The Rise of the “Woke” Right and Neo-Catholic Zealotry in America

America was founded on anti-Catholic sentiment.

The second president, John Adams, who called to "restore the Jews to Judea in an army of 100,000 Israelites," also argued that "If ever a group of men deserved eternal damnation, on earth and in hell, it is this society of Loyola," referring to the Jesuit order.

His cousin, Samuel Adams, the most devout Christian among the revolutionary fathers, wrote, "I did verily believe, as I do still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of Popery in America than from the Stamp Act."

In Virginia, too, anti-Catholic sentiment found an echo. The third president, Thomas Jefferson, argued in a letter to Alexander von Humboldt that: "History, I believe, has furnished no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."

This hostility was not a marginal opinion of a handful of grumpy Puritans in New England and the deist Jefferson. The November 5th processions (an anti-Catholic event imported from England in the early 17th century) in which Protestants burned Church writings continued into the 19th century, accompanied by laws that restricted the civil rights and freedom of action of the Catholic clergy.

In fact, even in the 20th century, states like Florida and Missouri enacted restrictions on institutional Catholic activity to prevent the waves of Irish, Italian, and Polish immigration that flooded America in the second half of the 19th century from influencing the character of state education systems.

With the "big tent" days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the melting pot of the 20th century, institutional discrimination and anti-Catholic rhetoric began to fade. Thus, the minority that composed 1% of the U.S. population during the Revolution became an important political demographic, an integral part of the American public landscape, which found a home in the ranks of the Democratic Party.

And yet, that population, which today constitutes about 25% of the U.S. population, has failed to leave its unique mark.

On the left, the Kennedy aristocracy collapsed under the weight of the establishment it sought to challenge. The Biden-Pelosi era, which operated in the shadow of the Clinton and Obama families, accelerated the moral and institutional erosion of the Democratic Party and even spurred a migration of many Catholics into the Republican establishment. On the right, too, Catholics struggled to achieve success. Reactionary figures like Pat Buchanan tried to create a strange combination of preserving traditional-religious culture within a liberal-Republican structure but were often suspected of antisemitism and were excluded from the core of conservative politics in America.

Unless one sees big government, a bloated bureaucracy, mass immigration (the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, associated with the Kennedy administration), and a failed decentralized economic policy as a success—it is difficult to identify a contribution at the policy or ideological level that Catholic politics in America has made. All this, while corruption has remained a prominent feature of politics in areas with large Catholic populations, such as Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Worcester, Massachusetts.

This is not to deny that American Catholics have contributed to the advancement and development of cultural and economic life in the U.S. as individuals. But as a political force or class, they have failed to produce or provide a real alternative or reinforcement to the civil foundations laid by Anglo-Protestant thinkers.

Part II - A Jew and a Catholic Walk into Washington

It would be a mistake to claim that the second-largest non-Protestant group in the U.S., the Jewish one, has done any better in offering an alternative to the Lockean-Protestant foundations that made America a success story. On the contrary, some of the most subversive and harmful ideas and movements to America's civil and liberal foundations over the past century originated with thinkers or activists of Jewish descent. This is a statistical fact recently highlighted by the 'Woke Right,' which until recently operated on the far fringes of American media and politics.

The Woke Right is a fascinating phenomenon in itself; no longer the racist and benighted rabble-rousers we once knew in the "Alt-Right," but a broad coalition, including intellectuals and men of action alike, who are reactionaries basing their socio-political philosophy on old continental concepts (Machiavelli), modern ones (Schmitt, Michels, Mosca, and Pareto), and even critical theory (Foucault, Marcuse).

They call for a rethinking of the Constitution, the separation of church and state, the republican structure, and the American approach to questions of "heritage" and ethnic identity. The presence of a new and vocal generation of Catholics in the Woke Right is no accident, as they systematically demand the integration of religious tenets into the state structure. Between the coffee shop (of the intellectuals) and the newspaper (of the social influencers), a movement with millions of supporters has been created that is still largely excluded from the core of the Republican establishment. But not for long.

