Common Sense Crusade?

When Donald Trump was last President, then Calvin Robinson was an ICT teacher at a North London comp, with a sideline in videogames. It is always videogames. Robinson is clearly a tortured soul. Since the Church of England refused to ordain him, then he has joined a different denomination every year. He is in Old Catholic Priest's Orders, so the late Richard Williamson might have raised him to the Episcopate in 2025. Someone probably will. Then watch Robinson ordain any and every fanboy. It is a story as old as the Church Herself.

The key to understanding Williamson was that he had been existentially a Catholic for only a very few months, if ever. The Authorised Version is that he was received from the Church of England in the usual manner in 1971, and that he was then briefly a postulant at the Brompton Oratory. But he was one of the Society of Saint Pius X's first ordinations to the Priesthood in 1976, meaning that by then he had completed the six-year seminary course at Écône. The SSPX had lost its canonical status the year before, so that those ordinations resulted in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's suspension a divinis. And even before 1975, it had always been a thing apart, participation in which was a very different matter from being part of a diocesan parish, or even of being at a mainstream seminary, whether before or after the Second Vatican Council. Yet Williamson really does seem to have gone straight there from the Church of England. In practice, he was always in opposition to the Pope. He was never less than a de facto schismatic, and he was a de jure one most of his life. To him, that was normal.

The rise of the online and populist Right has given an odd political prominence to this particular world of overlapping subcultures. Yet against what does all of that think itself a bulwark? An apostate from the Syriac Catholic Church, Salwan Momika had sought asylum in the Schengen Area, not "the Anglosphere", on account of the newfound militant atheism that moved him to burn the Quran. That act would have been a straightforward public order offence in this country, yet it is defended by those who screamed about the Nazis when people burned The Satanic Verses. Momika would as gladly have burned the Bible, as his defenders still would. His lies about his terrorist connections on his Schengen visa application made his immigration status questionable in Sweden, and led to his straightforward deportation from Norway. A martyr for something, I suppose. But certainly not for conservatism, or for Christendom, or for Christ.

See also Elon Musk's open fondness for LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, magic mushrooms, and ketamine. See also Nigel Farage's support for drug legalisation, the support of 60 per cent of Reform UK's MPs for assisted suicide, and Trump's nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, a nomination that Barack Obama very nearly made, and a nominee who believes that abortion, while "always a tragedy", should nevertheless be legal up to birth. Kennedy now denies being an anti-vaxxer, even though Trump's base wanted his nomination precisely because he was one, whereas no one in Britain would ever ask the medical opinion of a serving or potential Secretary of State for Health. You have never taken the fight to the anti-vaxxers unless you have shared a cell with one.

And see also the Alternative für Deutschland, with which Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen identified, and which does best in some of the most secular places on Earth, as befits its noticeably irreligious leaders. Right-wing populists have no interest in answering Islam with a return to structured daily prayer, to the setting aside one day in seven, to fasting, to almsgiving, to pilgrimage, to the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, to the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, to the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique both of capitalism and of Marxism, to the coherence between faith and reason, and to a consequently integrated view of art and science. On the contrary, their blanket opposition to immigration would prevent the re-Christianisation of the West. If they are social conservatives, then they have an entirely Boomer or Generation X understanding of what they wanted to conserve. We now see just how dangerous they are.

Germany has never had a firewall. Key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU had very recently been Nazi officers. One of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been.

On this fifth anniversary of Brexit, give thanks that we are no longer subject to the legislative will of numerous such persons routinely and increasingly in the European Council of Ministers, and permanently in the European Parliament, where Patriots for Europe, the likes of the French National Rally and the Austrian Freedom Party, of Fidesz and Vox, are the third largest Group with 86 MEPs, with a further 26 in the Europe of Sovereign Nations Group, including 14 from the AfD. Another AfD member sits among the non-inscrits, alongside Niki, the Confederation of the Polish Crown, and S.O.S. Romania.

Now to end the potential or actual subordination of our Armed Forces to officers who were ultimately subject to members of most of those parties, and of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's, by Brexiting NATO as well. That would also free our Forces at least from the direct influence of the network of British émigrés in and around the Trump Administration. Such as Sebastian Gorka. And Calvin Robinson.