Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 19 - Trad Caths
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Mikeus VI, Freddus III, and Yugopnikus X discuss the curious case of "trad" caths (as in "traditional catholics", not "tradeable catheters") and it's foremost crusaders, such as Peter Thiel and JD Vance.
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I think that's exactly the brilliance of Peter Thiel, because he finds all of these particular individuals that might be politically potentially influential, or he builds and invests in their career when he finds them in some other field, or he engages with people from the private sector in every category. And he's kind of like, I don't know. I recently watched the second Devil Wears Prada, and there's that one character that always picks everybody's outfit, right? And the way I see Peter Thiel when he is interacting with his, I guess, uh with people who he is a surrogate to, he chooses the appropriate dress that they need to put on, the appropriate reactionary ideology that will always keep them in line. Because once you kind of publicly state that you are this and start accruing political power as this, going back on it would render you completely irrelevant because now uh nobody's gonna take you seriously, especially the donors and the people that uh vocally supported you because of your particular belief system. So he kind of both traps them but also helps them uh with identifying, as you very adequately said, what their background uh can facilitate, what combining their background with this this kind of reactionary dress can facilitate the largest amount of growth and popularity. So probably Peter Thiel, with certain people that he interacts with, he tells him to wear the Tradkath uh dress because, for example, for JD Vance in particular, that would work very well. And I'm pretty sure he he agitates for a different approach with other reactionary figures that he's uh he's attempting to push into the mainstream or to keep very close to himself in the uh in the private sector. So uh just going back to what what Fred asked, it really, really is, I feel like just a grift, but a grift from Peter Thiel's perspective. Uh a much larger, grander scale grift from his perspective where he's building this kind of ecosystem but understands that there needs to be a diversity of reactionary pitches, and that is why he is right, like making this fashion show allegory just to finish it off. Making the you know, the runway filled with all sorts of models, with all sorts of aesthetics in this case, all sorts of reactionary uh reactionary ideologies. And JD Vance, to an extent, being stereotyped, I feel like by Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel was like, okay, this is a filthy fucking redneck. When it comes to this background, he's gonna work great with the fucking with the conservative Catholics. Let's let's attach that particular category to him and see how much we can milk.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I I just want to say, like, the strangeness surrounding Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance only compounds. Peter Thiel now spends his lecture circuit previewing the Antichrist and reportedly described Pope Leo the Fourteenth, the first American pontiff, as a tool of that same Antichrist for the sin of urging caution on artificial intelligence. How dare he? Yeah, exactly. The man who nudged Vance toward Rome has become one of the loudest voices telling him to disregard Rome's actual occupant. Vance, for his part, has not been shy about instructing the Pope either. He told Pope Leo the Fourteenth in April 2026 to quote, be careful when he talks about matters of theology, unquote. Wow. A sentence that would sound absurd, coming from anyone who understands that traditional Catholics preach submission to the church hierarchy. And it's it's that's kind of like Tradcats in general, which is I think I know more about Catholicism than the Pope.
SPEAKER_02And like a lot of the online Tradcats, obviously, they don't really read the Bible, they don't really give a shit about that stuff. Like it's all aesthetics, it feels like, and maybe community and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01You know, uh as an American Catholic, my family and I practiced the version of Catholicism commonly called cafeteria Catholic. You know, obviously my parents made sure that I got all the official church sacraments, baptism, first communion, confession, confirmation. They ensured that me and my siblings were all, as far as they were concerned, fully integrated members of the Catholic Church. But as far as like going to church every Sunday, for part of my childhood, they they gave it their best shot. But for the most part, they're like a lot of other Catholics, which is like maybe a few holidays, maybe when they get the hankering, you know, they're not exactly following the dictates of the church with their, you know, the weekly mandatory mass. And most Catholics are like that, lapsed or partially practicing. And, you know, listen, every faith tradition has its selective readers. The American left, we have our own history of picking scripture like a salad bar. But when JD Vance goes on Fox News and defends Donald Trump's and the administration's deportation agenda, he invents a hierarchy of love, family first, then neighbor, then countryman, and only then everyone else. He chooses a version of Catholicism that aligns completely with his political goals. Catholic tradition is a costume. Cardinal Provost, not yet Pope, shared an article bluntly titled JD Vance is Wrong. Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others. Pope Francis sent American bishops a similar rebuke weeks before he died. Vance met Francis in Rome in April 2025, pressed him on immigration, and came away describing the Pope's answer as cliched, which is an odd complaint to lodge against a dying man's last recorded meeting with a foreign government official. Francis died the next day. People that J.D. Vance meet just keep dropping dead.
SPEAKER_02Excellent work, Agent 47.
