Pentagon Official Allegedly THREATENED Catholic Cardinal, Warns Vatican To ALIGN With TRUMP
Tate Brown and Scott Greer dissect allegations that Pentagon official Elbridge Colby threatened Cardinal Christopher Pierre with a 14th-century weapon to force Vatican alignment on Venezuela. They argue the online outrage stems from "eCaths" or political converts seeking identity, contrasting this zeal with average cradle Catholics who view papal stances as expected. The discussion highlights internal friction within the Trump administration and dismisses fears of a "Vatican invasion," concluding that the drama reflects elite Beltway dynamics rather than genuine Catholic sentiment or geopolitical threats. [Automatically generated summary]
This is Tate Brown here holding it down, and I'm relieved to be back with you guys here on this beautiful Thursday.
Thank you, just top of the show.
Huge shout out to Libby Emmons.
Thank you, Libby, for holding it down while I was away.
I was on a bit of a journey, a side quest, as many have been calling it.
I was on a side quest, and so very grateful for Libby holding it down while I was out.
With that, I missed a lot.
I missed a lot of stuff while I was out, a lot of action, and Libby did a great job covering it.
Again, I Like an entire ceasefire and then bombing, etc.
It was wacky and wild.
While I was out, that being said, I am back on this beautiful Thursday.
It's a little chilly here just outside of our nation's capital.
Had to throw on a jacket, but I think the summer is getting closer and closer.
You're starting to feel it break through every once in a while.
So, yeah, we're getting close to the promised land, the promised land, which is a beautiful summer.
America 250.
I'm stoked.
I'm so stoked.
I got a lot of friends coming in.
It's going to be fantastic.
We're going to have a great time.
And I'll probably keep you guys updated when I'm heading to some of these.
Events, you can come find me and say hello.
Very excited for that.
The World Cup's coming.
I'm excited about that.
You know, this is probably one of my most lip-hearted takes, one of my most lip-hearted tendencies, is that I actually do kind of like soccer.
I grew up watching soccer.
I'm not like super into it anymore.
Like when I was a teenager, I would follow it quite closely.
But I do kind of keep an eye on the national team, the American national team.
And so I'm pretty excited.
We got a good squad.
Like a lot of our players, we have this kind of golden generation, and they're all entering their primes right now.
Like Christian Pulisic is 27, and, you know, he's like our best player, and he's entering his prime.
So.
I have pretty high hopes for this World Cup.
It's going to be pretty exciting.
I do think the American team will penetrate quite deeply.
It's going to be some exciting stuff.
With that, we have a big show for you guys today.
Obviously, this is really just going to be a lot of kind of just ranting because the right wing has just completely lost the plot.
I think that's fair to say.
Just complete call out.
We have the eCaths.
That's what they kind of call these online Catholics.
Most of them are converts.
So, you know, this isn't really saying anything about Catholicism or Catholics in the United States by and large, because, you know, when I meet Catholics out and about in the United States, they're very normal.
Well, they're just Americans.
Like, you don't even really know they're Catholic until they tell you.
And even then, they're just Christians.
They're very ordinary Christians.
It's really this flavor that you see online where it's like a mixture of like LARPing and shadow boxing.
They shadow box like figures that don't exist.
I'll get into all of that.
But they're coming unglued over this story, which, by the way, was put out by a leftist Biden apparatchik, Christopher Hale, claiming that a Pentagon official brandished a weapon at the Vatican, like some cardinal they sent over, I guess is like their ambassador to the United States, and was like brandishing a weapon and invoking a 14th century historical precedent as to why the United States, you know,
or why the Vatican rather should really fall in line with the United States.
Bizarre story.
Again, real or not doesn't really matter.
It's just the reaction is quite hilarious.
Again, we'll get into the story in and of itself and sort of what the take should be, what our assessment should be.
It's such a big story that I'm actually going to bring in Scott Greer, the great Scott Greer.
We're going to bring him in at halftime and he's going to come in and kind of give his thoughts on it as well because there's a lot of different angles, a lot of different sort of narratives around this story that are worth exploring.
So we'll get into that.
Also, I have a few more stories.
I want to get into this clip that came out from Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida.
And he's great.
I mean, I like Ron DeSantis.
But this clip, and I'm picking on him, but like everyone's been deploying this rhetoric, like really GOP leaders for a while now.
And it's just really counterproductive and useless.
It's kind of these attacks on European countries, but not in the way that the Trump administration does it or Trump in and of himself, JD Vance by extension, where they're kind of criticizing him for their geopolitical decisions.
Um, you know, like being dependent on Russian energy, um, sort of purposely dismantling their military.
I mean, even the UK giving away, we've got colonies.
This specific line that Ron DeSantis was using is used quite often by a lot of people in the GOP where they basically just try to dunk on them for like importing the third world and they say like, oh, we should just break from them because they're not even Western anymore.
And that's just kind of counterproductive for a lot of people.
I'm not going to like be super harsh here because I think a lot of people just repeat this and they don't really realize what they're doing.
But I'm going to get into why that is not a right wing line to push, while that's actually like a left wing narrative to push.
So we're going to get into that.
We have another story the Masters.
I love the Masters.
The Masters is like quite literally one of the last bastions of true American culture, but it's being watered down and ruined.
So I'm going to get into why the Masters are being ruined.
It really feels like this year it's kind of a jumping the shark moment for a variety of reasons.
So before we get into all of that, I want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsors Rumble Wallet.
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Thank you very much to Rumble for sponsoring the show.
We love Rumble.
It's the home of this show.
Obviously, this is sort of the Rumble daily lineup where I take you from the morning to the afternoon on the Rumble daily lineup.
We got to jump into this first story because this is really the story.
I don't know if everyone's talking about it, but this show really is predicated on discussing topics that everyone's discussing on Twitter, on X, and that kind of dominates the X timelines because this is an online show, right?
This is a show on Rumble.
And I would say the vast majority of people tuning into the show are at least plugged in to the discussions happening on X. Sort of are dominating X so much.