One of its attractions is its success in normalizing institutional suspicion towards the state of Israel, the American Jewish community, and the deep ties between Israel and the U.S. This suspicion is growing due to what appears to be the success of Jews in offering their own successful political model that operates in cooperation with the organized diaspora—in the form of mobilizing support and identification with Israel.

Anyone seeking to understand the change now occurring on the American right towards Israel must therefore begin to look for answers not in Washington think tanks—but, as conspiratorial as it may sound—in the spirit of the Vatican.

No, the Vatican is not handing out instructions to anti-Zionist Catholic influencers with millions of followers (each...). But the desire to critique a functioning capitalist democracy, and the attempt to negatively highlight the significant mobilization of American Jews on its behalf, or Jerusalem's strategic role in U.S. Middle Eastern foreign and security policy—is exactly what infuriates religious zealots like Candace Owens, Jack Posobiec, and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who speak openly about the Jewish origins of administration officials, about "Jewish money" in Washington, and about "Jewish infiltration" of national security apparatuses.

Things that until a year ago sounded quite imaginary.

The animosity, characterized by monologues featuring sharp rhetoric and self-righteous fervor, is growing against the backdrop of the knowledge that not only in the United States, but also throughout Europe and the Americas, the political experiments that took place in Catholic countries in the 20th century ended in catastrophic failure.

From Spain and Italy to Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Brazil, and Argentina, and down to the Congo, Mexico, and the Philippines—there is no country with a Catholic majority that did not become either a reactionary-socialist and oppressive dictatorship at some point in its existence, or in other cases, an antisemitic state.

The 21st century and the feudal-mercantilist political style of the European Union, and the condition of Catholic nations in South and Central America, have not provided a particularly corrective experience.

These spectacular failures have turned the prosperous and independent Jewish state, supported by a mobilized American Jewish community that is almost 90% united behind it, into a painful and unforgivable contradiction for these neo-reactionaries. It is a contradiction that is unacceptable to the drafters of the new nationalist-religious doctrine that tries to patch over (while ignoring) the split between conservatives and liberals that has existed in the Catholic world since the 1970s.

The anti-Jews offer a formula for compromise and unity—around hostility to Israel. It is a combination of an understandable contradiction between paleo-libertarian Buchanan-style positions that emphasize suspicion of Jews and the preservation of identity with a soft emphasis on ethnicity on one hand, and on the other hand, liberal positions in the style of classic Catholic-Democrats who emphasize sentimentality and Christian moralizing while demanding a federal structure and 'compassion' for the Palestinians.

In fact, the growing neo-Catholic reaction in America today brings together figures from both the political right and left who find it difficult to agree on much except the need to criticize Israel. Some liberal Catholics have also learned to accept antisemitic hints or statements along the way.

Part III - Theological Paradoxes, Modern Ideologies

When Israel was established, it took the Vatican 45 years to recognize it as an independent state (1993).

Theologically, the very existence of Israel contradicted one of the main tenets of the doctrine of replacement (Supersessionism), which recognized that the inability to see Jesus the Messiah in the flesh, and thus to affirm his divinity, forces us to "make do" with the image of a persecuted and outcast Jewish sub-class as an ontological anchor for the truth of the faith.

If it cannot be proven that "the sacrifice" is divine, at least we will be convinced that his "sacrificer" will be an anti-messiah for all time.

Another weighty, banal fact that tends to be overlooked and explains the traditional Catholic hostility lies in Jewish survival—versus the crucifixion of the Messiah.

The genetic descendants of the murderer are alive; those of Jesus are not.

However, the only real descendants who are here look at the cross, which, unlike the Protestant one, emphasizes the moment of crucifixion and sacrifice, not the moment of resurrection and ascension.

The Catholic cross forever assigns a negating role to the Jews on a Christological level. It highlights the betrayal without catharsis. In contrast, the empty Protestant cross, especially the Calvinist one, adopts a philo-Semitic stance by seeing the emptiness as symbolizing a redemption created both for and by the Jews.

Catholicism found itself with a deep sense of injustice and narrative bitterness towards the Jews, which only intensified against the backdrop of the theological absurdity that sees the oppressed and continuous existence of the Jew as proof of the Church's righteousness.

