“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

— Pogo

First of all, let’s announce the good news. Professor David Hawkes has declared war on the forces of anti-Logos in our age, telling us that the “profound hostility to logos,” which “permeates every aspect of modern and especially postmodern culture” is “only the latest in a long historical series of dialectical clashes between logos and eidolon.”1 Eidolon is the Greek word for idol, which is his word for graven images of the sort which should be immediately smashed. Professor Hawkes’ book announces his engagement with the forces of anti-Logos, but does this mean that he supports the Logos? His attack on eidolon gives us some indication of where his sympathies lie, which is another way of saying that Professor Hawkes is an iconoclast in the 16th century meaning of that term.

If conservatism is invariably a defunct revolutionary movement, viewed through the lens of nostalgia, as a way of dealing with the revolutionary spirit’s most recent manifestation, the one currently in power, then David Hawkes is a revolutionary conservative. In this Hawkes is not unlike Edmund Burke, who opposed the French Revolution by being a supporter of the Glorious Revolution in England. When Mary Wollstonecraft, the proto-feminist, asked how far back in English history Burke’s conservatism was willing to go, and whether he was willing to return to the time when Englishmen worshipped bread as God, no answer was forthcoming.

We can say something similar about David Hawkes, whose position is based on an amalgam of obsolete revolutionary movements. He is a nominalist, an iconoclast in the tradition of Andreas Karlstadt and Leo Jud, and a paleo-Marxist who hates the Foucaudian transformation of economic conflict over the means of production which characterized proto-Marxism into the sexual identity politics which characterizes left wing politics in academe today.

Hawkes is also an English professor at the University of Arizona who has been fighting a losing rear-guard action against the queer studies and critical race theorists who have turned our universities into one big Cambodian re-education camp where students squat in the hot sun chanting incomprehensible phrases from Gramsci, Foucault, Joe Buttigieg and a host of lesser lights in the grand climactic battle against Logos in our day. Hawkes is annoyed that “first women, then African-Americans, then homosexuals and, most recently, the queer movement in general, have replaced the working class as the vanguard promoted by revolutionary intellectuals,”2 and his book is an attempt to settle that score. Hawkes is determined to turn back the clock to a time before classical Marxism was superseded as the avant garde of the revolutionary spirit in human history. That moment happened when “the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci . . . first distinguished between the ‘war of position’ (a struggle for physical control of state institutions like parliament, police, and the armed forces) and the ‘war of maneuver,’ a battle for cultural influence in such institutions of ‘civil society’ as the church, the media, the creative arts, and the education system.”3 By the time Hawkes became an English professor at the University of Arizona, “Gramsci’s ‘war of maneuver’ within the cultural institutions of Anglo-American capitalism had effectively been won,” and Hawkes, who had studied English literature under the classical Marxist Terry Eagleton, found himself “marginalized,” along with a “proletariat, whose institutional and ideological power had been decisively crushed over the same period.”4 Thanks to academic interpreters and translators like Cornell West and Joseph Buttigieg, Gramsci got weaponized against the communists themselves as racial and sexual minorities shoved the proletariat aside as the main beneficiaries of a marginality which had become “an end-in-itself.”5

By leaving Michel Foucault out of this equation, Hawkes misses an important fact contributing to this marginalization, namely, the capitalist class’s embrace of sexual liberation. This embrace on the part of both the financial oligarchs, symbolized best by the Rockefellers, and the New Left, symbolized best by the neoconservative David Horowitz, then got weaponized and codified by the CIA, who began studying Foucault in the 1980s. With the collaboration of Buttigieg pere at Notre Dame, the government’s intelligence agencies combined with government funding created the current unwritten constitution of academe, which was then able to engrain in three successive generations the motto of the new regime, which was “Give us unlimited sexual liberation, and we will become docile wage slaves and won’t trouble the oligarchs with demands for economic justice.” This shift of emphasis from decent wages for the working man who needs to support a family to discos and set-asides for queers who are controlled by their sexual compulsions is one of the main reasons why the homosexual replaced the worker as the avant garde of the revolutionary movement in our day.

