The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (2008) by E. Michael Jones presents a theology of history as history. The book runs nearly 1,200 pages, footnotes heavily, and covers terrain from the Gospel of John through Bolshevism, Vatican II, Hollywood, abortion-rights politics, and American neoconservatism. The argument compresses to a single claim. The Jews rejected Christ, who is Logos. That rejection turned post-Temple Judaism into a permanent revolutionary force against the social and rational order Logos sustains. From that engine, Jones derives modernity.
Jones argues that Judaism, defined theologically after the destruction of the Second Temple, became the negative image of Christian order. Rabbinic Judaism, in his account, is a pseudo-Judaism. The older Hebrew religion ended in 70 AD. What followed was a religion organized around the rejection of the Incarnation. Every later episode of Jewish prominence in revolutionary, intellectual, or cultural movements then receives a unifying theological cause.
The argument requires a definition of Jewishness that is theological rather than ethnic, sociological, or historical. Once Jewishness is defined as the rejection of Christ, every Jewish disagreement with Christian order counts as evidence for a revolutionary essence. Conversion to Christianity removes a Jew from the category. Quietist or Orthodox Jews, who do not match the revolutionary type, can be redescribed as inconsistent or as cover for the broader pattern. The thesis cannot meet a falsifying case because the category has been built to absorb every outcome.
That is the first logical problem. A historical claim that admits no counterexample is not a historical claim. It is a definitional one. Karl Popper called this the mark of a closed system in The Open Society and Its Enemies. The cost of using such a system is that its conclusions are guaranteed by its premises. The system tells us what its author already accepts.
A serious fact-check has to separate three layers in the book. The first layer is empirical claims about named persons and movements. The second is the demographic and sociological pattern of Jewish participation in modern intellectual and political life. The third is the theological claim that ties the first two together.
On the first layer, Jones is often accurate in narrow detail and wrong in synthesis. Many of his sources are real. Early Bolshevik leadership did include a high proportion of men of Jewish origin. Yuri Slezkine documents this in The Jewish Century. So do Robert Service and Richard Pipes. Jewish radicals were prominent in early socialist movements in the Russian Empire, in part because Jews were among the populations the Tsarist state most heavily restricted. Jewish intellectuals had a large presence in Hollywood’s founding, in mid-century American liberalism, in Frankfurt School critical theory, in the early abortion-rights bar, and in late-twentieth-century neoconservatism. None of this is hidden. Mainstream historians treat these patterns openly. Jones cites real footnotes for many of these claims, and a reader can trace them.
The second layer concerns why these patterns occurred. Here the standard scholarly account is unflashy. Ashkenazi Jews entered modernity from a constrained position. Long exclusion from landownership and from many guilds had pushed them into trade, finance, and learning. High literacy under Rabbinic Judaism produced a population that could move quickly into the new universities, professions, and media that opened with emancipation. Marginal status made universalist and reformist ideologies attractive. Recent secularization detached many Jews from religious authority while leaving the textual habits intact. That combination, applied across generations, produces overrepresentation in disruptive intellectual fields without requiring any metaphysical engine. Yuri Slezkine gives one version of this account. So do Norman Cantor and David Biale. So, in a different idiom, does Thomas Sowell. None of these writers needs an anti-Logos to explain the data.
The third layer is the theological frame, and this is where the book separates from the history. Jones reads each pattern as the surface expression of a single hidden cause. The cause is Jewish rejection of Christ. The patterns are diverse. The cause is one. Whenever a unified hidden cause is asked to carry the weight of many independent variables, the historian should ask whether the cause does any work the variables cannot do on their own. In this case, it does not. Jewish revolutionary participation tracks legal status, urban concentration, literacy, secularization, exclusion from older elites, and the presence or absence of liberal reform. When these factors weaken, as in the late twentieth century, Jewish radical participation also weakens. The pattern follows social and historical inputs, not theology.
A second order of logical problem haunts the book. Jones repeatedly slides from participation to causation. Some Jews were prominent in a movement. Therefore the movement is Jewish in spirit. Therefore Judaism produced the movement. The first sentence is empirical. The second is a literary metaphor. The third is metaphysics. Each step adds claims the prior step did not contain. By the end of the chain, an argument that began with a verifiable observation has arrived at a conclusion that no evidence could test.
A third order of problem is the treatment of Christianity as the seat of order and Judaism as the seat of negation. The historical record does not cooperate. Christian revolutionaries shaped the Reformation, the English Civil War, the Münster commune, several waves of Anabaptist upheaval, the Levellers, abolitionism, Latin American liberation theology, and the Christian wing of the American civil-rights movement. Christian thinkers helped build modern nationalism, modern racial theory, modern colonial administration, and modern liberal democracy. To treat order as Christian and disorder as Jewish requires removing most of the actual history of Christianity from the picture.
Connected to this, the book’s account of Logos compresses a long philosophical tradition into a single Catholic register. Logos in the Gospel of John has roots in Stoic and Platonic philosophy, and the patristic synthesis combined Greek metaphysics with Hebrew scripture. To call modernity an attack on Logos requires reading Logos as identical with the social order of medieval and early-modern Catholic Europe. That order had concrete historical foundations: feudal property, guild monopolies, peasant labor, an established Church, and limited literacy. Calling its dissolution an attack on reason itself elevates a particular social formation to the rank of metaphysical truth.
A fourth problem is the book’s treatment of Jewish diversity. Orthodox Jews, secular Jews, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Bundists, Communists, neoconservatives, liberal reformers, abortion activists, capitalists, and quietist scholars are all assigned to the same engine. When a single cause has to explain mutually opposed effects, the cause has stopped explaining anything. If Jewish neoconservatism, which sought to defend American power, and Jewish Bolshevism, which sought to overturn American-style order, both express the same revolutionary spirit, the spirit no longer describes behavior. It labels behavior after the fact.
Fifth, the book’s category of “the Jew” does work that no single category can do. It functions sometimes as a religion, sometimes as an ethnicity, sometimes as a sociological cohort, sometimes as a theological role. The slippage allows Jones to move freely between scales. When he wants Jews to be a moral agent, he uses the theological definition. When he wants demographic evidence, he uses the ethnic one. When he wants intellectual influence, he uses the sociological one. The same word covers each role, and the reader is asked to treat the resulting picture as coherent. It is not coherent. It is layered.
Popper describes the structure as the conspiracy theory of society: the assumption that whatever happens in history happens because some group wanted it to. The structure flatters the reader. It tells him that the chaos of modern life has an author. The cost is that the author has to be invented, and once invented, has to be defended against every counterexample.
Decoding the book is straightforward once these moves are visible. The book does not ask what particular Jews did in particular movements. That question has answers, and the answers are mixed, contested, and often surprising. The book asks how to make Jewishness the hidden continuity behind every modern development the author opposes. The list of opposed developments is long. It runs from the Protestant Reformation through the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, modern finance, Bolshevism, psychoanalysis, mid-century liberalism, the sexual revolution, the abortion-rights movement, Vatican II, civil rights, Hollywood, and the foreign policy of the post-Cold War United States. To unify so many phenomena under one cause requires a cause flexible enough to wear any costume. The Jewish revolutionary spirit, defined theologically, can do that. No social-scientific category can.
The decoding has a second layer. The book treats the loss of Christendom as the central event of modern history. Many other accounts could be given. Industrialization, urbanization, the printing press, the rise of the nation-state, the spread of literacy, the scientific revolution, Atlantic commerce, and the discovery of the New World all reshaped Christian Europe before any of the modern movements Jones blames had taken form. By assigning the loss to a single external enemy, the book relieves Christianity of any internal account of its own decline. The price of comfort is a closed loop in which the Church is never responsible for what happens to the Church.
The book sits in a recognizable lineage. Hilaire Belloc‘s The Jews from 1922 already developed many of its themes in milder form. Denis Fahey, an Irish priest writing in the 1930s and 1940s, sharpened them. Father Coughlin made a popular American version. Conservative French Catholic writers from the late nineteenth century, including Édouard Drumont, supplied a more aggressive precedent. The patristic anti-Judaism of John Chrysostom and others gives the theological backbone. After the Second Vatican Council, this lineage went underground in mainstream Catholic discourse. Nostra aetate in 1965 repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Christ and affirmed the ongoing covenantal status of the Jewish people. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 597, follows that line. Jones writes against this turn. His book is a sustained attempt to revive the older theological framework and to read every modern crisis through it.
This places the book in post-Vatican II traditionalist Catholic reaction. It belongs alongside the writings of the Society of Saint Pius X, the sedevacantists, and the broader trad-Catholic ecosystem that sees the conciliar church as compromised. It also draws from the older European Catholic right that survived the Second World War in a chastened form. What is novel in Jones is the fusion of that theological line with American conspiracy historiography. The result reads like Belloc rewritten by someone who has spent years in the world of late-twentieth-century alternative-history publishing.
Who, then, does the book serve? It serves three audiences cleanly. The first is traditionalist Catholic readers who experience the post-conciliar Church as an institutional defeat and want a historical theology that names the defeat’s cause as external. The book gives them that cause and gives them patristic warrant for naming it. The second is a broader conservative readership that wants a single explanation for the cultural changes of the last sixty years. Sexual revolution, abortion law, mass immigration, the decline of religious practice, the transformation of universities, and shifts in foreign policy can all be hung from one nail. The book offers the nail. The third is the readership of conspiracy historiography in general, which is large and crosses confessional lines. Readers who want a covert cause for the visible disorder of modern life can find one in the book whether or not they share its theological premises.
The book also serves a function for those who see Jewish influence in American life as a topic that mainstream institutions handle poorly. Some of those readers come to the topic from empirical curiosity. Others come from older grievances. The book welcomes both. That is part of its rhetorical strategy. It treats every Jewish prominence in American life as evidence of the same thing, and it treats every objection as confirmation that the taboo is real.
A balanced verdict has to acknowledge what the book does competently. It assembles material that mainstream histories cover only in fragments. A reader can learn something from following its citations, especially on Vatican II–era Catholic-Jewish dialogue, on the history of usury debates, and on the rabbinic literature Jones surveys. The book is wide in scope and serious in its sense of vocation. It is not a quick polemic. It is a long argument that has been worked over for years.
What the book does not do is the work it claims to do. It does not establish the existence of a Jewish revolutionary spirit. It assumes the spirit and then arranges centuries of material around the assumption. The arrangement is impressive. The assumption is the thesis, and the thesis is never tested.
A reader who wants to understand Jewish roles in modern revolutions, intellectual movements, and cultural change has better tools available. The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine offers a sociological account of why Jewish populations entered the modern world’s professional and intellectual strata at the rate they did, without requiring any theological cause. Cultures of the Jews: A New History edited by David Biale traces how Jewish communities navigated different host societies across centuries. American Judaism: A History by Jonathan Sarna gives the historical scaffolding of Jewish life in the country whose culture Jones treats as captured. The Sacred Chain: History of the Jews by Norman Cantor surveys the long arc of Jewish history without compressing it into a single causal claim. None of these books explain everything. That is a virtue. They keep their categories small enough to test.
The book’s value, finally, is diagnostic. It shows what a totalizing account of modernity looks like when written from inside a particular Catholic tradition under pressure. It demonstrates how theological supersessionism can supply a structure for political historiography long after the theology has been formally retired by the institution that produced it. And it illustrates the cost of using a single category, defined to admit no counterexample, to explain a vast and uneven historical record. The cost is the loss of the record. What remains is the category, doing the work the record cannot do, and asking the reader to trust that the work has been done.
Jones, MacDonald, David Duke, and the older European tradition of Drumont, Chamberlain, and the Protocols milieu all converge on the claim that Jewish influence drives modern disorder. They diverge sharply on why.