You know, a lot of people ask me about this.
And I think the reason is because X is, as it stands, still the place that disseminates most of the information that dominates the political sphere.
This is where ideas are proposed, where topics are discussed, arguments are had, sort of in house debates.
You know, that would be the way I kind of put it.
Because you got to think, you know, within the Trump administration and by extension, the Biden administration and also governments really around the world, all of their staffers, I'm not talking about officials like, you know, Trump or DeSantis or whatever, like, They have their own thing going on, but the actual staffers, the ones that are in charge of drafting policy, implementing policy, executing on the policy, they are on Twitter.
They are active on Twitter.
They are reading their timelines.
They are sort of engaging with the very same political discussions and cultural discussions that we are engaging with on X.
So that is why it is a really vital place to truly understand how politics works.
Now, this isn't to say that X is real life.
This is a critique that people always make where they say, well, Twitter is not real life.
What's happening on there is removed from what people are.
In real life, so to speak, are talking about that.
But I'm actually kind of of the opinion, and I've been increasingly persuaded of this, that that's not entirely true anymore.
It may be true that X isn't real life, that Twitter isn't real life, but you can't really escape the internet anymore.
I think the internet has poisoned virtually every aspect, and I'm saying poisoned, you know, again, this is kind of an ambiguous term I'm using, but as poisoned, has impacted every aspect of American culture and American life, where there isn't truly this phenotype of someone that's offline anymore.
And actually, it's worth noting the left will actually use this talking point now where they kind of try to portray people that are right wing as like terminally online and like they're just, you need to touch grass.
You're not a normal person.
Just go touch grass.
But the reality is, when you leave, like when you're not on the internet and you're talking to people in real life, everyone is interacting with online content, everyone is disseminating ideas or sort of memes even that come from the internet.
You know, there's no such divide anymore between real life and the internet.
And in some ways, the older people, even the elderly, are more online than a lot of the younger people.
I mean, I just think in my own life, you know, my people and my loved ones that are, you know, over 60, they probably spend more time on Facebook than like the majority of young people.
Nowhere is completely untouched.
There's no such thing as these people that are just completely untouched by.
Social media anymore.
It just doesn't really exist.
I mean, this whole looks maxing craze is evident by this.
I was listening to.
To Bronze Age Pervert, he has his show Caribbean Rhythms, and he brought on a guest, and they were kind of talking about how looks maxing, you know, the idea of looks maxing, everyone's talking about it.
You know, everyone's now maybe people aren't, you know, in depth about like the actual sort of like philosophy, like under, you know, underlying there, but everyone's aware of it.
Everyone knows what it is.
They're making jokes about it.
And that's just proof that what's happening on the internet, even though looks maxing, so to speak, this like lookism, this realism when it comes to like the dating marketplace and sexual dynamics, Obviously, this discussion was happening on the internet 10, 20 years ago.
This didn't just start with clavicular.
It's now kind of everywhere.
Everyone knows about it.
Everyone's talking about it.
Again, not to say that they're bought in or that they're sort of evaluating the concepts being discussed there, but it's just to say that, again, stuff that was being discussed on obscure forums 20 years ago is now in the cultural zeitgeist.
Everyone's talking about it.
It's being discussed on television, it's being discussed in massive newspapers.
Knows, everyone's talking about it, and it's just a thing.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is you know, these stories that are happening on Twitter are important because they do actually impact everyday life and everyday Americans, where maybe you know, your average Joe, so to speak, isn't tapped in on all the stuff that we are, but they are feeling the same sort of they are participating in the same political sphere that we are.
Like I said at the top of this kind of little diatribe here, every staffer, Democrat or Republican, is on Twitter.
And they are seeing the exact same thing you are.
And in many cases, they're participating in these same discussions that we are.
So, with that, we have to get into this first story here.
We already chewed up a bunch of the clock here.
This is from Christopher Hale.
If you don't know who Christopher Hale is, he was a White House staffer for Obama and Biden.
He's a DNC apparatchik.
He's a leftist fundamentally.
And so, right away, when I saw this story, I saw that he was the one reporting it.
I just assumed it was false because he's a liar and he's a leftist, which, you know, if there is any truth to the story whatsoever, it was going to be completely watered down by the time it made it to the pages here, the news, before it hit the timeline, so to speak.
This is what he said.
This is what he reported.
We won't read the entire article, but this is a segment of what he is saying from Christopher Hale.
In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christopher Pierre, Pope Leo, then ambassador to the United States, and delivered a lecture.
America, Colby, and his colleagues told the Cardinal, the military has the power to do whatever it wants in the world.
The Catholic Church had better take its side.
As tempers rose, one U.S. official reached for a 14th century weapon.
Invokes the Avenon Papacy, the period when the French crown used military force to bend the Bishop of Rome to its will.
That scene, broken this week by Mattia Ferrarisi in the extraordinary piece of journalism for the free press.
I mean, here we go.
Maybe the most remarkable moment in the long and knotted history of the American Republic's relationship with the Catholic Church.
So, again, this is just reporting coming from, again, a source that you shouldn't take at face value.
I guess that would be the way I would put it.
Um, again, my interpretation of what happened here again, we're just kind of the wait and see.
We're going to need more confirmation if this story is real.
I mean, it is shocking if this did indeed happen, um, for a variety of reasons.
But again, this is what I'm trying to get at as people are already reacting to this as this is gospel.
Um, media, this was the headline everyone's reporting this.
Pope Leo reportedly unlikely to visit the U.S. after a train wreck Trump admin meeting.
A train wreck.
I don't know about that.
I mean, look, I guess the quick analysis of the story here that I would give would be again, this idea that the Vatican, you know, so this, okay, so this story here, this happens, it says here in January.
So everyone's reacting to this story as if this just happened.
So they're acting as if this is in the context of the Iran war.
But this story broke right after the Venezuela operation.
And obviously, Pope Leo came out and he was like, you know, saying, parroting the exact same line that all of these, you know, European leaders were parroting, which was, Uh, you know, the United States needs to follow the rule of law in the global world order, the post World War II consensus.