As Hawkes correctly notes, Buttigieg pere et fils played a major role in this transformation. Gramsci, according to Buttigieg pere, who wormed his way onto an endowed chair at Notre Dame University on the basis of a warmed over doctoral dissertation on James Joyce which retailed all of the modernist cliches he would later ridicule, used “the phenomenon of marginality” to dispossess the proletariat, which had always proven to be ideologically feckless and more interested in banal issues like higher wages, and handed their banner over to truly “marginal” groups like homosexuals, whose war against nature was better suited to the ontology of revolution, as E. M. Forster had pointed out in his homosexual novel Maurice.

The man who carried the Gramscian virus out of its academic host and into the world of national politics was Buttigieg fils, a man Hawkes rightly characterizes as someone who “could not be less interested in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. To the contrary, Buttigieg Jr. is deeply committed to consolidating the rule of financial capital. He is just as committed to furthering the assimilation of homosexuality into mainstream culture. The obvious question raised by his candidacy is the nature of the connection between these commitments.”

Having lost that war, Hawkes has been forced to conduct a rearguard action from the academic equivalent of the caves in Okinawa after World War II. But in the 1520s, Hawkes would have been fighting on the front lines of the revolutionary movement, at the side of Thomas Muenzer in the Bauernaufstand. Without losing his place at the heart of the struggle, he then could have migrated north to Muenster, where in the 1530s with Jan Bookelzoon, the tailor king as his spiritual guide, he would have joined forces with the horny nuns and priests who flocked to Bookelzoon’s banner in support of the communality of property (but perhaps not the communality of wives) as a proto-Marxist avant la lettre. Hawkes would have then joined with Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli in their attack on the Catholic notion of transubstantiation. Finally, as an iconoclast he would have picked up a crowbar and engaged in the Beeldenstorm in Antwerp in 1566 after having had his mind wrecked by the Scholasticism of William of Ockham, from whom he received the final component of his eclectic identity as a nominalist.

No one was more qualified to write a book on beauty than the late Sir Roger Scruton. He was a man of impeccable taste and cultivated manners who could charm an audience even when, after being invited to a symposium at Notre Dame to talk about beauty, he ended up talking about wine instead. He most probably could have come back in a year and talked about beer and charmed that audience just as much a second time, but death intervened.

He was especially qualified in the field of music, having not only the ability to play an instrument but the ability to compose musical pieces as well. Das Rheingold is a brilliant critique of the mythic origins of Capitalism in theft, but Scruton turns his review of it into an attack on the failed revolutionary socialism—Wagner took part in the revolution of 1848 with Bakunin—which motivated Wagner to take to the barricades in Dresden and write the opera in the first place. When Scruton turns Nibelheim into a “police state” which is “perhaps the first premonition in Western art of Orwell’s 1984,” instead of viewing it as the City of London and symbol of capitalism as state-sponsored usury, he misses the point in a way that defies explanation. His analysis of Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold is musically acute but philosophically and economically tone deaf because the same conservative world view which allowed Scruton to charm his audience at Notre Dame is based on an ethnocentrism which blinds him to the reality of what Wagner is saying here. Scruton can’t seem to get over the fact that Wagner had the misfortune of being born a German, and that he needs to turn him into a proper English conservative by dragooning him into the anti-Communist crusade to make up for that birth defect.

What is true of his book on music is a fortiori true of his book on beauty. Scruton aspires to universality when he defines beauty as “a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature.” Because of its firm foundation in Being, “the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.” Unfortunately, Scruton then loses his train of thought along the way of telling us what he means by those and other undefined terms. Scruton traces his understanding of beauty back to Plotinus, referring to beauty as a transcendental, a notion which still had not been universally recognized at the time of Aquinas, who dealt with it as an addendum to his thought on Being. According to Plato and Plotinus, “beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given.” Scruton then compares beauty to truth and goodness, making it “one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.” Scholastics called those “ultimate values” transcendentals, which meant that they, along with “the One,” described the fundamental and ultimate aspects of Being, or as Scruton put it “Why believe p? Because it is true. Why want x? Because it is good. Why look at y? Because it is beautiful.”