Jones operates in a theological register. The cause is rejection of Christ. The category of Jewishness is defined by that rejection, and the revolutionary force he attributes to Jews follows from a metaphysical break with Logos rather than from biology, race, or genetic strategy. A Jew who converts, in Jones’s framework, exits the category. The argument lives or dies on Catholic theology. It draws on patristic sources, medieval canon law, and post-Tridentine Catholic political thought. Belloc and Fahey are the closest twentieth-century kin. The framework forbids racial essentialism in principle, even when its rhetorical effects resemble racial essentialism in practice.
MacDonald operates in an evolutionary-psychological register. His trilogy, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism As a Group Evolutionary Strategy, With Diaspora Peoples, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, argues that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy. Jews, on this account, have evolved cultural and possibly genetic adaptations that allow them to compete with host populations while maintaining group cohesion. The cause is selection pressure, not Christ-rejection. Conversion does not exit the category, because the category is biological and behavioral rather than theological. Jewish intellectual movements, in The Culture of Critique, are read as ethnic strategies pursued under universalist cover. Boas, Freud, the Frankfurt School, and the architects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 all become moves in a long evolutionary game.
The two frameworks are incompatible at the foundation. Jones cannot accept MacDonald’s account, because it treats Jewishness as a biological-behavioral phenomenon and removes the theological cause that does all the work in Jones’s system. MacDonald cannot accept Jones’s account, because Logos and Christ-rejection have no place in an evolutionary model. Each writer, read carefully, has to reject the other’s central claim. They share a target. They do not share a theory.
A second axis of difference concerns scholarly method. MacDonald wears the costume of social science. He cites journal literature, uses the vocabulary of behavioral ecology, and frames his claims in terms that look testable. The frame raises the stakes. His critics, including John Tooby, Steven Pinker, and most evolutionary psychologists, argue that the actual application falls short of the methodological standards the field requires, and that group-selection accounts of the kind he uses were rejected within evolutionary biology decades ago for reasons that do not depend on the politics of the topic. The work has been reviewed by professional evolutionary psychologists and largely repudiated by them, including by his former colleagues at California State University Long Beach.
Jones does not pretend to social science. He writes as a theologian and cultural historian. His footnotes are dense but his method is exegetical and literary rather than empirical. He is not subject to the falsification standards MacDonald invites by claiming the mantle of evolutionary biology. He is subject instead to standards of theological coherence, historical accuracy, and consistency with Catholic tradition. By post-Vatican II Catholic standards, his framework fails on the third count, since Nostra Aetate and the Catechism reject the supersessionist and collective-guilt claims his argument requires.
A third axis is the treatment of race. MacDonald’s framework is racial in the technical sense. It posits genetic and behavioral differences that track ancestry. Jones repeatedly denies that his framework is racial and insists the issue is theological. The denial is sincere within his system. Whether the rhetorical effect tracks the denial is a separate question, and most critics argue it does not, because a hereditary group described as carrying a transhistorical political tendency functions in practice like a racial category whatever the author calls it. The denial matters, though, because it places Jones in a different lineage than MacDonald. Jones descends from Christian anti-Judaism. MacDonald descends from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century race science.
David Duke represents a third type. Duke’s writing, in Jewish Supremacism and elsewhere, is frankly racial and openly draws on the older twentieth-century antisemitic canon, including the Protocols tradition, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and the literature of American segregationism. Duke does not have Jones’s theological apparatus or MacDonald’s evolutionary apparatus. He has a populist racial frame and a political career that gave the writing a public profile the others lack. As a thinker, he is the least developed of the three. As a movement figure, he had reach the others did not have until recently.
The older European tradition, running from Drumont‘s La France juive in 1886 through Houston Stewart Chamberlain‘s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1899 and into the various Protocols-influenced writers of the interwar period, supplies the deep stock from which all three later writers draw. Drumont is closer to Jones in that the framework is Catholic and cultural rather than biological. Chamberlain is closer to MacDonald in that the framework is racial and pseudo-scientific. The Protocols tradition is closer to Duke in that the framework is conspiratorial and populist. Each later writer represents a modern rearticulation of one strand of this older inheritance.
A fourth axis is the role of the Catholic Church. Jones writes from inside Catholicism and treats the Church as the central institution whose loss has to be explained. MacDonald is not Catholic, has no theological commitments, and treats Christianity instrumentally when he discusses it at all. Duke comes from a Protestant Southern background and uses Christian motifs occasionally but not systematically. Chamberlain dismissed historical Christianity in favor of a constructed Aryan Christianity. Drumont was a French Catholic in the conservative nineteenth-century mode. The Catholic frame is doing real work in Jones in a way it does not in the others.
A fifth axis is the diagnosis of modernity. Jones treats modernity as a unified theological catastrophe. The Reformation, Enlightenment, French Revolution, industrial capitalism, Bolshevism, sexual revolution, Vatican II, and American empire are all expressions of the same anti-Logos current. MacDonald treats modernity more narrowly. His central focus is the twentieth-century American intellectual transformation, especially the displacement of older WASP elites by Jewish-influenced movements after 1945. Duke treats modernity through the lens of racial decline in the United States and Europe. The scope of the historical claim shrinks as one moves from Jones to MacDonald to Duke.
A sixth axis is the relationship to mainstream scholarship. None of these writers occupies a mainstream academic position. MacDonald held a tenured psychology post at California State University Long Beach for decades, but his department formally repudiated his trilogy and the university distanced itself from the work. Jones was dismissed from Saint Mary’s College in 1981 over a pro-life article and has worked outside the academy since. Duke has no academic affiliation. The three exist in an intellectual ecology that runs through small presses, journals like Culture Wars and Occidental Quarterly, and online publishing. They cite each other selectively. They are not collaborators, and they sometimes criticize each other’s frameworks.
A seventh axis concerns what kind of reading they reward. MacDonald rewards a reader interested in evolutionary theory and willing to track citations into the technical literature. The reader will find that the technical literature does not support the use MacDonald makes of it, but the engagement is at least intellectually substantive. Jones rewards a reader interested in patristic theology, medieval Catholic intellectual history, and the long Catholic argument about usury, conversion, and ecclesial authority. The reader will find real material there even if the synthesis is unpersuasive. Duke rewards political curiosity more than intellectual curiosity. The Drumont and Chamberlain tradition rewards historical curiosity about how the modern antisemitic imagination was constructed.
The contrasts add up to a clear picture. These writers are not interchangeable. They draw on different intellectual traditions, make different kinds of claims, accept different evidentiary standards, and target different institutional enemies. Treating them as a single phenomenon flattens the differences and obscures what each one is actually doing.
The similarities are also real. Each builds an account of modern history in which a single hidden group does most of the causal work. Each treats Jewish diversity as cover rather than as evidence against the unified-cause hypothesis. Each constructs a framework that is hard to falsify because the category of Jewishness is defined to absorb counterexamples. Each addresses a readership that experiences modernity as a defeat and wants a single explanation for it. Each ends up in a place where individuals are read as expressions of a group essence rather than as agents with their own histories.
The shared structural problems are more telling than the shared conclusions. Different starting premises, different methods, and different intellectual traditions converge on the same shape of argument. That convergence suggests the shape itself is doing work the premises do not justify. The shape rewards the reader with explanatory closure. It removes the disorder of historical causation and replaces it with a single agent. The cost, in each case, is the same. The category that explains everything explains nothing in particular, and the historical record it claims to organize gets lost in the organizing.
Jones’s Jewish Revolutionary Spirit as Pseudoargument
Pinsof’s framework distinguishes argument from pseudoargument by examining whether the form of the activity fits the function its author claims for it. Argument aims at persuasion through evidence and reasoning. Pseudoargument wears the costume of persuasion while doing other work: tribal rallying, rationalization, sparring, status defense, status attack, and the concealment of all of the above. The diagnostic is structural rather than topical. A book can address any subject and still be classified by what it does rather than by what it says it does.
Applying the framework to E. Michael Jones’s The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit requires care, because Jones presents the book in a register that initially looks different from Duke’s. Jones writes as a Catholic theologian and historian, not as a memoirist or political organizer. The footnotes are dense. The patristic and medieval citations run deep. The prose carries the cadence of Catholic intellectual writing rather than the conversational warmth of My Awakening. A reader could plausibly suppose that the difference in register marks a difference in genre, and that Jones is engaged in the kind of inquiry Pinsof would classify as argument.
The framework cuts through the appearance. The diagnostic does not depend on the surface idiom. It depends on whether the form of the work fits the function of persuasion. Jones’s book fails the fit test on multiple dimensions, and the failure is consistent enough to classify the book as pseudoargument in Pinsof’s sense.
Begin with the strongest test. Pinsof points out that real arguments end, at least sometimes, in someone changing his view. Jones’s book is structured to make change of view nearly impossible. The category of Jewishness is defined theologically as rejection of Christ. Once the definition is accepted, every Jewish action that can be construed as opposition to Christian order counts as evidence for the thesis, and every Jewish action that cannot be so construed is removed from the category. Converts exit the category. Quietists are exceptions or covers. Conservative Jews are reclassified as inconsistent with their own essence. The framework cannot meet a falsifying case because the framework has been built to absorb every outcome. Pinsof’s diagnostic for this kind of structure is decisive: a system that explains everything explains nothing, and a system that cannot lose is not engaged in inquiry. It is engaged in something else.
The pseudoargument diagnostic checks out item by item.
Jones does not engage with the strongest versions of opposing views. Liberal universalism appears in the book as a Jewish strategy rather than as a tradition with internal disputes among Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers across centuries. Modern biblical scholarship appears as anti-Christian rather than as a discipline in which Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and secular scholars have argued about texts using shared methods. Post-Vatican II Catholic teaching appears as a capitulation rather than as a theological development that has its own arguments and its own defenders within the Church. The opposing positions Jones describes are flatter and more strategically coordinated than the actual positions held by the people he is opposing. A reader who wanted to be persuaded by careful inquiry would expect the strongest versions of the opposing views to be presented and addressed. Jones presents weaker versions. Pinsof’s framework reads this as a sign that the goal is not persuasion but the tribal demarcation of insiders from outsiders.
Jones shows little curiosity about counterexamples. Jewish religious conservatism, Jewish anti-revolutionary politics, Jewish defenders of traditional moral order, and Jewish thinkers who have explicitly written in defense of Christian civilization receive minimal treatment. Christian revolutionaries, Christian liberals, Christian sexual reformers, and Christian architects of modernity receive even less. The book’s master category requires that order be Christian and disorder be Jewish, and the historical record’s failure to cooperate with this division is handled by selection rather than by argument. Pinsof’s diagnostic again: pseudoargument filters out the cases that would force revision, while real argument dwells on them.
Jones treats opposition as confirmation. The post-Vatican II Catholic repudiation of supersessionism, the Catholic-Jewish dialogue of the past sixty years, the censure of his work by mainstream Catholic institutions, and his loss of his teaching position at Saint Mary’s College all appear in the book and his surrounding writings as evidence that he has touched a forbidden truth. The structure closes the system. Anyone who disagrees, including the institutional Catholic Church on its own terms, is either compromised or deceived. Pinsof reads this move as a status-defense operation. The function is not to engage critics. It is to inoculate readers against them.
The book is monological. Jones does not display the markers of careful inquiry that a reader trying to be persuaded would expect: doubt, revision, intellectual debt to interlocutors who could pose serious challenges to the framework, moments where the author concedes that he does not know. Jones’s framework arrives fully formed and is applied to material across two thousand years without significant modification. A real argument leaves the conclusion open. A pseudoargument announces the conclusion early and walks the reader back through the steps the author has chosen.