They must, um, you know, fall in line with that.
This is unacceptable and beyond the pale, which is just again globalist.
Uh, you know, that word's thrown around a lot, but this is a correct term.
This term would be correctly deployed here is a globalist talking point.
The whole reason Trump is a thing is because we're trying to upend the post World War II consensus.
Again, this is when this happened, was in January.
So, remove all of the poisoning of the well that the Iran war has done, because obviously, you know, for a variety of reasons, it's been.
Um, a net negative to say the least.
This happened in the context of Venezuela, an operation that was, for the record, massively popular on the right wing.
A lot of these figures on the right now that are very upset over the Iran war and are sort of leaving the MAGA coalition, so to speak, were in favor of the Venezuela operation.
But the Pope obviously just kind of took the liberal globalist line, which was, oh, you know, you fall in line with the post war consensus.
And so the Pope has said, no, not only is he not visiting the United States, he's an American.
Well, he's born in the United States, raised in the United States, in Chicago.
Nor is he visiting us on July 4th for our 250th anniversary celebration, but he's visiting Lampedusa.
I think you pronounce it Lampedusa, Lampedusa, Lampedusa.
I don't know how you pronounce it.
It's the island in the Mediterranean that belongs to the Italians that is used as the staging point for African migrants when they are infiltrating Europe, when they are arriving into Europe.
They use this island as a staging point, and it's this infamous island that is kind of considered the stepping stone for migrants as they enter Europe.
So he's visiting there.
On July 4th, out of all the days that he could have visited this island, he's doing it on July 4th.
That is clearly, let's just cut the BS.
That is clearly a political message to the Trump administration because ultimately Pope Leo's biggest gripe with the Trump administration thus far is that he's too mean to migrants and that, you know, for whatever reason, you know, it's kind of obvious why he wants open borders in the United States.
He wants the national sovereignty of the United States to be eroded and he would like to see the United States just battery farm the third world.
And again, we can get into a variety of reasons why I think that's the case.
Ultimately, and I think the most gratuitous explanation here is because he's a globalist.
This isn't an attack on Catholicism.
This is an attack on Pope Leo and Catholic leadership.
They are open borders globalists.
This isn't a uniquely Catholic issue.
The Protestant churches have the same problem, especially the mainlines.
You know, look at the Episcopal Church.
The Lutheran Church is, you know, the Catholic Church.
There's a lot of criticisms of the Catholic Church funding these NGOs that basically, you know, carry these migrants into the United States.
The Lutheran Church, the mainline Lutheran Church, has participated in the exact same thing.
They have the exact same institutions going on.
So this isn't necessarily picking on Catholics per se.
Someone picking on Pope Leo.
Pope Francis was the same way.
He was the same way.
He's just like, oh, you know, Trump, it's inappropriate.
He wants to build a wall, even though the Vatican's surrounded by a wall.
So, Christopher Hale, this is where it gets out of control.
This is where it comes off the rails.
And I got to get through this, and we'll get to Scott and discuss this further because there's another story that I want to get to.
Christopher Hale puts this up Note to MAGA authoritarians, don't frick with the Catholic Church.
We will defeat you.
So, his line goes from his opening line, Christopher Hale was, There was a tense meeting with this cardinal that was brought in by Colby.
And they dressed him down, and it was tense.
And it was, you know, basically them saying, you know, you need to chill.
You know, why are you weighing in on American foreign policy?
Why are you trying to poison the well for American foreign policy?
Especially because we are deposing Venezuela, a Catholic country, and a massively unpopular leader in Nicolas Maduro.
And we deposed them.
This is something that benefited Catholics directly.
And Pope Leo comes out, and he's just, you know, basically finger wagging at the United States.
And so we bring him in, wherever we bring in his.
His spokesman, his ambassador, and just say, zip it.
This is ridiculous.
We're going to do what we want to do, and then you guys do your thing.
And again, if you're going to keep trying to undercut what we're trying to do, and if you're going to keep trying to undermine us, then we're going to discipline you.
Obviously, things got a little out of control, but that's at the core of it.
And everyone's blown this up.
And this is taking Christopher, if his story is true, this is taking it face value.
They're making it seem like it's this standoff between President Trump.
And Pope Leo, like they're enemies, and like that America has the Vatican sieged right now, and that we're about to invade or something.
Not at all what's happening.
But this is where he goes.
He starts with this LARP.
And this was this poster, Nicholas.
I don't know too much about him, but he says, This is a very interesting new approach.
Hale is taking on the language and attitudes of trad crusade LARPers and using it for his lib agenda.
So this is correct.
And so the libs here have effectively laundered this trad calf base talking point, and they're using it as a cudgel against the Trump administration.
The reaction here is crazy.
I mean, Pope Leo was half an hour late for his audience with Italian Winter Olympics and Paralympic committees because he was meeting with David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist this morning.
So, this is again what I get at is like if you're a Catholic, most cradle Catholics agree with this.
The only people that disagree with this are these like converts online who spend all their time online and like are just LARPing all the time.
But most cradle Catholics kind of roll their eyes at statements made by Pope Leo and Pope Francis all the time because they correctly understand, they explain this to me all the time as a Protestant, where, you know, one of my critiques of Of Catholicism is papal infallibility.
They make this point all the time, which is that's rarely invoked, and the Pope does not speak with infallibility pretty much all of the time.
So they correctly understand that you can disagree with statements the Pope makes.
But these trad LARPer people online, again, basically have created an effigy of the Pope.
They've turned him into something that he's not.
Again, every Catholic, cradle Catholic, every normal Catholic you meet that's a conservative will tell you, yeah, Pope Leo's a globalist.
Yeah, he's a liberal.
There's really no question about that.
I mean, he's literally meeting with David Axelrod, you know, chief, you know, chief blank slate Obama apparatchik NGO complex.
This is what he says, Paulos here.
The church is being run like an open borders NGO because Pope Leo is a product of the Obama NGO complex.
