Brief: The CPAC Pope and the Icicle Babies (w/ Brad Onishi)
Brad Onishi of Straight White American Jesus sits down with Matthew to analyze the debut of “America’s Bishop,” Joseph Strickland, on the CPAC stage, where he blessed MAGA Christian Nationalism with his purple finery and endless torrent of anti-choice bafflegab.
Strickland—removed as Archbishop of Tyler, Texas in November by the ultra-woke Pope Francis—has hit the influencer circuit to firm up the sometimes-precarious Evangelical-Catholic alliance on the backs of women. His aw-shucks “humility” and East Texas drawl offers this reactionary movement genteel cover for its aggressive fever dreams. He is, as Onishi puts it, the Catholic Ned Flanders who conspires with Mr. Burns at night.
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Show Notes
Brad Onishi
Conspirituality 183: Woke Pope Cancels America's Bishop w/Mike Lewis
Weekly Roundup: Embryos are People Now? — Straight White American Jesus
Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies
Bishop Strickland at CPAC — LIfesite News (redpill site warning!)
The making of Bishop Strickland - Where Peter Is
Strickland's Adventurous Online Legacy - Mike Lewis Extra
Bishop Strickland's "Letter from a Friend"
Twitter photo: Strickland with Fournier and Pavone
Catholic Priest Uses Aborted Fetus On Altar In Appeal For Donald Trump (Trigger warning. Image blurred, but still, JFC.)
Fr. Frank Pavone uses aborted fetus in message for Election Day | National Catholic Reporter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And I'll add to that tagline today how sometimes that authoritarianism launders itself through the aw shucks pretense of humility that American Catholics are just so damned good at.
Returning friend of the podcast, Brad Onishi of Straight White American Jesus, joins me today to help understand what it means for America's pseudo-Pope, Bishop Strickland, recently removed by Pope Francis from the Archdiocese of Tyler, Texas, to be awarded the Ronald Reagan Award at CPAC this year while keynoting the conference.
Hello, Brad.
Welcome back.
So glad to be here to talk about not Straight White American Jesus, but the Straight White American Pope.
Everybody, I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
So, Brad, I got to do the 101 on Strickland.
Our listeners are somewhat familiar with this guy.
He's come to be known in MAGA, Christian Nationalist circles, as America's bishop.
He's 65.
He's ordained in 77 under his hero, Pope John Paul II.
Up until last year, he was Archbishop in Tyler, Texas, but Pope Francis removed him for alleged administrative failings.
But I think it's fair to say that however HR and finances were going in Tyler, Rome had good reason to scrutinize this guy because during the pandemic, he became a red-pilled shitposter, decrying COVID mitigations, implying that Francis was part of the global cabal, gathering a massive following of Christian nationalists.
So, Francis removes him, but doesn't laicize him.
And there's kind of an irony there because essentially, he's released from all church responsibilities, which he apparently wasn't that competent in, and he's now free to roam, to just live the full-on influencer life.
And that leads him straight to the stage of the CPAC Jamboree last weekend as the keynote Saturday night speaker.
So I've got two broad questions first.
Your 101 take on how is the trad cath and evangelical alliance going these days?
And secondly, what does a trad cath influencer like Strickland really offer Christian nationalism?
So the first part of that question is an interesting one because I think it's a matter of where we look and at what levels and in what demographics we want to talk about the trad catholic and evangelical alliance.
You know, I've had friends and colleagues and scholars who spend their days on like Tradcath TikTok.
And if you look there at the 24-year-olds and the 27-year-old tradwives versus the white evangelical women, sometimes you get disagreement.
Sometimes you get sort of dissonance.
And then you'll get some of that with the Theo Bros and the various ways that certain Catholics want
to return to one vision of Christendom, and others want, the reformed guys in Michigan
want to return to another.
However, with that said, the alliance on the issues of reproductive rights remains.
And this is one that has been in place for six decades.
And it continues to be the great uniter of these two groups.
