Mood: The Obscure
Some hard-right Catholic bloggers went mainstream in 2020. What about the other ones?
On October 30th last year, Vanity Fair partnered with Type Investigations to publish a long piece titled “Deep State, Deep Church: How QAnon and Trumpism Have Infected the Catholic Church”; the piece details the growing hard-right reactionary splinter of American Catholicism, and how it married itself to the most reactionary groups in American Trumpism, often encouraged and sometimes funded by the Trump 2020 campaign in an effort to win an uncommitted voter bloc. Previous G.O.T.H.S. characters like EWTN, Church Militant, LifeSiteNews, Taylor Marshall, Robert Barron, Robert Altman, Carlo Vigano, Thomas Tobin, Frank Pavone, Bill Barr, and Amy Coney Barrett all make appearances in the article. I’m sorry if you’re just finding this out now, but: that one Vanity Fair article is a nice tidy summary of everything I tried to cover in the first year and first 200,000 words of G.O.T.H.S., and it has cool graphics like this one:
When I started G.O.T.H.S., I was excited to spend time looking at weird people in the Catholic church that most of us had never heard of and had ended up ignoring. Unfortunately, most of my subjects turned into people that we couldn’t ignore anymore. By the time we got to the 2020 presidential election, Conspiracy Catholicism had erupted into the mainstream, and the Q delusion about Donald Trump fighting the Satanic pedophiles in the Deep State got welded to a different delusion where conservative bishops were fighting Pope Francis, who was actually a secret gay Communist Freemason bent on destroying Catholicism and triggering a "great reset" of the new world order. This all came with “Stop the Steal” bishops, protestors storming the Capitol with Notre Dame flags, and the global church getting its own self-proclaimed “Q” informant in Vigano. Mainstream Catholic outlets, as well as mainstream non-religious outlets, now report on the ongoing political dementia of the American church, and how it mirrors our secular political illness.
The media - the real media, not me - shining a spotlight on people like this is a good thing for the church long-term; if a respected media outlet is talking about violent conspiracy theories in the church, if bishops are getting asked about violent conspiracy theories in the church, there's a greater chance somebody will actually say something or do something about violent conspiracy theories in the church. If we don’t recognize the danger that these people pose to the continued safety of the church and its ability to rise to the moral challenges of today, we’ll continue to rot away from the inside. And now that actual writers with actual copy editors are on the case, I really don’t need to post about every little thing that happens at First Things or Church Militant, which is honestly kind of nice.
But that still leaves me with a question: why did those online shitheads become popular when other online shitheads pushing similar messages didn't? Some conspiracy-slinging Catholics broke out in 2020 through a combination of lucky timing and an increasingly polarized social media environment, but they weren't the only guys who were trying. Plenty of other hard-right Catholic outfits continue to toil away in the content mines, and they will never sniff the kind of success that Michael Voris or John-Henry Westen have gotten, even in an environment that seems perfectly designed for their success. And I wanted to understand who those guys were, the guys that Vanity Fair will never cover, and what makes their projects different.
Let me put it another way: folks like Taylor Marshall are so 2020. We’re in a brave new world of insane Catholic people on the Internet, all hustling to become the next Taylor Marshall, in a post-President-Trump world where everyone is looking for answers. All of the circumstances are there for a new Type of Guy in online Catholicism to break out from the pack, but can he pick up a new audience, or have the existing guys already cornered the market? To answer this question, I picked three far-right Catholic blogs that are significantly less successful than the ones I’ve looked at in the past, and I spent a week reading each of them cold, with minimal background research beforehand on who ran them and where they came from. Ultimately, my goal for each writer was to answer three questions:
If I came to this site as a prospective reader, with my basic knowledge of the conspiracies currently en vogue with hard-right Catholics, would there be enough interesting stuff on the new site to keep me reading regularly?
Who runs the site, and are they meaningfully different from the other guys I've researched? In other words, have I found a new Type of Guy in online Catholicism?
Is this project actually driving me insane?
I have a definitive answer to at least one of these.
WEEK ONE - THE NOW WORD WITH MARK MALLETT (FEBRUARY 1-5)
When I landed on The Now Word on Monday, February 1, there were no new posts for the day, so I sated myself by reading musician and blogger Mark Mallett's most recent post from 1/29, titled "The Agitators - Part II", and headed with photos of two clear agitators, the most aggressive, take-no-prisoners politicians of all time, Donald Trump and oh come the fuck on:
The piece opened with "In Part I, we saw the fascinating and incredible parallels between President Donald Trump and Pope Francis," so right away, I found myself in uncharted territory. Had I found a new Type of Guy so quickly?
