Above: Jack Posobiec at CPAC, with my own edit of his face
Religion is compatible with communism, and Christianity especially has a connection to communism’s altruistic ideas. This is why every existing socialist country is able to function quite well with Christian churches existing in their borders, and why Nicaragua’s socialist government has made Christianity a core part of its guiding ideology. Nietzsche, the pro-hierarchy philosopher, argued against Christianity. He felt that its central teachings share the socialist desire to empower the oppressed and exploited. Now, many of those who are building socialism have affirmed Nietzsche’s fears by concluding: yes, Christianity shares important traits with communism, and we’re using that to our advantage.
With the Heritage Foundation’s introduction of its radical right-wing takeover plan Project 2025, and the media’s reaction towards this, the ruling class is trying to prevent Christianity from assuming that progressive role within the United States. Both the lower levels of capital which are aligned with Project 2025, and the intelligence forces which advance the goals of monopoly finance capital, are working to keep Christianity a tool for reactionary politics.
This is what the main voices on the left are missing in their efforts to expose the Christian right: there are covert intel manipulations happening at this moment that have been manipulating both the Christian right itself, and the left-liberal discourse around it. There’s a large element of global Christians who share beliefs that can potentially turn into anti-imperialism; for instance, many of the Catholics who’ve opposed Pope Francis have at the same time come to support Putin. Plenty of these Catholics could become Marxists, or at least committed antiwar activists who can ally with Marxists. So the feds are carrying out psyops intended to prevent these individuals from further developing their counter-hegemonic beliefs, and becoming part of an anti-imperialist united front.
These psyops have two goals: to funnel conservatives with revolutionary potential towards far-right religious culture war politics, and to convince Marxists that Christianity is nothing more than their enemy. Or at least that the non-left elements of the people hold no revolutionary potential, rendering communists isolated to the secular minority. This outcome, where the highest levels of capital succeed at sabotaging the class struggle, is the truly realistic dystopian scenario which we need to worry about. Not the prospect of Trump successfully using Project 2025 as a plan for becoming a dictator, which simply isn’t plausible. The lower levels of capital which Trump represents aren’t capable of overcoming the deep state. Despite Trump’s anti-deep state posturing, his support for Zionism and the new cold war make him a figure who the feds can ultimately keep under control. And they hope to also gain such influence over the illiberal religious social forces which are behind Trump.
Up until when anti-wokeness recently became the primary narrative tool of the psyop machine, these intel operations mainly took the form of efforts to suppress certain religious groups. A House Judiciary Committee press release from last year described an effort by the FBI to target traditional Catholics, under the rationale that this is necessary for preventing domestic terrorism:
The Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have been investigating the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) categorization of certain Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists. While the FBI claims it “does not categorize investigations as domestic terrorism based on the religious beliefs—to include Catholicism—of the subject involved,” an FBI-wide memorandum originating from the FBI’s Richmond Field Office did just that. Under the guise of tackling the threat of domestic terrorism, the memorandum painted so-called certain “radical-traditionalist Catholics” (RTCs) as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of “threat mitigation.” The FBI’s Richmond memorandum is a startling reminder that Americans’ civil liberties and core Constitutional rights must be vigorously guarded against government overreach, including in this case from an overzealous federal law enforcement agency.
This was unsurprising, given that the state increasingly seeks to wage war against any social force which presents an alternative to the liberal cultural hegemony. The real reason why the FBI has gone after traditional Catholics is because they represent a break from the hyper-individualist paradigm that finance capital views as optimal. This doesn’t mean they’re inherently revolutionary, as the vast majority of them are at this stage right-wing anti-communists. It simply means their strong belief in God, the family, and the church places them outside today’s predominant liberal orientation, which says there is no objective truth and encourages people not to be loyal towards any collective. It’s for this reason that they’ve been placed on the national security state’s list of groups to keep an eye on.
Though this continues to be true for traditional Catholics and other types of conservative Christians, the security state has lately also been seeking to recruit them to advance its aims. Under the right circumstances, illiberal groups can be used as counter-gangs; as tools for diverting mass passions towards ideological trends that the state guides. Now that the Gaza genocide has made wokeness into a less effective narrative tool, and the elites have pivoted towards a controlled anti-woke backlash, they’re promoting a version of illiberal Christianity that’s designed to impede revolutionary consciousness. That purely furthers the culture war, making it incompatible with class struggle or anti-imperialism.
