Here’s a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand:
“Traditional” Catholics and white nationalist “groypers” forge a new far-right youth movement
Activist arm of right-wing Catholic outlet Church Militant is increasingly entwined with racist “groyper” movement
This is the second in a two-part series. In our first installment, read about how the aftermath of the leaked Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade revealed extensive connections between the white nationalist “groyper” movement and the far-right Catholic network around the controversial outlet Church Militant.
The activist wing of Church Militant is called the Resistance network. As of 2020 the outlet said it boasted more than 5,000 members, and claimed to have launched groups in almost every diocese in the U.S. Last June, the group claimed that its protest of a church vaccine drive in Southern California forced the drive to end three hours early. The same month, members of the Resistance network hosted an “affidavit-signing drive at Church Militant headquarters” outside Detroit, joining with other right-wing Michigan groups in demanding a forensic audit of the 2020 election and holding a protest rally on the state capitol steps.
More recently, as Resistance leader Joe Gallagher outlined at a Church Militant rally last November, the group has picketed local bishops; brought “ex-gay” conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos to the Penn State campus to advocate “praying the gay away”; and protested at a Dallas memorial for George Floyd to “bear witness to a real racial injustice: the mass slaughter of the unborn, which disproportionately affects minorities.”
Now the Resistance network is looking to recruit directly from the groypers, the largely young far-right followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes. On May 2, Gallagher interviewed Dalton Clodfelter — the same groyper leader who celebrated the Catholic counter-protester at New York’s Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral last weekend — introducing Resistance viewers to Fuentes’ website, CozyTV, as a “new streaming platform for a lot of awesome younger conservatives.” Gallagher hyped the reported 1,200 attendees at Fuentes’ AFPAC III gathering, saying that “obviously [America First] is booming, you guys have gotten huge…You guys go for the jugular every single time.” He continued, “[You go for] the truth, you’re not afraid to hide it at all, and that’s one of the most respectable aspects of America First, is you guys don’t really care. And that’s cool.”
Clodfelter, who told Gallagher it was Yiannopoulos who first introduced him to Church Militant, pitched America First in a language that his new audience was likely eager to hear. “It’s not like it’s the alt-right, because that is not even cool anymore, even if you wanted it to be. And it’s also not like normie neocon conservatism. … it’s Christian nationalist.” He went on, “The message of America First is tied directly to the word of God and spreading Christianity through our nation where it’s lacking … everything we do is [a spiritual battle], we’re fighting demons, we’re fighting Satan.” Clodfelter emphasized the need to “grow the viewer base” of CozyTV, explaining that “a majority of white young Zoomer men would just love CozyTV — the problem is, they don’t know where to go to get it.”
Clodfelter went on to draw a particular connection between the groyper movement and Catholicism, saying he’d never considered joining the church before getting involved with America First. “I met people who are truly devout, truly living by the word and they weren’t hypocrites,” he said. “They were representing Catholicism so well for me I was like, wow, the least I could do is go to Mass and do some research.” Now, he said, he’s studying for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults — the formal process by which unbaptized adults become Catholics — and says he understands why Fuentes says of the groypers, “This is sort of a Catholic movement.”
Since then, Resistance has continued to brand itself to appeal to groypers. One advertisement for Resistance posted on Gab last week featured the America First and CozyTV logos as well as a style of sunglasses popularized by Fuentes as part of last year’s “White Boy Summer” groyper branding campaign. Meanwhile, as reported in part 1 of this series, Clodfelter attempted to mobilize groypers to attend Resistance counterprotests of pro-choice demonstrations planned for weekend in cities across the country. As of Friday, the events appear to have been removed from Resistance’s website, while on Telegram Clodfelter noted late Wednesday night that most of the counterprotests had been postponed, writing, “Working with Church Militant on this to make sure we are doing this in the most organized and safe way.” Clodfelter still claims the groypers will rally in Nashville.
Do read the whole thing. Voris has full-fledged groypers on staff at Church Militant: people who are absolutely fine with stuff like this:
Fuentes has engaged in elaborate jokes denying the Holocaust, praised Hitler and told viewers on one livestream show that “frankly, I’m getting pretty sick of world Jewry running the show,” to name just several examples of his virulent antisemitism. Fuentes has disparaged African-American voter outreach as attempts to “flood the zone with n****r votes,” called for “total Aryan victory,” rejected “race-mixing” because “people should stick with their own kind,” bragged that he “made misogyny cool again,” celebrated domestic violence against women and much more.
But, as is far too common, the MAGA Catholic monomania about Roe means that, in the words of Church Militant leader Michael Voris, “Church Militant might partner with anyone in a particular effort to achieve a limited and shared goal. In this particular case (Roe), yes. [Church Militant] will link arms with almost anyone who decries the horror of babies being hacked to death in their mothers’ wombs.”
In short, as MAGA antichrist religion so often teaches in direct repugnance to the Church, “Opposition to abortion, not Jesus Christ, taketh away the sins of the world”. So as long as groypers sell themselves to Reactionary Catholics by palming off pagan blood and soil fertility cult rhetoric as “prolife”…
… they can feel free to sell Nazism to young, self-pitying, angry, white incel males with Voris’ blessing:
While it is true that little Nazi sects always love to inflate their numbers and growth rate, it is also true that Reactionary Catholics tend to be deeply attracted to authoritarianism, thuggery, and anti-semitism. Voris famously released an inflammatory video smearing Jews a decade ago, for which he characteristically never apologized. And never forget that when the Reactionary blog Rorate Coeli greeted the election of Pope Francis by instructing the Greatest Catholics of All Time to scream “THE HORROR!” (which they have never stopped doing for nine long years) their principal source was an Argentinian Holocaust Denier. Do not underestimate the grave danger these kooks pose, not just to America, but to the Church. The blood libel rhetoric about “blood-drinking babykillers” will come naturally to this unholy marriage. Oppose it with all your might for the sake of Jesus Christ:
We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man’s relation to God the Father and his relation to men his brothers are so linked together that Scripture says: “He who does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8).