SPEAKER_01So J.D. Vance did not invent this fusion. He absorbed it from a cohort of Catholic intellectuals who have spent the last decade rebuilding the theoretical case for illiberal government and found in Vance their first genuine foothold in executive power. This is actually a really scary development of like the trad cath discussion, is that there is a lot of what I would describe as Catholic fascism and a rejection of liberal modernity or liberal norms or liberal values. In particular, uh Notre Dame's Patrick Denin is the most visible of them. His 2018 bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed, argued that the Enlightenment project, individual rights, pluralism, the separation of church and state, was never a neutral referee, but a corrosive acid eating through family, faith, and community. And I just want to point out that this is actually something that Marx himself argued in the Communist Manifesto.
SPEAKER_02Yes. All this stems from their extreme hostility to the French Revolution. And obviously, because of like I guess the extreme crackdown on Catholics uh during the revolution, there might be some, you know, some tiny little bit of validity to, I guess, like some sort of generational trauma. But bro, that was like a long time ago. That's not that that trauma is not touching you at this point. The whole thing is just like, you know, we hate the revolution, therefore we hate democracy, we hate you know, all this stuff. Like half these guys, they want to bring back a monarchy. They're like restorationists, like Orleanists and stuff. It's crazy.
SPEAKER_01And Patrick Denin, he wrote another book in 2023 called Regime Change, and it completely dropped all the euphemisms. It calls for openly replacing American elites, praises Victor Orban's family policy in Hungary, and argues for using state power to enforce what Danin calls immoral media and a revitalized public Christian culture. Vance appeared alongside Denin in 2023, borrowed his vocabulary wholesale, and now describes his own politics as quote, explicitly anti-elitist and explicitly anti-regime. Behind Denin sits a smaller and more candid faction that calls itself integralist, a term borrowed from the reactionary Catholic monarchs of the 19th century, France, who never accepted that the church should share power with a secular state. Harvard's Adrian Vermule is the most institutionally embedded of these thinkers, a sitting law professor who has argued that Catholics should stop worrying about localism, instead focus on capturing the administrative apparatus of the American government from within. It should be noted that there are six judges on the Supreme Court that were either practicing Catholics or were raised Catholic. So when I point to a Harvard law professor, they're literally implementing this in the Supreme Court. Like it's actually pretty crazy. Like Catholics do hold the Supreme Court majority in America.
SPEAKER_02That's crazy because like I don't think you you can legitimately say that like, you know, there is a conspiracy for, you know, Jewish Americans to like have disproportionate control over the American government. But I think there might be a case for like, you know, certain religious denominations are trying to like take over like Christian religious denominations, uh at least in history, but also I guess somewhat contemporaneously now with like these integralist Catholics and such.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it doesn't really matter like what particular religious field it is. Most of them have exceptionally reactionary sets within them which want to proactively like let's say coup either violently or through institutions or particular countries' government. Of course, these are more, let's say, viable and more common in very ethnically and religiously diverse countries, because you know it's it's impossible to do, I don't know, a a Protestant coup in Poland, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's what happening, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but in places like the United States, like Canada, like to a lesser uh uh extent certain South American and Central American countries, uh, very like multiple times throughout history, particular elements that heavily used religious identity as kind of a unifying factor, but also for us versus them that I'm gonna talk about later, did try to organize along those lines against the current status quo and in favor of them kind of being this dominant category. So what the only reason I interrupted is like it doesn't matter if it's Jews or Catholics or Muslims or whatever, it's the reactionary element which makes it bad, not that the Catholics evil, they want to take over.
SPEAKER_02Of course, of course, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what must be said is that like these guys are obviously not like an oppressed class, a small, like, small, like, you know, I guess like an a uh you know, when people uh talk about like religions um uh influencing and sort of like doing the long march through the institutions, uh, we often get connotations of like how you know we covered Rupert Lau and these like insane like UK right-wingers talk about Islam in the United Kingdom when they call up call like Bradford like Bradistan or whatever, because like they've got like a couple of Muslim counselors or whatever the hell, and a couple of like neighborhoods that are like majority Muslim. Like it's never these like recently arrived like immigrant communities exerting the this sort of influence. It's always like these people who have at least a few feet within the doors of power, these people who are a part of like at least a middle class, if not like the sort of upper class of that society. Like these Catholic people, these Supreme Court justices aren't a fringe minority community in America. This is these are people representing basically like upper class interests in America. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So, you know, if we set these elite theorists aside and JD Vance aside for a moment and we look at the ground floor, that's where things get really fucking weird. Yeah. Something is also happening among young Americans and Catholicism. A Harvard Youth poll found that Gen Z Catholic identification has risen from 15% in 2022 to 21% in 2023, edging past millennials. Dioceses from Cleveland to San Francisco reported conversion jumps of 45 to 49% in a single year. What is it, the Cartres? How do you pronounce this shit? Shote? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh do you get do you know about this? It's like some fucking holy site in France that can apparently cure the sick or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's in Crusader Kings, I believe. But yeah, anyways, yeah. Of course it is.