The book revolves around issues central to the author’s tribal identity. This is the Pinsof diagnostic that does the heaviest work in classifying Jones. The book is not about the design of liturgical calendars or the philological history of patristic Greek. It is about the cause of the collapse of Christendom, the meaning of Jewish history, and the moral status of modernity. These are precisely the topics on which, by Pinsof’s account, humans cease to be rational animals and become apparatchiks. The tribal identity at stake is traditionalist Catholicism in its post-conciliar wounded form. The book’s function is to give that tribe an account of its losses that places the cause outside the tribe itself.
The book is overconfident. Disputed historical questions are presented as settled. Contested theological claims are presented as obvious to anyone reading the patristic sources honestly. Alternative accounts of modern history are presented as either ignorant or dishonest. A reader trained in the actual scholarly literatures Jones draws on, including patristics, medieval Catholic intellectual history, the historiography of the Reformation, and the social history of European Jewry, will notice that Jones writes as though the controversies in those fields had been resolved in his favor. They have not. The overconfidence is a tell. Persuasion requires acknowledgment of the points where the case is weakest. Tribal rallying does not.
The book engages in deflection. When the framework runs into pressure on one front, the discussion moves to another. When the patristic case for collective Jewish guilt is strained by the actual range of patristic positions, the discussion shifts to medieval canon law. When the medieval canon law case runs into the variety of actual Jewish-Christian arrangements across medieval Europe, the discussion shifts to the Reformation. When the Reformation chapter cannot make Protestant radicalism into a Jewish phenomenon, the discussion shifts to the Enlightenment. The motion is constant. Pinsof’s framework reads this as the verbal-sparring function of pseudoargument. The goal is not to settle a question. The goal is to keep moving so that no question gets settled in a way that damages the tribal narrative.
Now consider what the framework predicts the book is for, function by function.
Rallying the tribe. The book creates common knowledge for traditionalist Catholic readers. It provides a shared narrative of the loss of Christendom in which the loss has a single external author. The narrative gives readers a script for understanding their own institutional defeats and a vocabulary for talking with each other about those defeats. Pinsof’s account predicts that most pseudoarguments are directed at people who already share the author’s basic orientation, and Jones’s primary readership is traditionalist Catholic and adjacent traditionalist Christian. The book is not, in practice, addressed to Reform rabbis, secular liberals, or Vatican II Catholics. It is addressed to the tribe.
Rationalizing tribal positions. The book gives traditionalist Catholic readers a framework for understanding their position as the natural one and their opponents’ position as the result of corruption from outside. The patristic citations function as moral cover. A reader who feels the institutional weight of Catholic teaching against the older supersessionism can point to John Chrysostom, Augustine, and Aquinas and tell himself that he stands with the deeper tradition against a recent deviation. The volume of citation is itself part of the rationalization. The reader does not check whether the citations bear the weight Jones places on them. The reader registers their existence and feels supported.
Verbal sparring. The book provides readers with rhetorical weapons for use against liberal Catholics, mainstream historians, and Jewish interlocutors. The selections from the Talmud, the medieval disputations, the early-modern usury debates, the Frankfurt School, and the architects of the sexual revolution are arranged for deployment in conversation and online debate. The book is a quarry. Pinsof’s framework reads quarries of this kind as artifacts of the verbal-sparring function. The goal is not to settle questions but to win exchanges, and winning exchanges requires ammunition.
Defending status. Jones’s own status is at stake throughout the book. He was dismissed from Saint Mary’s College in 1981 over a pro-life article, and his subsequent career has been a long campaign to reframe that dismissal as evidence of his integrity rather than as evidence of his unsuitability. The book is part of the campaign. The framing positions Jones as the man brave enough to say what cannot be said, and the bravery becomes the credential. Pinsof’s framework reads this as a status operation. The book elevates Jones from disgraced academic to dissident intellectual, and the elevation is part of what the book is for.
Attacking status. The book’s treatment of Jewish historical figures, modern Jewish intellectuals, post-Vatican II Catholic clergy, and liberal political figures is sustained status attack. Reputations are eroded across hundreds of pages. The erosion is not incidental to the argument. It is the argument, in the sense Pinsof identifies. To raise the status of the traditionalist Catholic tribe, the status of competing tribes must be lowered. Jones does this systematically, and the patristic citations serve the lowering function as much as they serve the rationalizing function.
Concealing the operation. Jones does not present himself as engaged in any of these functions. He presents himself as a Catholic intellectual who has followed the evidence where it leads and who has paid a price for telling the truth. The presentation is necessary because, as Pinsof points out, overt status-seeking lowers status, overt tribal rallying lowers tribal cohesion, and overt rationalization fails as rationalization. The work has to be done under cover. The cover is theology and history. Jones describes himself throughout as a theologian and historian, an evidence-presenter, a man following the data of the patristic and medieval record. The describing is part of the operation.
A point of contrast with Duke clarifies what is distinctive about Jones. Duke’s pseudoargument operates in a register that mainstream readers immediately recognize as suspect. Racial autobiography, hereditarian science citations, and explicit political mobilization carry warning labels. The reader who picks up My Awakening knows roughly what kind of book he has in his hands, even if he does not yet know whether to trust it. Jones’s pseudoargument operates in a register that mainstream readers do not immediately recognize as suspect. Catholic theology, patristic citation, and the cadence of confessional intellectual writing carry no such warning labels. A reader can be far into Jones’s book before recognizing the structural moves that classify it as pseudoargument. The disguise is more effective.
Catholic intellectual readers who would never open My Awakening will read Jones, because Jones speaks their language. The patristic apparatus that does the rationalizing work is the same apparatus those readers use in their own thinking. The supersessionist theology that does the categorizing work is the older Catholic theology those readers were taught was the deeper tradition before Vatican II. The critique of modernity that does the framing work is the critique those readers already accept on independent grounds. Jones offers them a single causal story for losses they already feel, and the story is told in an idiom they already trust.
Catholic critics have answered the book on its own terms, treating it as an argument about Jewish history, theological supersessionism, and the cause of modernity, and providing counterarguments about those topics. The strategy is reasonable but partial. If the book is a pseudoargument, then refuting its claims does not address what the book is doing. The book’s function is tribal, and the tribal function is not defeated by counterargument. It is defeated, when it is defeated at all, by exposure of the function.
The structural diagnosis matters more than the topical one. Jones’s claims about the Bolshevik leadership, the architects of the sexual revolution, or the founders of modern biblical scholarship can be evaluated case by case, and the evaluation is worth doing. What the evaluation cannot do is unmake the book. The book is not held together by those claims. It is held together by a category that absorbs every outcome and a narrative that gives traditionalist Catholic readers an external author for their internal losses. The category and the narrative are doing the work the citations are credited with. Removing any individual citation does not weaken the category. Removing the category leaves nothing standing.
Pinsof identifies the chant function in pseudoargument: the repetition that creates common knowledge of tribal solidarity. Jones’s book runs nearly 1,200 pages, and a reader who works through it encounters the central thesis repeatedly across radically different historical contexts. Synagogue of Satan in the patristic chapters becomes the Talmud in the medieval chapters, becomes the conversos in the early modern chapters, becomes the Freemasons in the Enlightenment chapters, becomes the Bolsheviks in the twentieth-century chapters, becomes the Frankfurt School in the postwar chapters, becomes the neoconservatives in the contemporary chapters. The variation in surface material conceals an underlying repetition. The reader is being told the same thing seven hundred ways. Pinsof’s framework reads sustained repetition of this kind as the chant function performing tribal consolidation. The reader who finishes the book has not learned seven hundred different things. He has been told one thing seven hundred times, and the telling has done what repetition does. It has felt, by the end, like established fact.
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit is pseudoargument of unusual length and theological craft. The patristic citations, the medieval and early-modern documentation, the dense prose, and the air of confessional seriousness are all parts of a cover story for operations that have nothing to do with persuasion. The operations are tribal. The tribe is post-conciliar traditionalist Catholic, wounded by institutional defeat and looking for an account of the defeat that places the cause outside the tribe itself. The book provides that account at exceptional length and in a register the tribe trusts. It rallies, rationalizes, spars, defends, attacks, and conceals, and it does each competently enough that the cover has held within its target readership.
The proper response, on Pinsof’s account, is to recognize what the book is and to leave the room. Recognition does not refute the book. It changes what the book is asked to do. A reader who knows he is reading pseudoargument is no longer the reader the book was written for. The persuasion frame loses its purchase. What remains is the tribal operation, visible as such, and the reader is free to evaluate that operation on its own terms rather than through the costume it wears. Jones’s costume is more elegant than Duke’s, and the elegance has carried the book further into respectable readerships than Duke could reach.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma
Jones’s body of work is a sustained trauma constructions produced for traditionalist post-Vatican II Catholicism. The carrier group is the segment of American Catholic intellectual life that experienced the conciliar reforms of 1962 to 1965, the subsequent liturgical changes, the demographic collapse of the religious orders, the secularization of Catholic universities, the loss of distinctive Catholic political identity, and the broader cultural transformations of the postwar period as a single catastrophic event. Jones writes for this carrier group and gives the catastrophe its public form across decades of monographs, the Culture Wars magazine he edits, and a continuing stream of long essays and lectures. The construction operates with the four answers Alexander’s framework requires.
The pain is the destruction of Christendom. Jones reads the postwar transformation of Western Catholicism as the loss of an integrated civilizational order in which Catholic moral, intellectual, and political authority had structured the lives of Catholic peoples and influenced the broader societies in which Catholic populations existed. The pain is not the loss of personal piety, though Jones engages personal piety. The pain is the loss of jurisdiction. The Church no longer governs marriage. It no longer governs sexual life. It no longer governs the universities that bear its name. It no longer governs the political life of formerly Catholic nations. It no longer governs the intellectual life of its own seminaries. The jurisdictional collapse is total enough that Jones experiences it as ontological. The order that Catholic civilization once provided to Western life has been replaced by a different order, and the replacement is what Jones names as the wound.
The victims are several layered groups. The most immediate is the Catholic Church itself, understood as the institutional bearer of the order that has been displaced. The Church appears in Jones’s construction as victim because it has been hollowed out by forces operating against it from inside and outside. The figures Jones writes about, including Father Leonard Feeney, Cardinal Mindszenty, the German bishops who resisted the Reich, Father Denis Fahey, and the broader cohort of pre-conciliar Catholic intellectuals whose work Jones treats as the authentic Catholic tradition, are presented as victims of the institutional capture that produced the conciliar settlement. The wider category of victims includes Catholic peoples whose civilizational inheritance has been taken from them. The widest category extends to Western civilization itself, which Jones reads as having lost the spiritual structure that gave it its distinctive character. The victim category expands outward through the construction in the way Alexander’s framework predicts, with the immediate victims connecting to wider audiences through universalizing language about civilizational order, moral authority, and the spiritual foundations of Western life.
The connection between the victims and the wider audience runs through the language of Logos. Jones makes Logos the master category of the construction. Logos is divine reason, social order, and the structuring principle of legitimate civilization. Anti-Logos is the rejection of divine reason, the embrace of disorder, and the structuring principle of revolutionary upheaval. The pair allows Jones to connect the immediate Catholic carrier group to broader audiences who experience the postwar transformation as loss without sharing the specifically Catholic theological commitments. A reader who is not a traditionalist Catholic but who experiences contemporary cultural conditions as disordered can find in Jones’s framework a vocabulary for the experience that does not require him to accept the full Catholic theological apparatus. The Logos framework operates as the universalizing extension Alexander identifies as essential to successful trauma construction. The construction does not stay within the immediate Catholic readership. It travels to broader audiences who absorb the Logos vocabulary without absorbing the full theological framework.