I think that what we are seeing in the fallout of the ending of Roe v. Wade is now the question is what's next?
What's next?
And the evangelicals, honestly, don't always know what's next.
I mean, they have, I would say, and this in the broadest terms, evangelicals have a vague idea of, well, is it birth control?
Is it all forms of contraception?
Is it, is it in vitro fertilization?
What are we doing here?
Because that's not a unanimous vision in the evangelical world.
There's a lot of evangelicals Who take the birth control pill and, and have, and there's no theological issue with that.
There's a lot of evangelicals, right?
That are not against IVF.
The point is that if you want the even more hardcore reproductive rights vision, the trad cats are the one that have the playbook and they've had it.
So I think my point here is, That alliance is still in place and the tradcasts are almost like ahead of the evangelicals in terms of where do we go after the end of abortion.
They're almost the ones like, hey guys, we've been doing this, you know, for, for a lot longer than you have.
Let us show you the ropes here.
IVF?
Out of bounds.
Birth control pill?
Let's get rid of it.
All forms of contraception?
I don't think so.
So I think that's the answer to, to your first question.
The benefit of a, of a TRDCAF influencer like Strickland, I think a couple of things.
I think it's easy for people, To reduce Christian nationalism to white evangelicals.
And that's a mistake.
White Christian nationalism is a movement that encompasses anyone who tells a story of a Christian nation founded by Christian people in which Christian people should be privileged somehow.
Economically, politically, socially.
That includes so many Catholic people.
That includes so many Latter-day Saints.
That includes some Jews.
So I think one of the things that having him there does is it reminds all of those Catholics Who are drawn to the politics of CPAC but aren't sure that they get a place at the table and are sometimes feeling left out when the Charlie Kirks of the world and the Ralph Reeds and the other really front and center evangelicals have the mic all the time.
Strickland is like, A reminder to the 59% or 57% of white Catholics that voted for Donald Trump in the last election, we want you, you're part of this flock, and we're doing everything we can to signal to you that you're part of our tribe.
And so I think that's a main benefit.
And then recognizing him at this moment is a chance to recognize somebody who did something.
And this is really weird.
He stood up to a global elite named Pope Francis.
Right.
And if you look back at the prejudice, the Protestant prejudice against Catholics in the United States for the last centuries, one of the things people have said is, we're not sure you're loyal to the United States because you're loyal to Rome.
Exactly.
Look at this guy.
This guy's in here saying, America first.
That that Pope over there, who happens to be somebody from Latin America, who speaks Spanish, not the ethnic white Pope John Paul II, the ethnic Polish white, but the the Latin world Spanish speaking Pope Francis, the woke globalist Francis.
This dude spoke up to him, paid the ultimate price, get him in CPAC and get him the award.
So I think there's a lot there.
Speaking of the politics of CPAC, which are hurtling year by year towards the right, the first clips we got We're of Jack Posobiec saying, welcome to the end of democracy.
We're here to overthrow it completely.
We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.
Then on Saturday, NBC reports on roving cadres of Nazi sympathizers strutting through the halls talking loudly about the Great Replacement.
Last year, CPAC managed to kick out Nick Fuentes, but this year they seem to have given up on image control, except maybe for bringing in a Catholic bishop in full regalia.
So, you know, your podcast, our podcast, a lot of researchers have done a lot of work on Project 2025 and on Christian nationalist rhetoric and strategy.
We know that Posobiec is not just shit-talking here.
But by keynoting and not refuting Posobiec, Strickland is essentially co-signing that statement along with everyone else on the bill.
But he would never say anything like that.
And I'm wondering, do you think he's there in part to provide cover for that extremism?
You know, whether or not that was a strategic choice, whether or not there was folks pulling strings behind the scenes saying, hey, we're definitely not kicking out the Nazis this year, so let's get in the the Texas bishop to kind of balance things.
Whether or not that happened, I don't know.