It is an existence that fundamentally only increases the believer's sense of injustice, as they depend on a negative factor for their self-justification. This creates a morbidly complex system of dependence, in which the believer knows that in the process of justification, he is forced to see himself as a stepchild, speaking on behalf of the Father's son (Jesus) who was rejected by the firstborn sons of God, who murdered his God—and through whose humiliation he is made aware of God and the story at all.

However we look at it, even after Nostra aetate of 1965 (which, due to an internal split between liberal and conservative Catholicism, is still not universally accepted), Catholicism in its devout form makes it theoretically difficult to adopt a neutral or philo-Semitic position like the Evangelical or various Calvinist churches.

Add to this the fact that socialism, although some of its psychological roots can be attributed to several prominent Jews and their heirs, is in fact a secular imitation—whether in symbols, language, the sanctity of blood, eschatological redemption, class dogma, the sanctification of suffering, or a feudal social structure existing under a single truth—a fact that traditional Catholics themselves refuse to admit. And so, the weight of projecting blame onto Judaism increases, as if the world has not been in an accelerated process of secularization for 400 years.

The fact that the Catholic monarchy is a prototype for the socialist class structure—only that in it God is the state that becomes a collective body embodied by the class or nation—does not help in projecting internal Catholic deviations onto the Jews.

Thus we have reached a pivotal point where the resurrected biblical "Israel," like "Jewish socialism," or more accurately "Cultural Marxism," makes it easier for neo-Catholics to hide a theological failure, and a modern political ineptitude, in implementing classical Anglo-Protestant liberalism and in creating a healthy relationship with the modern Jewish phenomenon.

Instead of dealing with the fact that their flawed recipes originate in their ecumenical tradition, they identify these failures as part of an ancient and ongoing Jewish conspiracy for tikkun olam (repairing the world), embodied in the acts of Zionism, banking, and the media, and which harks back to the Passion of Christ. It sounds delusional, but this is a summary of the plot to which millions of Americans are now exposed every day—something that would have been imagined as nothing but delusion only about three years ago.

Part IV - Concrete Obsession, Total Solutions

Since the beginning of President Biden's term, the obsession with Israel and Jews has become a psychological defense mechanism preventing neo-Catholics from doing what they are supposed to do well, but struggle with most—confessing.

An archetypal ecumenical perception, based on irrational feelings towards the sins of Judaism, is increasingly focusing on an inquisitorial attitude. It is much more reminiscent of Toledo, Spain, than Toledo, Ohio.

In the absence of real substance, a strange and clumsy projection is taking place—whether its origin is in a religious or traditional environment—that seeks to see the troubles of "working," "white," "honest" America, and the political and economic failure of institutional Catholicism to adapt to the modern world, as a Jewish failure. This, even though this failure was already clear in the days of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War.

At the same time, voices are growing within the American Christian Nationalism movement, calling to separate from the growing young Catholic influence within it. Not because of antisemitism, but because of other concerns, which we may address in a separate article.

As is known, apart from imperial France, which held world power for about 250 years (most of them as a radical secular state), it can be argued that the current rise of antisemitic Catholic nationalism—now spreading like wildfire across America—brings us back to one undisputed truth about political Catholicism in the late modern era: it is a complete failure, fundamentally a toxic combination of Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism that are supposed to find their release through antisemitism and domination.

Modern Catholicism in all its forms, from Lisbon to Vilnius, from Bavaria to Buenos Aires, created artificial demand and supplied very little. And all this blame it casts on the USA, or on Israel/the Jews, who it seems control it.

Whether the Jews are a race, as in Bavarian-occult socialism (Nazism), whether they are a class as in Marxist socialism, or whether they are members of a religion, as in the new restorative nationalism emerging before us—it all comes back to a call to purify spaces of Jewishness—as a functional necessity.

The failure to provide a functional response to the core of the Anglo-American Enlightenment has created a deck of fraudulent cards, leading to blaming the other for philosophical and economic fossilization.

Isn't it simply better to be an honest Puritan like the Founding Fathers, who already foresaw all of this?