Because let's be clear: "Trump and Francis have a lot in common" is not a very popular take with the audience this guy is trying to capture, based on his overall message and the other websites he cites throughout his posts. LifeSiteNews - quoted throughout posts on Mallett's site - framed the 2020 election as "Trump/Vigano vs. Biden/Francis for future of global order," and Taylor Marshall also did whatever this is:
The party line for this audience is not that Trump and Francis have anything in common, it's that Francis and Biden have too much in common since they're fake Catholics COMING FOR YOUR CHURCH. In fact, later in this piece, Mallett outright rejects the idea, shared by his contemporaries, that the Pope was fraudulently elected, writing "there is no authentic Catholic prophecy that foretells a canonically elected pope destroying the Church — a clear contradiction of Matthew 16:18. Rather, there are many prophecies from saints and seers where the Pope is either forced to flee Rome, or is killed. This is why we must pray especially for our Pontiff in these darkening days." Our Pontiff! Praying for him! Whod've thought there were still extremely online Catholics writing this stuff!
So Mallett started out with something novel, and I really didn't know where he was going to take it. Unfortunately, he took it here:
"I believe these two men have been used as instruments of God to sift the hearts of men. In the case of Trump, he has been used to test the foundations of freedom in the Western World, expressed in the Constitution of the United States. In the case of Pope Francis, he has been used to test the foundations of truth in the Catholic Church. With Trump, his unorthodox style and provocations have exposed those with Marxist and socialist agendas; they have come out into the open, their cause no longer in the darkness. Likewise, Francis’ unorthodox and Jesuit style of creating a “mess” has exposed the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” eager to “update” Church teaching; they have come out into the open, their intent clear, their boldness growing."
I'm not sure Mallett's thesis holds up here - what do Donald Trump and Pope Francis have in common? According to Mallett, they're drawing the enemies of Christianity out into the open. But can we even count that as a trait they have in common if they're on different sides of the fight? Trump is drawing out the enemies of Christianity by being (in Mallett's estimation) a great Christian president, and Francis is drawing out enemies of Christianity by enabling those enemies. This point is incoherent, and falls back into the same Trump-good-Francis-bad bullshit I can find anywhere.
Because Mallett, Canadian though he is, thinks Donald Trump is swell, writing in a post later in the week:
"President Trump became one of the most outspoken presidents for ending abortion (his defence of the unborn during his debate with Hilary Clinton was one of the most courageous moments of any politician on this issue). He defended freedom of religion. He gave many profound speeches that acknowledged Jesus Christ by name that left me cheering. And like many of you, I watched in disgust as the mainstream media dispensed with even attempting to appear objective and, with one collective voice, became a propaganda machine the likes of which the Western World has never seen on their own soil.”
This post from mid-week was titled "Letter to My American Friends," in which Mallett had to walk back some criticisms he made of Trump in an earlier podcast episode. He wants to be absolutely clear: he loves Trump and thinks he's just a great Christian, and he just wants to make sure we're not blindly following a leader who still has some flaws. Not only did Mallett think Trump could be too uncouth at times, but he had a strong policy disagreement with Trump, and if you had a guess as to where this Catholic blogger, podcaster, and musician would disagree with Trump with on policy, you probably guessed wrong:
"Before Christmas, Trump proudly retweeted that he is “The most gay American President.” Many of you don’t even know that, but it’s true. How can we as Catholics simply ignore these obvious public incongruities with our Faith, especially when gender ideology and gay marriage are perhaps even more on the vanguard of persecution than the abortion issue? None of this detracts from the good things Trump did. But as Catholics, are we disciples of our politicians or Jesus Christ? Whom do we serve?”
That's right everyone, Trump - the guy who banned transgender Americans from the military and lambasted the Supreme Court for extending Title VII employment protections to gay and trans employees - is just a little too gay for Mallett. So as the week progressed, Mallett's posts rapidly lost political coherence.
