Yes, Franco Was a Fascist Monster

Tom and James talk to Victoria Holmes, who works on her own video series on Catholicism and politics here on YouTube. She also works at the The Dispatch an a multimedia editor. She talks to Tom and James about how bad postliberalism has become among people her age and what she hopes to do about it.

James and Tom talk about Father Josef Tiso, who was dictator of Slovakia during the Second World War. During those years, Slovakia was a client state of the Third Reich, and Tiso was a wily, ambitious Catholic priest who saw to the deaths of between 50,000 - 95,000 Jews until his hanging in 1946. Afterwards, Slovakia, like Croatia, managed to endure the worst of both worlds, first fascism and then communism.

Tom flies solo this week in our (late) video because James is taking care of a newborn and starting classes at a new university. We will be back together to talk soon, but we hope this is good enough to cover our bases for now!

After edgy social media poaster Pinesap debated the virtues of Francisco Franco in a debate with Mehdi Hasan, Franco Appreciation Content resurfaced. When Tom and James remarked on Franco's atrocities, we were once again visited with spurious claims about Franco's virtues as a pious Catholic leader who restored Spain. He was nothing of the sort, as Tom and James detail.

After several requests, Tom and I decided to do an episode on the worst example of postliberal governance, the Independent State of Croatia, operated by Ante Pavelic and the Ustase. It's a bit of a downer of an episode but important for people who take the rise of integralism and postliberalism seriously.

Thomas was eager to talk about Vichy after having completed the section on Vichy in our book. Vichy is important because of how its brief existence illustrated the inhumanity of postliberal ideas within the right wing Catholic culture that had fostered them. We are a little harried because Thomas was on the road and James having no idea what day it was.

We review some of the major developments since we wrapped recording our first season. We cover the election of noted postliberal JD Vance to the Vice Presidency, the likely ouster of Viktor Orbán, the papacy of Pope Leo XIV, and other developments.

Tom and James speak with Dr. H. David Baer (Texas Lutheran) about Englebert Dolfuss and the rise of Austrofascism of the 1930s and its influence on contemporary postliberals. They then pivot to discussing the centralized of Viktor Orbán to postliberal ideas and institutions.

We waited until after the election to upload this episode with friend of the podcast Fr. Stephen Vrazel. Fr. Vrazel gives us a sense of how much postliberalism is part of the ordinary life of a parish and where he has or has not seen it crop up in Catholic circles he travels in.

A recent episode of The Remnant featured its host, Jonah Goldberg, discussing contemporary political Catholicism with George Weigel. Weigel dismissed postliberalism and integralism as primarily "online" and hence marginal. Weigel reveals his age by dismissing online media as though it were not the primary source for young people to learn about the world. We discuss that more here.