What I do know, though, is that I just finished a great book by the veteran journalist David Naywardt called The Age of Insurrection.
It's a big, long book, great book.
One of the great takeaways from the book is that throughout American history, the United States history, I should say, The trick of the American right, including white supremacists, has been normalization, right?
One of the goals has always been to lessen the appearance of being fringe or beyond the pale.
I talked about this on my show over the course of two episodes with Kelly Baker, the scholar of the KKK of the 1920s.
And, you know, people think the KKK was this thing where, oh, I can't believe you're part of the KKK, Jeff.
We're no longer friends.
That crazy group.
And the opposite is true.
In 1920s America, the KKK was governors, mayors, small town insurance salesmen, pastors and priests.
Same when we talk about Jim Crow.
I mean, we can go through the years in this country.
Strickland is a vanilla-looking old white man.
When you see him, you don't think of Enrique Terrio.
You don't think of Stuart Rhodes.
You don't think of Baked Alaska.
You think safe, Catholic, you know, leader who is up here talking about humility and Mary.
What do you mean, Libs?
We're not Nazis.
Look at this man we gave the award to.
He's talking about Jesus and Mary and protecting life.
Get out of here.
So whether or not a strategic, I don't know, but I do think it does help with that endeavor for sure.
Well, I think we can go right there to the speech, which is given in dialogue on stage with Deal Hudson, founder of Crisis Magazine.
The speech is pretty boring Catholic boilerplate and word salad.
It's really not that different from a typical uninspired sermon, but there are a few things to pull out.
And the first one, as you've already mentioned, is this.
Think about our nation.
Think about our time, our culture.
Humility is not one of those most popular words.
We need to be prideful and bold and arrogant and strong.
But humble?
But humility is the greatness of Jesus Christ.
Some humble that He began as a human embryo in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
We need to remember that.
And how sacred life is that our Lord entered into.
So rather than, as we all know the scripture, pointing to the other and say, oh, I'm glad I'm not like them.
Let us be stronger in humility.
I gotta say, he does turn that hall into a church with that rhythm and that inflection.
And I also have to say that the East Texas Jesus Christ is like so, it's really resonant.
It reminds me of how Charlton Heston says, God, in the Ten Commandments.
There's something in that that could teach people to do that, right?
Or something like that.
But anyway, so a lot of humility.
Setting aside the humility of telling other people what to do with their bodies, is Strickland actually pushing back here against the affect of aggression in Christian nationalism?
Or is he actually offering some PR or messaging advice?
So I thought a lot about this.
I mean, I have been chewing on this since the clip of the speech came down.
And I'm going to give you my take.
I'm happy for you to tell me that you think I'm wrong or for others to write in and say, I totally missed it.
But sure.
I, here's, here's my thought.
A couple of things.
I think.
There are some things that resonate for CPAC in his cadence and his accent.
I mean, that is one of the ways that you get to say in this country, I can't believe you wouldn't trust this man.
Look at him.
He's a 65 year old white priest who speaks like that.
Yeah.
He doesn't speak.
Like in a way that is, he has no quote unquote foreign accent.
He doesn't speak in a way that sounds like he's from a big city, right?
So his way of articulating his words is important.
However, He turns it into a church, but he doesn't get any ruckus applause there.
When he's like, be humble, I think he thought that was a kind of kicker.
And there's not a lot of like, yeah, amen.
You know, there seems to be a kind of flat audience energy there.
It's true.
You know, and so here's my take.
My take is that he's delivering, this is a Catholic homily.
Um, this is a Catholic like way of delivering a homily as part of a mass.
Yeah.
And he's really trying to take us to what the word to me that he's trying to take us through in this paragraph is human embryo, right?
He's trying to get you to think of Jesus as a human embryo.
You're right.
Just like those frozen in Alabama.
That those embryos are like Jesus, and Jesus was humble enough to be like those embryos, so we should all sort of pay attention and really take that to heart as Christians.
I'm not gonna lie.