Amazingly, this wasn't the only time this week that Mallett had to walk back a comment he made on an earlier episode of his ongoing podcast, "Countdown to the Kingdom". In the episode dated 2/4/21, Mallett issued two apologies up top: first, for inadvertently flipping his Zoom camera around and making it look like he was making the sign of the cross with his left hand, and second, for (sighs heavily) comments he made about pregnancy. Specifically, while making the comment that (sighs heavily) "the only difference between us and the unborn is that the unborn are younger," he added that this rule applied "whether they were one month in the womb, six months in the womb, or a year and a half in the womb," and while he apologized for (sighs heavily) overshooting the period of human gestation by one hundred percent, I would say this doesn't help establish him as somebody who has any useful opinions about abortion.
Mallett's online presence is, to put it succinctly and bluntly, unimpressive. He's not posting daily, so he can't keep up with the pace of content churn at other more popular sites, his political views make no sense, and half of his content is backtracking the other half of it. His theology is even less coherent than his politics: on his podcast, he makes it clear that he buys into the "great reset" conspiracy theory, that American Marxists and "green politics" are coming to abolish all private property, and he shares unverified bizarre "private revelations" of Our Lady of Fatima as data points to back him up. He and his guest acknowledge that these revelations aren't officially recognized by the church - the evidence presented by Mallett adds up to "some guys said some things about visions they had, and they happen to align with my economic political views" - but they defend themselves, incredibly, with "there's a zero percent chance all of these people are wrong". And with all of that, he thinks accusing Francis of being a fake pope is a bridge too far; if he doesn't want to go balls-out with papal conspiracies that's fine, but it makes his site less of an “urgent sensational message” and more a “jumble of loosely connected block quotes,” and it seems pretty clear to me why other bloggers are leaving him in the dust.
Mallett's not a new Type of Guy, either. We've already got Canadians who comment on American politics, LifeSite already cornered the market. We have Marshall and Heilman already covering the Unverified-Fatima beat. We even already have Randall Terry covering off "anti-abortion musician," although Mallett does have an old album called Vulnerable, and the cover art is just a photo of Mallett being told by a photographer "Okay, I need you to look vulnerable riiiiiiiiight now":
So I walked away from The Now Word (what the fuck sort of title is that) very underwhelmed, and hoped that the next subject would give me more to work with.
WEEK TWO - CREATIVE MINORITY REPORT (FEBRUARY 8-12)
Matthew Archbold, seen here from the point of view of a marshmallow he’s been told he’s not allowed to eat, is a former National Catholic Register contributor who now runs a Blogger.com site called Creative Minority Report, which promises “The Catholic Church at the Beginning of an Age. Religion, Politics, Current Events, and Humor.” An old bio on Archbold's Amazon page actually referred to the site by a longer name - Creative Minority Report: We Laugh Because We Believe. What I'm about to say about Archbold is more horrifying than anything I've ever covered before on this site, but: he considers himself something of a comedian.
Oh boy. Photoshops of multiple masks on Fauci, whose name has been changed to Faux-i because of how fakey-fake he is? We are not in The Onion territory, or even The Babylon Bee territory, as much as we are in post-2000-and-really-out-of-steam-at-this-point-Mad-Magazine territory. Still, that particular story is from the previous week, and I didn't have time to look at it because Archbold posted right away on Monday morning, with a piece titled "WaPo Columnist Compares Republicans Who Shoveled Her Driveway to Terrorists."
It's unclear what Archbold is going for in this piece, mainly because he opens the piece by copying and pasting the same block quote two times in a row, seemingly unintentionally. Even without the apparent typo, 90% of this piece is just block quote. To be fair, criticizing an op-ed you don't like in a newspaper is not something I can get too upset about, but Archbold doesn't have any point of view, comedic or otherwise, about the Post column - an admittedly weird piece where the author's Trump-supporting neighbors shovel her driveway and she can't get past their support of Trump's cruelty over the past four years - besides "I hate it and this is stupid". It's not novel - there's barely any commentary beyond the copypasta from the Post - it's not funny, and, perhaps more importantly, it's not Catholic. There's no distinct reason for this particular spleen-venting to be on a Catholic blog and not a general-interest "Old Man Yells At Cloud" roundup. The only reference Archbold makes to religion at all comes here:
"Because every interaction between people must be viewed through the prism of politics. I mean, what else is there, right? It's not like God loves everyone and instructed us to love one another...if you're willing to think exactly like she does, she might just be willing to forgive you. My advice to this woman is get off Twitter. Don't watch CNN. This brand of insanity is tearing our country apart. The politicization of every interaction is destroying us. God help us all."