No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.
The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. On the contrary, following in the footsteps of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, this sacred synod ardently implores the Christian faithful to “maintain good fellowship among the nations” (1 Peter 2:12), and, if possible, to live for their part in peace with all men, so that they may truly be sons of the Father who is in heaven. – Nostra Aetate
One good place to start educating yourself, if you are Catholic (or if you just want to know what the Church teaches), is the Decree on Religious Liberty, a document increasingly forgotten by MAGA Catholics drunk on the idea of imposing the Faith with blood, iron, force, fear, and law instead of trusting in the grace of God. Give it a read.
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4 Responses
I gave some thought to your argument about Jewish doctors being forced in their conscience to perform abortions. And while I initially agreed with the points you made, they didn’t sit right. I talked to my wife today, presented your case and she literally took it apart.
1. The argument against abortion is not religious. It’s a biological fact that a new human being is formed when gametes connect. It’s not a philosophical or theological question, it’s purely scientific. There are some more and less clear distinctions later, like when the zygote is implanted, like when organs are starting to form, like when heart begins to beat, when pain can be perceived, etc., but none of them are as clear to the existence of a person as when a new human being is formed with its unique genes that are completely separate from the mother’s, to the point where you can clearly point to specific cells and state that these are not the mother’s body cells.
Reductio ad absurdum: If a woman is free to do anything she wants with these foreign cells within her body, she’s free to bite off her dentist’s fingers.
If she’s not free to bite off those fingers because she gave consent to the dentist, she’s also given consent to having a child when she agreed to sexual intercourse since no contraceptive is 100% effective.
Before anybody asks what about rape, lack of consent only considers the perpetrator and the victim. Two people. The child is neither of them, it’s a third person. If Alice forces Bob to French kiss Catherine, does Catherine have the right to bite off Bob’s tongue? That would be absurd.
2. What are sincerely held beliefs and which religions get to practice them freely and which can be prohibited from freely practicing their sincerely held beliefs? You singled out Judaism, but imagine there was a significant group of people willing to practice pre-Columbian Aztec or Maya religions, including human sacrifice. Would they be free to acquire victims to sacrifice? What if their sincerely held beliefs required that at least some sacrifices must be made of unwilling or struggling victims?
But even then, suppose they would only limit their sacrifices to victims already practicing the religion. Would the state interfere with this or not? If not, should the state interfere with cults such as Peoples Temple? Some people in Jonestown apparently struggled against being injected. How would the state regulate this so that unwilling victims are not sacrificed? Wouldn’t that potentially interfere with the rights of that group to practice their religion?
This question puts the state in the role of an arbiter which religions can be considered legitimate and which religions are allowed to have followers that are free to practice their sincerely held beliefs.
3. I don’t think there are religious arguments against abortion that don’t stem from the natural argument. And if I’m not mistaken, all major denominations have provisions for when the unborn child is a health or life risk for the mother. At least Catholicism does. For example, it’s not a sin to pursue oncological treatment, including chemotherapy or radiotherapy to battle cancer, even if it comes with a high risk to the unborn child.
4. There’s of course a practical argument against abortion that pharmacologically induced abortion will still be available and it will be hard to criminalize this because certain abortifacients can be used for other purposes. And that’s correct. But it doesn’t mean that just because it’s difficult, it shouldn’t be done. Otherwise it’s equivalent to calls for decriminalizing hard drugs or deregulating sale of poisons or poison precursors.
Also, since pro-gun groups heavily overlap with anti-abortion groups, this is an excellent argument for gun control.
Intentional desecration of Eucharist incurs an excommunication latae sententiae (incidentally, just like abortion does), but the Church doesn’t call for criminalizing it (some countries have laws against sacrilege, but they’re rather benign and only really brought against severe issues), even though it’s a much graver sin for a believer to intentionally desecrate Eucharist than it is to perform abortion.
There is a huge qualitative difference between calls for outlawing sacrilege and outlawing abortion.
The former would force beliefs of a certain group on people who don’t share those beliefs because it’s dependent on believing in divine revelation concerning what is sacred and what isn’t.
The latter doesn’t require believing in divine revelation because a coherent argument can be made from reason.
Never heard of these characters, groupers? Nick who? But one thing is true without discussion. God created You and Your soul at conception. Abortion is murder. The Natural Order is God’s created order. All forms of manipulation of conception life to suit man’s desires is sinful. So IVF, surrogacy, morning after, morning before, during the morning prevention of life are included. And no, two men cannot reproduce. I think that covers it.
The use of the unborn as human shields for your MAGA cult’s Nazi fetishism and racism is the single most disgusting tactic of your evil racist cult. What you write is not a defense of the unborn, but a defense of MAGA antichrist religion.
Mark, she didn’t mention being in a MAGA cult, didn’t give any indication of being a populist. Her dismissal of the LGBT+ community was rude and impertinent but I see nothing to justify your response, unless maybe you have seen from previous interactions with this individual that she is MAGA-aligned. We shouldn’t assume people are members of a certain group just because they give curt replies that are characteristic of that group. And for the record, I think her reply was imprudent and a total waste of everyone’s time, as she’s not looking for dialogue. But is there really good evidence to suggest she’s part of the MAGA cult?