I think there are ways that the Catholic and the trad Catholic framework for reproductive rights ethics is informative for the CPAC crowd and is actually the playbook.
I think this is a moment where, as a preacher, He is not Robert Jeffress.
Right.
Right.
He is not Jerry Falwell.
And he actually didn't know his audience and didn't, this does not play well is what I'm driving at.
Um, like the, the idea of humility, um, is not one I ever hear Charlie Kirk.
Who's like, you know, a big, uh, favorite of this crowd.
It's not one I ever hear, uh, you know, Alex Jones or any of those folks preaching.
And it's not the Jesus they're expecting at CPAC.
So, I'm just, I'm just, this is my take.
I just think this is a moment that fell flat because A, it seems more like a Catholic homily than an evangelical sermon, and the virtues that he's trying to get us to in terms of human embryo as Jesus as humble.
Nah, I'd rather be the big tough guy with a gun and a truck protecting that embryo than the humble embryo.
Well, I wonder whether this provides some laundering, some masking.
I'm wondering if this softening of the muscular Jesus rhetoric, whether it might play well maybe to some evangelical women in particular.
I was thinking about this last night, and I was thinking, in one sense, I understand this, and I think I understand it along the lines of the idea of the white suburban women voter in the United States who's put off by all the machismo of Trump or anyone else, but is
thoroughly pro-life, anti-abortion, and therefore is caught in a pickle. And if someone can
reach that white suburban, you know, woman, they will get her vote as a Republican. However, I'm
also very aware that this is a CPAC audience. And CPAC masculinity and CPAC femininity are
already geared toward the muscular Jesus.
The Jesus in the image of Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk or any of the, you know, of Michael Flynn.
Right.
And so once again, I'm not sure if this actually was going to reach any of those ears.
I mean, I'm not going to lie.
I know women from this culture that would be like, stop giving me this wussy Jesus.
Wow.
I'm into men With big arms and big guns and big trucks that go out and are violent when they need to be violent, because that's what men are supposed to be.
Is that going to sort of mesh with, you know, long-standing evangelical allergic reactions to the Marian devotion as well?
Or is the surge of tradwife popularity in Christian nationalism starting to shift that?
I think when we think about Marian devotion as appealing to a potential evangelical woman, here's my thought about this, is that Max Weber, who I seem to talk about every time I come on this podcast.
You do?
Okay, I apologize.
No, that's great.
Had this idea that the Protestant religious cosmos is stripped.
It's like economized to the point where it's the individual soul in relationship to God.
And much of the sacred and the transcendent and the apparatus of religiosity is taken out of the equation such that There are many evangelicals, including myself, who grew up going to churches in strip malls, in very nondescript, the opposite of a cathedral kind of a setting.
Yeah.
And what I saw with so many peers, and the data continues to show us that this is true, is that there are many evangelicals who tire of the bare and naked religious cosmos, but they don't tire of the theology or the politics.
So when some of them sign on to TikTok, when some of them sign on to Instagram, when some of them discover Marian Devotion, an entire Catholic cosmos or Orthodox cosmos of saints, of robes, of incense, of candles, of old buildings, of Latin, And then there's accompanying it this whole role, the trad wife garb, the prairie dress, the sourdough starter, the way that you feed your seven children every morning and do so with perfect hair and perfect makeup.
It's like you've given people a much more filled out and complex LARP to play.
It's like they got a character in the school play that instead of like being stripped down to a couple words, got to dress up.
Has like six like costume changes.
And gets the double down on the like saturation within the world because I think what a lot of people love about the tradwife ideal is that you can envelop yourself in a pre-modern ideal and escape all of this uncertainty and grotesqueness of living in 2024.
When he starts talking about the Marian devotion and I do think there are people in the evangelical world Who are drawn to Catholicism, traditional Latin mass Catholicism, gender roles and all, because they want actually a more filled out cosmos and more entrenched gender roles.
