but they have a lot of education and resources available to them. They’re experts in ways that would surprise many people. They know a whole lot. I wouldn’t want to debate some of them on the founding or other questions.

These well-learned people shape the minds of people like Joe Rogan. Ideologically, there is a trickle-down effect. The culture war has a big impact. You see the impact of someone like Christopher Rufo.

You argue that the right operates with an “ideas first” approach, believing that ideas have a tangible, causal impact on politics. Democrats, in contrast, are putting ideas last. You contrast the “coarse brazenness of [the right’s] ideologues and the tepid intellectual and cluelessness and cowardice of so many centrist and liberal leaders both within academia and beyond.”

That is a stinging indictment of the liberal intellectual class. Where are you coming from here? When you say that they’ve failed in contrast to the coarse brazenness of the new right, what do you mean?

Trump has been much more effective in his second term. The Democrats are in a difficult position. They had a very rocky electoral cycle with Biden staying in so long and Harris in this awful position of having to parachute in and not being very well prepared.

I don’t feel like there’s much of a response from the left intellectually to what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to me like the party has much to offer on the ideological front.

It is frustrating as an observer to see that Bernie and AOC were the people who went and toured the country. But I didn’t see more centrist Democrats doing very much. And I still think that’s the case. They seem very shocked and unprepared. And I think that that comes down to a failure of imagination — taking way too much for granted for a very long time. And that’s part of what got us Trump in the first place.

See More:

Politics

thcarter123

Terrific YouTube. Really good. I’d say spot on for everything about Leonard Leo (my boss from 2009-2012 at USCIRF) except that he or his court picks believe in “originalism.” Originalism is a rebranding, a marketing scam. Like you say toward the end, Leonard is an extreme right Catholic true believer. That is his political faith. He is a Catholic Crusader. It is called Catholic Integralism, based on Aquinas “natural law.” Today’s intellectual deans of Integralism are Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. In short, US separation of church and state is heresy. The state must be run by Catholic king, with immunity. This theology runs thru the Inquisition, the Papal States, Opus Dei’s Franco Spain, Hitler’s Carl Schmitt and Leo’s Supreme Court. Leo spent 35 years and $600 million finding and placing Catholics in important slots. Only extreme Catholics. Six Supremes, Kevin Roberts and Roger Severino at Project 2025. JD, a disciple of Deneen, in the White House. Again, terrific video. You tell the Leo story better than most. Hope it gets millions of views.

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AN 7 24

since his nomination as the Republican candidate for vice president, focus has intensified on JD Vance’s religious beliefs and how they connect to his politics.

Vance is a convert to Catholicism and seems to have the same policy positions that many American Catholic conservatives hold: opposition to abortion, support for the traditional family, skepticism regarding liberal immigration policies and efforts to combat climate change, and advocacy of economic tariffs.

Some news reports have also referenced Vance’s apparent association with Catholic Integralism, although Vance himself has not addressed the issue publicly.

So, now might be a good time to ask: What is Catholic Integralism?

What is Catholic Integralism?

The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.

Catholic Integralists disagree about how to achieve this integration between the spiritual and temporal. Some argue that Christians, particularly Catholics, should have advisory roles in government and lead by example. Other Catholic Integralists want a more comprehensive approach to organizing society along Christian principles.

Catholic Integralists share an opposition to liberalism. Generally, liberalism is understood as a political philosophy that supports limits on the government’s authority and constitutional protections for the rights of individuals and minorities. But Catholic Integralists argue that liberalism is incapable of establishing deep forms of human community because it values individualism and liberty above all things.

The irony, from the Catholic Integralist perspective, is that liberalism is not really that liberal. Instead, liberalism demands – and enforces – adherence to a certain set of values, like tolerance and pluralism, that prevents creating a social order in which human beings can realize a larger, God-given meaning for their lives.

Catholic critiques

There are strong criticisms of Catholic Integralism coming from both within the Catholic church and beyond.

The Vatican II document, “Dignitatis Humanae,” affirms that the state should protect religious liberty for all, not only Catholics. This is a position that some Catholic Integralists would find problematic.

Other critics have argued that Catholic Integralism is “unreasonable” and unworkable because society needs to rely on the cooperation of individuals who inevitably have different ideas and values.

Vance and Integralist views

When considering Vance’s current policy commitments, some certainly seem consistent with Catholic Integralist views. For example, Catholic Integralists might justify opposing immigration and migration because they believe that society needs to be more homogeneous in order to have a shared system of values.

Additionally, Vance has recently called to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. In one sense, Vance is expressing the overall Catholic belief that sex and gender distinctions are willed by God – a point that Pope Francishas also made. But moving to enforce this religious belief by law might reflect a Catholic Integralist position that society must respect “natural law,” or the order of the universe as believed to be established by God.

Right now, Catholic Integralism is of interest to a distinct minority of Catholic academics and political conservatives in the the English-speaking world. But if Vance is elected vice president, it will be interesting to see what happens if he clarifies – or expands – his apparent Catholic Integralist connections.

Mathew Schmalz, Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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rww 7 24

J.D. Vance spoke at the Heritage Foundation's 50th anniversary celebration.

The Trump campaign’s recent dishonest efforts to distance itself from the deservedly reviled Project 2025 policy agenda created by his former aides and closest allies got even less convincing Monday with Trump’s choice of MAGA hardliner J.D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has praised Project 2025’s authoritarian, anti-equality, anti-freedom policy agenda.

Vance is a close ally of the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s primary sponsor. Vance he was “thrilled” to write the introduction to Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ new book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America.”

Heritage sponsored a “policy fest” on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Held at a symphony hall a few blocks from the secure zone, the policy fest was a day-long series of speeches and panels promoting the kinds of policies laid out in Project 2025.

Roberts addressed the RNC audience just after the lunch break. He said Heritage welcomes the recent media coverage of what he called “the conservative movement’s plans for taking back this country,” claiming that “the vast majority of American people” support the project’s efforts to undermine the federal government’s regulatory powers and dismantle the administrative state.

Roberts tried to make the case that Policy 2025 is “a plan among a unified movement to speak on behalf of the everyday American, the Forgotten American.” In reality, Project 2025 would gut the federal government’s ability to protect American workers, families, and communities from corporate wrongdoing, predatory financial institutions, irresponsible polluters, and more. Roberts’ book title is reminiscent of a joke told among Federalist Society operatives describing their long game to repeal the New Deal and reverse a century of precedent and progress: “Rome Wasn’t Burned in a Day.”

At the same time, Project 2025 would grant a future President Trump virtually unchecked power to use federal agencies to target his political opponents, personal enemies, and mainstream media. That’s why historian Heather Cox Richardson has called it “a playbook to end American democracy.”

When Vance was running for the Senate in 2022, Right Wing Watch noted his support for Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and Vance’s contempt for democratic checks and balances:

If you’re wondering what kind of United States Vance envisions, it’s one where Trump rules with an iron fist and only employs loyalists at all levels of government. “If I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Vance said.

Vance added that if the courts rule against such a move, Trump should defy them. That kind of stance explains why Vox calls Vance a “naked authoritarian” with a worldview that is “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.”

Earlier this year, Jack Jenkins at Religion News Service reported on Vance’s connections to Catholic integralism, a right-wing Catholic version of authoritarian Christian nationalism.

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lauren windsor doku alito tapes poses a paleo-cath? also roger stone

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paleo-catholic? poso 2 rosary kirk conf 6 24

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AN 12 23

The U.S. Supreme Court has leaned conservative for decades, but a key difference between the High Court of the 1990s and the High Court of 2023 is the strong influence of social conservatives. Former Justice Anthony Kennedy and the late Justice Sandra Day O'Connor were conservative Ronald Reagan appointees but often sided with liberals when it came to abortion and gay rights; today's Supreme Court is much more sympathetic to the religious right.

In Oklahoma, social conservatives are pushing for a taxpayer-funded Catholic school — inspiring, according to Politico's Heidi Przybyla, heated debates over what the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment says about the separation of church and state. And social conservatives, she reports, may have a sympathetic audience at the Roberts Court.

"At issue is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma's push to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the nation's first religious school entirely funded by taxpayers," Przybyla explains. "The school received preliminary approval from the state's charter school board in June. If it survives legal challenges, it would open the door for state legislatures across the country to direct taxpayer funding to the creation of Christian or other sectarian schools."

Paul Collins, a legal expert at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, believes that the religious right could have a major advantage if the Oklahoma debate goes to the Roberts Court.

Collins, author of the 2008 book "Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making," told Politico, "The Christian conservative legal movement, which has its fingerprints all over what's going on in Oklahoma, is a pretty small, tight-knit group of individuals. They recognize the opportunity to get a state to fund a religious institution is a watershed moment. They have a very, very sympathetic audience at the Supreme Court. When you have that on the Supreme Court you're going to put a lot of resources into bringing these cases quickly."

The religious right has been claiming, for decades, that there is no such thing as separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution — a claim promoted by far-right House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). But critics of the religious right, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the late Norman Lear's People for the American Way, have been countering that although the First Amendment promises freedom of religion, it is very clear about government not favoring one religion over another.

The First Amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Attorney Andrew Seidel, whose book "American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom" was published in 2022, warns that the religious right has gained considerable influence on the Roberts Court.

Seidel told Politico, "Schools are the last bastion of church-state separation, and they have been the target of Christian nationalists and the shadow network for decades. That's why it's so striking. In 2022, they got a change in the personnel on the court thanks to [conservative legal activist Leonard] Leo."

*Heidi Przybyla's full article for Politico is available at this link.

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paleo adjacent?

an raw 5 23 thom h

no lnx

you’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.

Anthony Comstock was a mama’s boy who hated sex. His mother died when he was 10 years old and the shock apparently never left him; women who didn’t live up to her ideal were his open and declared enemies, as were pornography, masturbation, and abortion. He was so ignorant of sex and reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse.

Comstock spent decades scouring the country collecting pornography, which he enthusiastically shared with men in Congress, and harassing “loose women.” For example, when he visited a belly-dancing show (then a new craze) in Chicago at the Cairo Theatre during the World’s Fair of 1893, he demanded the show be shut down.

As Amy Sohn, who wrote a brilliant Comstock biography titled The Man Who Hated Women, noted:

“Despite national controversy and Comstock’s intervention, ultimately the only alteration made to the fair’s belly dancing was costuming: the dancers swapped their gauze blouses for thin woolen undershirts. The vice hunter had lost in Chicago. But he would not forget the dancers, and would have four of them arrested and fined when they came to New York that winter. New York, after all, was Comstockland.”

Comstock lobbied for and shepherded through Congress a law passed on March 3, 1873 titled “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use.” Today we refer to it as the Comstock Act.

Its language with regard to abortion is not at all ambiguous:

“Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance … designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and

“Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

“Every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of such mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means abortion may be produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and

“Every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

“Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing—

“Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier.” (emphasis mine)

The penalty is also not ambiguous. Persons mailing information about abortion, or drugs or devices to produce an abortion:

“[S]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both, for the first such offense, and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, for each such offense thereafter.”