Instead of accepting the ontological foundation of beauty as the platform upon which he erects his own aesthetics, Scruton begins to quibble with the Angelic Doctor, accusing Aquinas of making “theological claims” about beauty, when this is not the case. Scuton undermines his whole aesthetics by erecting a roadblock which divides its history between then and now when he says apodictically that the Angelic Doctor’s “subtle and comprehensive reasoning” is “not a vision that we can assume.” As a result, Scruton proposes “to set it to one side, considering the concept of beauty without making any theological claims.”

Throughout Scruton’s book we are subjected to the same self-defeating behavior. Scruton opens the door to what seems like a promising solution to “a deep difficulty in the philosophy of beauty” only to slam it shut again after we have been granted a tantalizing vision of our goal. In this regard, Scruton tells us that Aquinas’s understanding of beauty is “worth noting” because he “regarded truth, goodness and unity as ‘transcendentals’—features of reality possessed by all things, since they are aspects of Being, ways in which the supreme gift of Being is made manifest to the understanding.” Beauty is a manifestation of Being, and this fact provides the best response to those who claim “that beauty is a matter of appearance, not of being.” Then after affirming that beauty makes a reasonable claim about its object, Scruton takes it all back again by claiming that these “reasons do not compel the judgement, and can be rejected without contradiction,” forcing him to wonder “So are they reasons or aren’t they?” Whenever Scruton is on the verge of drawing definite conclusions, he has to run the idea first by his ethnic superego, an imaginary figure made up of the ghosts of people like John Locke and David Hume, who have the final say on everything, “creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail.”

Pace, Sir Roger, but there is nothing theological about Scholastic aesthetics. Aquinas’s ontology has been influenced by Revelation, but the rudimentary aesthetic principles we can derive from that ontology do not determine his aesthetics, nor does it determine the aesthetic theories of those who paved the way for a deeper understanding of beauty.

Why then does Sir Roger feel that the Angelic Doctor’s “subtle and comprehensive reasoning” is “not a vision that we can assume.” In his autobiography Gentle Regrets, Scruton tells us that “there is consolation without truth, as we know from the history of religion.” The real question is, however, whether Scruton believes that there can be beauty without truth.

Solemn Rituals

Sir Roger Scruton was born into a troubled lower middle-class family and grew up “in a nondescript corner of post-war England,” where “nothing could conceivably happen . . . except the things that happen anywhere: a bus passing, a dog barking, football on the wireless, shepherd’s pie for tea.” After discovering the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Scruton realized that art provided a way out of that dreary existence. Scruton associated art with the English upper class, who lived hidden behind a wall which he could see from the library that provided the Hermetic texts, which he “read like an alchemist, searching for the spell that would admit me to that secret world, where shadows fall on tonsured lawns, and the aesthetic (or was it ascetic?) way of life occurs in solemn rituals after tea.”

After serving his apprenticeship as “a barbarian let loose in a library” (a phrase he appropriated from Ezra Pound, Scruton ended up at Cambridge University, where he had the misfortune to study philosophy as “bequeathed by Russell, Wittgenstein and Moore.” Logical positivism convinced him that any philosophy with any connection to the Logos of human existence (or its rejection, as in the case of Nietzsche) was founded on “nothing more than megalomaniac fantasies, implausible analogies and false distinctions founded neither in logic nor in fact.” Realizing that “the new philosophy I studied proved no more satisfactory to me than the science it had replaced,” Scruton gravitated toward culture as a “more important way of seeing things,” and that eventually led him to aesthetics.