They don't want Lauren Boebert being the like upfront congresswoman.
They actually think Women should be quiet and sit down and go cook dinner.
And they want that in the context of what they think of as a traditional marriage and so on and so on and so on.
So anyway, I was laying in bed thinking about this last night, and that's what came to mind.
OK, so a little bit later, as Strickland gets into his speech, he quotes Bishop Fulton Sheen, another Texas boy.
Here he is.
America is suffering from intolerance.
It's not.
It is suffering from tolerance.
Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos.
Tolerance of false messages.
Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted As it is overrun with the broad-minded.
Then he quotes Mother Teresa.
The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men.
It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.
It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society.
It has portrayed the greatest of gifts, a child, as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience.
It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters, and in granting this unconscionable power It has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or their sexual partners.
Fulton Sheen, Mother Teresa, does this stuff only play with boomers?
Like, does anybody care about the ancestors?
How dependent is this movement on its history when it pays no attention to history?
So in terms of, here's my thought, in terms of an appeal to authority, Mother Teresa may not play with the 31-year-old who's kind of like, don't remember her, kinda, I don't know, or sheen.
But I think the rhetoric here does land.
If I think that Strickland didn't land with humility a moment ago, I do think he lands here because this clip is built for CPAC.
America is suffering from intolerance.
Nope, it's suffering from tolerance.
Cheers!
The crowd goes wild.
Now they looked up from their phones.
The saliva has been summoned.
They're drooling all over the place in order to vote for Donald Trump again.
So, suffering from tolerance.
Okay, now we're doing it because that's code.
And I don't care if you're a white evangelical mega church person from, you know, from rural Georgia.
I don't care if you're a Catholic from Milwaukee, right?
I don't, I don't care where you are in this CPAC cosmos that plays.
Yes, that's the problem.
The problem is tolerance.
And does he come out and say tolerance of, you know, name groups?
No, he says tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil.
Come on, QAnon, Great Replacement, Immigration, doesn't matter, we're landing now.
This is landing, right?
The tolerance of false messages, love it, right?
COVID, I mean, this is going to envelop everybody in the audience, whatever conspiracy they adhere to, whatever religiosity, whatever theology they're in.
And then he goes to Mother Teresa.
And I actually think rhetorically as a preacher, this is great stuff.
And if you want to like reach your audience, it's terrible stuff ethically.
Yeah.
Because Mother Teresa is a mother.
She's a mother.
Now, she did not give birth that we know of, but mothers against their children, women against men.
This is perfect, because this is going to hit right with the Moms for Liberty, the Mama Bears, all those women in the audience that are like, damn right, my role is as a mother, and that's when you better look out.
Because I'm a Mama Bear, and there's no way you're going to get in between me and my kids.
And your so-called woke ideology, the tolerance we have for all these different kinds of families, that's what's getting in the way of men and women.
If we could just be men and women again, we'd have good marriages.
We'd have a good society.
Everything would be peaceful.
So I think when he goes from sheen and tolerance and intolerance to the mother role, this is a rhetorical home run.
And it probably, in my mind, hit a lot more targets than the humility piece.
Well, yeah, and I think especially the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society is really going to hit home.
I mean, he got the Ronald Reagan award, right?
Yeah.
That's the Ronald Reagan welfare queen.
That whole line of thinking you fatherless society.
Who is that?
That's men of color.
That's black men.
I mean, there's so many there's so many code words here and dog whistles that are going to just hit and resonate.
All right.
Now we have to turn to IVF.
As you know, the Supreme Court of Alabama issued a ruling the week before Strickland's appearance that frozen embryos used in the IVF process are persons who must be kept alive, or at least frozen, forever.
And this came with a no-holds-barred, cristo-fascist concurring opinion written by QAnon-addled Chief Justice Tom Parker.
God made every person in his image.
Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God who views the destruction of his image as an affront to himself.
Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.
It even sounds biblical in the repetition and the redundancy there.