The Biden administration argues that the Comstock Act of 1873 was set aside almost a century ago.

And, indeed, in 1930, the Appeals Court for the Second Circuit ruled in Youngs Rubber Corp. v. C.I. Lee & Co that the law couldn’t apply to things sent through the mail that are legal, even if they were illegal at the time of the passage of the Comstock Act. (The case involved condoms manufactured by Youngs Rubber.)

“Such a construction,” the court wrote, “would prevent mailing to or by a physician of any drug or mechanical device ‘adapted’ for contraceptive or abortifacient uses, although the physician desired to use or to prescribe it for proper medical purposes.”

The law has been amended by Congress four times (in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994), but the language above was never struck because legislators figured the appeals court’s ruling rendered it nugatory.

But don’t tell that to Trump’s appointee Texas District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, who ruled last month that Mifepristone was to be banned nationwide: he based a large part of his decision on the plain language of the Comstock Act.

And don’t tell it to the three rightwing judges hearing an appeal this week of Kacsmaryk’s decision before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

When the Biden administration’s attorney argued that Kacsmaryk’s decision was “unprecedented,”Circuit Judge James Ho — also a Trump appointee, who personally swore his good friend Kacsmaryk into his office — interrupted her with a curt snap, saying:

“I guess I’m just wondering why not just focus on the facts of this case rather than have this sort of ‘FDA can do no wrong’ theme.”

The appeals court, made up of a George W. Bush appointee and two Trump appointees, earlier had ruled in their preliminary finding to hear the case that they disagreed with the Biden administration’s assertion that, to quote the three judges, “the [Comstock] law does not mean what it says it means.”

When the Biden interpretation of the Comstock Act was brought up in oral arguments, the Bush appointee, Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, said there is “some disagreement” about whether previous court rulings actually invalidated the law.

Republican members of Congress agree, and want the Comstock Act enforced nationwide.

In a letter sent to CVS (among other pharmacy chains), Mississippi Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and eight other Republican senators (Lankford, Daines, Braun, Rubio, Marshall, Risch, Crapo and Blackburn) wrote that the Biden interpretation (and that of Congress in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994) is wrong.

“We write to express our support and agreement with 21 State Attorneys General,” they wrote “who have reminded you that Federal law in 18 U.S.C. 1461-1462 [the Comstock Act] criminalizes nationwide using the mail, or interstate shipment by any express company or common carrier, to send or receive any drug that is ‘designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.’”

The 1930 court ruling that lawmakers and judges had, for over 90 years, believed only applied the Comstock Act to items that were illegal (like child porn), she wrote:

“[D]oes not protect CVS or any other individual or entity from being prosecuted within the five-year statute of limitations for the illegal mailing or interstate shipment of abortion drugs … even for conduct that occurs today.”

The lawyer for Republicans defending Kacsmaryk’s ruling before the Fifth Circuit, Erin Hawley (the wife of Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley), went so far as to assert before the court that even physicians and pharmacies shouldn’t be able to receive Mifipristone or other drugs that could produce an abortion via the mail, FedEx, or UPS:

“What the Comstock law says is that it is improper to mail things that induce or cause abortions, which is precisely the action the FDA took in 2021 when it permitted the mailing of abortion drugs.”

If Hawley’s interpretation is ultimately adopted by the Supreme Court, all abortions in the United States would be ended when drugs and suction and surgical devices designed specifically for the procedure can no longer be shipped to hospitals, clinics, or physicians’ offices.

And this is no idle threat.

Given how all three judges on the Fifth Circuit reacted to this week’s arguments, most court observers believe they’ll vote to sustain Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling and ban Mifipristone nationwide, perhaps even outlawing its legal shipment to pharmacies for other uses like helping with incomplete miscarriages.

Other drugs and surgical devices used for abortions are almost certainly next.

As Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond wrote for his Substack newsletter, anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson, who’s helped several cities around the country put into law local versions of the Comstock Act, told him:

“If a future president were to enforce these federal statutes, then they could shut down every abortion facility in America.”

Such a ruling by the Fifth Circuit will kick the whole mess up to the Supreme Court, where six hardcore rightwing Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church but was raised Catholic) are gleefully rubbing their hands in anticipation.

This battle promises to be long and hard-fought, and if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Fifth Circuit’s anticipated decision the only solution will be for Congress to overturn the Comstock Act itself.

And that’s unlikely to happen unless or until Democrats can take back the House, hold the White House, and gain a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in the 2024 election. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Several states are now stockpiling Mifipristone in anticipation of just such a dystopian outcome. Families with women and girls of childbearing age may want to do the same.

Forewarned is forearmed.

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an ah 11 22

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.

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.

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. Conservative Washington Post opinion columnist Henry Olsen had a blunt comment in his November 22 column: “College-educated voters just aren’t into MAGA.”

But “weird” Republicans, The New Republic’s Graham Gallagher emphasizes in an article published on November 25, 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.

“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 Claremont Institute, right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms.”

Gallagher points to “the right-wing embrace of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin” and former Rep. Allen West’s obsession with the Medieval Knights Templar as examples of how “bizarre” the “online weird right” can be. Others include beliefs that “real men don’t eat soybeans, seed oils are dangerous, meat substitutes will turn men into women and…. the best diet is all-meat.” And Gallagher cites some specific examples of how “weird” MAGA candidates could be in the 2022 midterms.

“Blake Masters and J.D. Vance — two Republican candidates for Senate funded in part by tech billionaire and new-right linchpin Peter Thiel — have embraced new-right ideas and actively courted the ‘weird right,’” 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.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/postliberalism/

kay joyce

On a Friday night in early October, in a downtrodden city in eastern Ohio, a speaker laid out a grim vision. At the height of 2020's first, most terrifying wave of COVID-19, an employee at a Chinese slaughterhouse led his coworkers on a walkout. For years, the state-owned company had abused its staff with continual video surveillance, punishing production quotas and demerits for bathroom breaks. Now it was casually disregarding their safety during a once-in-a-century pandemic. Following the walkout, the employee was fired, and then vilified through a PR campaign that denounced his protest as immoral and possibly illegal.

This article originally appeared on Salon.com.

After a pause came the reveal: That hadn't happened in China, but in New York City's Staten Island; the hero wasn't a Chinese meatpacker, but a young warehouse worker named Chris Smalls; the villain wasn't the Chinese government but Amazon.com. The speaker went on, quoting from Karl Marx about "masters and workmen" and the "spirit of revolutionary change" before clearing his throat to deliver another correction: Apologies, that was actually Pope Leo XIII.

Both jokes were preface to a larger punchline, one that's particularly relevant after the 2022 midterm elections: This wasn't happening at a Bernie Sanders rally or a Democratic Socialists of America meetup, but a decidedly conservative conference at Ohio's Franciscan University of Steubenville, a center of U.S. right-wing Catholic thought. The speaker (and conference organizer) was Sohrab Ahmari, a Catholic writer best known for his 2019 polemic against conservatives insufficiently committed to the culture wars. The conference, "Restoring a Nation: The Common Good in the American Tradition," was a showcase for the modestly-sized but well-connected Catholic integralist movement, part of the broader current of conservative thought known as postliberalism.

Over the two-day conference, 20 speakers, including then-Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, hammered home the argument that the same faith used to justify abortion bans and curtail LGBTQ rights also demanded a different approach to the economy, one that might plausibly be called socialist. Laissez-faire capitalism, speakers said, wasn't the organic force conservatives have long claimed but the product of state intervention; ever-expanding markets hadn't brought universal freedom but wage-slavery and despair; Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal — demonized on the right for generations — was in fact a "triumph for Catholic social thought"; social welfare programs were good.

All that might be striking enough. But the conference also served as something of a rebuttal to another gathering of right-wing intellectuals that had taken place a few weeks before: the third major National Conservatism conference, held this September in Miami. The two conferences — one in a hollowed-out former steel town, the other in a $400-per-night golf resort — represented two sides of what some partisans recently called a "fraught postliberal crack-up." Broadly speaking, these are ideological kin: members of the Trump-era intellectual "new right" who see themselves as rebels fighting an elite "Conservative, Inc." But it's a family in the midst of a feud, and the public split signified by the two meetings comes after months of less visible infighting over questions only hinted at in headline Republican politics.

Earlier this month, after the midterms failed to deliver a promised "red wave," those fights spilled into the headlines, as Republicans' disappointed hopes led to some of the first open shots in what's been a cold civil war over the party's future. Partly that fight revolves around whether Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will lead the GOP into the 2024 presidential election. But it goes much deeper than that, and the fight also has implications that go well beyond the right.

The midterms gave conservatives of all stripes something to claim, or to denounce.Activists who spent the last two years sniffing for "critical race theory" and "gender ideology" in public schools cheered DeSantis' re-election as proof that maximalist culture war is the key to Republican success. Anti-Trump conservatives pointed to culture warriors' widespread losses elsewhere as proof the GOP needs to come "home to liberal democracy." In a New York Times op-ed, Ahmari chastised conservatives who'd spent the run-up to the election mocking an overworked Starbucks barista as one likely reason that "the red wave didn't materialize." Vance's victory in Ohio was simultaneously touted as proof that right-wing populism remains viable and that "the culture war still wins."

Others called on Republicans to actualize their claim to be the new party of the "multiracial working class." The ecumenical religious right journal First Things exhorted conservatives to join picket lines. The conservative policy think tank American Compass unveiled a comprehensive "New Direction" economic agenda, repurposing lyrics from the Clash to propose things like realigning financial markets with the common good. In, Trump strode into a Mar-a-Lago ballroom to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy to the "Les Misérables" anthem "Do You Hear the People Sing?"

And after days of lambasting "Washington Republicanism" for offering little of substance for the working class, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., issued a proclamation: "The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new."

* * *

The right-wing populist wave that elected Donald Trump in 2016, like the U.K.'s Brexit vote a few months earlier, is typically described as a watershed moment for conservatism. But the fact of the Trump revolution arrived before the theory. Something had clearly changed in the political order, but Trump's impulsiveness and lack of coherent ideology or policy agenda created a vacuum that needed to be filled, retroactively, by intellectuals on the right.

A variety of themes emerged from those efforts. One was an "America First"-inspired rehabilitation of nationalism, long tarnished by its association with authoritarian movements in pre-World War II Europe. Another was heard in Steve Bannon's call to dismantle the "administrative state" of unelected bureaucrats who might stand in Trump's way. A third was the conviction that classical liberalism — in the historical Adam Smith sense of that word, which prioritizes individual rights, pluralism and free trade and which guided both parties for generations — had been a catastrophe, replacing traditional norms with a destructive free-for-all.

As postliberals like Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, author of the influential 2018 book, "Why Liberalism Failed," argue, classical liberalism promised peace and prosperity but instead delivered an era of haves and have-nots, swapping good jobs for dehumanizing gig work, empowering corporations to enforce a homogeneous global monoculture and promoting social policies that led people — particularly working-class people — away from traditionalist values like church, marriage and parenthood. In that light, conservative regions' higher rates of divorce, teen pregnancy and opioid deaths weren't evidence of red-state hypocrisy but rather an unrecognized form of class warfare.