On October 3, 1998, Pope John Paul II beatified Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac at the national shrine of Marija Bistrica in front of 500,000 Croats.1 The next step was canonization. On February 10, 2014, the memorial of Blessed Stepinac, Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, announced that the canonization was possible in the year 2015 during the Eucharistic celebration over which he presided at St. Jerome’s church in Rome.2 What looked like a sure thing in 1998, however, never happened, and why it never happened has become an object of intense speculation and discussion ever since.

The Croats, as we have come to expect, blamed the Serbs, largely because Pope Francis convoked “a commission of Catholic and Orthodox leaders,” under the presidency of a representative of the Holy See, to examine the wartime record of Blessed Aloysius. Pope Francis established the commission in “May 2016 after receiving a letter from the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church Irinej, who stated his opposition to the cardinal’s canonization.”3 Instead of coming to an agreement on the life of one of the most heroic figures in the post-World War II Church in eastern Europe, the commission concluded its work within the foreseen time frame of one year, it terminated its investigation in the summer of 2017 without reaching any results “agreeing to disagree about the Croatian cardinal’s cause for canonization.”4

When Pope Francis was asked about Stepinac on his return from Bulgaria on March 17, 2019,5 he replied:

The canonization of Stepinac is a historic case. He is a virtuous man for this Church, which has proclaimed him Blessed, you can pray [through his intercession]. But at a certain moment of the canonization process there are unclear points, historic points, and I should sign the canonization, it is my responsibility, I prayed, I reflected, I asked advice, and I saw that I should ask Irinej, a great patriarch, for help. We made a historic commission together and we worked together, and both Irinej and I are interested in the truth. Who is helped by a declaration of sanctity if the truth is not clear? We know that [Stepinac] was a good man, but to make this step I looked for the help of Irinej and they are studying. First of all, the commission was set up and gave its opinion. They are studying other sources, deepening some points so that the truth is clear. I am not afraid of the truth, I am not afraid. I am afraid of the judgment of God.6

As in so many instances lately, Pope Francis once again spread confusion in the very act of making a clarification. If Stepinac’s life is an example of heroic virtue, as Pope John Paul II claimed, what’s holding back the canonization? Or is he, as the pope says, “a virtuous man for this church” alone? And if so, what does that mean? At what point did his status become unclear after his beatification? Shouldn’t the committee which approved his beatification have looked into unclear, historic points before beatifying him? Or are we talking about the difference between John Paul II, who like Stepinac lived under both Nazi and Communist rule, and Francis, who experienced neither? According to Matija Stahan, the Serbs presented no new evidence and Irinej made use of sources that have “perpetuated allegations fabricated by the Yugoslav government after World War II to remove Stepinac from the public as a symbol of Christianity and Croatian patriotism.”7 As proof that Stepinac was not guilty of the crimes which Patriarch Irinej laid at his feet, Stahan cites evidence from Stepinac: His life and Time by Robin Harris, who refers to the campaign to defame Stepinac as the “project”:

That project—as Stepinac himself well understood—meant that, in practice, the Yugoslav Communist Party and elements within the Serbian Orthodox Church, which otherwise had nothing in common, shared a joint goal. This consisted of demonizing the Catholic Church (to which nearly all Croats belonged) and the Croatian nation (which numerically, culturally and economically was, alone, in a position to challenge Serbian supremacy). The existence of this unholy and unspoken combination helps explain why the black legend against Stepinac was so persistent and its promotion so effective.8

The bland tone we have come to expect from press releases issued by official Vatican commissions failed to allay the outrage and betrayal Catholic Croats felt at the hand of the Vatican. Catholics had been suspicious of the commission from its inception. In 2016, Professor Ronald J. Rychlak, who has written about Pope Pius XII, whose canonization had been stalled by the Vatican for lack of a miracle—even though he had been proclaimed “venerabilis” in 2009—announced that the Serbian case against Stepinac was “a false narrative created by Soviet agents.”9

Stepinac’s sermons were “prohibited … from being published, because they were so strong against the Ustashe,” Rychlak said. Instead, his words were secretly printed and circulated and occasionally broadcast over the radio. He also severely condemned the Ustashe’s destruction of Zagreb’s main synagogue in 1941 and in an October 1943 homily, the archbishop condemned notions of racial superiority.