Responsibility belongs to a specific set of actors in Jones’s construction. The most controversial feature of the construction is the attribution to Jewish actors. The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit names Jewish rejection of Christ as the ultimate metaphysical cause of the postwar transformation. Subsidiary attributions go to Protestant reformers, Enlightenment philosophes, Masonic networks, modernist Catholic theologians, postwar liberal Catholic intellectuals, Vatican II reformers, and the broader liberal political and economic order that has structured the postwar West. The attributions are layered. The metaphysical cause is Jewish rejection of Christ. The proximate causes include the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, modernist theology, and the conciliar reforms. The structure of the attribution allows Jones to operate at multiple levels simultaneously. Readers who reject the metaphysical attribution can still absorb the proximate attributions. Readers who accept the metaphysical attribution receive the full theological framework. The layered structure expands the audience beyond what a simpler attribution could reach.
The trauma construction is unusually accomplished within its target ecosystem. Jones holds a doctorate in American literature from Temple University. He held a faculty position at Saint Mary’s College before his dismissal in 1981 over a pro-life article. He has built his publishing operation from South Bend over four decades, producing books at substantial length on topics ranging from sexual revolution through usury through urban planning through contemporary geopolitics. The discursive skills are real. The institutional access within the traditionalist Catholic ecosystem is substantial. The material and ideal interests align with the carrier-group function in the way Alexander’s framework predicts. Jones has built a career around the trauma construction his work performs, and the career is sustained by the carrier group whose intellectual self-understanding the construction provides.
The four questions illuminate what Jones is doing that other traditionalist Catholic writers have not done. The questions of post-conciliar Catholic decline have been addressed by many writers across the past half century. What Jones contributes is the totalizing framework that connects every dimension of postwar Catholic experience to a single causal narrative. Other writers have addressed the liturgical changes, the theological developments, the demographic collapse, and the cultural transformations as separate phenomena requiring separate analyses. Jones connects them through the Logos framework and through the metaphysical attribution to Jewish rejection of Christ, producing a single narrative that absorbs every dimension into one story. The totalization is what distinguishes Jones from other writers in the traditionalist Catholic ecosystem. The carrier group acquired a primary intellectual document that organized the disparate experiences of post-conciliar Catholic life into a coherent meaning structure, and the document has functioned as the carrier group’s intellectual self-understanding for two decades.
The transformations Jones describes are real transformations. The Catholic Church has lost institutional authority across the postwar period. The conciliar reforms did produce changes that traditionalist Catholics experience as loss. The secularization of formerly Catholic institutions is documented. The demographic collapse of the religious orders is documented. The cultural conditions of the postwar West differ from the conditions of the pre-conciliar period in ways traditionalist Catholics read as decline. The pain Jones names is real in Alexander’s sense. What carrier-group analysis adds is the recognition that the pain does not predetermine its public construction. Multiple constructions are available. Some constructions take the pain in directions that produce theological renewal within the conciliar framework. Other constructions take the same pain in directions that produce broader cultural critique without the metaphysical attribution Jones performs. Jones’s construction is one option among many, and the option he performs has institutional consequences that the other options have not had.
Now apply the Watergate framework.
The Watergate framework illuminates Jones’s reading of the conciliar period and his attempt to construct an ongoing ritual narrative against the post-conciliar settlement. Alexander’s framework concerns the conditions under which an event generalizes from ordinary dispute to civic-religious crisis. Jones’s work attempts to perform the generalization in reverse direction. He attempts to redescribe the conciliar reforms, and the broader postwar transformations, as the polluting events that the ongoing Catholic ritual structure should treat as crises requiring purification. The attempt has failed at the level of mainstream Catholic life and has succeeded only within the traditionalist Catholic carrier group. The five conditions Alexander identifies were not present at the strength required for the broader ritual generalization Jones’s work attempts.
Consensus that the conciliar reforms were polluting events is restricted to a small minority of Catholic readers. The broader Catholic Church accepts the reforms as authoritative ecclesial development. The Society of Saint Pius X and adjacent traditionalist communities reject the reforms, but the rejection has not generalized into a broader Catholic consensus. The first condition Alexander identifies is therefore not met at the level of broader Catholic life. Within the traditionalist carrier group the consensus is strong, and Jones’s work operates within and reinforces that consensus, but the consensus has not extended beyond the carrier group at the strength required for ritual generalization.
Perception of threat to the center is similarly restricted. The traditionalist carrier group perceives the post-conciliar Church as having abandoned its center, and Jones’s work articulates this perception with unusual force. The broader Catholic Church does not perceive its post-conciliar arrangements as having abandoned the center but as expressing the center under contemporary conditions. The perception of threat operates within the carrier group but does not generalize beyond it.
Activation of institutional social controls has occurred only weakly. The institutional Catholic Church has not activated controls against the post-conciliar settlement because the institutional Church endorses the settlement. The traditionalist communities have activated their own controls within their own infrastructure, but those controls do not reach the broader Catholic institutional ecosystem. Jones’s own institutional position, operating outside formal Catholic infrastructure from his South Bend publishing operation, is itself evidence of the limited activation of institutional controls. He cannot work from inside Catholic institutions because Catholic institutions do not endorse his framework. The condition Alexander identifies as essential to ritual generalization is therefore weakly met.
Mobilization of differentiated elite countercenters has been weak. The traditionalist Catholic intellectual ecosystem includes Jones’s Culture Wars, the publications associated with the Society of Saint Pius X, the broader sedevacantist and traditionalist publishing infrastructure, and a small number of academic figures whose work touches traditionalist concerns. The countercenter exists, but it is small relative to the institutional Catholic Church and is institutionally marginal in ways that prevent it from performing the ritual generalization the framework would require. Compare the countercenter that mobilized against Nixon. The Senate, the federal courts, the major press institutions, and the broader civic infrastructure all participated. The countercenter against the post-conciliar settlement does not include analogous institutional resources. Its mobilization is restricted to its own carrier group and does not extend to the broader Catholic institutional ecosystem.
Effective ritual processes of purification have not occurred and cannot occur given the structural conditions. Ritual purification requires the institutional center to participate in the ritual against the polluting event. The institutional Catholic Church will not participate in a ritual that would purge its own conciliar arrangements, because those arrangements are constitutive of the institutional Church’s contemporary identity. The ritual generalization Jones’s work attempts cannot occur because the central condition Alexander identifies, the participation of the institutional center, is structurally unavailable.
The result is the structural pattern Alexander’s framework predicts when ritual generalization fails. The carrier group continues to maintain its trauma construction and its ritual claims against the polluting events. The broader institutional ecosystem continues to operate without the ritual response the carrier group seeks. The carrier group remains stable but does not expand at the rate that successful ritual generalization would produce. The trauma construction continues to function for the carrier group’s internal self-understanding while failing to produce the broader institutional response the construction demands. Jones’s work has functioned in this stable but limited mode for the past two decades, and the framework predicts the continued operation of the same pattern unless the structural conditions change.
Jones’s career has been shaped by the pollution-transfer ritual. His dismissal from Saint Mary’s College in 1981 followed the publication of a pro-life article that the institution treated as polluting. The subsequent pattern of his career has been shaped by mainstream Catholic institutions managing distance from him. He has been disinvited from speaking engagements. His books have been declined by mainstream Catholic publishers. His invitations to academic conferences have been withdrawn. The institutional management of distance from Jones’s work is the management of pollution transfer in the sense Alexander identifies. The mainstream Catholic institutional ecosystem treats his work as a polluting source from which separation must be maintained, and the management of separation is what produces the structural conditions of his career.
Jones has responded to the pollution-transfer dynamics by building his own institutional infrastructure. Culture Wars magazine, the Fidelity Press publishing operation, and the network of speaking venues that exist outside mainstream Catholic infrastructure together constitute an alternative ecosystem within which Jones’s work can circulate without triggering the pollution-transfer responses that mainstream venues would produce. The alternative ecosystem is small relative to mainstream Catholic infrastructure but is sufficient to sustain Jones’s career. The framework’s prediction is that figures excluded from mainstream institutional ecosystems through pollution-transfer dynamics will build alternative ecosystems if they have the resources to do so, and Jones’s case illustrates the prediction with unusual clarity. The alternative ecosystem he has built is the structural outcome the framework would predict for a carrier-group writer whose work is treated as polluting by the broader institutional ecosystem.
Mainstream Catholic institutions cool out his framings by treating them as fringe rather than as challenges requiring substantive engagement. The cooling-out strategy is effective at the level of mainstream Catholic life because it prevents the framings from generalizing upward to the level of ritual crisis. The strategy is also effective in the precise sense Alexander identifies. Nixon’s administration attempted cooling out and failed because the ritual frame had already taken hold. Mainstream Catholic institutions attempt cooling out against Jones and succeed because the ritual frame has not taken hold beyond his carrier group.
Alliance Theory
Who provides status, income, and protection to Jones. The answer is the alternative institutional infrastructure he has built around Culture Wars magazine, Fidelity Press, the network of speaking venues that operate outside mainstream Catholic infrastructure, and the donor base that supports his publishing operation from South Bend. The infrastructure is small relative to mainstream Catholic infrastructure but is sufficient to sustain his career across four decades. The infrastructure has been built deliberately as a response to the pollution-transfer dynamics that have closed mainstream Catholic venues to him since his dismissal from Saint Mary’s College in 1981. The structural position is the position of a writer who has built his own institutional ecosystem to compensate for the institutional ecosystems that have closed to his work, and Alliance Theory predicts this kind of construction when carrier-group operations have produced exclusion from mainstream venues but the operations have sufficient resource base to build alternative infrastructure.
Jones’s donor base includes traditionalist Catholic readers, international networks that have provided support across various periods, and the cumulative subscriber base of Culture Wars magazine. The donors share the coordination requirements the operation maintains. They accept the Logos framework. They accept the metaphysical attribution to Jewish rejection of Christ. They accept the broader analysis of postwar Catholic and Western decline. They are willing to absorb the social costs of association with Jones’s framings. The donor base is the coalition Jones has actually assembled, and the size and composition of the donor base reflect the coalition the operation has produced rather than the coalition the operation has attempted to assemble.
Who must be attracted as allies. The coalition Jones has attempted to build is unusually broad in its theoretical scope. The work addresses traditionalist Catholics, broader Christian readers experiencing modernity as decline, paleoconservative political readers, dissident-right intellectual readers, anti-Zionist readers across various political positions, and international readers in countries where Jones has maintained speaking and publishing relationships, including Russia, Iran, China, and various European traditionalist communities. The breadth is unusual for a carrier-group writer operating from a single ideological framework. The work attempts to assemble a coalition across audiences whose other commitments differ substantially, and the attempted assembly is what the framework identifies as the unusual feature of Jones’s operation.
The strange bedfellows of Jones’s attempted coalition are unusually strange. Traditionalist American Catholics and Iranian Shi’a clerics share few coordination resources outside the framings Jones provides. American paleoconservatives and Russian Orthodox nationalists share few coordination resources outside the framings Jones provides. Anti-Zionist progressives and traditionalist Catholic anti-modernists share few coordination resources outside the framings Jones provides. The coalition Jones attempts to build is a coalition whose members would not naturally find each other and whose shared commitments outside Jones’s framings are minimal. The framework predicts that such coalitions are difficult to maintain because the coordination resources required to hold them together must do unusually heavy work. Jones’s framings have to provide the coordination that the natural absence of shared commitments would otherwise prevent, and the framings have to do this work across audiences whose other commitments are substantially different.
