TRANSCRIPT: Bishop Barron Presents Nick Fuentes - Conversations at the Crossroads [updated with annotations]
My contact at Word on Fire asked me to tell you that all Bibles are currently 20% off.
Thanks to a helpful contact at Bishop Barron's Word On Fire, I was able to watch the video of an upcoming interview that WOF will be releasing soon on their social media feeds1. I have transcribed it below as a public service.
BISHOP ROBERT BARRON: I’m delighted to be here with Nick Fuentes today. We were just talking before we started recording, I was saying - this is the first time we’ve met in person - but I was saying how many of my previous guests had recommended you to me. I just had Chris Rufo on2, and then some of Ben Shapiro’s people - I don’t think it was Ben himself, but some of the people who worked with him3 - they have all been telling me, ‘you have to have Nick on your show, this is a guy who's been so successful with new media, this is a guy who makes his Catholic faith the center of his message’.” So, welcome.
NICK FUENTES: Great to be here.
BARRON: I could talk to you about, well, a lot of things, I guess4, but let’s start with your show5. As I understand it, you talk about the key issues of the day in politics, and in culture, but you always center it in your Catholic faith. I know the big story, as we’re recording this, has been the protests we’ve seen on college campuses.
FUENTES: Absolutely, we’ve spent a lot of time on those.
BARRON: I’ve written about these protests myself, it’s the sort of thing you see a lot in woke circles, right, to divide the world into the simplistic categories of oppressor and oppressed. And now, what we’re seeing is that that has all spilled onto the streets, the contemporary professoriate and this dysfunctional culture is encouraging it, these universities are, sadly, not places where truth is sought, right, but instead, they’ve become hotbeds of woke ideology6.
FUENTES: Absolutely. And when you look at the protestors, these people deploying to campuses, these people don’t love America-
BARRON: Yeah.
FUENTES: They’re leftists, a lot of them are going on the campuses really for the wrong reasons, they’re with Palestine, not because they’re sympathetic even for the humanitarian cause, a lot of them are just radical liberationists, so we’re not ideologically aligned at all. They’re hardcore leftists, communists, they’re tearing down the American flag7.
BARRON: Yeah. You see echoes of Foucault, or of the Frankfurt school, it’s just gotten out of control. It really is tragic. I think of what my old boss Archbishop Gomez said, how movements like this are substitutes for Christianity, how we need to proclaim Jesus Christ in the face of them, you do that on your show, what’s involved in that?
FUENTES: Look8, I think that religion is fundamental. I am fundamentally motivated, more than anything, by the mission to evangelize people into the Christian religion - for me, in particular, that’s the Catholic church.
BARRON: Yeah9. You start with first principles, and with your identity as a Christian. To know how to behave as a Christian is a function of knowing, first, who we are as Christians10.
FUENTES: Absolutely.
BARRON: And obviously, it’s resonating with people. You’ve been hosting shows for years now, people call you one of the most successful voices in new media, you have an annual convention11, you’re a regular and sought-after presence at the March For Life12, my understanding is that you participate in other marches as well13. I think that your emergence and success are indicators of how the church can get a serious message out to a wider, and younger, audience14. What do you think is the relationship there, between your medium and your message?
FUENTES: Well, the media landscape that I was born into certainly helps with that. There was a very short window of time, I think at the beginning of the last decade - I would say, 2013 would probably be the starting point - when social media really became activated. This, I would say, is a specific singularity in the history of technological development, when people had all gotten smartphones and social media. It’s the hottest medium that has ever existed in the history of mankind. Unlike even before, when people had internet and computers. For the first time, roughly in that period in the middle of the last decade, everybody was connected to everybody else, via social media, at all times, via their smartphones. It’s no surprise that when, for the first time in history, the consciousness was elevated to such a high degree by social media and smartphones, it produced this sort of revolution, in many areas, but including the Catholic church, this is why, you know, we saw young people taking an interest in reclaiming their church, in pushing back on a church that they see as not doing enough to fight modernity. It’s really a great story, what social media has done for society, not just for people like you and me who get our message out that way, of course, but for the people that need to receive these messages to really understand their world and their faith15.