The report about the FBI op to infiltrate traditional Catholics is one of the big pieces of evidence that the intelligence community is doing this. That’s because it follows in the pattern of how U.S. intelligence has used jihadist sentiments to create Muslim counter-gangs. The FBI heavily works to infiltrate Mosques, surveying the Muslim community and entrapping their targets into Islamic terror plots which the feds can take credit for “stopping.” But it also uses its manipulation tactics to radicalize Muslims into joining U.S. imperialist proxy forces, such as ISIS, so that it can mobilize them towards actual terror attacks.
That’s what the feds want to do with the Christian conservatives whose circles they’re infiltrating: fuel the culture war grievances of these conservatives, and solidify their role as agents for fanatical anti-communism. It’s unlikely that the deep state will try to mobilize these right-wing counter-gangs towards committing actual violence, because making the right into liberalism’s main paramilitary force would discredit the government. (The left anti-communists in “Antifa” are a much more culturally palatable candidate for such a role.) The deep state certainly seeks to channel the religious right’s passions towards anti-communist paranoia, though. And that’s where the other big piece of evidence for intelligence involvement comes in: the role of Jack Posobiec, the far-right demagogue who’s also a former Naval intelligence officer.
CNN had the perfect thing to react to when Posobiec held up a cross at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, and said: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this, right here.” It’s extremely odd that Posobiec chose this particular combination of words and ideas to include in his statement. Because the sentiment he communicates—that January 6 was good because it represented a blow against democracy—is not the prevailing interpretation of the Capitol Hill riot among conservatives.
Virtually no conservative would think it’s a good idea to strengthen the Democrat perception that January 6 was not only an entirely organic development which had no federal involvement behind it; but also an intentional effort to hurt democracy. We’ve seen conservatives say that January 6 was Antifa storming the capital, or that it was an originally legal protest which got manipulated by federal agents (something that actually has quite a lot of evidence). But only one faction within the right takes the stance on January 6 that Posobiec does. This is the faction represented by Steve Bannon, who was standing on the stage with Posobiec at that moment and concurred with his comment.
Bannon is a special kind of anti-communist political actor, because he uses the tactic of co-opting communist language and ideas in highly specific ways. Bannon has said: “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Where have we also seen a project by the far right to carry out a radical upheaval by tapping into the same social elements which could otherwise side with communism? We’ve seen this in the original fascist movement. In the effort by Mussolini to put into practice the ideas of George Sorel, the theorist who posited that the essence of class struggle is violence and therefore a socialist’s goal should be to cultivate an elite of zealous fighters.
Such a notion was in essence reactionary, because it opposed the people being able to drive the revolution. It depicted the vast majority of the people as being unable to bring history forward, mandating that a tiny group of warriors do battle against the establishment on their own. Mussolini, who said that he owed everything to Sorel, broke from the Marxist-Leninist view on revolution because of this idea. He came to put forward a warped version of Leninism that acted to turn the state into a weapon against the actual revolutionary forces, drove Italy to pursue the most nakedly brutal forms of imperialism within Ethiopia, and had the country follow Germany down the path of genocidal warfare in Europe itself. That’s the role which the fed-aligned “dissident right” has: an appendage for finance capital. A tool to help the elites advance their plans for further war and degrowth.
The intelligence effort to channel mass disillusionment into reactionary rage, and to use this for cultivating Christian counter-gangs, is raising the potential for American society to be further destabilized. So much that the deep state may at some point lose control over its own proxies, and bring about a type of chaos that’s no longer controlled. Because whether the deep state wants these far-right Christian groups to get violent or not, their leaders are increasingly working to put together militias, as well as making threats. They’re also using real-estate front companies to buy up large amounts of land, effectively giving them jurisdiction over entire communities and the ability to create massive militia training compounds. Since there’s only so much the feds can do to control the members of this project, it’s possible that at some point they’ll go through with their stated plans to become fully rogue, and launch a domestic holy war.
Such an attempt to instigate a left-right civil conflict wouldn’t succeed on a substantial enough scale for these militias to become the main threat towards communists. These militias are fringe, and lack true support among most of the MAGA base. So their hubristic attempt at a greater, violent territorial grab may ironically create an inter-capitalist conflict. One that the proletarian movement can exploit. The question is whether communists will see beyond the liberal narratives about Christianity being nothing more than a reactionary enemy, and expand the workers struggle beyond the “left.” If we do this, we’ll be able to frustrate the recruitment efforts of the reactionaries by drawing more people into communism and anti-imperialism, creating a front that can defeat monopoly capital.
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