It's really not much more complicated than that.
And again, most of my friends, I have friends that are Catholics, a lot of friends.
I mean, I'm a conservative in media.
Most of my friends are Catholics at this point.
They don't disagree with this, they do not disagree with this.
But this is what's really hilarious.
So, again, like I said earlier, where Christopher Hale blows this up into something that's not, you have all of these, again, these like trad LARPer Catholic people coming out and like declaring that they're loyal to Pope Leo over the United States of America, which is hilarious because this was like the founder's concerns with Catholicism.
And this was like literally JFK's biggest problem when he was running for president is that people were skeptical that he had dual loyalty.
And not only this, these trad based Catholic LARPers will be the first people to accuse Jews of dual loyalty.
They do this all the time.
They're like, well, Jews are.
You know Ben Shapiro, etc.
Are loyal um, you know they're loyal to uh, you know they're loyal to Israel as well as the United States.
Um, let me uh, let me follow up real quick um, with the guest.
Just real quick um um, Boom.
See, we do it live.
This is how we do it.
We do it live.
So, anyway, see if these guys come out of nowhere and they're like, by the way, I'm loyal to the Pope.
This girl, Faith Marill, it's one of these people that they just outrage, farm, rage bait pretty much 24 7.
Just a reminder to Trump and his team don't mess with the Catholic Church.
It was an underling of Elbridge Colby, apparently, that said this.
Again, this is her taking a leftist hit piece at face value.
And so are many people.
And they're just openly declaring that, like, again, they're loyal to this open borders, Obama apparatchik over the United States.
Again, this guy, Adrian Pascal, whoever, I don't know who he is.
It's hard to keep up with all these, you know, convert LARPer people.
I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but I genuinely pray that the Democrats win the midterms.
May MAGA be utterly defeated and humiliated.
Their name shall be synonymous with Judas.
Like, what?
Yeah, I'm such a base Catholic that I want to get rid of the guy who got Roe v. Wade overturned.
Again, every cradle Catholic you talk to that's a conservative, their number one issue is abortion.
This is where you can tell the difference between actual Catholics and these converts who converted for political reasons the actual Catholics are focused on abortion.
Abortion is their thing, as it should be.
So they get behind Trump, all the criticisms aside, because they say abortion is the issue we want to get across the finish line.
It's these new guys just completely ungrateful for any of this.
And it's really funny.
Captive Dreamer pointed out his posted pin post is him celebrating his conversion to Catholicism not even a year ago.
I'm trying to double check if that's true.
Oh, yeah.
So, April 20th.
So, not even a year ago, he converted.
So, he literally just got here yesterday, 10 minutes ago, and now he's like lecturing everyone on how Catholics ought to be and declaring holy war against President Trump.
Really, I just feel bad for the Catholics at this point.
Frank McCormick says Catholics spent decades combating the belief that we were subversive papists with dual loyalties to the Vatican and thus unfit to be trusted.
Thanks for setting us back 150 years.
So, like I said, the normal Catholics are just really.
Frustrated with all of this.
So, with that, we're going to jump into the story before we grab Scott here.
Um, And we'll hopefully get him, grab him here at the half hour mark.
Let me just get a tab open so I can keep this posted on the situation with the guest.
This is what I want to get into this quote.
I won't replay the clip because we're running out of time.
But Governor DeSantis says the United States should reconsider being close allies with the United Kingdom because they've imported the third world and we do not share a common culture anymore.
My commentary was this safe, edgy, tough guy routine is so gay.
Dunking on fellow Western nations, but in a based way, will never be threatening to the left whatsoever.
The GOP never has anything to say about nations that directly harm.
Americans like India.
And yes, so there's kind of two problems with what Governor DeSantis is saying here.
And again, I'm not necessarily picking on him because they just kind of say these things because, again, staffers tell them it's like the base thing to say.
But this is just really counterproductive and gay, where again, they do this like chest beating routine and posturing towards like the UK and Canada.
And like, I guess a way that they can signal they're doing this in a based way is by saying it's because they've imported the third world.
And therefore, we should like break our alliance with them or, you know, like being close allies with them.
There's a lot of problems with this.
The first problem being the United States probably is the most egregious case of importing the third world in the world just by sheer numbers.
America, you know, we have the exact same problem the UK has and that Canada has.
Again, it's being reversed or undone in some ways by the Trump administration, but we very much are still in the throes of mass migration.
So, on the first hand, like, what are you even talking about?
Second of all, this is just.
Again, this routine where they attack white countries, they're very comfortable attacking white countries.
And if you ask the average American, you know, what country is negatively impacting the most, what nation is negatively impacting the most, they're not going to say Britain or Canada or New Zealand or Australia or France or Sweden.
They're going to say like India or China or Mexico.
But these guys have the harshest rhetoric possible that they're, you know, tripping over themselves to.
deploy to dunk all over Britain.
But then they never have anything to say about like India.
You never noticed that?
It's the really craziest thing.
So, again, they're just going to come out and just chest beat.
Oh, you know, the UK is just completely ravaged by Muslims.
But then India, they have nothing to say.
They have nothing to say about India.
And India is literally, they openly say that they ship excess capital, human capital, to the United States.
And they want to build voting blocks within these countries.
Same with China.
China literally, you know, they've been abusing our birthright citizenship to, again, sort of do the birth tourism where there's CCP aligned figures having children in the United States, so they're citizens, and then they move back to China, and then those citizens can come back and vote in our elections.
I mean, that's the actual threats to our country.
India completely undercutting our economy, but these guys go all out on countries that are friendly by and large.
Geopolitically, what Trump is doing is saying they need to pull their weight in NATO, they're screwing us over in our foreign operations.
That's completely separate from what DeSantis is doing here, where DeSantis is again, this is just liberal talking point, anti white talking point, but repackaged so it's like based.
You know, we need to cut ties with Britain and Canada because they have the exact same issue that we have.
That's what he's saying.
I mean, it's utterly ridiculous.
It's counterproductive.
It's just old.
It's just old and stale.