We're going to direct listeners to your excellent coverage of this ruling on straight white American Jesus, where you and Dan Miller run down the political, philosophical, and theological absurdities of the icicle babies.
But Strickland hops right on this train.
This decision by Alabama's court was correct, according to our Catholic faith.
We must stand strong and instruct these good men and women that are calling to lead us, and we need them to lead us.
We must help them understand the intricacies of what science has done in playing God and having children, embryos, embryonic children, frozen and too easily disposed of.
When the Alabama court says, no, we cannot dispose of these human beings.
Let us guide our politicians to know that truth.
So this is where the absolute insane intrusiveness of conservative Christian reproductive dogma really seems to implode because even if the drive is to dogmatize the natural or to confine reproduction to married heterosex, There are just too many God-fearing evangelical couples out there who really want babies and are using this technology.
So, Brad, are they thinking this through?
Depends on who they are.
And I agree with you that there's going to be people, especially in What we can, you know, reluctantly call more moderate evangelical settings are not going to like this.
I can tell you that like the church I came from in suburban Orange County, California, would not agree with this approach to reproductive rights.
At least when I was there, there was no prohibition against birth control at that church.
And there was definitely no prohibition against IVF.
However, I want to point everybody to a great book called Abusing Religion by Dr. Megan Goodwin.
And in the very beginning pages of that book, Dr. Goodwin argues something that I find very persuasive and relevant to this part of Strickland's speech.
Goodwin talks about the Catholicization of American reproductive rights ethics or morality.
And what she means by that is this, that when the religious right got together, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, Morton Blackwell, Richard Vigery, They eventually used abortion to catalyze white evangelicals.
But history shows us that abortion and reproductive rights had really not been a uniter for that group.
Now, it doesn't mean that there weren't evangelicals, as Gil Frank has argued, that weren't very against it and so on.
But it wasn't a unanimous issue.
What Goodwin argues is that the Catholic Church, and American Catholics in particular, had been united on this front for a long time.
And this is why at the beginning of this episode when I talked about that playbook being in place for Catholics, It was.
And therefore, if you hang out in Catholic theological circles and talk about reproductive rights, you're going to hear going back a long time, decades and decades and decades, that things like IVF are not part of God's plan for families.
Why is that relevant now?
One of the reasons I think someone like Strickland continues to be useful for CPAC, now that Roe is gone, You've gotta continue to push the gas.
You can't just look at everyone and say, we did it, we're glad, yay.
You've gotta say, what's next?
What unborn babies are being murdered now?
Which Holocaust is it today?
And so, who do you look to?
Well, the Catholics have been doing this a long time.
They're the ones that are like, IVF?
No.
Birth control?
No.
You know what sex is for?
Sex is for reproduction.
Sex is not for pleasure.
Sex is not for simple enjoyment.
Sex is not for blah blah blah.
Sex is for family, right?
And so you can see the even narrowing of the American mind as it approaches reproductive rights.
And so when he mentions Alabama and IVF here, I know there's people in the room that don't agree.
But I also see this as like, they don't have many more tributaries to go down in terms of, you know, white Christian nationalists uniting on reproductive rights in the United States after the fall of Roe.
They got to push the gas.
So they're going to go places where they hit a few rocks and it gets a little shallow, but you got to go down that tributary nonetheless, because, you know, where else are you going to go unless you stop?
And stopping means political death.
We're really shopping for catastrophes or looking for holocausts under every rock.
Fear is the motivator.
Crisis is the way to get people to care.
And so once again, the Catholic and I'm not trying to denigrate all Catholics and I'm not trying to lump all Catholic people into this sexual ethic.
What I'm saying is there have been conservative traditional Catholics with this approach to sexual ethics for a long time.
The evangelicals don't have this like you could go To Rick Warren's church out in California, you could go to Robert Jeffress' church, you could go to, you know, all kinds of mega churches across the country.
And for the last 15 years, is there like agreement on whether or not IVF, IUDs, the, you know, birth control pill, are these allowed, not allowed?