The right's retconned Trumpist ideology also made a meta-argument: that the conservative "fusion" that had defined the Republican Party since the 1960s — uniting religious traditionalists, Cold Warriors and free marketeers in opposition to communism — had ultimately failed.

In 2019, Ahmari and a cadre of mostly conservative Catholic intellectuals gave voice to that argument through a group manifesto, "Against the Dead Consensus," which declared (several years before Josh Hawley) that the old conservative coalition was over and something new must take its place. Two months later, Ahmari wrote a follow-up, declaring never-Trump National Review writer David French the poster boy of that dead consensus, for being the sort of conservative who would defend Drag Queen Story Hours on the grounds of free expression. There was no polite, pluralist way to fight such an abomination, Ahmari argued, only a zero-sum approach to fighting the culture war "with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good."

Language like "the Highest Good" was a hat-tip to integralism, a right-wing faction of Catholicism that aspires to effectively re-found America as a Catholic "confessional state," where state power is subordinate to the church and government is devoted to fostering public virtue and the "common good." Part of that project aims to replace the longstanding conservative legal ideology of constitutional originalism (as championed by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scaliaand his followers on the current court) with "common good constitutionalism" (primarily theorized by Harvard Law professor and former Scalia clerk Adrian Vermeule), wherein the law works as "a teacher" to instruct, and enforce, public morality. In other words, if the actual public doesn't want to live by conservative Christian ideology, a new governing class should impose it.

That premise has led other Catholics (conservative and liberal alike) to condemn integralism as reactionary and authoritarian. When integralists weren't being intentionally vague about their plans, critics charged — in a widely-discussed 2020 Atlantic essay, Vermeule declined to specify what common good constitutionalism would mean in practical terms — those plans are frightening, as in one integralist text that suggests limiting citizenship and the vote to members of the faith.

James Patterson, a political science professor at Ave Maria University, has written about integralism's troubled lineage going back to pre-World War II European fascist or authoritarian movements, including the Spanish Falangists that supported dictator Francisco Franco or the antisemitic Action Française that grew out of France's Dreyfus Affair. On Twitter recently, a Catholic parody account posted a satirical book jacket for an "updated and honest" edition of Vermeule's latest book with images of combat boots and a tank and an invented blurb from Ahmari: "Finally we can stop pretending what we're really talking about."

But the postliberal critique resonated beyond the cloistered world of right-wing Catholic discourse, intersecting with another post-Trump project: the rapidly-growing national conservatism movement. Led by Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony, author of the 2018 book "The Virtue of Nationalism," the NatCons also see classical liberalism as fatally flawed— its central premise of a neutral public square, where no religion or culture reigns over any other, is nonsense, because liberalism is both a competing worldview and a slippery slope, inevitably leading to cultural revolution. As Hazony often argues, within two generations of the Supreme Court's ban on religious instruction in public schools, marriage rates and religious observance had plummeted and "woke neo-Marxism" took their place.

Since its first conference in 2019, NatConhas come to represent a series of positions: hostility to transnational bodies like the EU and UN; a quasi-isolationist skepticism of foreign entanglements; sharp reductions or a complete moratorium on immigration; realigning the free market with national interests (variously described); and, most importantly, replacing the illusion of a neutral public square with the conviction that, "Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision," as a recent NatCon statement of principles holds.

From the get-go, there were important differences between the integralists and NatCons. Catholicism makes a fundamental claim to universality (and some integralists speak wistfully of empire), which fits uneasily with NatCons' nation-centric vision. Integralists have far more ambitious economic plans than most NatCons would support.

But there were important commonalities too: a mutual opposition toward mainstream conservatism, a largely shared rejection of liberalism, a common desire to return Christianity to the center of American public life. Both camps swooned for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and saw his avowedly "illiberal" "Christian democracy" — with its expanded government power, sharp restrictions on immigration, repression of LGBTQ rights and pronatalist family subsidies — as the primary model to emulate. Both sides also benefited, to one degree or another, from the largesse of right-wing donors who are funding numerous projects (and candidates) on the "new right."

"If anti-communism bound together the old conservative consensus," said Jerome Copulsky, a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, the new right's coalition "is animated by antiliberalism and a belief that a high degree of religious and cultural uniformity is necessary for social cohesion and political legitimacy."

But there are problems with building alliances on the basis of shared enemies, Copulsky warned. "The coalition-building is about the Venn diagram of who they don't like: liberals, 'woke' multiculturalists, non-traditional sexuality and gender roles. But as they move forward, their different understandings of what they want to put into place will bring out the tensions and contradictions of their alliance. The 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' attitude only goes so far."

* * *

Over the last year, that exact problem has played out through quarrels fought on social media, in new right publications and on conference stages. It was even visible in the difference between this year's NatCon conference in Miami and the one held a year before.

In November 2021, multiple new right camps converged in Orlando for NatCon 2. The heart of the conference was an evening panel featuring the nationalist Hazony and integralist Ahmari, as well as "anti-Marxist classical liberal" Dave Rubin and British neocon Douglas Murray, all discussing whether a new alliance could be forged. Hazony, an Orthodox Jew, had a surprising suggestion: Bible instruction must be restored in public school, as a crucial first step toward reasserting America's identity as a Christian nation and a "conservative democracy."

There were tensions, most notably around the fact that Rubin and Murray are both gay: would there be room, Rubin asked, for him and his family in this new right? But after reaching apparent agreement that the problem wasn't gay people per se but rather expanded trans rights or LGBTQ representation in schools, the session closed as it had begun, with the PA system playing "We Are Family."

That unity was short-lived. This September, when NatCon reconvened in Miami, the only panelist who returned was Hazony himself, reflecting a number of upheavals in the preceding months.

One seeming result was that this year's NatCon — the movement's largest to date — reflected a marked increase in hostility toward not just "gender ideology" but LGBTQ rights in general. In one plenary address, a seminary president declared that in order for conservatives to resist "the fantasy and folly" of transgenderism, they must also reject same-sex marriage: "He who says 'LGB' must say 'TQ+.'" Another speaker argued that the failure of any major U.S. institutions to denounce "the LGBT agenda" proved that America has become "basically anti-American." NatCon's own statement of principles, released just months after asking two gay men to help build the new right, defines marriage as only between a man and a woman.

In part, this shift reflected some conservatives' belief that NatCons' tent had gotten "a little too big." One right-wing website used a photo of the 2021 panel to warn about "the quiet rise of LGBTQ influence in Christian and conservative circles." Rubin had also become the center of a conservative firestorm, after he announced that he and his husband were expecting the birth of two babies being carried by surrogate mothers — news that sparked not congratulations but widespread denunciations of both Rubin and any conservative who stood by him.

But the altered mood also reflected something else, Hazony told Salon: The Supreme Court's June decision overturning Roe v. Wade had opened a new world of conservative possibilities, and the sense that it might be "possible to restore an earlier constitutional order." Post-Dobbs, conservatives giddily discussed which Supreme Court precedents they might topple next, and the 2015 Obergefell decision that had legalized same-sex marriage nationwide was high on the list. To Hazony, it suggested a rapid revival of the desire to reassert biblical values in the political sphere. Conservatives wanted to go for it all.

In his own conference address, Hazony called on conservatives to commit to being "fully Christian in public," arguing, "The only thing that is strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity." For the politicians in attendance — including DeSantis, Hawley and Florida's two Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott — that meant not just mouthing platitudes about God-given rights, but insisting that American freedom comes from the Bible. Less than an hour later, Hawley happily obliged, declaring, "Without the Bible, there is no America," with a fervor matched by other speakers eagerly reclaiming the label "Christian nationalist" as a battle cry.

Perhaps even more conspicuous were the missing Catholic integralists, who in 2021 had provided much of NatCon's intellectual framework. This year, their absence prompted so many subtle, and less subtle, asides throughout the conference that one confused audience member raised his hand to request an explanation.

A British priest who said he'd been invited to affirm that, contra some people, Catholicism and national conservatism go together just fine, suggested that the integralists' seeming boycott amounted to useless theological squabbling: Who cared "how many integralists can dance on the head of a pin"? In a breakout session, another Catholic panelist suggested it was "cringe" for integralists to believe they'd ever set the moral framework for a "basically Protestant nation."

The biggest rebuke came from Kevin Roberts, the recently-appointed president of the Heritage Foundation, the great white whale of institutional conservatism, which has been shaping Republican priorities since the first years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Roberts' presence at the conference was itself a coup. Two years earlier, Hazony said, Heritage had attacked him for "importing nationalism" into the U.S. Now the foundation had underwritten much of this year's conference, had met with NatCon leaders to discuss their statement of principles and had published a 20-page booklet recounting a conversation between Roberts and Hazony on "Nationalism and Religious Revival." In a line widely quoted after the conference, Roberts declared, "I come not to invite national conservatives to join our conservative movement, but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours."

Roberts, who describes himself as a Catholic populist, also admonished his missing coreligionists ("Integralists, heal thyselves!"), accusing them of rejecting "conventional constitutional" politics and seeking to "subordinate the state to an institutional church" in ways that would discredit both. Alluding to the fact that many prominent integralists are recent Catholic converts, Roberts continued that, while he shared many of their frustrations, "and I certainly rejoice in their religious conversion," their zeal had "led them into error."

The integralists fired back. At the start of the Miami conference, Ahmari tweeted that he was "emphatically not a 'NatCon.'" The movement's academic Substack published a long theological rebuttal to Roberts' claim that integralists wanted to establish a theocracy. Another writer asked whether NatCon's big tent still had room for integralists. When Gladden Pappin, cofounder of the conservative journal American Affairs and a professor at the University of Dallas, repeated the question on Twitter, Hazony responded with exasperation: Pappin could answer that question himself, since he'd spoken at a NatCon event several months earlier.

"In my view, conditions of ongoing animosity and hostility between NatCon and the five or six of you would be a colossal waste of time," Hazony wrote. "However, if you decide that a strategy of hostility, boycott or insults is the way to go — I can assure you that a wiser Catholic intellectual leadership will arise to take your place."

* * *

"There is clearly some kind of break," Hazony told Salon, but he saw it arising primarily from the integralists' side. Several had been invited to sign NatCon's statement of principles in June, but all had refused. Ideological differences that were "soft-pedaled a year or two ago" were suddenly getting "a high-octane emphasis."

For Hazony, the primary issue was about how conservatives understand China, the rising superpower that NatCons see as America's No. 1 rival. Their conference had banned all speakers who are "pro-Xi, pro-Putin, racists or antisemites," although that standard seems malleable at times. (As Political Research Associates' Ben Lorber reported, this year'sNatCon included a meditation on the viciously xenophobic French novel "Camp of the Saints," approving mention of antisemitic Action Française leader Charles Maurras and an address by a former Trump speechwriter fired for alleged ties to white nationalists.) But some integralists, Hazony charged, had "always had a soft spot for dictatorship, for imperialism and for China," and in recent months that had become impossible to ignore, as members of the movement wrote articles praising China's government or culture.

