REPOSTING a report from an X Investigator.
“How a Network of Political Catholic Integralists, Russian Ideologues, and Media Provocateurs Are Systematically Dismantling the Evangelical Foundation of the American Right”
The conventional framework for understanding the convulsions tearing through American conservatism treats them as a foreign policy argument. Israel or no Israel. Aid or no aid. “America First” versus “globalism.” This framing is wrong in the most important possible way.
What is happening is not a debate. It is a demolition.
The men and women at the center of this operation are not primarily interested in the 2026 midterms or even the 2028 presidential election. They are interested in a question that will take a decade or more to fully answer: Who controls the ideological and theological DNA of the Republican Party’s base?
For seventy years, that answer has been evangelical Protestant Christians. Roughly 30 percent of the American electorate, 80 percent of whom vote Republican, motivated by deep biblical conviction, organized through tens of thousands of local churches, and bound together by a theological commitment to the Bible have been in the drivers seat of the conservative movement.
Remove it, or transform it, and you have a different party. Not a party with different policies. A party with different gods.
That is the actual objective.
I am going to map out what I think is the most sophisticated attack in modern political history and all of its corresponding vectors — institutional, intellectual, theological, generational, and media — and explain how each one feeds into a single ten-year project: the replacement of evangelical Protestant political theology with a Catholic integralist or ethnonationalist framework that views Jews, Israel and Protestants not as covenant partners but as adversaries of Christian civilization.
A Necessary Distinction: This Is Not About Catholicism or Regular Catholics but about Political Catholic Integralism
Before mapping this operation in full, one clarification is essential — because without it, the analysis will be misread, and misreading it serves the operation’s interests.
This is not about Catholics.
The 70 million American Catholics who go to Mass on Sunday, vote their conscience, pay their taxes, coach Little League, and have been reliable partners in the pro-life movement for fifty years are not the subject of this investigation. They are, in a real sense, among its victims. The political integralist Catholicism being deployed in this operation bears no relationship to the ordinary American Catholic faith — it uses the vocabulary and symbols of a faith tradition as a vehicle for a power project that most practitioners of that faith would find alien and alarming. In fact, I would argue that but for the influencer and opinion shaper class, everyday Catholics don’t even know its happening.
What is actually being deployed is a specific ideological cocktail with three distinct ingredients, none of which represent mainstream American Catholic life.
The first is integralism — a pre-Vatican II political theology that holds the Catholic Church should exercise direct authority over temporal governments, that religious liberty is a Protestant error, and that a properly ordered state must subordinate itself to Church teaching. This is not the position of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It is not the position of Pope Francis. It is the position of a small but highly credentialed group of academic theorists — Vermeule, Ahmari, Deneen, Pappin — who have spent the last decade building intellectual infrastructure and who are quite explicit about their goal of replacing the Protestant liberal constitutional order that America was founded on.
The second is SSPX-adjacent traditionalism — the world of the Latin Mass hardliners, the Society of Saint Pius X, the sedevacantists and near-sedevacantists who regard the Second Vatican Council as a catastrophic betrayal and the post-conciliar Church as illegitimate or gravely compromised. Nick Fuentes operates in this world. His entire theological framework — the Apostles’ Creed imagery, the Christ the King invocations, the explicit hostility to ecumenism and interfaith dialogue — is drawn from a traditionalist Catholic milieu that the Vatican itself has repeatedly disciplined and that most American Catholics have never encountered. The SSPX was in irregular canonical status with Rome for decades. These are not mainstream Catholic positions. They are fringe positions that have been given a mass media platform.
The third ingredient is imported European and Middle Eastern sectarianism — and this is perhaps the most important point, because it explains something that confuses many American observers: why does any this feel so foreign?
It feels foreign because it is foreign. America does not have a native antisemitism rooted in two thousand years of living in close proximity to Jewish communities in a Catholic or Orthodox Christian civilization. We did not have pogroms. We did not have the Dreyfus Affair. We did not have centuries of Jewish ghettoes enforced by Church law, blood libel accusations, forced conversions, and expulsions. The specific texture of European antisemitism — the theological contempt, the conspiratorial frameworks about Jewish power, the language of “Christkillers” and “usurers” and “rootless cosmopolitans” — is not native to American political culture. It had to be imported.
That importation is exactly what is happening. Dugin’s geopolitical framework is Russian. The integralist political theology is drawn from pre-Enlightenment European Catholic political thought. The SSPX traditionalism is French in origin — founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a bishop who openly expressed sympathy for the Vichy government. The specific antisemitic conspiracy frameworks being deployed — about Jewish control of media, finance, and foreign policy — are recognizably derived from European far-right sources, recycled through American online culture and repackaged for a new generation.
The Middle Eastern dimension adds another layer. Part of what Carlson, Fuentes, and their network have successfully done is import the sectarian framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it exists in the Arab world and on the European left — a framing in which Israel is a settler-colonial project, Zionism is racism, and Christian support for Israel is a form of complicity in oppression — and introduced it into evangelical spaces where it has no native roots. The Palestinian Christian angle — sympathetic pastors presented on platforms like Carlson’s as authentic voices of the Church in the Holy Land — is specifically designed to create cognitive dissonance for evangelicals who have never had to think of support for Israel as a form of Christian-on-Christian hostility.
None of this is accidental. All of it is deliberate. And all of it is being imported into a country that, uniquely among Western nations, built its founding constitutional architecture specifically to prevent exactly this kind of sectarian conflict from taking root.
The Voter Problem
There is one more thing that must be said plainly, because it reveals the desperation underlying the operation’s aggression.