I suppose I can't be too critical of a guy posting a column he doesn't like and just throwing up his hands and saying "God help us all"; I may have done that once or twice myself in the past. But I am including that quote here to see if Archbold can live up to his own standard for the rest of the week: can he view people through a lens other than the political? Can he fight against polarization? Can he approach those who disagree with him in a spirit of humility and forgiveness? I was eager to see what this stupid little-dicked smooth-brained pot-bellied vat of chunky bile could do.
As the week went on, things played out exactly as expected. Archbold had a flurry of posts mid-week, one of which covered a story which could be considered explicitly "political", in that it involved state actors in a lawsuit, and the other two covered stupid nerd shit.
Let's start with the political story, titled "NY AG Sues Pro-Lifers for ‘Threatening, Harassing' NYC Clinic Patients. Here We Go…". The story is pretty self-explanatory, but as the State AG was going to the courts for an injunction against some of the more odious abortion clinic protestors in her state, Archbold was ready to counter with this insane argument:
"It seems to me that most of what the attorney general of New York is accusing pro-lifers of doing is already illegal. Pushing people? Hitting people? Slamming doors on their hands? I think that's all illegal, amiright? Why not simply prosecute them with breaking already existing laws rather than asking the court to create new laws to keep pro-lifers away from abortion clinics? Ah. That's because the attorney general isn't about enforcing the law even thought [sic] that's literally her job. She's advancing an agenda."
Even with my podcast-level understanding of civics, I know that the way a State AG would enforce existing laws would be to seek a court order and injunctive relief. The alternative option, of course, would be to immediately charge and arrest the protestors, and since Archbold is clearly not a new Type of Guy, he'd be even more upset about the use of criminal charges against 'pro-lifers'.
More importantly, this piece isn't comedic! The only thing in the piece that appears to be structured like a "joke" is how Archbold chooses to end things, but even then, I don't get it, other than an attempt to say, about the Attorney General of New York, "this bitch be crazy". Archbold is certainly allowed to make this joke and call it a joke, but it pales in comparison to my marshmallow test reference a few paragraphs earlier:
And this isn't even the dumbest piece that Archbold ran that day, because the man who started his week warning against reducing everything to the political continued his week by waging wars in the political arenas of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars, areas with zero stakes for Archbold personally, and minimal stakes overall. Archbold uses the recent reporting of Joss Whedon's shitty abusive behavior on the set of Buffy as a chance to score points for Catholicism, since "Whedon is an out and proud atheist," and the actress who excoriated Whedon, Charisma Carpenter, is Catholic. Getting in shots at other people for sexual harassment and abuse is not a place where Catholics can, let's say, operate from a moral high ground. But regardless, it's not even really clear what point Archbold is trying to score, as the only statement of opinion in the piece - the only sentence that isn't a block quote or restatement of a block quote - is a throwaway "seems like a nice guy".
As for Star Wars, Archbold laments the firing of Gina Carano from The Mandalorian as a chance to lament cancel culture and ask Disney "I wonder if they even recognize the irony of this?" Carano was ostensibly fired for comparing Republicans, who have unified control of 23 state governments and a significant presence across the federal government, to Jewish people being exterminated in the Holocaust. It was one of a string of terrible and increasingly anti-semitic posts Carano refused to apologize for (like the one shown below), and Disney probably saw the economic risk of keeping somebody so toxic on the payroll as more significant than the artistic benefit of casting a former MMA fighter with extremely limited range.
Archbold's posts are stupid, but they also don't stand up to the standard he set on the same website at the beginning of the same week. Archbold decries workplace abuse and casting decisions as political - a defensible position in the right hands! - but he can't do that while saying, out of the other side of his mouth, that we're wrong to treat everything as a political us vs. them battle. A guy who sarcastically wrote, literally three days earlier, that “every interaction between people must be viewed through the prism of politics. I mean, what else is there, right? It's not like God loves everyone and instructed us to love one another” might have spared a few words for how Charisma Carpenter’s faith got her through her ordeal on the Buffy set, or how there might be one or two Jewish people who were horrified by Gina Carano’s comments. But he doesn’t go for that, and it seems to be less because he’s a hypocrite and more because he’s just half-assing all of his posts as it is, to just get something out there with a minimum of thought or opinion or any new information at all.
