November 2025

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls: A new feature on Elon Musk’s X has given deeper insight into the online “America First” movement. (Jack Revell, Nov. 23 2025, Daily Beast)

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.

In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.

The funniest exposure since the Venona files.

THE rIGHT HAS ALWAYS HATED UNIVERSALISM:

Tocqueville versus the Groypers (Samuel Gregg, 11/17/25, Law & Liberty)

[F]rom the very beginning of his acquaintance with Gobineau, Tocqueville made clear his firm disapproval of the younger man’s opinions. That especially concerned the racial determinism that steadily pervaded Gobineau’s writings. In a letter penned before Gobineau’s Essay appeared, Tocqueville wrote:

I have never concealed from you that I have a strong prejudice against what seems to be your leading idea which strikes me as belonging, I confess, to that family of materialist doctrines and to be one of its most dangerous members, since it involves the fatality of constitution applied not only to the individual but to those collections of individuals that are called races.

Tocqueville didn’t deny that there were often profound cultural differences between, say, Italians, Germans, Russians, Persians, Algerians, and Mexicans. But the notion that peoples have unchanging aptitudes and even fixed destinies by virtue of their ethnicity was described by Tocqueville as “unprovable.” For one thing, he noted, such claims ignored the hard-to-deny fact that historical changes have many causes, and that sorting out which ones are more important than others is always challenging. Monocausal explanations for political and social trends, Tocqueville thought, were invariably wrong.

This empirical criticism, however, was accompanied by Tocqueville querying Gobineau’s motivations for advancing his thesis of racial determinism. Point-blank, he asked Gobineau:

What possible interest can there be in persuading miserable people living in barbarism, idleness, or slavery that, by virtue of their race, there is nothing that can be done to improve their condition, change their mœurs, or modify their government? Don’t you see that from your doctrine derives naturally all the evils which permanent inequality gives birth to: pride, violence, scorn for one’s fellows, tyranny, and abjection in all its forms?

The unspoken answer to Tocqueville’s question was that Gobineau’s propositions had little to do with science or the pursuit of truth. Instead, they had everything to do with a desire to rationalize serious injustices and deny freedom to millions of people. For as Tocqueville wrote elsewhere, Gobineau’s racial determinism led to “a very great restriction, if not to a complete abolition of human liberty.”

Against such positions, Tocqueville affirmed a proposition that he regarded as self-evident: that being the essential “unity of the human race.” For Tocqueville, there were no superhumans or subhumans. There were simply humans. That self-evident truth, Tocqueville believed, was foundational to his brand of liberalism as well as natural law and Christian morality. By contrast, Tocqueville insisted, Gobineau’s suppositions about race led to the conclusion that we live in a world in which “there are only victors and vanquished, masters and slaves by fact of birth.” It was no coincidence, Tocqueville stated, that Gobineau’s “doctrines are approved, cited and commented upon … [by] the owners of negroes in favor of eternal servitude.”

MAGA HAS ALWAYS BEEN WITH US AND ALWAYS HATED AMERICA:

Two Forms of Catholic Nationalism (James M. Patterson, 5/25/23, Law & Liberty)

…Sheen endorsed a form of Americanism, which was by this time in favor with the authorities in Rome. Despite Sheen’s use of Americanist rhetoric (or, arguably, because of it), Pope Pius XI elevated Sheen to Auxiliary Bishop of New York under Cardinal Francis Spellman, while also making Sheen the Director of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. In 1940, he said:

Americanism, as understood by our Founding Fathers, is the political expression of the Catholic doctrine concerning man. Firstly, his rights come from God, and therefore cannot be taken away; secondly, the State exists to preserve them. … The recognition of the inalienable rights of the human person is Americanism, or, to put it another way, an affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of man. … As a political document, [the Declaration of Independence] affirms what the Gospel affirms as religion: the worth of man. Christ died on a cross for him, and governments are founded on account of him. He is the object of love theologically and politically—the source of rights, inalienable and sacred because when duly protected and safeguarded, he helps in the creation of a kingdom of Caesar which is the steppingstone to the Kingdom of God.

At this time, Sheen condemned nationalism as the elevation of the nation over God, and named Mussolini its chief advocate. He accused Adolph Hitler of valuing race over God, while Stalin made an idol of the proletariat. Sheen made these statements in homilies and public engagements, but most of all over the radio on The Catholic Hour, which broadcast out of New York starting in 1930, sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men.

In this period, the separationist position was supplied by Coughlin, whose 1931 radio show The Hour of Power, broadcast from Detroit, Michigan. Originally, Coughlin’s mission was to teach listeners the basics of the Catholic faith in a dual effort to catechize Catholics and evangelize non-Catholics. After the Great Depression began, his radio shows began to take on a more political and conspiratorial tone. He became an enthusiastic supporter of Roosevelt, but regularly indulged in antisemitic paranoia that earned him a large audience but little gratitude from the new president. Coughlin took that rejection personally and turned his program against the president and the New Deal. He began to rely on fascist and Nazi propaganda that was introduced into his radio program by agents in Coughlin’s Social Justice Party, and later his Christian Front.

Coughlin argued on the air that Jews wanted Americans to enter the Second World War, hoping the United States would bolster the flagging Jewish conspiracy to create the Soviet Union and spread communism over the world. He therefore urged his listeners to be both anti-war and anti-America.