Then there was Compact Magazine, the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right."

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them."

Both Thiel and Klingenstein spoke at NatCon this year, and a handful of other NatCon speakers attended the integralist conference too. But on the whole, Hazony said, Compact was a bridge too far for most NatCons. While many in the movement were open to "rethinking the commitment to the free market as an absolute principle," and might even support targeted business regulations, he said, there was "no appetite, no capacity among nationalist conservatives to accept the ideal of social democracy as an alternative to the market mechanism."

Integralists had their own complaints. Some also involved foreign policy questions, like whether NatCons' enthusiastic defense of Ukraine amounted to a creeping neoconservative revival, or whether their strident hostility to China reflected warmed-over Cold War politics. But their main concern was more fundamental: NatCons, they charged, were abandoning the populist promise of Trumpism for a seat at the establishment table.

To be sure, NatCon 3 featured critiques of big business, but, with limited exceptions, most amounted to dragging "woke corporations." Ron DeSantis (introduced in Miami as "the future president") spoke dutifully about how free enterprise should be seen as a tool to help "our own people" rather than an end in itself. But his real firepower was saved for war stories: his battle with Disney over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, his resolution banning state pension funds from weighing environmental or social justice concerns in investment decisions, a promised law to help Floridians sue tech companies that commit "viewpoint discrimination."

Other speakers called forblacklisting banks that disinvest in fossil fuels; seizing universities' endowments; and making it illegal for employers to ask if applicants attended college, in order to disincentivize young people from entering the "inherently liberalizing environment" of higher education. (In a more recent example, after contrarian billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and numerous companies stopped advertising on the platform, Republicans suggested that congressional hearings into "leftist corporate extortion" might be in order.)

To Ahmari, this amounted to "fake GOP populism." "This may sound strange coming from me," he said — that is, the guy who made his name by denouncing "David Frenchism" — "but it's just culture war." He was increasingly convinced that whipping up Twitter wars over corporate gestures towards progressive politics was the kind of conservatism "designed to ensure" that nothing important ever changed. "It's easier to pick a fight over Disney than to take on corporate power as such."

"There is this emerging sense on our side," Ahmari continued, "that the old Reaganite establishment is reconsolidating itself under the banner of NatCon or populism, but the agenda and personnel haven't changed." For instance, he said, the Heritage Foundation's Kevin Roberts calls himself a populist, but this summer tweeted the Reaganesque claim that "Government is not the solution, but the obstacle, to our flourishing." If the new right wanted to "get in bed with Heritage," Ahmari wrote this summer in an essay lambasting "Fusionism 2.0," that was fine. But then it didn't get to call itself populist; he refused to be such "a cheap date."

Integralists also expressed a worry shared by radical movements since time immemorial: Their language and ideas were being co-opted and neutralized by either establishment Republicans or elements of the new right all too eager to go mainstream.

Now that postliberals had made certain policy ideas "trendy," said Gladden Pappin, who's written extensively about replicating Hungarian social policies in the U.S., others on the right were "trying to fill them with concepts that bring it back down to classical liberal conservatism." You'd see people suggesting, he explained, that the foundation of conservative family policy should be religious liberty and right-to-work laws, or libertarians saying, "You know what supports the common good? Radical free markets."

Postliberals weren't the only ones drawing that conclusion. When Roberts told NatCon that Heritage was part of their movement, supporters celebrated it as "the moment they went mainstream." But other attendees remarked that they were increasingly unsure of how NatCon actually differed from regular "con." New York Times columnist Ross Douthat warned that the movement risked being "reabsorbed into the GOP mainstream without achieving its revolution," so that a hypothetical President DeSantis might call himself a national conservative while pushing through more tax cuts for the rich. New York Magazine described this year's conference as having "the flavor of a party convention," albeit one headed toward a "middle ground between Reagan and Mussolini."

Perhaps this evolution was both natural and inevitable. If national conservatives originally intended to build a new right, James Patterson wrote recently, its current, apparent reconciliation with fusionism reflects changed political realities. In 2019, when NatCon held its first conference, the Trump presidency was in full swing and the movement sought to fill the ranks with true believers. By their next meeting in 2021, Republicans were newly out of power and eager to forge alliances to win it back. This year, Patterson noted, the Dobbs decision demonstrated that there might be life in the "dead consensus" yet, since a Supreme Court dominated by old-line originalists — not their "common good" critics — had just delivered the right's biggest victory in decades.

"They're learning the lessons of why the last fusion collapsed," said Jerome Copulsky: Different factions of the right can work together easily enough until their movement begins to gain power. Then they come to realize "that someone's policies will be implemented, that there will be winners and losers in this coalition."

The NatCons feel pretty sure which of those things they are. At one point during this year's conference, Hazony recalled, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler — perhaps the preeminent voice of the evangelical right — excitedly told him, "This is what it was like in the 1980s when the Moral Majority was first getting organized." In a midterm postmortem with British outlet The Spectator, Hazony sidestepped the question of whether Trump or DeSantis would win the right's civil war. NatCons would rally around Trump, or someone else, he said; either way, their ideology would lead.

* * *

In response, integralists vowed to build a coalition of their own. "NatCon is trying to put the constellation of right-wing organizations back together," said Pappin, "whereas I'm trying to articulate a political vision that could be successful at governing and also oriented towards the common good."

Considering various constituencies that have swung right in recent years — like law-and-order Latinos in Texas or the Midwestern white working class — Pappin said he was more interested in finding ways to keep them in the fold. That could happen through "something that a lot of Republicans would call left-wing economics," he suggested. "Can Republicans articulate a vision that might be more traditional morally, but also favor a supportive state?" Compared to efforts to reassemble the old right-wing fusion, Pappin asked, which was real coalition building?

"U.S. conservatism has so long been associated with pro-capitalist policies that we sometimes forget that conservative movements in other countries can look extremely different," said University of Michigan political scientist Matthew McManus, a progressive who's written extensively about the modern right. Postliberals' favored models in Hungary and Poland demonstrate that, he said, with expansive social welfare programs tied to "socially conservative and exclusionary practices."

It's not unthinkable that such a political gumbo might also work in the U.S., said University of Oregon professor Joseph Lowndes, co-author of "Producers, Parasites, Patriots." A clear lineage can be traced, he said, from the populist presidential campaigns of paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan in 1992 and 1996 through the Tea Party to Trumpism to projects like Compact today. "Not to put it in crude Marxist terms, but when you're under the material conditions of a second Gilded Age, when you have real gaps in wealth and neoliberalism becomes less and less credible," Lowndes said, "it opens up space for something that could wed the cultural politics of conservatism to a social order that seems more humane."

To that end, Patrick Deneen's forthcoming book, "Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future," calls for replacing "the self-serving liberal elite" with a "new elite devoted to a 'pre-postmodern conservatism'" that's aligned with the working class. Compact's own hybrid politics, said Ahmari, represents a similar attempt to forge a "positive vision" that is "liberated from the dogmas of the establishment right" and thus creates space for alliances with the left.

In practice, that has meant that Compact publishes essays on unions or trust-busting from conservatives and lefties who agree to disagree about cultural questions like abortion and same-sex marriage. Ahmari — who's undergone his own political odyssey, from socialist to neocon to postliberal, and increasingly these days, something like post-conservative — says he hasn't changed any of his positions on social issues but believes that building economic alliances can "lower the temperature" of those disagreements. "If you just have less corporate power," he proposed, "then whatever the corporate agenda is, wokeism or whatever, it doesn't bear down on ordinary people so much."

As for conservatives who dismiss their vision as a pipe-dream, Ahmari said there are "far fewer Americans than these folks think who favor the idea that the government is always an obstacle" and far more who might be mobilized by the resurrection of a mid-century conservatism at peace with the New Deal. After all, he said, "the last time Catholics voted as a united bloc was for the New Deal coalition."

That's not quite the whole story, argues James Patterson, recalling substantial Catholic infighting over FDR's agenda. But beyond historical quibbling, he says, the postliberal conviction that there is an untapped reserve of fiscally liberal, socially conservative voters waiting for something like integralism ignores the fact that most people who fit that demographic aren't the proverbial white working class but rather immigrants and people of color likely to be suspicious of a movement that "cites the Francisco Franco right." (Not coincidentally, Lowndes notes that Pat Buchanan's father was a legendary Franco fan and Buchanan himself called the dictator a "Catholic savior" and "soldier-patriot.") In an earlier critique of the new right's courtship of the working class, the left-wing journal Jacobin argued that right-wing populism is only viable in the context of "historic levels of demobilization and disorganization for the working class."

Perhaps, Patterson said, the integralists were setting their hopes on J.D. Vance (as of this month a senator-elect), and the possibility that their movement might influence, or even staff, his Capitol Hill office. After all, a sub-tenet of integralism is the contention that the movement doesn't need a majority, if enough believers can place themselves inside "the shell of the liberal order" to effect "integralism from within."

That's one answer, said Copulsky, to the question of how either side of the new right expects to "shape a culture when the majority of the public doesn't agree with you anymore." Neither the NatCons nor the integralists represent a majority position, "so they either have to go convert a bunch of people or use the coercive power of the state to make people follow their rules."

"People are always like, 'Who cares about the integralists? No one's going to vote for this,'" added Patterson. "But what if they don't know they're voting for it? What if J.D. Vance doesn't even fully know what he's getting himself into?"

* * *

Over the course of the new right feud, both sides have accused the other of betraying the cause. Integralists accused NatCons of being closet liberals and channeling populist anger towards safe external enemies. A NatCon speaker dedicated a podcast episode to arguing that "Catholic Integralism Is an Op," intended to "collect and discharge" Trumpist energies in ways "that are ultimately harmless." In short order, the allegations became as tangled as leftist infighting that dates back to the Russian Revolution. (Online, it became inscrutably meta, as when one "crypto-fascist" "anti-leftist Marxist" launched a Substack series charging that all dissident publications serve as an "exhaust valve for middle-class discontent.")

Shortly after Compact launched last spring, journalist John Ganz called the magazine an "unholy alliance" that recalled previous efforts to combine "socialism + family, Church, nation." Specifically, Ganz wrote, it sounded like a 19th-century proto-fascist French movement that synthesized left and right positions and whose adherents often called themselves "national socialists" — a term, Ganz notes, "that once sounded fresh and innovative."

Other observers pointed to a more recent analogue: the New York critical theory journal Telos, founded in the late 1960s by New Left devotees of Herbert Marcuse, but which by the 2010s was better known for its association with far-right thinkers who inspired the alt-right.

Telos' metamorphosis, explains Joseph Lowndes, who watched some of it happen, wasn't a simplistic example of "horseshoe theory" but rather the result of the people behind the project, frustrated by their search for an effective form of dissent, accepting "easy, far-right answers to complicated social and political questions." After Trump's election, Lowndes wrote about Telos' strange history as a warning: At this precarious moment in history, he argued, there were "two off ramps" from the vast inequalities of neoliberalism. One led to a very dark place.

