Something is changing in an otherwise quiet corner of Christianity in the United States, one that prides itself on how little it has changed over time. Priests are swapping stories about record attendance numbers. Older members are adjusting — or not — to the influx of new attendees. Parishes are strategizing about how to accommodate more prospective converts than existing clergy can reasonably handle on their own.
Across the country, the ancient tradition of Orthodox Christianity is attracting energetic new adherents, especially among conservative young men. They are drawn to what they describe as a more demanding, even difficult, practice of Christianity. Echoing some of the rhetoric of the so-called manosphere, new waves of young converts say Orthodoxy offers them hard truths and affirms their masculinity.
“In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen,” the Very Rev. Andrew Damick, an Antiochian Orthodox priest and author in Eastern Pennsylvania, said of the large groups of young people showing up at many parishes. “This is new ground for everyone.”
In the United States, Orthodox Christianity is by far the smallest and least-known of the three major branches of Christianity, representing about 1 percent of the population, compared with about 40 percent who are Protestant and 20 percent who are Catholic. Orthodox pews here have historically been occupied by immigrants from Ukraine, Greece and other countries with large Orthodox populations. Their American-born children often drift to other churches.
But a homegrown Orthodox Christianity is strikingly emergent. Many of the young Americans new to the pews have been introduced to Orthodoxy by hard-edge influencers on YouTube and other social media platforms. Critics call the enthusiastic young converts “Orthobros.”
Has anyone else noticed an increasing number of coincidences in the U.S. that seem to line up with our own historical playbook for interfering with democracy in other countries?
Usually I think of Trump/Vance/Thiel being the power hungry dictators, and maybe colluding with a foreign government to gain power, but kinda wondering more and more what if they're pawns and their base was always meant to become disillusioned with them too? Not like they're not God awful, and have been the entire time, but could everyone within that administration really have just been failing upwards all the way to the White House, or is it our own playbook being used the same way it had been used to destabilize other countries?
Like if you look at the strategy we always seem to rely on to carry out something like this: frequent destabilization of the economy until it collapsed, loss of quality of life within the country that causes people to lose faith in government, bribing/blackmailing corrupt public officials, public propaganda narratives in the press undermining public trust in the government and democratic elections, interfering with elections and installing a dictator who was possibly always meant to fail and be the final nail in the coffin for the country? Or is that all just a coincidence?
Like I feel that the next logical step in the U.S. playbook might be something like creating a fundamentalist militia of fighting age men who wish to achieve all the things that have become gradually unattainable to most people in the U.S. However, because they're unaware of their own manipulation, they continue to buy into victim narrative/targeted propaganda, and see a loss of their shared traditional values as the culprit for their abysmal outlook on life.
They place their faith in a tyrant, who unbeknownst to them, was installed with the intent that he would always fail. They unite as a loyal militia to his administration until eventually they can't keep fooling themselves and become disillusioned with even him. Then once things destabilize enough they end up turning on him and his entire administration?
Oh, good... Also not too different from Russia, but Putin/Russia seems to be losing their narrative control lately too. How the Russian Orthodox Church Became a Weapon of Political Warfare
Just trying to figure this out. if MAGA fails because of Epstein, and the Heritage Foundation definitely seems to be rapidly imploding, and the Vance/Thiel butterfly revolution/technocracy BS fails once the AI bubble pops, what's even supposed to come next for a fundamentalist militia? Does it just fizzle out like it never even happened?
Idk maybe I'm just being naive thinking that they won't recover, but if they don't, is this like finding yourself recognizing stereotypical tropes in a horror movie and breaking the 4th wall/realizing the call was coming from inside the house the whole time? Was nobody in this administration supposed to walk away unscathed and not hated by the general public? Bc if you look at it as a trifecta of Traditionalists and Technocrats with Trump as the focal point, it seems like everybody has failed at this point and they're only a year in.
Or, is it just a house of cards situation where Trump and his incompetent administration somehow all legitimately failed upwards to this point, reached a saturation point of destruction and incompetence, and have all suddenly lost the ability to control the narrative over the chaos at the same time?
Unless it turns out Vance was Keyser Söze the whole time, if Trump and both factions never recover from this, who would that actually leave to fill the power vacuum?
Vance/masters/yarvin/musk are the Keysers.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets
And Dugin.
Because many of these results link directly to his own writings - I don't wish to promote his views - but this man is responsible for a lot of this:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alexsandr+dugin+orthodox
Tucker has interviewed him. The ultra right worship him.
He believes in some of the most appalling things any human could conceive.
So, back in the late 80s, before Yarvin or Thiel had any sort of following, the co-founder of Heritage (and really the cold black heart of Heritage Foundation, Fuelner was the establishment academic but it was Weyrich's baby) Paul Weyrich traveled to Moscow (and all over eastern Europe) holding mock elections and teaching soviet politicians all about Democracy and snuck computers and other electronics in to dissidents.
In 1991 several members of Heritage formed the first of its kind go between for U.S. and Russia businesses to help them make the transition to capitalism.
Weyrich later gave a talk at a Christian college in 1996, and while taking questions from the audience he casually mentioned that as far as he knew, Gorbachev's right hand man wanted to crack down on him while he was holding mock elections. He claims when Gorbachev responded in silence the right hand man left his office and allegedly began planning the coup the next day unbeknownst to anyone from the U.S.
Somebody made a documentary about some of it in 2012 that aired once on PBS and then never again, but it's available on YouTube.
Weyrich was always a religious zealot, but apparently his experience "liberating Russia" from the clutches of communism felt like God was working through him. He mentions it a bit in the speech in 1996, and there's a mention at one point in the documentary that at one point Weyrich felt compelled to walk around Soviet Moscow in the late 1980s screaming "Christ is risen!"
Weyrich is also no doubt the reason the Catholic right has such an established foot hold in the modern day conservative movement. He was from a very old school traditional Catholic family. Apparently they left the church in protest of Vatican II because and switched to Orthodox.
Weyrich died in 2008, but project 2025 is his legacy. The idea of destroying/tearing down America to rebuild is all him. To be honest, the more I learn about this guy, (including the fact that few people even know who he is to this day, but he just kind of came out of nowhere, had no college degree, showed up in D.C. and a few years later had somehow completely transformed the Republican party and coined the term Moral Majority, gotten Reagan to adopt the mandate for leadership as a policy guide, and then almost single handedly accidentally (allegedly) helped topple the Soviet Union while trying to spread "democracy" yet he didn't even believe everyone should be allowed to vote?) the more I honestly wonder if he was CIA or a Russian spy.
What's really interesting is there is this foundation that mentions talks to unite Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, as discussed with Weyrich and Frank Shakespeare, one of Reagan's cabinet members
I also just learned today actually that just before be began holding mock elections in the Soviet Union, he was apparently working with the Russian Orthodox church to free prisoners of conscience in Russia, and planning to use this as talking point to remind America that the Republican party was the anti-communist party.
Letter to Paul Weyrich regarding a Russian Orthodox prisoner of conscience in the Soviet bloc- proposed resolution for 1988 RNC