Again, if they were using rhetoric in the harshest terms possible for India, then maybe there could be something to be said about that, about maybe going after the UK and Canada, but it's just not.
It's just a one way street.
So, with that, I'll get into the Masters story tomorrow.
We'll let the Masters simmer a little more and then we'll get into it because I have a lot to say about the Masters.
Believe it or not, it is political.
But we're going to grab the great Scott Greer.
And we're going to have a conversation with them about this story regarding the Pope.
I don't know if you saw that Trump is invading the Vatican.
This is according to Christopher Hale.
I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, but that is essentially what a lot of people on Twitter are under the impression of.
I went through the story, I went through some of the reaction from the based TradCath contingent.
Of our MAGA coalition.
I wanted to get into the story first because a lot of people are immediately saying, should we take this guy at face value?
I mean, this is obviously like an Obama Biden apparatchik, and he's reporting that a Trump or a Pentagon official spurred out and crashed out on this Vatican official.
What's your analysis on this story?
I mean, I'm obviously a bit skeptical here, but what was your initial reaction to the story?
Was it, you know, is this base?
Is this justified?
Or was this crash out a little too beyond the pale?
It's also very odd for any administration to do this because what the official that is named in the story, Elbridge Colby, did is he brought in a Vatican official and a cardinal to castigate him for the Vatican criticizing American foreign policy.
But the Vatican has been doing that for many, many years.
They oppose the Iraq war, they have opposed some of the actions we did in Afghanistan.
This is not something totally new or out of the blue.
This is just something they do.
And According to the story, it's being treated as an unprecedented event that the Vatican has to be on our side, which has not always been the case in American foreign policy.
So I found it odd.
I don't know whether to believe it or not because it just sounds pointless for defense officials to try to tell the Vatican to get on the side of America and be like, we need you to be supporting us, which they haven't really done that in the past.
I mean, they did show, I mean, the Vatican and the Catholic Church did show support for America during the Cold War against the communist threat, but.
You know, it's been very different over the last 35 years with the Cold War over.
So, I don't really understand why they would have this meeting or what they would accomplish by it.
You know, even the claims that they're going to support an Avignon papacy, I don't know how that would work for America.
Or there's this threat that keeps growing up.
I don't know what that would work.
I guess we're going to have a Doral papacy, a pope appointed by Donald Trump.
I don't know who he would pick for pope.
Maybe himself.
I don't know what that would do.
But I don't think that's actually going to work out like it did in the Middle Ages.
So I don't really understand what's going on with that.
But it's just a very bizarre story.
It's very weird.
You don't know whether it's true or not.
And it certainly wouldn't accomplish anything.
I mean, there have been battles between the church and secular powers for many years.
I mean, this characterized much of the Middle Ages, it characterized battles in the 18th and 19th century between them and the French government.
And then, of course, the German government.
Of Bismarck's time, waged a cultural war against Catholicism in Germany.
So there have been all these types of battles before.
It's not unprecedented for the church and a secular power to be at loggerheads.
But I think in this situation, it just seems weird because they accept that the church is not going to be happy with wars that America is carrying out or certain policies that we engage in.
And I don't think a random department official or war department, we were almost calling it a defense department, it's a war department official.
We're having to correct ourselves, would gain anything by yelling at a cardinal.
Before we get like the thing where you accidentally slip up and say Department of Defense, and then people literally like it's like the dead naming thing.
It's like, oh, it's actually the Department of War.
And I'm like, what?
I need like a three year, like after three years, if I'm still saying Department of Defense, then you can get on my case.
But it's like, what are we doing here?
With that, I mean, to your point, it's a good point, which is like, Okay, the Vatican has been, you know, opposed to American foreign policy for decades now.
This is really not too big of a surprise.
I think it does actually kind of get to the point that a lot of Catholics are making, which is, you know, while, you know, obviously people are poking holes in this idea that there's this Catholic resurgence in the United States, because, I mean, you see numbers like for every Catholic convert, there's like eight that leave the church.
So it's like on the whole, Christianity by and large is still declining.
Maybe it's declining slower now.
That's probably true.
But again, like Zoomers are the least religious generation in history.
So a lot of this, like, New York Post sensationalism.
Fall short.
One thing that I think is true, and some Catholics are pointing this out, and it's true, is that it is sort of ascendant, so to speak, in DC circles.
You see a lot of DC people in the DC sphere, specifically in the Trump admin, that are Catholic or Catholic converts.
And so I think that could actually be what's going on here a little bit you have people that are staffing the Pentagon or the Trump administration by and large that are simultaneously Catholic and devout Catholics, but also loyal to Trump.
And that's a big point of contention for them.
That's frustrating.
And so I think that is why you are seeing this emphasis.
That's why you did see a crash out from a Pentagon staffer.
We don't know who it was, because they maybe feel a little bit of tension here between the Vatican's stance on this was following the Venezuela operation.
They were reacting to Pope Leo's comments, where he was basically just finger wagging.
That was kind of what this was in reaction to.
They probably feel that tension with the fact that the Vatican and their employer are at odds here.
And that's becoming abundantly clearer.
Maybe they didn't think about that before.
I don't know.
Do you agree with this consensus?
Do you think that could potentially be what's going on here?
Yeah, there is that element within the Trump administration.
I mean, there was last year where Vance got into a theological dispute with the church over immigration and other matters, which, you know, most prominent American officials have never gone into theology of like why we should deport people or why we should engage in certain policy.
But he was going really in the weeds on theological matters with the church.
And he had bishops, and even the Pope was rebuking him for his stance.
And it was just an odd matter because it's not, it's something that most Americans aren't.
That's familiar with what his arguments were making.
And it was like very in the weeds.
But it's something that was appealing to a lot of the people who are prominent in conservative circles and in the administration that they want these affirmative theological cases made for mass deportations or immigration restrictions of that sort.
And then they're going to go and make these arguments.
So it's for a certain audience, not necessarily the American public.
So you are, this type of dispute between the church and the administration would definitely cause tension and awkwardness among them.