Robin Harris’s 2016 biography of Stepinac joined the chorus of outrage which Rychlak articulated in the same year. Stepinac, according to Harris, was the victim of a Serbian-Communist conspiracy. His show trial was Serbian payback for the show trial of Draza Mihailovic, the Serbian leader of the guerilla group known as the Chetniks, to whom Harris attributes war crimes of the same magnitude as those committed by the Ustashe, the Croatian fascist state. “The stoking of hatred against the Catholic Church remained a means of keeping the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serb nationalists sympathetic to the regime. Tito, under pressure from the Americans, would later justify his reluctance to free Stepinac by referring directly to Serbian Orthodox sensitivities.”10 According to Harris, the controversy which surrounded the canonization of Cardinal Stepinac in 2016 can be laid directly at the feet of the Communists, who “had systematically played on Serbian desires for revenge by knowingly exaggerating Catholic Croat misdeeds.”11

Serbian nationalism may be responsible for slandering Stepinac’s memory in the former Yugoslavia, but Harris attributes the ongoing animus against Stepinac abroad which stalled his canonization to “propaganda from Communist circles.”12 “Lenin’s imitators in Yugoslavia,” Harris continues “have, indeed, found plenty of ‘useful idiots’ in the West, though the idiocy is often concealed behind a veil of erudition.”13

It is worth noting that Harris wrote these lines 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and 36 years after the death of Tito. To say that “Lenin’s imitators” were hard at work in the West stalling Stepinac’s canonization in 2017 is nothing short of preposterous, but the fact that Harris made the claim is a significant lead and needs to be examined more closely in order to discover the true identity of the group which is hiding behind the cover of a now defunct communism.

Harris spends a lot of time defending Stepinac’s actions during the war by rebutting the allegations of writers like John Cornwell, who claimed that “priests, invariably Franciscans, took a leading part in the massacres”14 of Serbs at concentration camps like Jasenovac, where a renegade Franciscan who came to be known as Brother Satan engaged in the slaughter, but only after he had been excommunicated by the Church as soon as they found out what he was doing.

Thirty years ago, almost to the day, I spoke at Hillsdale College, the bastion of conservative academic thought nestled in the woods and hills of southern Michigan. My speech took place one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, at what we can say with hindsight was the high noon of the conservative era in American history. As the English conservative William Wordsworth put it when he was a young and enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

I tried to remember the feeling then as we drove along a scenic route that only Siri, our computer, could compute, through wooded small farms, all of which had Trump for president signs in their front yards. Well, maybe not all of them, but whenever one of those farms declared its allegiance in the recently concluded 2020 presidential election it was for Trump. Not one Biden sign was visible. Michigan was a hotly contested state largely because of the draconian COVID lock-down which its Democratic governor had imposed on lower end entrepreneurs.

The group of students who invited me to speak were solidly in favor of Trump as well. Some wore Make America Great Again hats as an act of defiance against the oligarchic coup d’etat which was in full swing at the moment. The oligarchic mainstream press had anointed Biden as president elect, and tech giants like Google were censoring anyone who hinted that voter fraud had put Biden over the top, at least in the mind of the fourth estate.

I forgot to mention that this meeting had to be held in a secret off campus location. The students could have been mistaken for white boys, but they were all Catholic ethnics of mixed European heritage, not unlike me. The only exceptions were the students who were taking RCIA instruction to become Catholics. All of them were familiar with my YouTube videos. Some had read my books. One young catechumen whose build indicated that he could have played for the Hillsdale football team, if they still had one, told me that he listened to my “God has a Plan for Your Life” video while driving to work. The video’s message moved him to tears, so much so that he had to pull over. Shortly after that experience, he decided to become a Catholic.