BARRON: A lot of things were going through my mind while you were talking, but I think I want to talk about how you’re able to reach, I think, a younger audience than you’d expect for a religious commentator, and especially an audience of young and engaged Catholics. Because when you look at the religious commentariat today, it has just become so polarized and ideologically driven-
FUENTES: Absolutely.
BARRON: …the most elementary distinctions aren’t made and it’s common to just see, the most broad-brush analyses, without any regard for context or framing. And it’s hard to watch, because it stands in the way of addressing the real issues. The Church continues to hemorrhage young people, and we need to get serious about it16.
FUENTES: We need to get serious about all of the issues. It’s the vaccines, it’s poison GMO foods, it’s things like birth control, I would contend that it’s even built into modernity.
BARRON: Modernity, yeah.
FUENTES: It’s the fact that women are deferring childbirth all the time, the average age at which women are having children is always going up, and the higher it goes, the lower the fertility rate is. We cannot have a pro-freedom, pro-human, pro-life, and for my show especially, pro-America movement, that is meaningful, if we aren’t constantly getting the word out across as many platforms as we can.
BARRON: Maybe we can come back to that later, but you keep bringing up modernity, and I want to talk about that more, because I think you’ve identified the right villain. I think of it that way as well. I started writing - and this is thirty years ago, now - as a critic of what I referred to as “beige Catholicism.” That was this idea that the faith that had become culturally accommodating, you know, hand-wringing, unsure of itself, muted17.
FUENTES: Catholicism is certainly not beige. It’s not tan, or brown, or black, it needs to be pure, it needs to be purified18.
BARRON: Well, however you want to say it, but yeah, I think we’re saying the same thing.
FUENTES: That’s why it’s so important that we’re using our platforms to raise awareness about things that are going on in the world: about globalism, about medical tyranny, about transhumanism, it really truly can’t be overstated what that does for our movement.
BARRON: See, you talk about a “movement”, and I think the movement is winning in the face of modernity. You look at, say atheism. For the past two hundred years, atheists have been saying, loudly, that, if you get rid of God, that will lead to human liberation. And for me, it’s exactly the opposite view. Once the human being is untethered from God, he becomes, for lack of a better term, and object, someone who can be manipulated by powerful and self-interested people19.
FUENTES: Yes, exactly. Christians, they have a belief in God, they cannot be controlled by worldly powers. Of course, global government fears religion that they can’t control, it’s no different than the devil, who controls the world, who offered Jesus control of the world if he would just bow and worship at his feet, it’s really the same frustration that the devil had. Jesus would not submit to him, Christians will not submit to an anti-Christ, new world order system. That’s because we worship God.
BARRON: We worship God. Well said20.
FUENTES: Well, we have to be direct with what we’re talking about. We have to proclaim Jesus Christ, like you said. Sometimes I feel like the church isn’t even willing to do that. You look at some of the things that priests say now, or that the Vatican says, you take Fiducia Supplicans, or even going back to Nostra Aetate-
BARRON: [interrupts] Let’s get back to that in a minute, because I don’t want to get too technical right now, and I definitely want to make sure I emphasize a point you just made, which is that, it does sometimes feel like the church has been dumbing down the faith too much. Maybe that sounds strange coming from a bishop [laughs], but yes, I really think we got a ‘dumbed-down’ Catholicism that has been a pastoral disaster. When I think about how you’re able to reach so many people, young people, engaged people, those are people who don’t want an uncertain trumpet, right? They want something clear, and when they get it, they respond to it21.
FUENTES: The way I’ve put it before is that, I don’t have an indifferentist view of God. I don’t go around saying that “everybody’s out there worshipping the same God”. I think there’s one trinitarian God with a very specific nature-
BARRON: Mm. Yeah.