The network has infrastructure. It has influencers. It has think tanks and podcasts and academic journals and a Vice President who has yet to condemn it. Although many of us who supported him have high hopes that when it comes time he will. What it does not have — what it has never had — is voters.
American Catholics do not vote as a bloc for Catholic nationalist candidates. They never have. Italian-American Catholics in New Jersey, Irish-American Catholics in Boston, Latino Catholics in Texas and Florida — these communities vote on economics, immigration, crime, jobs, and family. They do not vote on integralist political theology because they have never heard of integralist political theology and would not recognize themselves in it if they had.
The Groyper movement’s actual voter base, stripped of the online amplification, is vanishingly small. Nick Fuentes cannot turn out precinct captains. He cannot fill a city council race. His million livestream viewers are a media phenomenon, not an electoral coalition.
This is why the operation must convert rather than persuade. It cannot win a fair fight for the Republican base because it does not represent the Republican base. So it must change the base — by demoralizing and theologically disorienting the evangelical voters who currently constitute it, by recruiting the next generation before they have formed stable convictions, and by capturing the institutional infrastructure through which that base is organized.
The aggression of the current moment — Carlson’s escalating attacks, Bannon’s declaration that Shapiro is a cancer, the shamelessness of the Young Republicans chats — is not the confidence of a movement that knows it is winning. It is the urgency of a movement that knows it does not have voters and needs to acquire them before the window closes.
Understanding that changes everything about how the counter-operation should be run. The goal is not to win a debate with Fuentes. The goal is to ensure that the evangelical base he is trying to convert understands, with clarity and confidence, what is being done to them, why, by whom, and what is at stake if it succeeds.
They are not being invited into a new political coalition. They are being hollowed out and replaced. And the people doing it are counting on them not to notice until it is too late.
A Second Distinction: This Is Not Donald Trump
Donald Trump did not create this operation. He does not control it. In important respects, he does not even fully understand it — and the people running it are counting on that.
Trump’s political rise was powered by legitimate grievances that had been building in the American working and middle class for decades. Deindustrialization. Trade deals that gutted manufacturing communities. Two costly wars in the Middle East prosecuted on false premises, with no clear victory and enormous human cost. An immigration system that neither party had the political will to fix. A credentialed professional class that had grown contemptuous of the people it was supposed to serve. A foreign policy establishment that treated American blood and treasure as instruments of global management while the communities that supplied that blood fell into poverty and despair.
These are real grievances. They deserved a political response. Trump provided one. The people who voted for him in 2016, 2020, and 2024 were not voting for antisemitism. They were not voting for white nationalism. They were not voting to dismantle the evangelical-Israel alliance. They were voting against a political establishment that had stopped representing them, and Trump was the man who volunteered for the job.
The network we have been documenting did not create those grievances. But it has become expert at exploiting them.
The foreign policy critique at the heart of the Carlson-Fuentes-Bannon messaging — that American resources have been squandered on foreign commitments that do not serve ordinary Americans — is a version, however distorted, of something Trump ran on and won on. The critique of neoconservatism — of the Bush-era foreign policy consensus that took America into Iraq and Afghanistan — is a legitimate critique that a significant majority of Americans, including a significant majority of Republicans, now share.
The operation’s genius, such as it is, has been to take that legitimate critique and attach to it a payload the voters who hold it never signed up for.
The argument runs like this: You were right that the Iraq War was a disaster. You were right that the foreign policy establishment lied to you. You were right that American resources were being spent on projects that didn’t serve you. Now let us tell you who was really behind all of that. Let us tell you who controls the foreign policy establishment. Let us tell you why Christian Zionism is the theological mechanism that keeps you supporting policies against your own interests. Let us introduce you to Nick Fuentes, who will explain it all.
Each step in that chain sounds like a reasonable extension of the previous one. The conclusion it leads to — that Jews control American foreign policy, that Christian support for Israel is a manipulation, that the real enemy is the Judeo-Christian framework itself — has nothing to do with the legitimate grievances the journey started from. But by the time a young man has followed the argument to its end, he has traveled so far from his starting point that he may not recognize how far he has gone.
This is the bait and switch at the heart of the operation. The bait is legitimate. The switch is radical.
Trump’s Actual Position
Donald Trump’s relationship with the Jewish community and the State of Israel is one of the most documented aspects of his public life. He moved the American embassy to Jerusalem — something three previous presidents had promised and failed to deliver. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He brokered the Abraham Accords, the most significant normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states in a generation. His son-in-law is Jewish. His daughter converted to Judaism. His grandchildren are being raised Jewish.
Trump’s foreign policy skepticism — his resistance to open-ended military commitments, his demand that NATO allies pay their share, his preference for deals over doctrine — is a coherent foreign policy vision. It is not antisemitism. It is not a project to dismantle the evangelical-Israel alliance. It is, in its essential character pragmatic realism: America should pursue its interests, make good deals, and stop subsidizing the security of wealthy allies who can afford to defend themselves.
One can agree or disagree with that vision. What one cannot honestly do is conflate it with what Carlson is doing when he calls Christian Zionists worse than Islamic terrorists, or what Fuentes is doing when he runs infiltration operations against the party’s evangelical base, or what Bannon is doing when he calls Ben Shapiro a cancer at a gathering held in the name of a recently assassinated evangelical Christian.
Those things are not Trump’s foreign policy. They are a separate operation, running alongside Trump’s coalition, using his legitimacy as cover, and pursuing objectives that Trump himself has never endorsed and that his own record directly contradicts.
The men running this operation are political parasites in the technical sense — they attach to a host organism, draw their sustenance from it, and do damage that the host does not fully perceive. Trump’s coalition is the host. The legitimate grievances of his voters — about war, about trade, about elite contempt, about an establishment that lied — are the nutrient they feed