Overall, Ganz views the postliberal movement as a "boutique intellectual project," a "tiny sect arguing with other intellectuals." But the possible inroads it might make with a disillusioned "post-left" were worrisome, he told Salon: "There's this broader thing going on where disenchanted leftists, who view their leftism as cultural revolt against liberalism, are becoming actually, substantially conservative. And they're crystallizing into a kind of quasi-fascist politics."

Beyond publishing articles about how the GOP might reconcile with unions, Compact has also published work by monarchist "neoreactionary" Curtis Yarvin as well as a number of leftists, or "post-leftists," who generally agree with the right on social issues: anti-immigration social democrats, anti-"gender ideology" radical feminists, leftists who see "wokeism" as "capital's latest legitimating ideology" (e.g., union-busting companies that fly Pride flags or post about Black Lives Matter). In September, the magazine published an essay exploring, with cautious sympathy, a hashtag movement called #MAGACommunism, which calls on leftists to abandon "toxic" social progressivism in favor of "the only mass working-class and anti-establishment movement that currently exists in America."

"[N]ot quite what I was going for," tweeted Compact cofounder Edwin Aponte in response. By then, Compact's resident Marxist had been gone from the project for several months, after disagreements over the leaked Dobbs decision forced him to conclude that his politics were irreconcilable with those of his colleagues and ultimately led to the dissolution of their partnership.

Aponte told Salon that when he first joined the project, as a Bernie Sanders leftist disillusioned with the collapse of that movement, he and his co-founders agreed to avoid issues like abortion "because, per them, they weren't interested in relitigating settled issues. But the second the Dobbs decision dropped, it was no longer a settled issue." When Compact published what Aponte saw as a "weirdly triumphalist article" proposing that Republicans respond to the fall of Roe by creating Hungary-style family subsidies, he had something of an epiphany.

"It revealed what they really cared about, and it was something highly specific and normative: that you can have a generous and materially comfortable state, as long as all these moral and cultural conditions are met," said Aponte. "On the surface, we wanted the same things. But the motivations behind it were different." It wasn't that he doubted their sincerity, he said, so much as that "the engine behind it is what goes unsaid, and is what actually matters more." For his right-wing partners, he said, "those material politics are a means to an end, rather than an end. And the end they have in mind is not something I think is good or just."

Exactly what that end is, Aponte doesn't feel sure, but he saw some troubling signs.

In late September, Compact held its first public event in an arthouse theater in downtown Manhattan: several dozen 20-somethings gathered in a basement screening room to listen as Anna Khachiyan, co-host of the quasi-socialist podcast Red Scare, introduced "heterodox economist" Michael Lind for an academic lecture about models of social organization.

It was one version of the weird, politically amorphous downtown scene where, as journalist James Pogue described in Vanity Fair last April, "New Right-ish" politics and converting to Catholicism "are in," and where Peter Thiel may or may not be "funding a network of New Right podcasters and cool-kid culture figures as a sort of cultural vanguard." (Earlier that month, the New York Times reported that a new Thiel network is channeling millions towards media projects, including journalism and "influencer programs.")

It's a scene suffused with a sense of ironic transgression, Ganz says, giving a "performance quality" to everything, "like part of this cultural revolt is about making yourself into a spectacle." For example: in recent weeks Khachiyan has promoted a "based literary journal" that includes an extended interview with her alongside a celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse and an exploration of whether the blood libel — the centuries-old conspiracy theory that Jews ritually murder Christian children — might actually be true.

"I don't think that white working-class voters who are even a little bit Trumpy are interested in this ideology," said Ganz. "It's a hipster thing trying to pass as working-class stuff, so it's kind of fake, but kind of scary. I don't really know where to situate it."

Throughout history, Aponte said, "Authoritarian reactionary movements have gained support and energy from such incoherence and contradictions." This movement seemed to have sufficient gravitational pull, he said, that "everyone starts falling in and gradually being converted. I've seen it happen with people I thought were really good leftists, who, next thing I knew, had turned into racists, transphobes and homophobes."

"Everyone's kind of on board, the specifics are blurry, but the direction is titled one way, whether anybody wants to acknowledge it or not," Aponte continued. "That's something we haven't seen in a long time. It's a vibe, and the kids love it, because the kids are not happy — justifiably so. It's a really spooky and dangerous time, and I feel foolish for participating. I feel bad."

In the end, what unites the right's various factions will likely hold more weight than what divides them. Generally speaking, said McManus, the right is better than the left at putting aside its internal differences to unite against a common foe. In J.D. Vance's speech in Steubenville, he called for a ceasefire in the new right's civil war. "We can't be so mean to one another," he told the audience, noting that all conservatives who challenge GOP orthodoxies are taking risks. They were right to be on guard against "Fusionism 2.0," Vance acknowledged, but perhaps the best way to prevent that was "being charitable to one another's ideas." After all, they had real enemies to fight, like transgender health care.

"We need to do more on the political left to inoculate people against the temptation to move in these radically right directions that can masquerade as a genuine critique of the status quo," said McManus. "Some people are being very foolish in toying around with these movements," perhaps because they don't take new right fulminations against trans rights or its idolization of Viktor Orbán seriously, believing "they won't actually go that far." In fact, McManus said, "There's a very large wing within these movements that wants to go exactly that far. Some of them want to go even further."

On Twitter, Aponte tried such an inoculation, addressing warnings to "all my heterodox former-leftist friends" that he'd "seen what lies behind the curtain." "[B]e careful with whom you ally," he wrote. "Their enemies might be your enemies for a just reason, but the devil is in their programmatic details."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/christian-nationalism-2657874677/

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https://www.salon.com/2022/08/24/new-america-avowed-nationalist-lgbtq-hater-pushes-vision-to-catholic-right/

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"New America": Avowed white nationalist, LGBTQ-hater pushes vision to Catholic right

Catholic fringe group acclaims "Christian fascist" who led ugly anti-Pride protests as a "saint in the making"

By KATHRYN JOYCE

Investigative Reporter

PUBLISHED AUGUST 24, 2022 6:30AM (EDT)

Anti-abortion activists and church members gather outside of a Catholic church in downtown Manhattan on May 07, 2022. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)]

On Aug. 18, the Catholic-right media outlet Church Militant featured a half-hour interview with John Doyle, a young YouTube streamer who drew national attention this June for helping to lead a uniquely ugly protest against an LGBTQ Pride Month event in downtown Dallas. The 22-year-old Doyle, whose YouTube show "Heck Off, Commie!" has an audience of some 300,000 subscribers, has openly referred to himself as both a "white nationalist" and "Christian fascist." But to his interviewer, Church Militant founder and president Michael Voris, he was a "saint in the making." And as the conversation brought Doyle's message to a new and different audience, the alignment of right-wing Catholicism with some of the most extreme voices on today's far right only grew.

For years, Church Militant has served as an angry gadfly within the world of right-wing Catholicism, objecting not just to moderate and progressive Catholics and Pope Francis, whom the outlet sees as a heretical liberal, but also to more mainstream conservative Catholic outlets it views as insufficiently critical of church hierarchy.

For his part, Doyle is a prominent member of online far-right youth circles aligned with the white nationalist America First/groyper movement and its leader, the gleefully racist and antisemitic livestreamer Nick Fuentes, with whom Doyle led a "Stop the Steal" protest in 2020. On his livestream show, where Doyle promotes an authoritarian form of Christian nationalism, he has attacked figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., claiming that "being assassinated was like the best thing that could happen to him" and said that "the destruction of white racism is ultimately code for the destruction of American society." Last October, Doyle taunted students at the University of North Texas by asking, "What is wrong with Christian fascism?" and warning that "when we and all my friends take power, bad things are going to happen to you."

Related Lone Star hate: Right-wing activists in Texas drive a new wave of anti-LGBTQ bigotry]

In February, Doyle appeared as a special guest at Fuentes' third America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC III) in Orlando, alongside far-right politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who called for hanging the movement's political enemies. In April, after keynoting an event hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara, chapter of Turning Point USA, Doyle praised the group for being brave enough to invite "white nationalists" like "yours truly" to speak.

And this June, as Salon reported, Doyle attacked a family-friendly drag queen brunch at a Dallas gay bar, declaring that LGBTQ people are "the symptom of a dying society," that he aimed to take away "every single one" of their rights and that Texas sheriffs should enter the bar "and put bullets in all their heads" because "That's what the badge is for."

That protest is what Doyle recalled when Voris asked him what Church Militant's right-wing Catholic audience should be paying attention to in the cultural arena. Describing transgenderism as "deeply disturbed and satanic," Doyle went on to claim that when some of his fellow protesters prayed the rosary, it had sparked a "demonic" response from the counter-protesters who were there to protect the bar and its patrons.

"There were people next to us who weren't exactly Catholic," Doyle said, but who nonetheless later told him that "at that moment, the sort of spiritual conflict we're in became very real to them." While LGBTQ advocates and allies might dismiss other forms of protests, Doyle continued, "hearing the word of God and something that powerful made these people who look as though they were probably demonically influenced screech. They weren't yelling their counterargument … they were literally screeching at us exactly as you would expect if you believe in spiritual warfare."

During that event, as local activists' and filmmakers' videos document, anti-LGBTQ protesters screamed at parents and their children, followed some families and performers back to their cars, called attendees and counterprotesters "faggots" and "groomers" and even taunted police there to separate the camps by saying, "Your dad probably dragged you to a lot of gay bars."

Doyle also suggested, without evidence, that the parents who had brought their children to the event were all "single mothers" who had "been failed by the men around them and they're taking it out on the children. You know, oftentimes these are little boys who are being brought to these events by their single mothers, and you have to assume that the single mother is basically viewing that boy as like his father, and getting revenge on him by destroying them."

Doyle went on to claim that American men have been feminized by "residual estrogen in our tap water"; that the behavior of women politicians shows "that they really were supposed to be like mothers or nurturers"; and that, should his side "win," it should erect statues of all the "Satanic Panic evangelical right-wing leaders [of the 1980s and early '90s], just as an apology to them, because everything they predicted turned out to be true." (As with baseless QAnon conspiracy theories today, the Satanic Panic involved elaborate but utterly unfounded accusations that American day care centers were part of a widespread network of organized ritual pedophilia rings.)

Doyle claimed American men have been feminized by "residual estrogen" in tap water and suggested erecting statues of the "Satanic Panic evangelical right-wing leaders" of the '80s and '90s, because their predictions "turned out to be true."

Doyle's racist ideas were also hinted at during the interview. When Voris asked Doyle why he thought he hadn't yet been censored by "big media," Doyle responded that he believed his "intellectual approach" disarms content moderators who are on the lookout for more obvious hate speech. "If I do an hour-and-a-half-long video, for example, basically preaching against the civil rights movement in every aspect, that has been able to survive on YouTube and get a few hundred thousand views," he said. "Whereas someone who will say, 'Oh, MLK is a bad guy because of XYZ cheesy joke,' they'll get censored." He went on to suggest that today's United States is "definitely unsustainable" because America's government was constructed "by people who were much more intelligent and educated than the people who currently run it," thanks to both "exponentially accumulating degeneracy" and "affirmative action."