That they would have this.
And I don't know why the administration would gain that.
I think they would just have somebody, you know, release some type of official to make a theological case for the Don Roe doctrine or some sort.
I don't know what theological case they could make, but I'm sure they would find someone to do that.
And then they can have this debate between the church over what's proper Catholic doctrine or what's not, like Vance was doing last year.
But yes, no, I think it is very much true what you're seeing with the.
Resurgences is definitely more a part of institutional conservatism.
I mean, they've always been a large number of Catholic converts there, but it's much more assertive than it was in the past.
And I think even a lot of the conversions are happening at a more elite level across the country.
I think it's more when you're seeing this, it's not so much the large country as a whole or in middle America, it's at elite institutions and elite universities.
Because if you talk to anybody who's still like Harvard or Chicago and all these places, they will note that there's A larger number of their fellow classmates who are turning to the church are turning to even orthodoxy of some sort, which a decade or 20 years ago, this had been very rare and very seldomly seen, but now you're seeing a number of them.
Doing that, and also journalists are aware of those trends.
You know, they go to many of the same schools and they notice these trends and they're like, Oh, that's odd.
But it's certainly a major factor within the conservative movement and the Trump administration.
You know, no other past Republican administration would have trotted out their vice president to make a theological case, you know, really in the weeds case for a certain policy that they were pursuing.
I mean, because you can tell it's kind of a new paradigm.
I mean, because, you know, us, along with Christopher Hale, we all share the same home state of Tennessee, the great.
State of Tennessee.
And this whole topic is just bewildering to the Republican base, that kind of evangelical base, because they just don't really understand what's going on.
I can say this as someone that grew up evangelical.
I grew up in the Southern Baptist Convention.
I didn't really even meet many Catholics growing up.
I mean, I grew up in the Memphis suburbs.
And so I always found this stuff just kind of like foreign and confusing.
I understood it later when I kind of got more into theology.
But the average Republican is just kind of like tuning this out, I would say.
This is mainly a in house conversation.
Sort of thing that's going on.
I guess this is kind of the frustration that a lot of people have had at the Trump administration where they do kind of get sidetracked on these issues that really only are like beltway issues.
These are only like topics that are really beltway.
And you can tell that the second Trump admin is staffed by a lot more, like I guess you would say, like zealous Catholics.
Because you'll see like Trump on Truth Social every once in a while just like randomly tweet out like a Catholic prayer.
Like I remember like a year, it was like a year or two ago, like it was that Archangel prayer and he just like chucked it up and was like, what's going on?
I thought this guy was like, Apollo White, you know, devotee, like what's going on here?
So, you know, I think that's kind of what's going on here is this is just an issue for maybe 10,000 people and it's kind of being exposed to the entire country.
And that's why everyone's just kind of like confused by what's going on here.
I mean, I actually grew up Catholic in Tennessee, but you didn't meet any.
And generally, this wasn't even a part of our experience there.
It was more Episcopalian flavor, I guess, of that type of growing up.
But, you know, a lot of this stuff even would seem foreign to me as someone who grew up Catholic.
And I think that would even be the case for a lot of the average Catholics who maybe only go Christmas and Easter.
You know, they're not as into this stuff as maybe their parents and grandparents would have been.
So this.
This is very much of an in house matter, but it also is, you know, if the White House did bring in a, you know, a representative of the Pope to skewer him or to criticize him and to demand the Vatican get on their side,
you know, that's just very strange for any administration to do, which is why I'm very skeptical about this story that they may have had, they definitely had the meeting, they confirmed the meeting, but over what that meeting talked about and how they went about things, I am skeptical as I'm not sure what they would have accomplished by yelling at him and telling him to be on the side.
And generally, it doesn't.
Most Catholics, I remember even when the lead up to the Iraq war was happening and the Pope came out against it.
And that didn't really sway the average Catholic in America because they're just like, oh, it's expected for the Pope to oppose the war.
I remember my parents saying that.
And then they, I mean, this is not an argument for the Iraq war, but that just didn't factor in.
People just expected it's like, that's what the Pope is supposed to say.
And I even think it's not like the Pope is going to be like, wow, this Maduro raid is one of the greatest accomplishments of all time.
Thank you, Donald Trump.
You know, he like hashtag MAGA.
I don't think that's going to happen with that.
I mean, the Pope is obviously going to oppose wars and military interventions.
You know, he's even had, well, I don't know, his predecessor, Francis, took a lot of criticism in Europe for wanting to end the Ukraine war and wanting to have negotiations with Russia.
And so, The Catholic Church was having a lot of this criticism and tensions and animosity with various European countries, particularly Ukraine, for wanting a peace deal with Russia, which, you know, it's standard practice for the church to want to end wars.
I mean, they were like this in World War I, World War II, you know, pretty much every conflict they've wanted to end.
And that's a problem for certain governments if it goes against their interests.
So it was very common for, in Europe, for them to bring in Vatican officials and then lecture them about how they're not supposed to end wars.
Supporting Ukraine and not backing the war effort, and then being too pro Russia.
And there were all these conspiracy theories that the Pope is controlled by Putin for merely wanting a peace deal.
And this is, I guess, this would be kind of a good segue then into sort of the reaction to the story.
Because, I mean, to your point, you know, you go and you talk to, again, your average cradle Catholic, you know, anywhere in the United States.
And if you ask them, you know, what their opinion is on Pope Leo or what their opinion was on Pope Francis, you're either going to get sort of, Like, I don't really think about it too much, kind of response, as in, like, they don't have a strong opinion because they're just used to this is business as usual.
There's always been a pope.
Like, I don't need to have a strong opinion on every single statement he makes.
Or you'll get the take of, like, yeah, he's a liberal.
I kind of expect that.
Their faith is very much detached from, like, the Vatican, although they are part of the Catholic Church.
Again, they're not, like, pious zealots.
They're not going through every single ecumenical council and, like, giving their take on it.
That's just not how Catholics operate.
And to this point, I mean, that kind of demonstrates that I think.