There is a wide opinion.
The tradcaths, they're pretty much in agreement.
That the contraception mentality is wrong.
That sex with any kind of contraceptive barriers, not part of God's plan.
So I just think you have to keep going down that theological pathway if you want crisis and catastrophe, and that's what you need on the American right.
To get people to vote and care and come out to the polls.
Two last questions about Strickland and what I might call clerical laundering.
I've kind of been arguing that he brings a sort of grandeur or etiquette to the evangelical milieu and somehow they're accepting his black and purple finery, but he's also legitimizing some real nutters in the Tradcath movement.
I've got a nice snapshot of him on Twitter yucking it up with Keith Fournier, who, according to our previous guest Mike Lewis, has probably been Strickland's QAnon ghostwriter advisor over the past several years.
So, Fournier was a leader in the Michigan-based Sword of the Spirit, and this is a group that, for all of its professed ardor and piety, hasn't fared any better in the covering up abuse department than the larger church has.
And Sword of the Spirit is now, of course, reckoning with having hidden known pedophiles through work transfers and reappointments over decades.
So, my first question is, you know, if we set aside the Nazis marching around at CPAC, as clean a guy as Strickland seems to be in his own world, it seems you never have to dig very deep to see the dirt he just seems fine with rolling around in, do you?
The trick has always been this, convince everybody If you're a white Christian nationalist in this country, that you're Ned Flanders, the Simpsons character.
Right?
Okay.
So, so Ned Flanders is hokey.
He, he, he doesn't use cuss words.
You don't think he's dangerous.
And so Strickland is like Catholic Bishop Ned Flanders.
He, you know, he walks in the room and you're thinking old white guy, Texas accent.
Regalia and garb in a way that means he's got an elevated status.
He's got an, as you said at the beginning, an aw shucks disposition.
His comportment is different to someone we're going to talk about in a minute than Frank Pavone.
Yeah.
When Frank Pavone walks in the room, dude, that guy is full of bravado.
His goal is everybody look at Frank.
When Strickland walks in, it feels more like Ned Flanders.
Now here's the trick though.
Is like, convince him you're Ned Flanders and convince him you're Ned Flanders who doesn't spend your nights conspiring with Mr. Burns.
But you do.
You do.
So send Flanders out there, but know that Flanders is hanging out with Burns and trying to run the town in an authoritarian way.
And I feel like that's what Strickland does with Fournier and all these other folks.
Okay, so let's go to Frank Pavone then.
Formerly Father Frank Pavone.
He's the other guy in this picture that I'll put into the show notes.
Frank used to be a priest in Amarillo, Texas.
He became the spiritual mentor of Jane Roe.
That's crazy.
Like Norma McCorvey of Roe v. Wade, when she turned anti-abortion at the end of her life, regretting her role in the reproductive rights movement.
Al, you've been in the room with him, and you're saying that he's quite a presence, huh?
I was in the room with him at a conference, and it was a conference where there was, it was actually a weird place for him to be.
A lot of journalists, and journalists, you know Matthew, are trying to sort of be the flies on the wall.
They're in the back, they usually have a pencil, they're writing things.
I have never seen so many journalists get up to ask a question after a thing.
And instead of asking a question, being at the mic, just pointing their finger, yelling at someone, like usually the journalist is trying to get copy for a story.
I mean, the amount of journalists who are blood red in the face, like tears coming out of their eyes and blood coming out of their nose angry because Pavone was that offensive.
Was incredible.
So yes, I have been in the room with him and he makes quite an impression when he's around.
Okay, so he's laicized late in 2016 for this incredibly heinous stunt that I had the misfortune of studying up on this past week.
So days before the election that sends Trump to the White House, This guy goes on a Facebook live stream in front of his studio altar and okay, so here's a trigger warning.
He displays a dead fetus on a christening pillow.
It's like black and purple and still bloody and he's inviting everybody online to pray over it so that Trump will be elected.