Still, if those pieces aren't enough evidence that Archbold readily sees everything as political, he also published a novel in 2020 titled American Antigone, which, as the title suggests, is an extremely heavy-handed allegory comparing contemporary fights over abortion rights to the conflict in Sophocles' play. From the jacket description:
"The actions of a young woman to honor her aborted brother ignite a national firestorm that changes the lives of everyone involved. American Antigone is a roller coaster ride of life-and-death encounters, a media firestorm, and a tale of grace and conversion. This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about a culture of life, religious freedom, or understanding our current national crisis."
I read the first few chapters of Archbold's book, and unless he really turns it around in the back half, it's not a great work of fiction, or allegory, or anything. The Antigone stand-in character - you know, the main one for whom the book is named - wasn't introduced at all in the first chapters, which focused mainly on a journalist at a Pennsylvania newspaper who resented his state-school degree and reminisced, in chapter-long flashbacks, about times he was horny in high school. Maybe he's the Greek chorus, but I don't give a shit.
If Mallett had some content but no real rage behind it, Archbold is struggling to show us how much rage he has, but he's limited because he has no content behind it - hell, just in terms of "posting about current events", he's choosing to cover Joss Whedon instead of the actual political thing that was happening this week, which was an impeachment trial over an armed insurrection at the seat of the United States government. This is unfocused, undirected bluster, made worse by its halfhearted branding as "comedy" or "satire", and I can't imagine why any Catholic would have any interest in any of this. What an absolute dork, I just want to read someone who's cool as hell. And so:
WEEK THREE - AKA CATHOLIC (FEBRUARY 15-19)
It's impossible to express my elation at my first time seeing the above photograph of Louie Verrecchio for the first time; the Italian Greaser Cowboy, or "Spaghetti Westerner," could represent a truly novel Type of Guy for us.
Well, not only is he not a new Type of Guy, he's actually one of the least-new Types of Guy in Catholicism: a sedevacantist. We've talked about this in previous installments, but sedevacantists - derived from the Latin for "the seat [of Peter] is empty" - believe that we currently do not have a legitimate Pope. The most recent post on AKACatholic, Verrecchio's blog, was a theological argument urging Catholics to embrace sedevacantism and basically reject our current Pope - and, as it turns out, quite a few Popes before him - as illegitimate.
The problem with sedevacantists - I mean, there's more than one, but a big one - is that if you believe we don't have a legitimate Pope but you still want to be Catholic, you only have two real options with any intellectual coherence: you can leave the church, or you can choose to follow a different Pope who claims to be the real Pope (antipopes have existed for centuries and I listed the stats for a bunch of the current ones in an earlier piece). Those are the only two options that make sense; if you believe that every Pope since at least John XXIII is fake - which is the current party line on AKAC - you can't trust the Vatican to eventually elect a good Pope who fixes everything because all of the guys who pick the Pope were in turn appointed by one of those fake Popes. So, leave the church or follow a different guy, those are the two options. Verrecchio, and others like him, invented a third option: just bitch all of the time on the internet.
And that brings us to AKACatholic. According to the site's "about" page, Verrecchio used to do a lot of speaking gigs at parishes on Vatican II, before (background music changes to minor key):
"I now realize that the conciliar documents, in spite of whatever faithful expressions are to be found therein...are polluted with ambiguities, contradictions and outright errors: Like an entire lump spoiled by a little leaven, the text of Vatican II, far from being solid nourishment for the soul, is downright poisonous. As such, I believe that I am duty bound to warn others that accepting the Council whole and entire, as if it’s a gift from Above, will undoubtedly lead to a loss of Catholic faith."
With that origin story, Verrecchio rebranded his online presence as "AKACatholic," whose stated mission is "to examine every proposition that claims to be “Catholic” through the lens of tradition – regardless of the source, and to scrutinize all things in the light of that which comes to us from God through Holy Mother Church." Pope Francis has already explicitly and specifically taught that rejecting Vatican II doesn't fucking work if you call yourself Catholic (that's a rough paraphrase), but I don't really need a complex theological argument for Verrecchio. Instead, I'll just ask you to look at it this way: there's a dude in front of you whom you've never heard of, wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses, who has just told you that he has unilaterally declared himself the arbiter of what's really Catholic and what's not, and also he's decided to exclude everything from John XXIII forward, anything from an era after the two world wars, anything from an era where the Pope was able to regularly travel around the world, anything from an era where anyone other than white men had any level of power or visibility in any part of the world and especially in the church. Does that sound like a good proposition to you?