The Logos framework is the central coordination resource Jones has constructed for this purpose. The framework allows readers in different traditions to absorb the analysis through the categories of their own traditions while accepting the broader narrative the framework provides. A traditionalist Catholic reader receives Logos as Christ. An Iranian Shi’a reader receives Logos as the divine reason that Islamic philosophical tradition has its own resources for naming. A Russian Orthodox reader receives Logos through the categories of Orthodox theology. The framework operates as a shared vocabulary that allows readers in different traditions to participate in the same broader narrative without requiring them to abandon the categories of their own traditions. The construction is sophisticated, and Alliance Theory predicts that this kind of sophisticated coordination construction is required when the coalition the operation seeks to assemble includes audiences whose other commitments differ substantially.
What beliefs and signals mark coalition membership in the Jones coalition. The signals are several. Acceptance of the Logos framework as the master analytical category. Acceptance of the broader narrative of postwar civilizational decline. Acceptance of the metaphysical attribution to Jewish rejection of Christ as the ultimate cause of the decline. Acceptance of the proximate attributions to Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, modernist theology, and the conciliar reforms. Willingness to engage with Jones’s particular literary and intellectual style across very long books. Willingness to absorb the social costs of association with the framings, particularly the Jewish question framings. The list is long, and the length is part of what limits the coalition. Each signal is a coordination requirement, and the coordination requirements are higher than the requirements other writers operating on adjacent territory have maintained.
The Jewish question framings are the coordination requirement that has done the most to define the boundaries of Jones’s coalition. The framings are sufficient to attract a particular audience that finds in Jones’s work the explicit attribution that other writers operating on adjacent territory have declined to make. The framings are also sufficient to repel audiences that would otherwise be willing to absorb the broader narrative without the metaphysical attribution. The structural pattern is the pattern Alliance Theory predicts when a writer maintains coordination requirements that other writers reduce. The audience that accepts the high requirements is smaller than the audience that would accept lower requirements, and the audience that accepts the high requirements is also more committed than the audience that would accept lower requirements. Jones’s coalition is smaller and more committed than coalitions assembled around lower requirements, and the structural relationship between coordination requirements and coalition characteristics is precisely the relationship the framework predicts.
What would be lost in status, income, or belonging if Jones changed his position. The losses would be substantial. The alternative institutional infrastructure he has built operates on the framings the position requires. The donor base would not sustain a different operation. The international networks would not maintain their current relationships if the framings changed. The personal identity Jones has constructed across four decades is the identity the position has produced, and the abandonment of the position would mean the abandonment of the self the position has produced. The position has produced consequences across his career, including the Saint Mary’s dismissal, the exclusion from mainstream Catholic venues, the controversies surrounding his speaking engagements, and the ongoing institutional management of distance from his work. The accumulated costs of the position are themselves part of what would be lost if the position changed, because the abandonment would imply that the costs were paid for nothing. The position is sunk and stable, and Alliance Theory predicts this kind of stability when the costs of changing position exceed the costs of maintaining it.
Jones has constructed coordination resources that allow an unusually broad coalition to be attempted while maintaining coordination requirements that prevent the coalition from being assembled at the size the breadth would otherwise allow. The construction is sophisticated. The Logos framework is genuinely able to operate across traditions in ways that other coordination resources cannot. The maintenance of the high coordination requirements, particularly the Jewish question framings, prevents the breadth from being realized as coalition size. The structural pattern is the pattern of an operation whose theoretical ambition exceeds the coalition the practical coordination requirements allow, and Alliance Theory makes the structural relationship visible.
Alliance Theory predicts that successful coalitions hold together groups whose interests do not naturally align. Jones’s attempted coalition includes groups whose interests are unusually distant from each other. American traditionalist Catholics and Iranian Shi’a clerics have political interests that diverge sharply. American paleoconservatives and Russian Orthodox nationalists have political interests that diverge sharply. The coalition has to construct shared enemies and shared status interests that produce coordination across the divergence. The shared enemy Jones has constructed for this purpose is the broader liberal modernist order, with the metaphysical attribution to Jewish rejection of Christ providing the deeper cause that connects the immediate enemies to the broader narrative. The shared status interests include the recovery of traditional civilizational order, the assertion of religious and cultural authority against secular and liberal forces, and the recognition that contemporary arrangements deny.
The shared enemies and shared status interests are real coordination resources for the coalition. They produce coordination across audiences whose other commitments differ substantially. What the framework adds is the recognition that the coordination produced is genuinely cross-tradition coordination rather than mere overlap of distinct local coordinations. The coalition Jones has assembled across his international engagements is a coalition in the strong sense the framework identifies. The members are in coordination with each other through Jones’s framings, not merely in parallel local coordinations that Jones happens to address. The Tehran lecture audiences and the South Bend subscriber base are in coordination through the shared framework, and the coordination is what allows Jones to operate across the international networks his career has assembled.
The JQ framings perform several coordination operations simultaneously. They identify a shared metaphysical enemy that connects the immediate political and cultural enemies of various coalition members to a single deeper cause. They mark coalition membership through willingness to absorb the social costs of association with the framings. They distinguish Jones’s coalition from adjacent coalitions whose framings do not include the Jewish attribution. They produce the strange-bedfellow coordination across audiences whose other framings differ substantially, because the Jewish question framings provide a shared analytical move that audiences from different traditions can make together. The coordination function is real, and Alliance Theory predicts that the framings will continue to perform the function as long as the coalition operates.
The engagements with Iran, Russia, and other non-Western traditional societies have provided coordination resources that the American context cannot provide. The Iranian state has resources to host Jones’s lectures, publish his work in translation, and provide him with platforms that American venues have closed. The Russian Orthodox traditionalist networks have provided similar resources within the Russian context. The international engagements are not merely speaking opportunities. They are coordination resources that sustain the broader coalition the operation attempts to assemble. The international audiences are coalition partners whose participation in the broader framework is part of what allows the framework to operate at the metaphysical breadth Jones requires. The framework’s account of carrier-group operations across international networks helps name what Jones is doing in these engagements, which is constructing the international coalition the framings require for the analysis to function at the level the analysis claims to operate.
Hero System
His hero system is integralist Catholicism in its pre-Vatican II form, with himself as a defender of Logos against the assaults of Jewish revolutionary spirit. The hero is the Catholic intellectual who names the enemies of the Church openly, refuses the postwar accommodations that softer Catholics accepted, and keeps the full traditional teaching alive against the cultural forces trying to erase it. Permanence is earned by participating in the Logos, the divine reason that orders reality, and by writing books that future Catholics will read when the present apostasy has passed.
The installation happened at Notre Dame and in his early Catholic education, but Jones radicalized the inherited system rather than simply receiving it. Most American Catholics of his generation were socialized into the post-Vatican II compromise that wanted accommodation with liberal modernity, ecumenical warmth toward Jews, and quiet management of the older theological positions on usury, on Jewish disbelief, on the relationship between Church and state. Jones rejected the compromise. He went back to the older sources and adopted the hero system they implied rather than the softer system his contemporary Church offered.
Becker would mark this as a man performing a hero-system rescue. The official Church around him had abandoned the heroic activities Jones believed the tradition required. He took it on himself to keep performing them anyway. Slaughter of Cities, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, Logos Rising, and the long run of Culture Wars magazine are the documents of that rescue. They perform activities his Church no longer performed publicly. They name what the older tradition named. They refuse the rhetorical softening the postwar compromise required.
The hero ideal at the center is the Catholic warrior intellectual. He reads everything. He writes constantly. He names the enemy. He accepts professional and social costs for naming the enemy. He builds a small institution around himself when the larger institutions have failed the tradition. He produces books that will outlast the present moment. His permanence comes through the Logos, which is eternal, and through the chain of Catholic intellectual transmission from the Church Fathers through the medievals through the manualists through whatever remnant carries the work forward.
The enemy structure of his hero system is more central than in most. Becker notes that hero systems usually have antagonists, but the antagonists vary in importance. For Jones the antagonist is constitutive. The Jewish revolutionary spirit, in his account, has driven every major modern catastrophe. Identifying it, tracking it through history, naming its current operatives, and warning Catholics against it is the work the hero performs. Without the antagonist the hero system would have less to do. Jones has built his project around the identification work, which means the antagonist must remain visible and active for the work to continue.
This produces a feature of his writing that readers notice quickly. Almost every cultural development gets read through the same frame. American urban renewal, sexual revolution, modern art, Hollywood, the financial system, contemporary politics, the war in Ukraine, and current Israeli policy all become expressions of the single revolutionary spirit he has identified. Becker’s framework explains why. A hero system organized around one antagonist requires the antagonist to be everywhere, because if the antagonist were merely local the hero’s work would be merely local too. Jones needs the universal frame because his hero system needs universal scope.
The mussar-style internal layer that Weinberg carried alongside his Torah scholarship has a Catholic equivalent that Jones operates in his own way. The Catholic moral life, the sacramental practice, the rosary, the Mass, the family. Jones lives this layer and writes from inside it. He had a large family. He raised them in the traditional Catholic forms. He attends Latin Mass when available. The personal moral life is part of the hero performance, not a private supplement to it. The hero is a Catholic father, husband, and parishioner before he is a polemicist, and the polemics flow from the prior commitments.
The institutional layer is small and self-built. Notre Dame fired him in the early 1980s, allegedly for his anti-abortion activism, and he never returned to a major institution. Culture Wars magazine, his own books published through Fidelity Press, his speaking circuit, his YouTube presence. Becker would say this matches the pattern of a man whose hero system has been rejected by the major institutions of his tradition. He builds a small parallel institution and operates from there. The institution is just large enough to sustain the work and small enough to remain under his control. The control matters because the major institutions would force him to soften the polemic, and softening would destroy the hero performance.
His audience is the recognition community that gives his hero work meaning. Traditional Catholics who reject Vatican II compromises, paleocon Catholics, and a wider audience of non-Catholic readers who find his Jewish-question framing useful for their own purposes. The wider audience is awkward for him, because some of its members are not Catholics at all and would not be welcome in his hero system as full participants. Becker would note that many hero systems acquire fellow travelers who use the work for their own purposes, and the hero usually accepts this because the alternative is a smaller audience and reduced amplification.
Jones was socialized into Catholicism in a particular American Catholic milieu that was at war with itself in the 1960s and 1970s, and his formation pushed him toward the traditionalist side of that war before he was old enough to evaluate it. The radicalization that followed was the working out of value infusions installed earlier. He cites Augustine, Aquinas, and the manualists because they were the texts his formation taught him to read. His enemies are the enemies his formation taught him to recognize. The reasoning came after the formation and rationalized it. Becker would say this is normal. Most public intellectuals do the same thing.
Jones identifies Jews as the carriers of the revolutionary spirit that his hero system exists to oppose. This is not incidental. The hero system requires the antagonist, and Jones has placed Jews in the antagonist role on the basis of his reading of Catholic tradition. He insists this is not racial but theological. Jews who convert to Catholicism become full participants in the hero system. Jews who do not convert remain in the antagonist role. Becker would note that a hero system structured this way produces predictable behavior. The hero must continue to identify Jewish involvement in cultural decline, because if he stopped his hero system would lose its central work. He cannot soften without dismantling.
This locks in a feature of Jones’s writing that critics often misread. They read his focus on Jews as personal animus that could be talked out of him with better evidence. Becker’s framework predicts that better evidence will not move him, because the evidence is not what placed Jews in the antagonist role. The hero system did. The evidence is recruited to dress the position. Jones is not unreachable because he is stupid or hateful. He is unreachable because his hero system has assigned a role that requires the antagonist to remain in place. Removing Jews from the antagonist role would require dismantling the hero system, which would require facing the death anxiety the system was built to manage.
His writing voice is the voice of a hero system in full operation. Confident, declarative, willing to name names, indifferent to the social costs. Becker would say this voice is what a man sounds like when he is performing his hero project at full intensity and has stopped caring about audiences outside the recognition community. The voice repels readers outside the system and energizes readers inside it. Both effects are intended.