You know, Catholic cradle Catholics in the United States are actually fairly well assimilated.
I mean, people make this point all the time.
You know, outside observers that are Catholics make this observation about Catholics in the United States is that they do have this kind of Protestant flavor to them in some regard, where they do kind of make their faith their own, even within the Catholic Church, where it's this new breed of converts who I think another maybe classification you can make of these people would be like For You page converts or Instagram Real converts, where they saw like a based edit and they converted for political reasons.
Unfortunately, like we actually do have to address.
These people because they're dominating my timeline right now.
Some people are calling it the great Catholic call out, the great ECATH call out of 2026, where they're just taking the story at face value and adding to it.
They're turning this into like there's some sort of showdown between the Pope and Trump right now, which is just not happening.
Trump probably doesn't even know this is going on right now, or he's probably not paying attention.
The Pope doesn't really care that much.
He's got a lot of bigger fish to fry.
But they're making this into this like, again, we have tanks right outside St. Peter's Basilica right now when we're about to go in, and they're like, I'm loyal.
To the Pope before I'm loyal to Trump.
And it's like, what are we even doing here?
But it's this new breed of converts who, again, unfortunately dominate a lot of discourse online.
And I was making this point at the top of the show that actually what happens on Twitter does have some implications because, again, a lot of Trump staffers and staffers across the world for various political institutions are reading Twitter.
They are participating in the political zeitgeist that is on Twitter and that is leaking into different policy decisions.
So, you know.
It's really crazy to see, again, a lot of these people adopt a flavor of Catholicism that hasn't really existed in the United States ever.
And it's just really bizarre to see.
I'm wondering what your take is, especially, you know, you have a Catholic background, so I mean, you have a particularly insightful, you'll have, you know, particular insight into this.
But I think it's that one thing about American Catholics is they do not live up to the know nothing myth that they would come here and be a fifth column for the Pope, is that they'd all be personally controlled by the Pope and acting under his orders, which that was a lot of the nativist sentiment against Catholics in the 19th century.
And as we've seen, that was not the case.
And that was illustrated by JFK, our first Catholic president, that he clearly didn't really care what the Pope and the Vatican were talking about.
He was not a very devout Catholic.
Yeah.
As you can see by his personal behavior.
And that would have been the case with Biden as well.
Our two Catholic presidents, even though the media like to hype up about Biden's devout faith, it's very obvious he did not have a devout faith.
He probably forgot he was Catholic by the end of his presidency anyway.
And yeah, and some of these types want to live up to that know nothing image of Catholics, but they themselves don't practice this because then if the bishops say something about immigration or they say something about Israel that maybe they disagree with or any type of other issue, You know, it could be anything.
And then they'll take great umbrage at that and demand that the bishops change their opinion based on what they have.
And some of these, there are, I think this is a very small number of them that you really only encounter on social media.
I don't think this is even the majority of converts, but some of them immediately convert and then they become set of Achanists where they, this is a big problem under Francis.
I don't, this has not really emerged under Leo, but there'd become a lot who would join the Catholic Church and say submit to Rome.
And then, you know, Francis would do a lot of, Make a lot of liberal remarks, particularly about immigration, or sometimes there'd be a prominent official who would signal openness to maybe gays being welcome in the church of some sort.
And then people would get mad and then start demanding that this is not my pope, you know, not my pope.
They can't have impeachment proceedings against the pope, to the best of my knowledge, but they would almost like want that type of response to it.
And so it's, you know, they immediately go convert and then they start.
Advocating their own against their own hierarchy, yeah.
So sometimes they will do that.
I think there are a few people who maybe are taking this a little bit more seriously than it is.
I, the administration is not going to be evading the Vatican City.
I mean, if the government did come down hard on the Catholic Church, it would definitely make sense for believers to take issue with that and be very opposed to it and turn against Trump over that.
But I don't think that's going to be the case.
I think this is either.
Badly remembered Marx, or maybe just one official made decided to do some creative commentary on what he thought the administration's policy was because it is very silly for the administration to try to tell the Catholic Church what to do.
It is, I mean, the church officials, especially in America, haven't been that.
Fond of Trump's policies.
You know, they did issue that unpressed, you know, it was a pretty notable letter that the bishops issued opposing his immigration policies.
And Leo himself has made it clear, even before he was Pope, that he was not a fan of Trump's immigration policies.
I mean, obviously, him not just not showing up for July 4th, which is whatever.
I mean, I don't know if I expected him to show up.
But again, go to Lampedusa, I think so you pronounce it.
Obviously, the staging point for migrants as they enter Europe.
I mean, that's clearly a political action.
I think it's quite obvious.
I guess this might be a point where maybe we diverge, maybe we disagree.
Stephen Wolfe, he's a Protestant.
He's a guy on Twitter.
I think people would recognize his profile.
He makes this point, and I'm kind of sympathetic to it.
And you might disagree here.
But I think what's going on with a lot of the Catholicism energy you're seeing on the right specifically is because this is a Protestant country, not to say it's distinctly Protestant, but obviously the majority.
Of religious people in the country are Protestant or evangelical at this point.
And so I think something that's happening in regards to, again, this new interest in Catholicism is because it grants you something additional.
It sort of grants you like a minority identity in the sense of being a Catholic, being a devout Catholic, gives you access to sort of some of these perks that would come with a minority identity.
You get like this in group preference, this group solidarity kind of thing.
Do you think that's part of what's going on here?
Because, again, you see people convert.
I mean, to your point, this isn't.
Necessarily the majority of converts, but again, the people that are participating in the zeitgeist seems to be a good segment of them immediately become really zealous.
They put the Vatican flag in their bio or whatever, and then they immediately adopt this group solidarity with other Catholics.
And that's, to me, kind of a luxury of a minority identity in a country that, again, is like majority, or at least the majority of religious people are evangelicals, is it grants you that.
I don't know, maybe if you agree or disagree, but it seems to be that's something that I think a lot of people are enjoying.