Before we answer, let's see if Verrecchio's site is worth visiting at all. He didn't have any new posts until Wednesday of this week, which happened to be Ash Wednesday, and Verrecchio framed up his piece as a guide to what we should be praying for during Lent. The final two paragraphs of the piece read:
"Jorge Bergoglio, the man that most of the world mistakenly considers the “religious leader” of the Holy Roman Catholic Church – including the vast majority of sincerely confused self-identified Catholics – is nothing more than a modernist marionette who is pleased to dance to whatever tune his Masonic, humanist, globalist puppet masters – the headquarters for which is the United Nations – decide to hum. This being so, let us resolve during this Lenten season to plead with Our Lord to send us a holy and intrepid pope, who will at long last fulfill His request for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the solitary path to authentic renewal."
Ok, so the Pope is just a tool for the UN, and we just are supposed to kind of pray that the next papal election works out better, I guess. Referring initially to the current pontiff as "Jorge Bergoglio (stage name, Francis)," Verrecchio's supporting evidence for this proposition is that, a year ago when the COVID pandemic was beginning to spread worldwide, both the UN Secretary-General and Francis said that the most vulnerable in the global community would be hit the hardest by the pandemic, and we needed to respond with solidarity and compassion. So, uh, QED I guess, although Verrecchio worded it "presumably the point has been made"; two world leaders made the same, pretty simple and pretty non-controversial statement - even if you're a conservative psychopath, are you going to deny that people died of a virus, and that a lot of those people were in poor and underserved countries and communities? Does that require a big cognitive leap? - and thus one is the marionette of the other.
It's not clear from the post alone what Verrecchio thinks the Catholic church should be preaching in a global pandemic, if not compassion and solidarity. If you came to this site cold this week as I did, you'd be underwhelmed by the number of new posts, confused by the new post that did show up, and confused further by the previous posts from the past few weeks, which include very dry and half-hearted theological justifications for sedevacantism, as well as a re-airing of concerns about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and whatever this is:
It's especially unclear, throughout everything on AKAC, what Verrecchio's actual vision for the church is. Okay, Vatican II is bad and apparently solidarity with the poor is also bad, and engagement with the global community is bad. What should the church do? Other shitheads I've covered have proposed that there church become an anti-abortion lobby, or a campaign arm of the Republican party, or a general vehicle for condemning anyone who's not a straight white man, and those are visions with which I disagree, but they're visions that people articulate and use to grow their influence and audience. AKAC claims to get 3 million hits a year and hustles for donations on every page, to argue, in the most opaque and infrequent language possible, for the absence of the post-1960s church with nothing to replace it. What a crushing disappointment from an Italian Greaser Cowboy.
EPILOGUE
If you're looking for quality content, or even halfway relevant bad content that you can riff on, reading these three blogs is a pretty clear waste of time. But all three are instructive, through their own failings, on what it actually takes to break out as a shitty reactionary conspiracy-slinging Catholic blog in this era.
First, you need a high level of churn; in other words, you must Never Stop Posting. All three of our subjects were posting a few times a week, and those are rookie numbers. It doesn't matter if the posts are good - they will, most likely, not be good - you gotta get people visiting your shit every day, multiple times a day if you can, and your audience will forget the previous bad posts as soon as the next one goes up. Church Militant or LifeSite would fall apart overnight if they scaled back to two articles a week and reduced their normal unhinged high-velocity tweeting. There always has to be something new to check on, something new to get mad about.
That's the next thing: you have to be mad, all of the time, about everything. Emotion is key to reaching the lizard brains of your key readerships: 23-year-old white supremacists and grandparents who shouldn't have an internet connection. Mallett's not mad, I don't get that at all: he's sitting around on his podcast going "it seems like the world is ending and the Pope is being attacked by Satan, that's weird huh?". If you're trying to convince your audience that it's the end of the world so that they'll give you money, act like it's the end of the world. And your anger should have some sort of substance and originality to it - the Joss Whedon story was infuriating because of the influence Whedon enjoys in the industry, because he pretends to be an outspoken feminist, because of his mocking a woman's faith, because he was so odious that the Buffy producers wouldn't leave him alone with Michelle Trachtenberg, and all Archbold had to say was "seems like a nice guy," which does not merit a visit to his website or any interest in the book he's plugging there.