FUENTES: I think that one of those persons of God became incarnate in man, his name was Jesus Christ, he was put on the cross, he founded the church. If people attack Him, or attack us because of Him, we should fight back, we should call what is evil evil.
BARRON: Yeah, that’s an important distinction. In the minds of far too many people today, there’s no such thing as an “intrinsically evil” act anymore22. And when we lose that sensitivity to intrinsically evil acts, we fall, automatically, into this sort of moral relativism, where you can just explain away anything, ally yourself with any sort of evil, and barely even notice it. I liked what you said about not being an “indifferentist”, I’ve used that term before23. I think the Bible wants us to push us beyond a sort of bland religious relativism - that’s what I called indifferentism, that’s what I grew up with, and it was exactly what you were talking about, this saying that “we’re all worshipping the same God”. We clearly articulate our beliefs as Christians, and yet, and I’m sure you’re on the same page here, we don’t want to fall into the other extreme, into tribalism, into something where we ignore God’s special covenant with Israel, or, even, the covenant he made with all of humanity through Noah.
FUENTES: I’m glad you brought up the covenant with Israel. When we’re talking about not dumbing down the faith, you know, Revelation talks very precisely about a ‘synagogue of Satan’-
BARRON: [interrupts] Well, we can leave that to the biblical scholars, but yes, it’s certainly true that throughout the salvation narrative, we hear over and again that Israel does not live up to its high calling, that it falls short of its vocation to worship the Lord alone24. That’s why faithful Yahweh finally met faithful Israel in the person of the Messiah, as you were talking about.
FUENTES: So I think - and you know, on my show, I actually talk a lot about other religious groups besides Catholics-
BARRON: [crosstalk] Oh, which ones25?
FUENTES: [continues] You talk about faithful Israel, but we also need to talk about the unfaithful people there. If there is a group of people out there that say that Jesus is burning in Hell, a group that prides themselves on being the only religion that actually hates Jesus, what are we doing about them?
BARRON: Mmm.
FUENTES: What does it mean when there’s a people that deliberately rejects the Messiah that they are supposed to bear? What does it mean when, throughout history, you see these people show up at the beginning of all of these evil movements, like the Kabbalah, like the Illuminati, you see them at the founding of the enlightenment with Baruch Spinoza, and you see them popping up all over the place, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and that’s something we really go in-depth on in my show.
BARRON: That’s so interesting26, now I will admit, I have not had a chance yet to watch an episode of your sho[Recording ends abruptly.]
Ok, so all of you already know this, but this interview obviously never happened, and I have no way of knowing whether Barron and Fuentes have ever met. But I think it’s worth taking an extra minute and looking back on how I put this piece together, there’s a lot to learn there. Because - as you’ve probably also guessed - Barron and Fuentes have each said all of these things, almost verbatim. They’ve just never said them at each other.
He did on September 23, 2023, in an interview titled “America’s Cultural Revolution”.
The joke here is that Shapiro and Fuentes actually hate each other. Shapiro hates Fuentes because he considers Fuentes crass and an impediment to building a serious “intellectual” conservative movement. Fuentes hates Shapiro for a much simpler reason.
Let’s get this clear up front: Barron is not actually a very good interviewer. To get a better sense of his mannerisms and tics during interviews, I re-listened to his 2022 interview with Shia LaBeouf, and Barron does a godawful job. LaBeouf is actually saying some interesting things about his experience with Catholicism, but Barron keeps redirecting LaBeouf away from that early in the interview, because he wants to show off to LaBeouf that he knows who Stanislavski is and that he once heard an anecdote about Dustin Hoffman. He also asks followup questions about completely the wrong things. Look, Barron appears to only be listening to himself and interested in showing off for his interview subject, and once I realized that, this piece became a lot easier to write.
