Within hours of the publication of the leaked memo from the FBI’s Richmond office targeting RTC or “radical traditionalist Catholics,” Tucker Carlson weighed in by launching an attack on the FBI, claiming that they tried “to manufacture crimes against sincere Catholics” and their “ideology.” “The Bill of Rights,” Carlson continued, “prevents government from weighing in on religious questions. They don’t get to decide whether your religion is good or bad. … But the FBI has decided if you’re too sincere about Catholicism, you’re a criminal.”1

Tucker Carlson, as I have said many times, is the only main-stream media pundit who comes close to doing journalism in any real sense of the term. His analysis was a good Episcopalian take on the issue, but then the spin doctors went to work. Charlie Kirk, the Kochsucker in charge of Turning Point USA, announced that “The FBI was just caught plotting to target Catholics who attend Latin Mass using SPLC rhetoric as justification to treat them as enemies of the state. The KGB didn’t go away. They just got the FBI to adopt their tactics.”2

Kirk turns the narrative into a liturgical intra-Catholic conflict, by completely ignoring what the FBI meant by RMVE or “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” or who exactly the SPLC considered a threat.

In its Appendix D, the leaked January 23, 2023 FBI memo, which was classified as “FBI internal use only. Do not disseminate externally,” explains the FBI's growing concern and the ideology it is actually defending:

…in light of the ongoing polarization characterizing the US political environment […] policy issues of mutual interest to RMVEs and RTC adherents will remain in the public spotlight. Catalyzing events in which RMVEs and RTC adherents might have common cause include legislation or judicial decisions in areas such as abortion rights, immigration, affirmative action, and LGBTQ protections. During this same 12 to 24 month period, the overal RTC community is likely to … show modest growth based on potential disaffection with mainline Catholic churches on social issues in the aforementioned areas, providing RMVEs a persistent Catholic-oriented base with which to interact.

Kirk is a recipient of funding from the Koch brothers’ foundation and as such is paid to move the terms of the debate into the manageable but irrelevant confines of conservatism as the Koch brothers define those terms. In this Kirk is like Ben Shapiro, who uses the Daily Wire to manage the Right to Life movement by excluding any mention of the fact that abortion is a fundamental Jewish value. Timothy Gordon followed suit when he tweeted that “FBI Targets TLM [The Latin Mass] Catholics.”3

The Post Millennial also ignored who was in the FBI's leaked SPLC list and derailed the story by turning it into a racial issue:

The FBI believes that white supremacy has taken root in Catholics who prefer Latin Mass, reports whistleblower Kyle Seraphin on UncoverDC. The FBI’s Richmond, VA office took their findings from the widely debunked Southern Poverty Law Center, which was cited in an intelligence bulletin. In essence, Catholics who prefer Latin Mass who are classified as “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics,” per the FBI, are painted as having an “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” The writer of the bulletin classifies RTCs as “typically characterized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council.”4

The white supremacy and Latin Mass connections, however, are not in the document created by the SPLC which created the whole brouhaha in the first place. That document mentioned “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” but as part of a group they designated as the “Dirty Dozen,” a congeries which had no internal coherence and no common denominator outside of the mind of its creator, Heidi Beirich, the SPLC henchwoman who compiled the list in 2007.

The leaked FBI memo describes how the Southern Poverty Law Center defined Catholic Hate Groups in the United States as “Radical Traditional Catholicism,” a term cooked up by Mark Shea. Instead of defining the term, the SPLC provided a list of their organizations. They included:

Catholic Apologetics International (Greencastle, Pennsylvania), which is Robert Sungenis’s ministry, which deals with Scripture and science and has nothing to do with the Latin Mass. In fact, none of his 50 books or hundreds of articles over 30 years deal with the Latin Mass, but they do deal with Catholic teaching on Jews and Judaism.

Catholic Family News, a publication which began as part of Father Gruner’s operation in Canada, which also made the FBI list as the Fatima Crusader, whose main concern should be obvious. Gruner was known as a promoter of Fatima. He said the Latin Mass illicitly in gatherings at South Bend under the auspices of the St. Joseph Foundation, which was part of the original list but disappeared mysteriously from the list circulated by the FBI.
Christ or Chaos (Corsicana, Texas)

In the Spirit of Chartres, which probably made the list because it is run by the mother of John Sharpe, a naval officer who ran afoul of the SPLC for publishing an anthology attacking the Neocons for involving America in the Iraqi War.

The Remnant, which is a Traditionalist newspaper run by the Matt family of St. Paul, Minnesota. Another branch of the family runs The Wanderer, which was always characterized as conservative, rather than traditionalist because they did not support the Lefebvrite schism.

The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart, the Feeneyite operation from New Hampshire

Tradition in Action, which is a front group of Tradition, Family, and Property, an anti-Communist cult from Brazil.

I forgot to add one other “hate group,” namely Culture Wars. Culture Wars is a magazine; it is not a “group,” much less a “hate group,” but it is the main reason for the creation of the list, which has no internal coherence whatsoever. If the SPLC were interested in attacking the Latin Mass, they should have included the Society of Pius X, and the group which broke away from the SSPX in 1988, the Fraternity of St. Peter, because they are the two main groups which celebrate the Latin Mass. Both groups are conspicuous by their absence from the SPLC list. This means that the Latin Mass is clearly not the common denominator uniting the above list. In fact, there is no common denominator. When the list came out, the people on the list were shocked to discover that the SPLC had lumped them all together. Culture Wars had published articles attacking Gruner as a con man who bilked widows and orphans with his fearmongering redaction of the Fatima message. Gruner reacted by calling E. Michael Jones “a secret Jew,” an epithet which took on ironic overtones after the publication of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. Missing from the FBI list was Chris Ferrara, who was outraged by being included with the likes of me, and got himself removed from the list, probably by legal threat.

The “Dirty Dozen” was, in other words, a category of the mind which had no relation to the reality of the groups that made up the list. It wasn’t about the Latin Mass, which never got mentioned; there was no common denominator.

So, what then was it about? It was about me. The SPLC cobbled together an imaginary movement to give weight to their claim that a dangerous conspiracy was afoot, when, in fact, the explanation was much simpler. The list originated in the mind of Heidi Beirich, then an employee of the SPLC, who showed up at the memorial service for Sam Francis which was held at the Press Club in Washington, D.C. weeks after his death, to expose this crowd of putative conservatives in attendance as in reality a bunch of white racists. Instead, she heard me blow up the racial narrative by introducing the theological categories I had hammered out in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit….

[…] This is just an excerpt from the March 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

Culture Wars: Volume 42 Issue 4

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Articles:

Culture of Death Watch

How I Landed on the FBI Hit List Targeting "Radical Traditionalist Catholics"by Dr. E. Michael Jones

"Tell Me What You See"What I Saw at the Houck Trial by Brendan Whitaker

Features

Catholic Teaching on Jews and Judaism by Dr. Robert A. Sungenis

Reviews

Ratzinger and the Judensau by Dr. E. Michael Jones

ENDNOTES

1 Fox News, "Tucker: The FBI tried to manufacture crimes against sincere Catholics," YouTube, Feb. 10, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3dnjUdD3tI, from Twitter search for "FBI Catholic," https://twitter.com/search?q=Fbi%20catholic&src=typeahead_click&f=top

2 https://twitter.com/search?q=Fbi%20catholic&src=typeahead_click&f=top

3 @timotheeology

4 Libby Emmons, "Breaking: FBI used discredited SPLC to paint Catholics as extremists in internal report," The Post Millennial., Feb. 8, 2023, https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-fbi-used-discredited-splc-to-paint-catholics-as-extremists-in-internal-report,