Now, the National Catholic Reporter wrote at the time that somehow he got the fetus from a pathologist under the auspices of giving it funeral rites.
So, it's hard to imagine that the parents consented to that detour into social media fame, but And needless to say, there's no part of Catholic liturgy that says you can put a baby corpse on an altar as a political stunt.
So the church fires his ass, but he's still at the helm of one of the largest Catholic anti-choice groups in the country.
So this is the type of person that Strickland is slapping hands with.
I wanted to ask you as a fellow father.
Can we just end with, you know, some thoughts on what the fuck is going on with these guys and their insanity over children?
There is a deep desire there.
To control and be an authority over other people's bodies in a way that you can solve the mortality and vulnerability of the human condition.
And there's just a deep desire for control over those bodies.
And I know that sounds so trite when we talk about reproductive rights and we talk about these discussions, it always, you know, you always hear this idea of men wanting to control other people's bodies.
But as somebody who has little kids, right?
I hurt for them every time they fall down, every time they hurt their knee, every time they have a nightmare.
It's just, you know, as a parent, doesn't matter your gender, doesn't matter whatever, that's just so difficult to go through.
I take this as a kind of neurotic desire for control, to think that you have an answer, and that you can walk into the room with Ro, with any other woman, and promise them you'll make it better.
Promise them that you're the one, right, who has the answer, and then going back to that whole picture of Jesus and men and masculinity, that you're the ultimate protector.
You're the ultimate carer of those who are vulnerable.
And so if you're looking for the man that'll stand up and not be afraid of any powers that be when they come for little kids, I'm that guy.
And I could be wrong.
There's certainly many more factors involved with someone like Pavone's been at this so long.
That there's, there's a lot going on with this guy that I think is worth dissecting.
I mean, it's, it's really worth a book or two, but that's what strikes me about him.
And I think Strickland is able to pull this off in a way that's, um, it's much less kind of hyper-focused and it comes off as much less creepy.
Um, and that's probably good for, for Strickland in some cases, but I think Pavone is just, when you encounter him, you, you, you really feel like you're in the presence of somebody Who is willing to ignore the suffering and pain of other bodies so that he can feel like he's the protector of the ones that he actually cares about.
Yeah, right.
One of the journalists I was talking about explained to him that they almost died on a hospital table because of a pregnancy that had become so complicated that It was really a matter of an unviable pregnancy and the fetus or her life.
And that was the, you know, that was really the situation in a night where she thought she was going to die.
And he looked at her with the glazy glass eyes of someone who would never use any of his capacity to feel or empathize with someone going through that, all the while being willing to put a fetus on a video in order to get everybody to think this is the life we should care about in ultimacy.
And so anyway, that's my thought.
It's not full.
I apologize if it's a little bit rambling there, but yeah.
It's pretty full, and I just want to add that I think the fact that we're talking about people who don't actually do the work of parenting really zeroes this in into the symbolic order in a very profound way.
It's like the notion that he wouldn't have gotten consent from the parents to make their child into a prop, for this political stunt goes along with the fact that children in some way don't really exist as persons anyway, which is so ironic if you're trying to advocate for the personhood of the fetus.
It's so strange.
The fetus becomes just a piece of the imagination, the agitated imagination, and it doesn't really have anything to do with on-the-ground caregiving or the difficult decisions that you actually have to make every single day that are ambivalent Yeah, but that's the absent father.
He's the absent father.
You get to be the father and be absent.
Yeah.
an absence of real life experience that sort of inflames this symbolic imagination
to some kind of mania.
Yeah, but that's the absent father.
He's the absent father.
You get to be the father and be absent.
Yeah.
You get to be all, you get all the authority of being the father,
all the like, look at me, I'm the father, and you do none of the fathering, none of the parenting.
Yeah, fuck that guy.
Okay, so thank you so much, Brad.
We're gonna have you back to talk about more things very soon.