His productivity is the productivity of a man whose hero system requires constant performance. Jones writes books at a rate few academics match. Culture Wars publishes monthly. He produces YouTube videos, lectures, interviews, and articles continuously. Becker would say this is what a hero system in operation looks like. The hero must keep producing or his life stops counting. Stopping would mean facing the death anxiety the production manages.
FAFO (F– Around and Find Out)
Phase one was a real and small bet that paid in disaster. Phase two was a much larger and ongoing bet that paid in audience and cost him almost everything else.
The setup. Philadelphia kid, lapsed Catholic at twenty, returned to the faith in rural Germany after reading Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, then a Temple PhD in American literature in 1979, hired the same year at St. Mary’s College in South Bend as an assistant professor of American literature on a six-year tenure track. He was thirty-one, married, two children, settled. A man with a normal Catholic academic career in front of him.
The transgression. He started writing op-eds in the South Bend Tribune attacking abortion, feminism, and the paid-child-care complex with an aggression his colleagues at a women’s Catholic college could not absorb. He named the local culture. He made the campus look bad in the local paper. He did not soften when warned. One year into the six. Fired. The dismissal was, in his telling and in the consensus of the available sources, retaliation for the op-eds, framed by the college as something else.
This first phase is real FAFO. He knew the op-eds were inflammatory. He knew the faculty disliked them. He kept writing them in a town where the dean read the paper. He did not have to make abortion the public test. He chose to.
The finding out, phase one. Three discoveries inside eighteen months.
That the Catholic credential on the building meant less than he had believed. St. Mary’s was Catholic on the door and Land O’Lakes on the inside. The conciliar settlement had moved the actual institution to a place where his pro-life op-eds read as harassment rather than orthodoxy. He had misread the building.
That tenure track does not protect a junior professor whose colleagues want him gone. The procedural protections he had assumed turned out to be polite, not binding. The dismissal happened fast.
That the wider Catholic academic market would not pick him up. The reference letter problem closed the second-chance door. He had been fired from a Catholic college in a way that named him as a problem. Other Catholic colleges did not want the trouble. He was, at thirty-two, finished in academic Catholic life.
This is where most stories like Jones’s end. The man re-trains, takes a non-academic Catholic job, writes occasional pieces, and lives quietly. Jones did the opposite. He founded Fidelity in 1981 and decided to make the firing the beginning of a career rather than its end. That decision is the second FAFO bet, and it is the bet that defines him.
The transgression, phase two. The magazine started as a traditionalist Catholic response to the post-conciliar collapse. The early Fidelity is recognizable Catholic conservative work, in the same intellectual zone as First Things or Crisis, though sharper and more local. The shift came in stages through the 1990s and accelerated after the 2002 abuse scandal coverage and the 2008 publication of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, his 1200-page thesis that modernity is driven by a Jewish revolutionary spirit dating from the rejection of Christ. After that book, the frame closed.
Once the frame closes, the writer becomes a writer of one book in many volumes. Libido Dominandi reads the sexual revolution through the same frame. Barren Metal reads capitalism and usury through the same frame. The architecture, the music, the cinema, the foreign policy: all of it gets read through the single cause. The audience that pays for the magazine and the books wants the frame. Soften the frame and the audience erodes. Sharpen it and the audience grows. The economics of the operation push toward sharpening.
The finding out, phase two. This is the larger and more interesting FAFO discovery, and it has four parts.
He found out that institutional exile is not freedom. The man fired by an institution is not released into the open air. He is released into the market for whichever audience will pay him next. Jones discovered that the audience willing to pay an independent Catholic writer at scale was the audience that wanted the single-cause reading. The institution he escaped was traded for an audience he could not afford to lose.
He found out that mainstream Catholic intellectual life would close to him. First Things will not run him. Commentary will not run him. Crisis will not run him. EWTN will not book him. Catholic universities will not invite him. The Catholic establishment, conservative and liberal alike, treats him as a contagion. The asterisk is permanent.
He found out that the wider antisemitism-watch apparatus would name him and never unname him. ADL, SPLC, the Catholic League, all on the record. The judgment is not a passing scandal he can wait out. It is the settled classification of his work in every reference source a librarian or producer or booker will consult.
He found out that the audience left to him after all those closures was loyal, paying, and global. Press TV in Iran. Eastern European traditionalists. American paleo-Catholic and dissident-right podcasts. Conferences with figures who carry their own asterisks. A small but devoted readership that buys the long books. The income suffices. The output is enormous. The output keeps the audience. The audience keeps the income. The loop runs.
The aftermath. Forty-plus years now of self-publication, more than thirty books, a magazine in continuous publication since 1981, a YouTube and podcast presence, a worldwide audience of conspiracists, traditionalists, and the curious. He is, in his way, productive. He has produced more pages than nearly any contemporary Catholic intellectual. He has been read in Poland, Russia, Iran, and parts of the American Right that nobody else reaches in quite his register.
Frank readings.
Did he win? In some terms, yes. He has had the career he chose, on terms he set, for forty years. He has written what he wanted to write. He has not had to soften anything for an editor. He has been read by people who needed what he was offering. The independent press exists. The output exists. The audience exists. By the standard of a man who refused to be silenced, he won.
Did he lose? In other terms, completely. He has no standing in Catholic intellectual life beyond his own circle. He has no claim on the wider conversation. His name is a problem in any room that does not already love him. His best work, on Catholic urban neighborhoods and on the use of sexual permission as social control, cannot be assigned in a college course because the assignment would have to defend itself against the rest of the corpus. The institution he was thrown out of still stands. The institutions he hoped to influence have hardened against him.
Was he naive? About St. Mary’s in 1980, yes. He read the building as more Catholic than it was. About the post-firing trajectory, no. He understood early that he was building outside the institutions and built accordingly.
Was he his own worst editor? Yes, and this is the heart of the second FAFO finding. The independence that freed him from the conciliar Catholic academy also freed him from any peer who might have said, before publication, “this thesis explains everything and predicts nothing, and the reader who buys it will not be the reader you want.” No such editor existed. The market provided the readers it provided. The readers wanted the frame. The frame closed.
Was he brave? Yes. He kept publishing what he believed when the safer paths were silence, softening, or a return to the conservative Catholic mainstream on its terms. He absorbed deplatformings, bannings, and a permanent asterisk. He did not move.
Was the bravery wise? This is the harder question and it is the heart of the case. Bravery in defense of a thesis that explains everything is not the same as bravery in defense of a true thesis. The frame Jones chose is exactly the kind of frame an intellectual should be most suspicious of in his own head, because it removes the conditions under which evidence might modify it. He chose otherwise. He kept the frame. The frame kept him fed. The bravery is real and the wisdom is contested.
Did the institution win? In the immediate sense, St. Mary’s removed him at near-zero cost to itself and never had to revisit the choice. In a longer sense, the Catholic intellectual establishment paid a cost too. It lost the capacity to engage the parts of his early and middle work that had value, because engaging any of him meant defending the engagement against the rest of him. The wholesale refusal saved the institution short-term and impoverished it long-term. There were arguments in Libido Dominandi worth taking seriously. The institution could not afford to take them seriously. So they went undiscussed and Jones grew larger in the only space left to him.
Jones’s case shows that exile is a market, not a wilderness. The man cast out is sorted to whichever audience will pay him next. The audience shapes the writer over time, often more thoroughly than the institution ever did. Jones is a clearer case of this than almost anyone on the list because the contrast between phase one and phase two is so stark. Phase one was a man fighting his employer over abortion. Phase two is a man whose audience pays him to find Jewish revolutionary spirit behind every modern development. The path from one to the other was not inevitable. It was a series of choices, each one rewarded by the readership available to him at the moment. Forty years of small rewarded choices compound into a frame that no later choice can re-open.
The Set
E. Michael Jones sits at the center of a small, dense world run out of South Bend, Indiana. He founded Culture Wars magazine as Fidelity in 1981, then renamed it after he borrowed Bismarck's word Kulturkampf to name the fight he thought he was in. He runs Fidelity Press, his book imprint, and his wife Ruth P. Jones keeps the business side under the corporate name Ultramontane Associates. The home and the operation are one thing. His public face now is EMJ Live, a Friday broadcast on Rumble, Cozy.tv, and Telegram, plus a heavy flow of guest spots on other men's channels. Watchdog groups including the ADL, the SPLC, and CAMERA describe him as an antisemite, and his presence on Iranian state media and white-nationalist sites is part of why. He calls himself anti-Jewish rather than antisemitic, and that distinction does real work in his world, which I will come back to.
The set has a few rings.
The Catholic-traditionalist ring is the one he claims as his real home. Patrick Coffin gave him a platform there. He debates Catholic Answers apologists like Trent Horn (b. 1983) and channels such as Culture Proof. This ring fights over who counts as a faithful Catholic and who has sold the faith to modernity.
The Muslim and Iranian ring runs through Kevin Barrett (b. 1959), a convert to Islam who hosts Truth Jihad Radio and False Flag Weekly News and broadcasts on Press TV. Barrett and Jones met at the 2013 Hollywoodism conference in Tehran, organized by the late filmmaker Nader Talebzadeh (1953-2022), and there Jones first preached a Catholic-Muslim alliance against what he calls the Zionist enemy. Mark Dankof, a Lutheran pastor and Press TV regular, moves in the same circle, along with Salim Mansur (b. 1950), the Albanian academic Olsi Jazexhi, and Eddie Redzovic's The Deen Show, where Jones pitches the alliance to a Muslim audience.
The third ring is the dissident right, which he overlaps with and fights at the same time. Ron Unz publishes him at The Unz Review. Kevin MacDonald (b. 1944) of The Occidental Observer has hosted him. The comedian Owen Benjamin (b. 1980) amplified him early and helped him reach a young online audience. Nick Fuentes (b. 1998) and the Groypers court him and quarrel with him by turns. Smaller hosts feed the same stream: Charles Moscowitz, a Jewish podcaster who debates him, Tim Kelly of Our Interesting Times, the Irish activist Gemma O'Doherty, Joseph Brothers, Chicago Talk Show Host, and others.
What they value is Logos. Jones takes the opening of John's gospel and turns it into a theory of everything. Christ is the rational order of the world, and a culture lives or dies by whether it conforms to that order. From this he reads usury, pornography, sexual liberation, revolution, and liberalism as forms of rebellion against Logos, and he traces each one back to a theological root. The men around him value the same thing in their own keys. They prize the long polemical book, the convert's hard certainty, and the claim that culture flows downward from doctrine. The magazine's motto says it plainly: no social progress outside the moral order. They want the Catholic neighborhood order Jones says a WASP and Jewish elite destroyed, and they want the West turned back toward the faith.
Their hero is the lone Catholic intellectual who says the forbidden thing and pays for it. Cancellation becomes proof. When PayPal drops him, when Amazon pulls his books, when the ADL writes him up, the men in this world read it as confirmation that he struck a nerve. Suffering at the hands of institutions ranks higher than any institutional honor. The prophet who called a future event also earns rank here, which is why Barrett keeps retelling the Tehran story where Jones predicts the resignation of a pope minutes before it breaks on the hotel television. The convert's testimony carries weight too. Jones returned to the faith after reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. Barrett tells his own conversion to Islam as a sacred turn. And sheer output is heroic. The enormous volumes, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation & Political Control, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Usury and Labor, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing, and Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, function as monuments. The man who writes a thousand-page book has done something the talkers cannot.