SPEAKER_01And how about the Shrek board? Intimately familiar. So yeah, it's a three-day Latin uh mass walk across France. It drew 19,000 pilgrims in 2025 with an average age of 20 and a wait list of 2,000 names. That's crazy. Mark Gray, the Georgetown researcher who runs Kara's official Catholic polling, looked at the same underlying data in early 2026 and found something considerably less dramatic. Now, if you don't know this, uh Georgetown is a Catholic university, Catholic, I believe, Jesuit university. And so, you know, their data is they're interested in actually delivering truthful and accurate information. And there has been kind of a contestation, contestation of like how big and deep this actually is, if it does represent a significant shift, or if it's just a kind of radicalization of an existing population. And he found that adult conversions among Gen Z sat at 2.9% in 2024, a figure Gray flatly called consistent with prior generations rather than any kind of outlier. The 2023 spike that made headlines, Catholic supposedly matching or exceeding Protestants among the youngest cohort, turned out to most likely be statistical noise. Gen Z remains, by Pew's numbers, the least of religiously affiliated generation in American history, with 44% claiming no religion at all, and only 17% attending services weekly. Both things are true simultaneously. And reconciling them tells you something important. Fewer young Americans are Catholic than a generation ago, but the ones who remain or who convert participate more intensely than their parents ever did. More mass attendance, more rosary, more willingness to organize an entire personal identity around their religious choice. This is a smaller, more committed remnant. This is not a broad national reawakening. It's a narrow but loud one, amplified past its actual size by an online ecosystem built specifically to amplify narrow, loud things. Narrow, loud, annoying things. Yeah, well, then that's what I said before is it's it's the creation of these like bubbles of where people, you know, they are virtue signaling each other the intensity of their belief. And it's almost a purifying spiral. And so this is existing on all areas of the political spectrum, right? I mean, I would even say it's happening in the center as well, with uh, you know, and it's I hope we talk about this in the future, a radical center, because it is the same kind of almost illiberal liberalism is growing in power as well. Walk through what a national Catholic reporter column this has called the Catholic manosphere, and you will find a recognizable genre developed independently of any pope. Young men lifting weights, smoking cigars, discussing the crusades and the Latin Mass, in the same breath that they mock a pop star for not wanting children. Content built around helping Catholic men land a quote, traditionally minded girlfriend, unquote, and a seemingly workable strategy for men who feel that they have lost the broader dating economy to apps, hookup culture, and women who no longer need them financially. What ties the influencers to the intellectuals to the vice president is a shared diagnosis, even when they have different prescriptions. All of them describe a civilizational emergency, family formation collapsing, birth rates that are falling, men adrift, and institutions hauled out by a liberalism that promised freedom and delivered loneliness. Marriage rates really have fallen, but the cure on offer, an authoritarian remixing of church and state modeled partly on Orban's hungry, is not a return to some lost golden age. It's a new project entirely. One that treats women's autonomy, LGBTQIA plus existence, and religious pluralism as the debris that must be cleared away in order to build it.
SPEAKER_02I love how you fucking dunked on me by adding the extra letters that I forgot. Oh, you're welcome. Yeah. Yeah, thank you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. I was gonna talk about you know two spirit as well, but I I got scared. Yeah, yeah, no, that's that's fair. Once you you know get further down the list, then it's like, okay, if I keep going, I then I have to do the extended universe.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, like at some at a certain point, if you get deep enough into it, it becomes disrespectful to cut someone off. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly, right? Yeah, you're you are being accommodating enough, and then the question becomes, why aren't you accommodating? Yeah. But obviously they don't give a shit, but like it is very striking how all of our sort of uh data, all of our um empirical evidence on less loneliness, um, more dating, more sex even, like, you know, speaking the language of the incels uh points to uh not you know this sort of like trad wife uh situation helping people have more sex and have happier relationships, um but the quite opposite. Uh more women in the workforce, more equality means more sex, better sex, more you know, more successful relationships, and so on and so forth. Countries that sort of lead uh on this data are countries like Iceland, uh Norway, Finland, um, Sweden, and so on and so forth. I will never give the Danes anything. So like it's very striking how like these people are completely just missing the obvious uh solution, but obviously they don't give a shit because they want to rule over women as well.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And to everything that you're saying, they would probably ask the question, okay, but uh which women get to have good sex and which men get to get have good sex, and why isn't it me? And then uh the answer to that question is always very very awkward.
SPEAKER_02I don't know, the the bowling game you're playing or something. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01I I do think there is something to the idea that our society is slowly dissolving the like bonds that we used to have. I think there is a a measurable decline in just like drinking, uh, which I see as a proxy for socializing. There is a there's a measurable decline in self-reported like uh like sexual partners. Like people are you know, they have fewer friends. You know, I'm just saying that like the internet's media. Well, I mean it's true though. Well, I I think it's all just meaningful, yeah. It just it's what I'm trying to say here is like people are fucking less, they're partying less, they're hanging out less, they have less friends, and when you have all of those things, you also have less relationships, and you know, call grinding more. They're grinding more but getting less. Exactly.
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