Participating in is kind of this additional identity that you get when you, again, become a Catholic, or if you are a Catholic, when you begin to take it very seriously.
Yeah, I don't know if I would say minority identity, but they want a well defined group identity independent of being a generic American.
And I think that's a common trait in a lot of Americans today.
I mean, you can even see that among certain groups that maybe their parents were immigrant and they were raised as a normal American.
Then they decide that they're suddenly very into the immigrant heritage that they had, that they weren't raised around, and they didn't even learn their homeland's language.
But I think with a lot of Catholics, they think of a generic American culture as just McDonald's and the NFL, and they want something more than that, and they feel that the Catholic Church offers them that.
And you can see that.
I can see that even with conservative circles today is that people, when Ash Wednesday comes around, they're very enthusiastic to have the ashes displayed throughout the day, more so than it was, I think, 10 years ago when there was still some of that, but there wasn't as overt.
And you can see that even on Fox News, where there's far more guests and hosts that are displaying the ashes.
Throughout the day, and these are people who are having to have makeup on.
So, I've heard even reports that some of them have it like reapplied over the makeup to identify that.
But it is a way of saying that I have a particular, well defined group identity that makes it different from just generic American, which they think is there's a lot of things lacking in maybe that generic American identity today.
And it gives them something unique and particular to themselves.
And they would like to have that particular group identity that you can see in other religious groups, such as Mormons, that they would like to have for Catholics, which.
You know, it operates to a certain level at the elite level, but I think for the rest of America, the average Catholics, as you can see by a lot of the people who only attend Christmas and Easter, you know, they don't even go to Ash Wednesday and all that, that they are not as participating in that Catholic culture.
They're practically generic Americans, but I think for a lot of the converts and cradle conservative Catholics, that it does provide that unique, particular identity that is not offered by generic American identity.
And so that's why they accept it.
You know, maybe it in some ways resembles minority identity, but it's not so much to become, even though some of them might want to proclaim themselves as victims, but I think that's a tiny minority among the right because they also want to identify themselves with the right wing trends of America.
And some of them even adopt nativist slogans and lingo and symbols while being Catholic.
So they don't want to pretend that they were victimized by, you know, the Protestants of the 19th century.
They also accept that, but it's.
Also adding this particular group identity with.
Recognizable symbols and cultural events and traditions that make them different from being a generic American.
I mean, I guess to kind of close here, maybe to escape the For You page discussion here and then go back out to like the geopolitical implications here.
We talked about last time on the show, I think this was, I think we were discussing the Greenland situation and we were kind of exploring how useful Trump, the Trump administration's rhetoric towards Europe is for, again, like our goals as American right wingers.
This, I think it's kind of tough for people to parse.
Would you say this is an example of the Trump administration just becoming increasingly frustrated with the Euros, so to speak, kind of mouthing off about American affairs and finger wagging from a position of authority that they don't actually have?
Or is this something separate?
I know you said this is just kind of redundant because this has always been the Catholic position.
But a lot of people are kind of tying this to kind of the same thing when, like, you know, you have like, you know, the president of Estonia come out and like start shaming, you know, Donald Trump as if like his opinion matters at all.
Do you think that's kind of.
Maybe part of what's going on, maybe not from that specific official, but the Trump administration largely just kind of increasingly frustrated with junior partners starting to try and dictate terms for, again, our foreign policy.
Whether it's with the church, I mean, the church is always going to do its own thing or not, but it is part of a pattern of greater criticism from our allies in Europe, far more than we've seen in past administrations.
Some of that might be with Trump's own commentary, but other times there's a greater overreaction towards it.
I mean, Europeans, you know, when they assess on polls, they generally like Democrats more than they like Republican presidents.
I mean, there was good reason not to like George W. Bush.
But then they thought Barack Obama was like the greatest president we've had in many, many years, which that was not the case.
And then they didn't really like Trump.
They liked Biden a lot more, and they certainly had a friendly relationship with Biden.
Even though Biden would make these off the wall remarks, he was also forcing Europe to cripple its economy on behalf of American foreign policy objectives and other things.
And the Biden administration likely played a role in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
And then Europe would practically say, We have no idea who did this, but thank you, America, for looking into it.
To it.
So there's a different reaction towards it.
And I think, you know, it's not like Europeans were not criticizing Trump in the first term, but maybe less so or less ostentatiously so.
And I think the administration feels the need to express itself more assertively when dealing with Europe and these allies.
So it could be seen as part of whatever that conversation revolved around.
I think the report is a little fantastical with their claims, what they kind of try to get across.
But I do think it's a part of a pattern of the administration getting.
Tired of their Europe and their allies constantly criticizing the administration.
And you can even see that with Caroline Levette's comments, I think she made yesterday, of basically promising for America to leave NATO, which is big news.
Whether that happens or not, that is it.
But It is part of this pattern of the administration getting tired of dealing with Western allies in Europe.
And I think that is part of the Vatican's comments about the Trump administration align with European EU criticisms of the administration as well.
I hope, uh, the administration went and locked me up for being loyal to the Pope.
I mean, I don't have a, I probably would not be, uh, depending on what they're fighting over, if they're trying to get the Vatican to deport immigrants, I would have to decide the with the administration on that remark, but I don't have to worry about that.
I don't think it's going to happen.
But where you can find me, I'm on Twitter at Scott M. Greer.
You can also find me on Substack at highly respected.com.
And I have a new book coming out in June called White Pill The Online Right and the Making of Trump's America that can be available for pre order on Amazon and other great places where you pre order books.
He keeps it fairly level headed, I would say, where it's the outrage machine on Twitter.
Right now, you know, you have the, again, like the e caths that are dominating the time.
We also have people that are responding with sort of relitigating some of the sectarianism from the 19th century, which I don't know is particularly useful, especially if you just quiz, you know, your average Catholic United States.
Again, they don't really have too strong of an opinion on Pope Leo.
So with that, we're going to wind this show down.
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I'll be on the show tonight, so I'll see you guys there.
Blair White's coming on, so that'll be interesting.