In response to that threat, Doyle continued, the "authoritarian right wing" was growing as "an immune response to Communism." While he said he and his fellow travelers weren't calling for "a Mussolini-style state," they "just know that what is happening is wrong and we're going to stop it eventually." Within the course of the next decade, he went on, "It will be more obvious that pillars are being put into place that could really cause a serious change. …We're seeing a lot of these people emerge and I think they're going to be very useful in orchestrating what will be, like, the New America, so to speak."

Part of that New America, he suggested, would come about through the increasing mobilization of young right-wing men. "I think it is going to be as we see throughout history: Men, in particular young men, finally get together and organize and take the country back in whatever capacity that means."

During the interview, Voris called Doyle "a saint in the making" and Doyle credited Church Militant with helping shape his faith, saying that after he'd "come out" as Catholic during one livestream, "without really knowing what that meant," members of Church Militant "reached out to me" and had become his "sherpa, leading me into becoming a good Catholic."

Doyle's New America will come about, he suggested, through the mobilization of young right-wing men, who will "finally get together and organize and take the country back."

Church Militant isn't the only outlet helping to mainstream Doyle's views. In addition to the welcome he's found with Turning Point USA — which is currently bringing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on a national tour to support far-right candidates such as Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Pennsylvania's would-be Christian nationalist governor Doug Mastriano — Doyle also regularly appears on, and even guest hosts, a show on Glenn Beck's BlazeTV network.

Furthermore, Doyle also isn't the only far-right activist affiliated with white nationalism that Church Militant has helped elevate to a new audience. The outlet made waves in 2021 for hiring disgraced alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos as a contributor. (Yiannopoulos in turn likely helped Church Militant score a major sit-down interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene this April, in which Greene declared that the existence of Catholic immigrant aid groups suggested that Satan was controlling the Catholic Church.) Last November, the outlet invited self-declared "groyper Mommy" Michelle Malkin to address its daylong protest rally outside the annual gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, where Malkin invoked "replacement theory" rhetoric to charge that the church's hierarchy was using immigration to destroy "the historic American nation."

More recently, as Salon reported in a series this spring, Church Militant has made a number of efforts to align itself with and recruit members of the America First/groyper movement, at least one of whose members is also on the outlet's staff. Those efforts have included buying social media ads that use groyper imagery in appeals for "based straight Zoomer[s]" to join Church Militant's activist arm, Resistance, and "fight for authentic Catholicism."

In a video last February, Voris praised AFPAC III as the place "where all the youthful (read: future) energy is," predicting that, between Fuentes' AFPAC and the more mainstream Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), "Whoever wins this struggle will dictate the future of the [Republican] party and, to a large extent, the nation."

In May, the head of Church Militant's Resistance group interviewed groyper leader Dalton Clodfelter, promoting a groyper website as an exciting platform "for a lot of awesome younger conservatives." Clodfelter, who described the America First movement as "not like normie neocon conservatism" but rather actively "Christian nationalist" and dedicated to "spreading Christianity through our nation where it's lacking," in turn promoted a series of Resistance-organized anti-abortion protests to his followers on the social media site Telegram in the days after the leaked Supreme Court opinion that eventually overturned Roe v. Wade.

In the past week, as Right Wing Watch has reported, Clodfelter has declared that "every homosexual is a child molester; every child molester creates a gay"; called someone he was feuding with online a "fucking k*ke" and promoted a vision of America's future in which Christianity will become the official religion, pornography and LGBTQ people will be illegal and all schools will "promote what it means to be a Christian to the youth of America."

"I believe in a far-right authoritarian government," Clodfelter continued. "Once we take control, we will identify our enemies and we will stomp them into the dirt. They will not be able to return to power. We will rip them from their offices. We will rip them from their homes for being degenerate liars, degenerate, treasonous domestic terrorists, because that is what they are."

Back at Church Militant last week, viewers were ecstatic about the outlet hosting Doyle, calling him an "Absolutely based Catholic man," declaring the interview "in the top ten crossovers in modern Catholic history," and urging Church Militant, "Please have Nick Fuentes on" next.

Read more from Kathryn Joyce on the far right

Tennessee showdown: Governor's big plan for right-wing charter schools sparks fierce backlash

Arizona's Kari Lake celebrates BDE (um, "Big DeSantis Energy") at right-wing lovefest

QAnon believers have a novel spin on Mar-a-Lago raid: At last the "Storm" is here

By KATHRYN JOYCE

Kathryn Joyce is an investigative reporter at Salon, and the author of two books: "The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption" and "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement."

https://www.nationofchange.org/2022/07/07/opus-dei-supreme-indecency-extreme-deceit/

the current Supreme Court majority that just denied women a legal right to abortion (Dobbs vs. Jackson) consists of religious fanatics whose careers have been fast-tracked (so that young Justices can serve for decades) by ultra-wealthy, like-minded lobbyists and political operatives. The nexus of this activity lies with a powerful arch-conservative organization within the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, that in the U.S. operates out of the Catholic Information Center in Washington D.C.

I am not targeting Catholics but rather the Church’s reactionary, fundamentalist wing. Many Catholic organizations are dedicated to upholding the rights and lives of minorities (and majorities, such as women), victims of pedophilic priests, gays, the poor, immigrants, etc. The fundamentalist wing of any religion has more in common with other creeds’ fundamentalisms than with many of its own co-religionists, whom they often regard as enemies. Catholic fundamentalism is obviously not the only “brand” influencing American politics, but it is the one with a dominant insidious influence on the judiciary.

Opus Dei and its partner organizations have poured tens of millions of dollars into promoting the careers and appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and the five Justices who overturned Roe: Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett (Roberts, an arch-conservative, nonetheless dissented on the abortion case).

Opus Dei was founded in Spain by Escriva de Balaguer in 1928 and grew in power, wealth, and influence during the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco who, with significant military help from Nazi Germany, overthrew the legitimate Spanish government and ruled over a police state from 1939-1975.The group extended its power throughout Latin America, supporting Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile and other terrorizing dictatorships. It consistently opposes gay, sexual, and reproductive rights, and the Catholic liberation movements that champion the poor in Latin America. It has been involved in the Vatican’s banking scandals but still wields enormous influence over Vatican finances, as detailed by Robert Hutchison in his book, Their Kingdom Come.

Opus Dei’s assets as of 2008 were $2.8 billion, but they have undoubtedly grown since. Popes John Paul II and Francisboth elevated Opus Dei officials to the highest Church offices. One of Opus Dei’s core principles, as articulated by its founder, is to engage in “the sphere of public life”, not because they are human or Catholic rights but because “they are God’s rights…May such ‘fanaticism’ for the Faith…become stronger every day.” Opus Dei is not simply a conservative religious group, it is openly dedicated to wielding political and financial power in nations throughout the world. And that often means promoting and aligning itself with the most violent, reactionary regimes and acting in the shadow realms of political influence.

Opus Dei members were prominent in Trump’s White House, including Attorney General William Barr and Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel. Opus Dei had access to Trump’s budgetdirector,Mick Mulvaney, along with other noted right-wing lobbyists (Heritage Foundation, Koch Industries), meetings the Trump administrationtried to keep secret. Member Larry Kudlow was Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. It may well be the most powerful political lobby in the world and yet its explicit political agenda is absolutely subservient to its extreme, authoritarian religious agenda.

A key fixer in this effort is Leonard Leo. Leo is on the board of directors of the Catholic Information Center (William Barr was a past director) and Executive Vice Presidentof the Federalist Society, a lobbying group that adheres to an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution (more on this below). The two organizations are close political allies, as Leo’s dual role suggests. As Trump’s close advisor during his presidency, Leo was responsible for selecting and guiding the Supreme Court nominations of Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch and was instrumental in riddling the lower Federal courts with Trump appointees.

Meanwhile, members of both Opus Dei and The Federalist Society include Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Chief Justice Roberts is a Federalist Society member and the Society’s members and supporters are prominent in many of nation’s top law schools and most powerful law firms, which allows it to have an untoward influence over judicial selections. When Clarence Thomas headlined a 2013 Federalist Society fundraiser, guests were seated in proximity to him according to the size of their donations. In effect, the Federalist Society and Opus Dei have become the Supreme Court of the land.

Much of Opus Dei’s influence was exerted via the Wellspring Committee, established and run by Opus Dei members Ann and Neil Corkery in 2008. The Koch brothers were instrumental in providing Wellspring with its first $10 million in seed money. According to Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Corkerys “have been the overseers of massive amounts of money that have gone into federal judicial races.”

Wellspring closed down in 2018 but not before passing its mantle to the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN); in 2017 Wellspring transferred $14,814, 998.00, or 94% of its donations that year, to JCN. JCN was formerly directed by Leonard Leo and now byCarrie Severino, who served as Thomas’s law clerk. (Opus Dei’s Roger Severino, Carrie’s husband, was Director of Trump’s Office for Civil Rights). JCN is a 501(c)(4) organization so its donors can remain secret. JCN poured millions into supporting Bush and Trump’s Supreme Court nominees (Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett) and millions blockingObama’s Court nominee, Merrick Garland.

Given Opus Dei’s absolute anti-choice ideology, global power, and influence over the Supreme Court, it is clear the Court’s anti-choice decision was not driven by legal arguments over the right to privacy, strict or “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, or states rights. These were all just window dressing. The Supreme Court—and much of our judiciary—has been taken over by fanatics with a strictly theologicalagenda: to replace “separation of Church and State” with “the Church runs the state”. It is a narrow, fanatical religious ideology that decided the case.

The so-called “originalist” theory of interpreting the Constitution claims the Constitution only protects rights explicitly mentioned in the text. The Constitution itself rejects the “originalist” idea so central to conservative ideology. The Ninth Amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This clearly states that interpreting the Constitution is a living, evolving process, for how else can those “other[s]” rights be “retained by the people”? The Ninth is also a safety valve: “If we left out any important rights, sorry, our bad, it doesn’t mean those rights aren’t protected as well.” The Ninth has been used to uphold such diverse rights as teaching non-English languages, sending kids to private schools, protecting against forced sterilization, and the 1965 Griswold decision overturning bans on contraception, in which privacy was deemed a “penumbra” (also called “unenumerated”) right. The penumbra concept was then applied to abortion in 1973’s Roe decision.

Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, citing both the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments:“This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or…in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent.” The Court also recognized that “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary…is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” Blackmun’s decision includes an overview of the dramatic shifts in cultural and legal attitudes towards abortion, though most views differentiated abortions in the first 12-16 weeks (before the baby is usually felt moving inside the womb) from those occurring later.