If these young men had a political affiliation, it was America First, but sympathy to that point of view had been banned from Hillsdale’s campus, which is why we were meeting where we were. When I asked what the name of their club was, one young wit said, “The Charles Lindbergh Aviators Club.” These young men had invited me not to praise conservatism, but to bury it. Conservatism died four years ago with the election of Donald Trump. By the time we met together in wake of the 2020 presidential election conservatism’s cold inert corpse has been lying un-mourned in the political equivalent of the county morgue. It was now time to give conservatism a decent burial, but before we could do that we had to write its obituary and mention the role which Michigan in general and Hillsdale College in particular played in its rise and fall.

Beginning at the beginning. I waved a first edition, signed copy of The Conservative Mind by the late Russell Kirk, Michigan’s most famous philosopher and formerly a lecturer at Hillsdale College. After basing his analysis of conservatism’s roots on Edmund Burke’s hope that “Providence would not abandon mankind to Jacobinism,” Kirk went on to place that hope in “that American society which John Adams did so much to guide into conservative constitutions and ways of enduring justice.”[1]

Having defeated fascism in World War II, America was now positioned in Kirk’s eyes to become “the Providential instrument of this redemption.”[2] The first step in Kirk’s “general plan of action” was “an affirmation of the moral nature of society.” Here again Kirk appealed to John Adams, who affirmed that “true happiness” could only be found in virtue. “Family piety and public honor must be shored up. A people who are arrogant, avaricious, and crass will wither. Americans still are nearly as responsive to ethical considerations as they were in Tocqueville’s day. They can be led to a life of dignity and order,”[3] but only if they follow Adams’ understanding of the necessity of moral behavior for the success of any form of self-government. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[4] America had no constitution which functioned in the absence of a moral people, according to John Adams, and history would prove him right in ways which Russell Kirk could not imagine in 1953.

The man who gave me Russell Kirk’s book was Henry Regnery, head of the Regnery Press of Chicago and Kirk’s publisher. Henry was a German-American whose family came from the Moselle Valley during the 19th century when Germans were a powerful force in American life, especially in Chicago. When the American exposition was held there in 1893, German was the main language spoken.

German was also the main language spoken at the Chicago symphony, at least until World War I, when the director of that symphony announced that due to political considerations everyone in the symphony would have to speak English. “Is that clear?” he asked after his little speech, prompting one member of the symphony to ask from the back of the room “Was hat er gesagt?”

The American Proposition

The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, an important year in the progress of the American Empire. Where was what Hegel would have called the Weltgeist in 1953? It was in Tehran, where Kermit Roosevelt orchestrated a coup which deposed Muhammad Mossadegh and installed the American puppet Shah Reza Pahlavi in his place. The year 1953 marked the emergence of the CIA as a player on the world stage. Stalin died in the same year.

Shortly after Stalin’s death, a man by the name of C.D. Jackson said that by losing Stalin, America had lost the best salesman for the American Proposition. C.D. Jackson was simultaneously an employee of the CIA and TIME magazine, where he functioned as Harry Luce’s right-hand man. TIME magazine at this point in time was the propaganda ministry for the United States of America, and one of the main vehicles for the anti-Communist crusade, which would find its culmination in 1991, which is where I came in. During my first visit, I was taken on a short tour of the campus by Lissa Roche Jackson, an attractive lady who introduced herself as “the wife of George IV, the mother of George V, and the daughter-in-law of George III, the man who put Hillsdale on the conservative map when he became president of the college in 1971.

Two years before the annus mirabilis of 1953, Henry Regnery published God and Man at Yale, another seminal conservative document, whose author was William F. Buckley. In the annus mirabilis of 1953, the CIA also got into the magazine business. One of the magazines they created as a front was Encounter, which was edited by the English poet Stephen Spender and the then unknown Irving Kristol, who went on to become the father of neoconservatism.

After playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film The Passion of the Christ, actor Jim Caviezel became the poster boy for Catholics who wanted to use the film to share their faith. Playing that role also got Caviezel blacklisted from Hollywood films. In 2011, Caviezel told First Baptist Church in Orlando, Florida that he had “been rejected by my own industry” after playing Christ in Gibson’s film. Responding to Gibson’s warning that “you’ll never work in this town again,” Caviezel said, “we all have to embrace our crosses,” and went ahead with the role, only to learn that “Jesus is as controversial now as he has ever been” and that “not much has changed in 2,000 years.” Seven years after the release of The Passion of the Christ, Caviezel tried to put a Christian interpretation on the wreck of his career by claiming that “we have to give up our names, our reputations, our lives to speak the truth.”

Caviezel, unfortunately, can’t distinguish between his reputation and his career because even if Passion wrecked his Hollywood film career (but not his ability to earn money on TV), it established his reputation as only a \$600 million world-wide blockbuster could do. The film industry may have known about him after The Count of Monte Cristo, but the world recognized him after The Passion of the Christ.

This, of course, leads to the next question. If Caviezel is willing to risk his career “to speak the truth,” why did he become involved in an anti-Iranian propaganda film like the newly released and quickly forgotten Infidel? At this point, we will let Caviezel speak for himself, as captured during a Fox news report flogging the film:

First of all, my job is to get people into the theater. Second, how is this relevant today? It’s relevant because we have this thing call cancel culture and if Christians don’t watch out, it will be canceling Christianity as well because a lot of our pastors, our bishops, our priests, they’re laying right over; they’re letting their churches be burned. Alright, how do we know that? Well, it’s right there in the news. Statues being ripped down. They don’t say anything. And I watched a movie that Mel Gibson did, Braveheart, where you have the English, who are the bad guys, against the Scots, but the real bad guys were the guys who were collaborating. That’s why we’re in this situation right now. We can’t go to churches; we can’t go into our church. Why? Because it could get contaminated, right? So why are we on airplanes? I have friends that have committed suicide. I have [Navy] Seal buddies who have lost seven of their friends, committing suicide, and would it have helped to get into a church especially during this time? Absolutely. And is it good for mental illness? Yes, it is. The collaborators in our faith, this is where the persecution starts. You’ve got to have guys in your faith that won’t stand up to the governors, that won’t stand up to the mayors. And that’s why the Gospels are very much alive right now. I got to play Jesus. Some of us love Peter or Paul. But there are many of us now who are flat out Judases, okay? Or they’re Pontius Pilates or they’re Pharisees, and it’s a bloody shame if you can’t tell the difference between a priest or a bishop and a politician. And it’s really sad, but this is called luke-warmness. And Christ has a very special place for them, and they know it.

After the awkward pause which ensued when Jim ran out of things to say, Shannon Bream, the Fox News Info Babe, jumped in and opined: “Well, we’re out of time, but it’s important for us to be sharing our faith.” Jim then signed off with a disgusted look on his face. Or was it frustration at having been so inarticulate? Or was he frustrated by the fact that he was trying to make sense of a film that was as inarticulate in its way on the screen as he was on Fox News. So why are we on airplanes, Jim?

Infidel is certainly a film about how “it’s important for us to be sharing our faith.” In Infidel, Caviezel plays a “Christian blogger” who gets betrayed by an Iranian friend, who in spite of his secular banter at a birthday party for his daughter is a violent Islamic fundamentalist. We find this out later when the cops remove one of the Persian carpets on his wall, revealing the door to his secret Islamic man-cave, a room replete with a picture of the late Qasem Soleimani and another picture of himself preparing to fire an rpg at the same type of infidel he just invited to his daughter’s birthday party. During the course of the party, the Iranian father becomes upset with his daughter, who is dating an infidel who drives a fast car and nearly rear-ended the car which Caviezel and his wife drove to the party. The daughter mysteriously disappears, and we learn later that her father, the admirer of General Soleimani, murdered her for assimilating in the same way that he did into Washington society, or was it for her lack of duplicity? Either way, the point is clear. You can’t trust an Iranian. They may talk a good game, but sooner or later they will reveal their true colors.

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