The third thing you need is some sort of call to action for your audience; no matter how disingenuous that call to action actually is, you need your audience to feel like they can actually do something about the crisis, and do it better by visiting your website frequently. In other words, in addition to having stakes and keeping those stakes top of mind, you need to show that your online platform is going to help your audience rise to meet this high-stakes moment. Verrecchio thinks that the vast majority of Catholics are following a false pontiff and fundamentally flawed body of teaching, which would be a five-alarm fire for the church, and his answer is "well let's hope the next Pope just works out". Gina Carano got shit-canned by Disney, and that's not a five-alarm fire for Catholicism, but all Archbold told his audience was "hmmm, irony much?" The easiest - and, as it turns out, most popular - solution for this is to just tell your audience to support open white nationalism, and unfortunately that happens to be the platform of one of America's two major political parties.
It really seems like this has been the determining factor in the success of some of the bigger names in conspiracy Catholicism: they tied their projects to guys who were also angry every day, and on TV and Twitter every day. Voting or supporting a politician was something easy that their audiences could do, and tying their project to Trump specifically was a way to ensure that they were also staying on top of their own frequent high-stakes posting and grievances, since Trump provided a model for doing both and staying relevant in people’s minds every day. When I ask why a conservative Catholic account would go all-in on Trump or the Republican party, I find that the answer is much clearer when I look at the guys who didn’t touch Trump or who half-assed it: they’re still in obscurity while the Trumpists made bank and built a name for themselves.
So none of these three guys - these unoriginal, tired, boring guys that nobody will remember - have broken through. If they keep doing everything the same way that they're doing it now, they probably won't ever break through. But don't count them out completely. Our country is still breaking in half, plague and disaster are still devastating us, and the church leaders, who could be providing a moral roadmap for navigating this new and scary era, are still tripping over their own dicks every day. The bishops still won't do anything to build trust and accountability with their flocks, and people are still trying to make sense of a very brutal world and understand what they should be doing. The audience for the kind of shit shoveled out by Mallett, Archbold, and Verrecchio is growing steadily. And these guys have nothing but time.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.
Sources used for this piece include:
“About.” AKA Catholic, 17 Feb. 2021, akacatholic.com/about/.
Archbold, Matthew. “Actress Warns of Intolerance Against Conservatives, Immediately Fired from The Mandalorian.” Creative Minority Report, www.creativeminorityreport.com/2021/02/actress-warns-of-intolerance-against.html.
Archbold, Matthew. American Antigone. Resource Publications, 2020.
Archbold, Matthew. “Director Joss Whedon Mocked Actress' Catholic Faith and Urged Abortion.” Creative Minority Report, 10 Feb. 2021, www.creativeminorityreport.com/2021/02/director-joss-whedon-mocked-actress.html.
Archbold, Matthew. “NY AG Sues Pro-Lifers for 'Threatening, Harassing' NYC Clinic Patients. Here We Go...” Creative Minority Report, 10 Feb. 2021, www.creativeminorityreport.com/2021/02/ny-ag-sues-pro-lifers-for-threatening.html.
Archbold, Matthew. “WaPo Columnist Compares Republicans Who Shoveled Her Driveway to Terrorists.” Creative Minority Report, 8 Feb. 2021, www.creativeminorityreport.com/2021/02/wapo-columnist-compares-republicans-who.html?m=1.
Joyce, Kathryn. “How QAnon and Trumpism Have Revealed a Deep Church Schism Among Catholics.” Vanity Fair, 30 Oct. 2020, www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/how-qanon-and-trumpism-have-infected-the-catholic-church?fbclid=IwAR09xfjBXdHqEPecp2KzrGFkmUDFKzFiz3emIdpb6GYNDw2EqqjBrGI3xaQ.
Mallett, Mark. “A Letter to My American Friends...” The Now Word, 9 Feb. 2021, www.markmallett.com/blog/a-letter-to-my-american-friends/.
Mallett, Mark. “The Agitators - Part II.” The Now Word, 31 Jan. 2021, www.markmallett.com/blog/the-agitators-part-ii/.
Mallett, Mark. “The Time of Fatima Is Here.” The Now Word, 4 Feb. 2021, www.markmallett.com/blog/the-time-of-fatima-is-here/.
Verrecchio, Louie. “Lent 2021: For What Shall We Pray?” AKA Catholic, 16 Feb. 2021, akacatholic.com/lent-2021/.