The “sanctity of the foetus”, that is, viewing abortion at any stage of pregnancy as equivalent to murder, is the linchpin of the anti-choice position and its driving emotional trigger. However, even the Catholic Church’s historical opposition to abortion had nothing to do with the sanctity of the foetus; it was aimed at the “sin” of sexual pleasure. Church policy varied over the centuries but the foetus’s life was either absent as an issue or secondary to sexual sin and other theological concerns. St. Thomas Aquinas asserted that in its earlier stages a foetus is in a “vegetal” and then “animal” state before achieving person-hood at some point, most likely at the end of the third month.It wasn’t until 1965 that the Church banned abortion on the basis of sanctity of life rather than sexual sin.However, the Bible passages used to justify this claim 1) do not really address abortion (the BIble is much more direct in advising that adulterers be stoned to death); 2) are drawn mostly from the Old Testament, a Jewish document, significant since the Jewish religion allows abortion; and 3) are in the Bible, which has no legal standing in the United States. Or didn’t.

The Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jacksonis only the beginning, as anti-abortion activists and GOP-led extremists mobilize to assault a wide range of rights. The anti-choice movement was never only about abortion. Abortion was used as the emotional catalyst for a broad attack on the values of tolerance and social commitment embodied in Federal guarantees backed by Constitutional authority. The well-being of Americans and our system of government is now in the hands of religious fanatics on a crusade against all those who do not believe in their degraded, medieval version of truth. They are welcome to their beliefs but are not welcome to impose those beliefs on the rest of us, nor to challenge the fundamental values of the United States, which holds the value of human beings above adherence to extreme and rigid political or religious ideologies.

===

salon:

...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. In 2017, groyper leader Milo Yiannapoulos was drummed out of many right-wing movements for statements he made minimizing child sex abuse, and subsequently used his return to Catholicism as an opportunity to rebrand.

This March he headlined an anti-abortion convention in Ohio that was blessed by the local Catholic bishop, and in June he will be a featured speaker at a Church Militant Resistance bootcamp. 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. "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. 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,former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fuentes himself.

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. Within it, hundreds of posters discussed traditionalist Catholicism and posted memes alternating, or combining, Crusades-era imagery with neo-Nazi and antisemitic content.

As journalist Eric Martin reported at the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners, some posters identified themselves as "Charles Coughlin Roman Catholics," for the 1930s pro-fascist priest 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."

More broadly online, far-right activists online began adopting phrases like "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.

Some conservative Catholics have welcomed this development. In a 2019 article published by the Catholic right magazine Crisis, "Kids in defense of the culture," American Greatness editor Pedro Gonzalez praised Fuentes' groypers. "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."

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."

But moderate and liberal Catholics were appalled. "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 "Pepe Catholicism," while Georgetown University theologian Adam Rasmussen called it "Catholic LARPing": a way for the alt-right to pretend they were "Knights Templar fighting the forces of darkness in the deep state."

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."

"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."

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."

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. "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."

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.

"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."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/jan-6-christian-nationalism/

In the midst of the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested man in Viking horns who's come to be known as the QAnon Shaman, stopped his fellow marauders in the Senate chamber to pray. "Thank you Heavenly Father for gracing us with this opportunity … to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs," he said. "Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn."

The prayer, caught on video by New Yorker reporter Luke Mogelson, was just one moment among hundreds that day illustrating how deeply the insurrection was intertwined with Christian nationalism. Across the sea of protesters in and outside the building, t-shirt and ball-cap slogans proclaimed it: "Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president"; "God, Guns, Trump"; or, on the sweatshirt of a man helping construct the rough gallows erected on the Capitol lawn, "Faith, Family, Freedom." (The gallows itself was quickly covered in handwritten notes — "as if it were a yearbook," observed lawyer and author Andrew Seidel — reading "Hang them high" and "In God We Trust.")

Elsewhere, protesters carried gigantic portraits of Jesus and replica statues of the Infant of Prague, or chanted about the blood of Jesus washing Congress clean. A long-haired blond man sang praise songs into a microphone plugged into a stack of amplifiers he was wheeling on a hand-truck. A Nebraska priest performed an exorcism on the Capitol building to banish the demon Baphomet, who he $_{claimed}_$ was "dissolving the country" in order to "bring it back as something different." One rioter later indicted for breaking into the Capitol was actually a cast member in a touring production of "Jesus Christ Superstar." Another, Leo Brent Bozell IV, came from a long line of Christian right activists: His father, L. Brent Bozell III, founded the right-wing Media Research Center and his grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., wrote speeches for Joseph McCarthy and a manifesto for Barry Goldwater.

"It was evident to anyone watching that there was this religious character to what was going on, both in the Trump movement writ large but particularly in the leadership of the 'Stop the Steal' movement," said religious studies scholar Jerome Copulsky, co-director of a new website, Uncivil Religion, dedicated to collecting "digital artifacts" of Jan. 6 religiosity and exploring what it means for, say, violent protesters to dress up like Captain Moroni — a legendary warrior from the Book of Mormon — or sing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" alongside fellow protesters carrying Confederate flags. "It wasn't just the Stop the Steal rally, then the assault," Copulsky continued. "People really wanted to display their religious commitments, literally wearing them on their sleeves."

The Uncivil Religion project developed from a Twitter hashtag, #CapitolSiegeReligion, created by author and religious historian Peter Manseau and based on his sense that the religious subtext (and text, and blaring headline) were "*the* story of what happened" on Jan. 6. In Manseau's view, religion wasn't an incidental element, but had been the driving motivation that had brought many people to the Capitol. Much of that had begun much earlier, with Christian right leaders — both official and self-declared — framing the 2020 election, and the rest of America's polarized conflicts, as an all-or-nothing showdown between good and evil.

Some were national names, like Samaritan's Purse president Franklin Graham, who in August 2020 warned in a Christian Broadcasting Network interview that if Trump lost, churches would close down and Christians would be attacked. But that message was echoed so widely, in both religious and secular conservative media and across numerous niche religious right communities, that allegations about the "stolen" election became nearly inseparable from messages of apocalyptic faith.

Much of that was on display on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, when a large-scale interfaith prayer protest, the Jericho March — widely seen as a forerunner to Jan. 6 — brought together a number of religious right factions to pantomime the biblical Battle of Jericho in praying to "bring down the walls of the Deep State." The carnivalesque full-day rally — organized, as journalist Sarah Posner reported, by two then-current employees of the federal government — featured an odd fusion of charismatic evangelicalism, Christian Zionism and right-wing Catholicism. There was contemporary Christian praise music and Virgin of Guadalupe iconography; a rendition of "Ave Maria" that concluded with the singer whooping "Giddy up"; and the female pastor of a New England pro-cannabis church wearing Catholic vestments while blowing on a Jewish shofar.

Emceeing the event was evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas, author of a bestselling biography of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a key figure in building an alliance between conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Metaxas had become increasingly extreme throughout the Trump era. The week of the Jericho March rally, he told TurningPoint USA founder Charlie Kirk that the 2020 election was like "somebody is being raped or murdered … times a thousand," and that conservatives would need "to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood" to keep Trump in office.

That December rally featured several notable names on the Catholic right, including a bishop from Texas who refused to acknowledge Biden as president-elect, a nun who had $_{delivered}_$ a fiery pro-Trump address at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, most prominently, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a dissident Catholic figure who had once been the Vatican ambassador to the U.S. but fell into disgrace after calling for Pope Francis' resignation in 2018. Since then, Viganò has turned into a sort of alternative pope for disaffected Catholic traditionalists at odds with their more moderate pope, and in 2020, he published an open letter to Trump warning that a "deep church" was working with the "deep state" to use the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests to undermine his presidency. After Trump tweeted a link to the letter, Viganò attracted so much support on the broader right that when he appeared, via video, at the Jericho March — praying "for the conversion of public officials who have become accomplices in public fraud" — an audience largely composed of evangelical Protestants cheered alongside his Catholic fans.

Evangelical speaker Lance Wallnau, who in 2016 famously compared Trump to the biblical figure of Cyrus — a "heathen" king who nonetheless served as the instrument of God — also sounded the theme of intra-religious conflict. "This is the beginning of a Christian populist uprising. There is a backlash coming," he said. "And you're going to see this wrecking ball of a reformation hit the church as well … because it's going to divide between those who are awake and those that are asleep. … There is a great awakening coming, and this is the spark that is starting it right now."

Not all speakers at the Jericho March were religious leaders in the traditional sense. Stewart Rhodes, the devoutly Christian founder of the militia group the Oath Keepers, was on hand to urge police and military members to prepare to fight Chinese "proxies" in the U.S., who he claimed were working to install Joe Biden as their "puppet."

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, freshly pardoned by Trump for lying to federal investigators, appeared in a flag bandana to talk about spiritual war and lead the crowd in an "Our Father." And conspiracy-theory talk-show host Alex Jones delivered a barn-burning near-sermon, proclaiming, "This is the beginning of the great revival before the Antichrist comes. World government, implantable microchips, Satanism — it's out in the open. The Bible is fulfilled, Revelation is fulfilled."...And there was Ali Alexander, the bombastic founder of the Stop the Steal movement, who appeared frequently on stage alongside Metaxas, vowing that if Biden was installed as president, Alexander and his supporters would return to "occupy D.C. full of patriots," adding, "We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us."

In the following weeks, Alexander repeatedly underscored the religious dimensions of his mission. In late December, he...https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/stop-steal-organizer-ali-alexanders-pre-january-6-calls-violence-weve-got...told the Epoch Times-affiliated NTD television network, "We are in a fight of good versus evil, of light versus the darkness, and a global order over sovereign citizens. … I believe that this is ametaphysical fight and we are channeling all energy in heaven and on earth towards a favorable outcome."

On New Year's Eve in 2020, Alexander announced on Twitter that he was converting to Catholicism, in part, he explained, because he'd become convinced that the Catholic Church had been "infiltrated" by an "earthy [sic] order that works in concert with Satan himself against the Church," and that he had been personally called to join the battle. And when the Jericho March returned to Washington on Jan. 5, for a slate of protest events leading up to the following day's MAGA march, Alexander spoke again, whipping the crowd into a ...

"The Jericho March put a definite religious imprimatur on Jan. 6," said Posner. "After Jan. 6, the organization put a note on their website that they condemned violence. But they held multiple rallies in which they talked repeatedly about the election being stolen, that God told them they must have the church 'roar,' and that they were going to be like Joshua's army in the Bible and the walls of the Deep State would fall."