The status games follow. Rank goes to the man who has read the big books and can run a cultural problem back to its theological source faster than the next man. Barrett crowns Jones America's leading Catholic intellectual, and that title is a chip the whole set trades on. Proximity to larger platforms raises a man's standing, so a Tucker Carlson mention or a Fuentes feud lifts everyone near it. Martyr capital, measured in deplatformings and watchlist entries, converts into authority. The sharpest contest runs along a boundary Jones himself drew, and it splits the set from the racial right. Jones polices that line hard. He mocks men who call themselves White Catholics. He refuses race science. The Groyper race crowd attacks him for it, and Fuentes plays both alliance and rival, since the two men compete for the same young dissident Catholics.
His norms are old and strict. Society must order itself to Logos. Usury is sin. Sexual liberation is a tool of political control, not freedom. The state and the culture should bend to the Church. Revolution, from the French to the sexual, is rebellion against Christ. And he names Israel and what he calls organized Jewry as the present enemy of that order.
His essentialism is where he parts from his neighbors on the right. He denies that Jewishness sits in blood, genes, or DNA. He calls it a spiritual posture, the rejection of Christ, the choice to stand against Logos. By his account a Jew who accepts Christ stops being a Jew in the only sense that counts. This puts him against MacDonald's biological theory of Jewish behavior and against the Groypers' talk of the White race. The essence he believes in is the will's stance toward God, fixed in the soul rather than the body. He treats Catholic identity the same way, as a matter of faith and not ethnicity, which is why the White Catholic label offends him. That single claim defines the social set and divides it. It lets him keep the Jewish-power thesis that binds him to the racial right while refusing the racial premise that would make him one of them.
Before 2013 the magazine was a Catholic culture-war paper. Jones wrote about Notre Dame, the abuse scandal, the Medjugorje apparitions, the sexual revolution, urban renewal as a plot against Catholic neighborhoods. His books ran along the same track: Monsters from the Id on horror, Dionysos Rising on music, The Slaughter of Cities on the bulldozing of the ethnic parish, The Medjugorje Deception. The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, his thousand-page volume from 2008, marked the turn toward the Jewish question, but he still framed it as a history of the Church and its enemies. The fight was domestic and Catholic. The enemy lived in chancery offices and Hollywood studios.
Tehran changed the scale. At the Hollywoodism conference in 2013 Jones met Barrett and walked into a state apparatus that wanted exactly what he was selling. Nader Talebzadeh ran a series of gatherings, the New Horizon conferences, with men like Gholamreza Montazami and Hamid Qashqavi, and the guest list mixed Holocaust deniers, anti-war activists, and a few anti-Zionist Jews such as Norman Finkelstein (b. 1953) and Miko Peled (b. 1961), who gave the events cover against the charge of antisemitism. The Iranian state offered Jones three things he could not get at home. It gave him an audience that already believed the West was sick. It gave him Press TV, a broadcast platform with global reach. And it handed him proof, as he read it, that his thesis ran wider than the Catholic Church. The rejection of Logos was not a parish problem. It was a world war, and a state with an army agreed.
The theology had to stretch to carry the new weight, and Jones stretched it. For decades he had said culture flows from worship and that Christ is Logos, the rational order of the world. To bring Shia Islam under the same roof he widened the term. Logos Rising, his 2020 book, recast the whole argument as a history of ultimate reality rather than a history of the Church. Logos became reason, natural law, the order any sound civilization tracks. Catholics and Shia could stand on that common ground. Both honor reason and revelation. Both condemn usury. Both reject sexual liberation. Both name a single enemy. Barrett gave the alliance its slogan, the Catholic-Muslim front against what he called the Zionist Antichrist, and Jones supplied the metaphysics underneath it.
The magazine followed the man. The table of contents drifted from Medjugorje and Notre Dame toward Hormuz and sanctions. Jones started writing and broadcasting on Iran, Syria, Russia, the dollar, the price of oil, the structure of American empire. He sat for Press TV segments advising the Revolutionary Guard that Israel, not Donald Trump, was the real enemy. He kept the old Catholic columns running, but a reader who picked up an issue now found geopolitics next to the abortion coverage. The throughline held. Jones told both audiences the same story. Sexual liberation, usury, revolution, and Zionist foreign policy are one phenomenon, the political form of a refusal to bend to Logos. Iran simply gave the story a map and a front line.
At home the enemy had been the liberal bishop and the pornographer. On the world stage it became organized Jewry and the state of Israel, named without the Catholic framing to soften it. The later books track the hardening: Jewish Fables, Jewish Privilege, and The Holocaust Narrative in 2023, which carried him into open Holocaust revisionism. Watchdog readers had long flagged his sources, including Michael Hoffman, and the Tehran alliance pulled him further along that road rather than back from it.
The cost came fast. The United States sanctioned the New Horizon conference in 2019 as an arm of Iranian influence. Payment processors and platforms dropped him over the years. The mainstream Catholic world, never warm, treated the Press TV appearances as confirmation of the worst read on him. Each blow fed the hero system, so the punishment doubled as proof. The gains were real too. He reached Muslim audiences across the world, picked up the global-south following that shows up in his recent broadcasts, and won a standing abroad that no American Catholic outlet would give him.
Now, in the 2025 and 2026 war coverage, the alliance sits at the front of the operation. The recent shows run with Barrett on False Flag Weekly News, the Iran-war streams with titles like Salamanders on Fire, the Deen Show appearances pitching the Catholic-Muslim front to Muslims directly. Talebzadeh’s death in 2022 took the broker who built the bridge, and Jones speaks of him as a loss the project has not replaced.
The alliance also strained the home audience. The same universalized Logos that lets a Shia Muslim be an ally cuts against the White-identity Catholics and the racial right who want a blood-and-soil West. Jones cannot preach a Catholic-Muslim front and a White Christendom at once. He chose the front. That choice wins him Tehran and Cairo and loses him part of the Groyper base, and it explains why his quarrels with the race crowd grew louder in the same years the alliance deepened.
The easy story says Jones widened his Catholic thesis into a universal one and that the alliance followed from the widening. His own books do not bear that out. A crack runs through the work, and Logos Rising is where you can see it.
Start with the early shelf: Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation & Political Control, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Usury and Labor, and The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing. These read modern disorder as the rotten fruit of a single act, the abandonment of the Catholic moral order. Sexual liberation, horror fiction, atonal music, urban renewal, usury, each one a symptom of one disease. The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, in 2008, gave the disease a carrier. Jones argued that Judaism, after it rejected Christ, became the standing party of revolution against the order Christ embodies. The argument was theological and supersessionist to the bone. Christ is Logos. The Church carries Logos through history. Rome fell to a faith that understood reality better than the empire did. Everything turns on the Church as the bearer of reason and the Jew as the figure who says no to it. The fight was Catholic, and it was triumphalist, and it did not pretend otherwise.
Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality, in 2020, looks at first like the turn toward the universal. The subtitle promises a history of ultimate reality, not a history of the Church. Jones reaches past dogma to the bare claim that the universe is intelligible, that reason and order point to a mind behind them, that any man who denies this collapses into nonsense. He runs the whole of intellectual history through Giambattista Vico's (1668-1744) cycles, revolution and heresy met by fresh appeals to natural law. He spends his fire on the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and the rest, for failing to grasp that something cannot come from nothing. Cast this way, Logos sounds like common property. Reason. Order. Natural law. The grounds any serious theist might stand on, Catholic or Muslim or Jewish.
Jones keeps Logos identified with Christ, the Word made flesh of John's first chapter, equal to God and God Himself. And he faults Islam by name on the one point the alliance leans on hardest. He charges Ash'arite theology and Sufi mysticism with a failure to hold reason and revelation together, and he treats that failure as the reason Islamic civilization stalled. The book ranks Islam below Catholic Christianity on the Logos question, the precise question the Catholic-Muslim front claims to share. Even a sympathetic non-Catholic reader felt it. Roosh Valizadeh, an Orthodox convert who admired the book, said its heavy Catholic perspective rubbed against his own faith. The book was not built to be shared. It was built to win.
So the alliance rests on a moral program and a common enemy. Catholics and Shia agree that usury is sin, that sexual liberation is a weapon, that liberal modernity corrodes the family, that Zionism drives the wars. They agree on the floor and the foe. They do not agree on the summit, and Jones's own book says they cannot, because the summit is Christ and the Muslim stops short of Him. The metaphysical claim that might fuse the two camps is the thing Logos Rising denies the Muslim. The fusion stays on the ground floor.
Jones did not soften his Catholic exclusivity to make room for Tehran. He kept the supersessionist core whole and bolted a war coalition onto the side of it. He can do this because his enemy sits at the theological level while his ally sits at the political one. The Jew rejects Logos and so becomes the antitype, the engine of revolution, the permanent adversary. The Muslim mishandles Logos, by the book's own account, but fights the same enemy and keeps the same moral law, and so he enters the story as a junior partner in the war for Logos rather than a co-owner of it. The hierarchy never goes away. Catholic Christianity stays at the top. Islam takes a place of honor in the trench, one rank down.
From the bulldozed parish to the Strait of Hormuz, the constant is the same equation. Logos is the Catholic order. Its rejection is the source of revolution. What changed after 2013 is the size of the map and the roster of allies, not the center. The universal language is the reach. The Catholic claim is the thing being reached with. When you hear him call the alliance a meeting of two peoples of Logos, set it next to the pages where he tells the Muslim he has not quite grasped Logos at all. Both statements are his. The second one is the one he wrote at length and in print.
The economic bridge carries more weight than the metaphysical one. On usury the Muslim is not a junior partner. He holds a parallel doctrine, intact, and on the present-day score he arguably keeps it better than the Christian West does. That changes the shape of the alliance on this front, and it explains why the men around Jones lead with finance rather than theology when they talk to the Muslim world.
Set out the argument first. Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Usury and Labor, from 2014, carries the subtitle A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury, and the thesis sits in that line. Wealth comes from labor and from labor alone. Credit turns into wealth only when a man works it. Lending at interest produces nothing and feeds on what others make, so it is theft dressed as finance, and modern capitalism is that theft run by the state. Jones wants to drag economics back to where Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) kept it, a branch of moral philosophy, the place Adam Smith (1723-1790) himself started before the discipline forgot its parentage. His history runs on a single arc. The Church banned usury from the fall of Rome and held the line for a thousand years by treating the economy as answerable to God. Then the Church's authority broke, the Reformation loosened the ban, and Jews moved into the lending vacuum. Usury is the economic face of the same refusal he writes about everywhere else, the refusal of the moral order, of Logos.
Now lay Islam beside it. Islam carries its own ban on interest, riba, straight from the Quran, with no debt to Christianity for it. The prohibition never lapsed the way the Catholic one did. It survives in law and in working institutions, the whole apparatus of sharia-compliant banking. So on this axis the Muslim does not arrive holding a deficient version of the doctrine. He holds a living one. Where Logos Rising had to rank Islam below the Church on reason and revelation, the usury question lets Jones point east and say, there, that is what fidelity to the moral economy looks like, and the modern Christian West no longer manages it. The overlap is real and it runs both ways. Both traditions call interest a sin. Both root economics in divine law. Both name the same foe, the financier, the central bank, the Federal Reserve, the men Barrett's circle call the Epstein class. The shared enemy and the shared positive program line up, which is more than the metaphysics ever gave them.
Read the architecture of the book and the protagonist is still the Church. The thousand-year hero of the story is the Catholic ban, enforced by Catholic authority, theorized by Aristotle and Aquinas and the Schoolmen. Islam barely appears in the medieval narrative. The lineage Jones reasons from is Greek and Catholic and Western. The Islamic prohibition enters as corroboration, a witness he calls to the stand, not a source he builds the case out of. And the cure he prescribes is Catholic too, a restored moral economy of just wages and productive labor under the old Christian rule, not the adoption of Islamic finance. So the bridge holds at the level of conclusion and enemy and program. The genealogy underneath it stays Catholic.