The other thing I had to keep in mind, and something I struggled with in earlier drafts of this piece, is that Barron writes differently than he talks (which is, I suppose, true of most of us). He uses bigger words and more technical terms and longer paragraphs when he writes because he’s trying to come across as a serious well-read intellectual. When he is having a conversation, he’s not going to say “professoriate” as often, and he tries to come across as a laid-back guy who happens to know everything about your particular area of expertise. So in some cases, while pulling Barron’s dialogue from his writing, I had to make the language a little more colloquial.
So: basically all of the Fuentes quotes come from an interview he just did on May 8, 2024, on Alex Jones’ show InfoWars, which I, in turn, heard on this excellent episode of Knowledge Fight, the podcast about InfoWars. This interview is very instructive: Fuentes and Jones had a prior falling out that they were both trying to repair (the reasons are stupid and not worth spending a lot of time on). As a result, Fuentes softened his rhetoric significantly during the interview with Jones rather than spewing out his normal white supremacy and anti-semitism, because Fuentes is pretty good at changing up his rhetoric to skirt the line of acceptability for whoever his audience is (because his regular broadcast audience is neo-Nazis, he doesn’t have to do that very often, but he can when he has to).
This is all to say that, whenever you see Fuentes talking in this piece, it’s probably something he actually said, very recently, when he was trying to get across his normal wild conspiracy theories and blood libels, without saying of the actual taboo words or phrases, so he could keep his interviewer happy. You know, the kind of thing that might fit on Bishop Barron Presents, if, say Barron were paying more attention to hearing himself talk than to whatever his guest was saying.
He says ‘yeah’ a lot when he’s talking. Fuentes says ‘absolutely’ a lot. I say ‘okay’ a lot, which is why I don’t publish audio of interviews.
[Rim shot]
Barron originally wrote this on June 18, 2019, but he was writing it about Jordan Peterson. In the years since, Peterson has not been well.
In the original interview, Fuentes wasn’t talking about the Catholic church, but he was saying that everyone being connected over social media led to a great awakening that led to people taking control of their country and electing Donald Trump president (he had earlier been talking about how he had recently been re-admitted to Twitter/X and how important that was to him). The line about how social media had done so many good things for people was added by me, and is meant to be grimly ironic since it’s being spoken to Robert Barron, who would presumably be a much better bishop and human being if he didn’t have an internet connection. Not that he’s unique in that regard, I would also be a better human being if I didn’t have an internet connection.
This statement is from the same piece on Peterson, which includes an almost verbatim “people are yelling at me but I promise I’m not mad and this is actually funny to me” deflection.
Barron wrote this on March 2, 2021. I guess I never realized he had been using the term “beige Catholicism” for decades. It was probably stupid then, too.
Okay, I made that line up, but I feel like I kind of had to.
Barron wrote this on July 28, 2015, referring to a video of a conversation that didn’t actually happen.
SHIA LABEOUF: Mel Gibson, a famously horrible man, is teaching me about Catholicism. He’s having me go to the now-suppressed Latin Mass.
BARRON: Incense is cool!
Barron said this in an August 16, 2023 interview with EWTN’s Catholic News Agency.
Again, Barron wrote this on December 9, 2023. I added in the bit about allying yourself with evil and not even realizing it, for obvious reasons.
He did, in the context that he’s about to describe. That’s taken from a sermon Barron posted on October 18, 2020. And Fuentes really did use that term, meaning the same thing, in his interview. Isn’t that interesting?
The answer Barron didn’t get here was “The Jews”.
It appears that Robert Barron is very sensitive to publications - real ones, not this one - making assumptions about his political leanings or inclinations. Thankfully, those publications don’t seem to have a lot of patience for his bullshit, but, I guess, given how litigious Barron appears to be, I should tell you all that I don’t want anyone to extrapolate anything from this piece about Barron’s political opinions. The only thing I wanted to demonstrate was that if you survey all of Barron’s output and put it right next to a recent interview by a white supremacist trying to sound polished, it suddenly becomes very easy to get these two men to talk to each other and agree on a bunch of things. But hey, it is anyone’s guess as to what that means about Barron as a thinker or a bishop.