...But no matter how explicit — and violent — the religious rhetoric swirling around Stop the Steal was, it was little recognized before the Jan. 6 attack. "We have gotten so used to religious language used by evangelicals and other religiously-affiliated officials that the danger that was there — whether at the Jericho March or the Jan. 6 rally that led up to the attack on the Capitol — was really just noise to some people," said Anthea Butler, chair of the religious studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. ":{And then it happened, and everyone pretended to be shocked. But that's willful ignorance about the role religion has played in the last 40 or 50 years in the Republican Party. It hasn't just been this alliance of how to get people elected, but has had this element of things that have fed upon each other to create a monster that threatens democracy."}:

That has remained central to the legacy of Jan. 6, as religious leaders have used the rhetoric of faith to minimize and redirect responsibility for the violence of that day: whether it's people like Wallnau or South Carolina televangelist Mark Burns blaming "antifa soldiers" for perpetrating a false-flag operation to smear Trump supporters;:{ Mike Huckabee suggesting, in email newsletters over the last six months, that Nancy Pelosi may have orchestrated the attack, and casting indicted Jan. 6 protesters as political prisoners; or former Vice President Mike Pence, in a December interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, downplaying the very attack in which an angry mob called for his execution.}:

The rest of its legacy is more diffuse, but no less troubling: Metaxas $_{suggesting}_$ that the creation of COVID-19 vaccines is akin to experimenting "with the bodies of Jews we murdered in the concentration camps," or Viganò writing that COVID exists merely as a "psycho-pandemic"; Wallnau calling "wokeness" the religion of the Antichrist and, on the eve of the Jan. 6 anniversary...that if America is to be one nation under God, it must have only one religion. More systematically, there's the fact that much of the religious organizing energy that went into Stop the Steal has now transferred itself, as Posner... , into:{ mobilizing the Christian right on behalf of voter suppression initiatives:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:.

A year later, none of the religious fervor that helped drive Jan. 6 has vanished, says Copulsky. "It's built into the fabric of American life. There's a radicality to it, but this didn't come out of thin air. And it's not going to go away. It's incumbent on religious leaders and organizations to think about what that means....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/confrontational-christian-nationalists-are-pushing-anti-vaxxer-extremism-report

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/watch-priest-says-catholics-cant-be-democrats-because-theyre-godless/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/intellectual-conservatives-seem-to-be-redefining-conservatism-for-make-believe-republicans/

sprigman

If you're like most people, you haven't followed the twists and turns of conservative intellectual efforts to gin up a new account of American conservatism distinguishing it from Trumpism. But if the past is any guide, don't worry. You're not missing much.

Conservatism since Reagan has been about interests, not ideas. The Reagan coalition united economic conservatives focused on "smaller government"—i.e., lower taxes and regulations—and religious conservatives intent on preserving traditional morality, which boiled down mostly to sex they don't like. The economic conservatives were the dominant partner. When the Reagan-era conservative movement deployed ideas, it was usually as a fig leaf to cover the nakedness of the dominant partner's interest.

The conservative movement that lasted from the late-1970s until 2016 looks positively egg-headed compared to today's Trumpist party. Trump's intuitive genius was to understand the standard account of the Republican coalition was incomplete. A big slice of the "smaller government" crowd, Trump understood, wasn't motivated by economicinterest at all. Rather, for a lot of exurban and rural Republicans, small government was not about reducing taxes but a way of starving the government of resources that benefit people they didn't like—namely, people who aren't white.

No amount of conservative intellectualizing is going to put a fig leaf over that. And so if conservative intellectuals are going to have any relevance, they will have to reshape American conservatism rather than simply providing ideas that cover for it.

So far the effort to do that has yielded very little. Even before Trump, the so-called "Reformicons," a circle of conservative intellectuals centered around National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru and National Affairs's Yuval Levin, argued that conservative economic policies should be reoriented away from the Reagan-era catechism and toward support of the working class—in particular, toward a set of policies aiming to strengthen the economic position of ordinary families and to restore social mobility.

Trump's ascent initially made the Reformicons look prophetic. But "reform conservatism" sputtered out in part because it was, well, still conservative. It was still burdened by the conservative reflex to devolve responsibility for reforms to state and local governments and to private charities—none of which were remotely up to the task. More to the point, the Reformicons weren't meeting the GOP's working-class voters where they were. They were trying to marry traditional conservatism to class-consciousness. But the GOP's working-class voters were far more focused on race.

Next came "Common Good Conservatism," even less likely to appeal to Trump's GOP. The main text is Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, a 2017 polemic arguing that virtually all of our society's pathologies can be laid at the feet of liberalism's identification of individual autonomy as the principal good.

Deneen's book has had more influence than it deserves. His idée fixe is too simple—he reduces liberalism to a sort of soft libertarianism. Deneen's response is essentially rehashed Reformiconism, but without the engagement with practical politics that made the Reformicons' ideas minimally credible. Deneen argues for more localism, more communitarianism, but he does little to explain practically what kind of political movement would be needed to get us there or how it could be put together.

The surest sign "Common Good Conservatism" is going nowhere is its hijacking by a band of well-credentialed kooks operating under the banner of Catholic "integralism." Advocated most loudly by Harvard Law professor and recent Catholic convert Adrian Vermeule, integralism understands the "common good" as equivalent to (less liberal) pre-Vatican II Catholic doctrine (as Vermeule and his collaborators misunderstand it).

To give you a sense of Vermeule's program, here's his argument for prioritizing immigration for "confirmed Catholics" ("confirmed" meaning Catholics who have completed the sacrament of confirmation in their early teens, thereby signaling to Vermeule that they are "real" Catholics rather than merely baptized non-believers):

The principle is to give lexical priority to confirmed Catholics, all of whom will jump immediately to the head of the queue. Yes, some will convert in order to gain admission; this is a feature, not a bug. This principle will disproportionately favor immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. (Note here that the priority is for actual Catholics, not for applicants from "historically Catholic countries"; relatively few Western Europeans will pass through the eye of the needle, and the Irish will be almost totally excluded). It will disproportionately favor the poor, and will draw no distinction between those seeking asylum based on a fear of persecution, and those fleeing "mere" economic hardship. It will in effect require opening the southern border of the United States, although immigration from Canada will rightly become a rare and difficult event, at least if we do not count a small subset of Quebecois.1

It's difficult for me, as a Catholic who grew up worshipping in a working- and middle-class parish (unlike Vermeule, who was raised Episcopalian in Cambridge, Mass., by well-off academics) to explain how absurd integralism is as an account of Catholicism as it exists in America. The mass of American Catholics would have no truck with Vermeule's ideas—indeed, they are far more likely to view them as confirming the worst prejudices that non-Catholics hold about Catholics and their supposed authoritarian bent (see, e.g., the speech Senator John Kennedy was forced to give to dispel the fear that as president he would be taking orders from the Pope).

Integralism as a political program, is, if possible, more preposterous. Vermeule said opposition to his immigration proposal "almost necessarily defends some alternative principle of immigration priority that allocates fewer spots to non-whites and to the poor, and is thus a troubling indicator of racism and classism infesting whoever voices that opposition." Um, yeah. And that's exactly the reef on which integralism, if it didn't already have about a thousand other disabling features, would ground. There is no constituency in the GOP for a race-neutral immigration policy. It's the opposite.

So what's the future of conservative ideas? It's hard to count intellectuals out entirely; the movement will continue to maintain the "ideas infrastructure" (which doesn't cost much) if, for nothing else, to support useful apparatchiks. That said, if intellectuals continue to produce ideas that would only work if we replaced the current conservative base with some better set of voters, the auguries aren't good. It may be at some point that it's the conservative intellectuals who get replaced—that is, we may see the current bunch pushed aside by new entrants who attempt to prettify white racial authoritarianism. Those ideas would be terrible. But at least they'd be relevant.

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omg acb 1st act is to kill ppl (soon to f/u by kill aca, which will kill more ppl, ~ sotomayor

related to war on xmas BS? paleo-cath? ultra orthodox?

deadly game’: Legal experts blast Supreme Court’s dead-of-night decision enshrining ‘religious rights’ over all others

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

November 26, 2020

At 11:57 PM Wednesday, three minutes before the country tries to celebrate Thanksgiving during a pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for a group of Catholics and Jews...

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so much for pro life

barr

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/penalty/

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/on-eve-of-stop-the-steal-rally-ed-martin-hosts-right-wing-archbishop-vigano-to-pray-for-trump/

pix: archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (Image from LifeSiteNews video praising his recent letter to President Donald Trump)

:{:{}:

Ed Martin, the Phyllis Schlafly acolyte who will be speaking at a Washington, D.C. rally planned for Saturday and dubbed “Stop the Steal” by its organizers, was joined by far-right Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on Martin’s weekly prayer call Friday.

Viganò is a leader of the hard right within the Catholic Church who has lavished praise on President Donald Trump while promoting right-wing conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the “deep church.” Since the results of the presidential election came rolling in, the religious right has jumped on the false voter fraud narrative being peddled by Trump and the Stop the Steal campaign, claiming that forces of evil were at work to prevent God’s will.

On Martin’s Friday call, Viganò described the current post-election period as a “historic moment for the future of the United States of America.”

“Forces of evil have gathered in coalition against God, against our Christian civilization,against your beloved country, against the family, against all of it, against the values for which your forefathers fought and gave their lives,” Viganò said.

He directly addressed the election, saying that “the kingdom of darkness has sought to subvert the outcome of the presidential elections, through such deception and fraud as to suggest a real attack on the very foundation of human social coexistence.”

He prayed that God would bless Trump and “drive back into Hell the enemy of mankind.”

Trump campaigned hard for the votes of conservative Catholics, telling them that Democrats “want to put the churches out of business.”

Viganò is a fierce critic of Pope Francis. National Catholic Reporter, an independent Catholic news outlet with a progressive outlook, published a profile of Viganò in 2018, which suggested that his eagerness to publicly attack church officials may be traced to his being denied a promotion to cardinal.

Tags: Carlo Viganò Ed Martin Election 2020 Stop the Steal

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people of Praise: Former member of group tied to SCOTUS front-runner calls it a ‘cult’

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now

As President Trump appears poised to announce a nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, we speak with a former member of the secretive Catholic group.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/barr-to-be-honored-for-christlike-behavior-with-award-from-right-wing-catholic-group-with-strong-ties-to-trump/

no lnx twt

attorney General Bill Barr will be honored for his “Christlike behavior” at Wednesday’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, according to Roman Catholic Sister, author, and anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean.

"sister Helen Prejean

@helenprejean

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast will present an award to Attorney General Barr for “Christlike behavior” tomorrow morning. A.G. Barr has ordered the executions of six men with at least one more on the calendar. What is “Christlike” about using discretionary power to kill?"

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast says Barr will be presented with its Christifideles Laici Award during today’s 16th annual prayer event.

“In Honor and Gratitude for Fidelity to the Church, Exemplary Selfless and Steadfast Service in the Lord’s Vineyard,” are the words inscribed on the award.

The event is being sponsored by several groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.

President Donald Trump is expected to address the group today during its virtual ceremony.

Among the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast’s founders are Pat Cipollone, President Trump’s White House Counsel; former Republican Senator Rick Santorum; and Joseph Cella, President Trump’s Ambassador to Fiji, and a former Trump transition team member who co-founded the right wing activist group Catholic Vote.

Another founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is Austin Ruse, the president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM).

Perhaps the most notable founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is the group’s president, conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo.

Leo also serves as co-chairman of the Federalist Society, the far right group responsible for promoting the illegitimate belief that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted by judges according to how the nation’s founders thought.

President Trump, for the first time in history, has effectively farmed out the approval process for federal court judges and even Supreme Court justices he nominates, to the Federalist Society.

The award to Barr is being condemned by notable Catholics, including Sister Prejean, and Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America magazine.

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