If the present-day Muslim keeps the usury law that the present-day Christian abandoned, then on this one axis the Muslim stands ahead of the Christian, and that inverts the hierarchy Logos Rising worked to keep. Jones handles it by splitting the ideal from the practice. The Catholic Middle Ages remain the standard, the source, the high-water mark. The modern West's surrender is the fall. The contemporary Muslim earns credit for holding a discipline the modern Christian dropped, but the discipline he holds is still, in Jones's telling, the one the Church invented and perfected first. The Muslim keeps the rule well. The rule is Catholic in origin. The top of the ladder does not move.
When Jones and Barrett take the alliance to a Muslim audience, they lead with the dollar, the sanctions, the Fed, the wars for finance, not with the Trinity. They do this because the financial plank bears real load and the theological plank cannot. On usury the two camps meet as something close to equals against a common predator. On Logos they meet as a senior and a junior. The economic bridge is the strongest timber in the whole structure, and the fusion that makes it portable is the one Jones has built his life around, the identification of the usurer with the figure who rejects God's order. Name the Federal Reserve, name Zionist finance, name the lender, and a Catholic and a Shia hear the same sermon. That is why the alliance travels on the money question. It is the place where his Catholic frame and a Muslim's own law point at the same man.
Here is the puzzle in one line. The sexual question is where Jones and a traditional Muslim agree most, and it is the plank the alliance leans on least. The reason tells you what the alliance is for.
Take the thesis first. Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation & Political Control, from 2000, borrows its title from Augustine (354-430), whose phrase named the lust to dominate. Jones turns the phrase on the dominators. Sexual liberation, he argues, is not freedom at all. A man ruled by his appetites is a man easy to rule. Augustine taught that mastery of the passions is the only real liberty and slavery to them the only real chains, and Jones says the heirs of the Enlightenment grasped this and inverted it. They learned to free the appetite so they could own the man. He runs the line from the Marquis de Sade and Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati through Freud (1856-1939), Wilhelm Reich, and Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), then into Margaret Sanger, the Rockefeller money, Edward Bernays and the advertising trade, Planned Parenthood, the therapeutic state. Pornography, sex education, mass media, encounter groups, all of it one project. Loosen the family, atomize the man, and govern what is left. The cure is the old one. Chastity. Marriage. Self-command under God's law.
On the sexual question a traditional Muslim signs nearly the whole sheet. Modesty. The family as the floor of society. Pornography as poison. Hostility to feminism and to the sexual identity politics of the West. Sexual restraint as a duty owed to God. The diagnosis matches, the values match, the remedy matches. And the modern Muslim world holds the line in plain sight, in dress, in law, in the ordering of the sexes, more visibly than the modern Christian West manages. The seam that opened in the Logos case and narrowed in the usury case nearly closes here. The Augustinian frame is Catholic, but the conclusions land on the same ground a conservative Muslim already stands on, and he stands on it now, not only in memory of a medieval high-water mark.
So the moral overlap is deepest on sex. The political use is thinnest. Four things explain the gap.
The sexual question has no enemy with a state and a face. The usury thesis points at the banker, the Fed, the financier. The Zionism thesis points at Israel and at the men Barrett's circle call the Epstein class. A coalition can march against a government and a banking system. It cannot march against pornography in the same way, because the enemy on the sexual front is a culture, a market, a drift, the air people breathe. Jones names culprits, Kinsey and Sanger and the rest, and he folds Jews into that story too, but the adversary stays diffuse. You cannot build a foreign-policy front out of chastity. You can build one out of opposition to Israel and to Western finance.
The sexual question also splits the partners as soon as you press past the broad strokes. Catholic and Muslim sexual law agree on the headline and part on the detail. Contraception, which the Catholic rule forbids and much of Muslim practice permits. Polygamy. Divorce. The theology of marriage and the standing of women. Lead with sex and these differences surface and start an argument inside the coalition. Keep sex in the background and the two camps nod at each other and move on. Better to lead with the foe they can hate without a single reservation.
The alliance lives on Press TV and the Iranian conference circuit and the geopolitical podcasts. The Iranian state did not bring Jones aboard to preach against Playboy. It wants the anti-Zionist, anti-empire, anti-dollar message, and the sponsor selects the material. The usury and Zionism planks are the ones the platform pays to amplify. The sexual plank earns no airtime in Tehran.
And Jones does not need the alliance for the sexual fight. That fight is his home ground. He wins it, or contests it, among American Catholics and the dissident right without help from any Muslim. The alliance exists for the thing he cannot do alone, which is to throw the anti-Zionist and anti-finance case onto a world stage with a state behind it. So he builds the coalition on the planks where he needs partners with reach, and leaves on the shelf the plank where he already has all the agreement he wants.
In Jones's system the sexual revolution and usury are not two enemies. They are two weapons held by one hand. The controllers loosen the appetite and they lend at interest, and behind both moves stands the same party, the one that rejects God's order. So he does not drop the sexual thesis when he goes to Tehran. He subordinates it. He leads with the puppet-master, the financier, the Zionist, and the sexual revolution rides along as one of the man's tools rather than the banner overhead. The deepest agreement becomes the quiet assumption underneath the loud one. The two faiths agree most about sex, and precisely because they agree about it so easily, it does no work at the front. The work goes to the question that names an enemy a Catholic and a Shia can fight together with a state, a budget, and a war.
Step back and the first thing you see is that this is not an alliance between equals. One side needs it far more than the other, and the smaller partner is Jones.
Look at what he brings and what he takes. From South Bend he runs a magazine, an imprint, and a Friday livestream. He has no Catholic institution behind him, no university post since Saint Mary's College let him go, no diocese, no foundation. The American Catholic establishment treats him as an embarrassment and the watchdog groups treat him as a case file. Strip the alliance away and he is a regional pamphleteer with a website and a camera. What Tehran gave him is the one thing he could not make for himself, a world stage with a state behind it. Press TV put him in front of millions. The conferences gave him the standing of an honored guest. The global-south following that shows up in his recent streams came through that door. Even the title he wears, America's leading Catholic intellectual, was pinned on him by Barrett, an ally inside the coalition, not by any Catholic body outside it. His rank is internal to the alliance that grants it.
Now turn it around. What does the Iranian side get from him? A useful face. Jones is a Western, white, Catholic man with a doctorate who says the thing the Iranian information war wants said, that the wars and the sanctions and the media all trace back to Israel and to Jewish power, and he says it in the register of civilizational morality rather than Islamic grievance. That register is the gift. A Muslim cleric making the same case reads, to a Western ear, as partisan. A Catholic with a PhD making it reads as principled. His insistence that he is anti-Jewish on religious grounds and not antisemitic on racial ones supplies a deniability the operation can use. He opens a channel into Western Christian and dissident-right audiences that Iranian state media cannot reach on its own. All of that has value. None of it makes him hard to replace. Barrett does a version of the same job. Mark Dankof does another. The roster of Western voices willing to appear is long, and the state keeps the ones who stay useful. He needs the platform. The platform does not need him in particular.
That asymmetry sets the terms. An alliance the small partner needs and the large partner finds convenient is an alliance the large partner ends when the convenience runs out. Were Iran's posture to shift, a thaw, a deal, a change in the line, the Western voices get fewer bookings and the front goes quiet. The coalition serves the sponsor's strategy. It lives at the sponsor's pleasure. Jones speaks of it as a meeting of two peoples of Logos. From the other side it reads closer to a media asset, valued while the message is wanted.
Then the broker. Nader Talebzadeh built the bridge with his own hands. He ran the conferences, made the introductions, carried the trust, turned a roomful of Western cranks and a Shia state into something that felt to the guests like a genuine encounter. Jones grieves him in print and calls the loss one the project has not filled. A coalition raised on one man's relationships rather than on standing institutions is exposed when that man dies. The scaffolding survives him. Press TV still books Jones. The war streams with Barrett still run. The successors keep the conferences going. So the alliance survives in its working form, because the working form never depended on warmth. What does not survive is the part Talebzadeh supplied, the sense of a civilizational meeting rather than a booking. With him gone the relationship settles toward what it was underneath all along, a transaction. Iran wants Western anti-Zionist voices. Jones wants a stage. The two keep trading. The romance of the prophecy in the Tehran hotel lobby thins into a standing arrangement.
Judge it by Jones's own rule, truth before comfort, and the comfortable account is the one he tells, two faiths joined against a common foe in service of the moral order. The truer account is harder on him. A marginal American writer found a foreign state willing to broadcast a message no one at home would carry, and the state found in him a respectable Western face for its propaganda. Ask who supplies his reach, his audience, his income, his protection from total obscurity, and the answer points east, to the ecosystem the alliance opened. Ask who carries the risk if the plain version of this is said out loud, and it is Jones, because the plain version costs him the self-portrait he prizes most, the independent prophet who answers to no power. He spends his life telling other men to follow the patronage and see who pays. Turned on himself the same question gives an answer he has reason not to dwell on. The alliance is real as a working relationship. It is thin as the world-historical event he describes. And it flatters him a good deal more than it needs him.
Kevin Barrett works as the control because so much is held fixed. Same stage, the Tehran conferences and Press TV. Same broker, Nader Talebzadeh, who introduced them. Same decade. Even the same programs, since they co-host False Flag Weekly News and trade appearances. Hold the platform constant and the only thing left varying is the man and the bargain he struck. Set the two side by side and Jones comes out ahead, and the reason he comes out ahead is the thing the earlier passes kept circling. He kept more of himself out of it.
Start where each man stood before Tehran. Neither gave up a mainstream career for the alliance. Both had already been expelled before they arrived. Barrett held a part-time lectureship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a one-semester slot worth around eight thousand dollars, when his claim that the September 11 attacks were an inside job drew sixty-odd state legislators and the governor calling for his removal. The university let him finish the term and never had him back, and the tenure-track Islam post he says he was first in line for closed over his head. By 2006 he was out of the academy for good. Jones had been pushed from his post at Saint Mary's College at the start of the 1980s and founded Fidelity in 1981 on the way out the door. So both men reached the Iranian platform as exiles. Neither paid his largest price to join the alliance. Barrett paid his to 9/11, Jones paid his to his Catholic militancy and the Jewish question. Each arrived already cheap to acquire.
What they carried in the door differed. Jones came with thirty years of independent capital. An imprint. A monthly magazine. A shelf of thousand-page books. A worked-out theory of history with his name on it and a Catholic brand that stands on its own. Barrett came with a narrower kit, the 9/11 cause, a radio show, the founding of a small interfaith truth group, and the standing of a convert who could speak to Muslims as one of them. Jones brought a body of work. Barrett brought a role.
The second split is depth of commitment. Barrett gave the alliance everything. He converted to Islam. He coined the slogan, the Catholic-Muslim front against the Zionist enemy. He took an editor's chair at the foreign-policy outlet, made the radio show his trade, and welded his whole public identity to the niche the platform serves. The platform is his livelihood and close to his self. Jones converted nothing. He stayed Catholic, kept the imprint running, kept the books selling, kept preaching a Catholic supremacy that, as the Logos pass showed, ranks his Muslim partners a rung below him. He uses the stage. He is not its creature.
Put the two splits together and the ledger is plain. Jones brought more, so he is the more valuable guest and the less replaceable one. Jones kept more, so he holds an exit Barrett does not. Were the Iranian platform to vanish tomorrow, Jones walks back into the life of a Catholic culture-war writer with an audience and a backlist intact. Barrett walks back into far less, because the academy is closed to him, the prior life is spent, and the cause he poured himself into has no home outside the ecosystem that now hosts it. The man who kept one foot outside is hard to use up and easy to release. The convert who burned the bridge behind him is all the way in and cannot leave cheaply. On the instrumental count, Jones struck the better deal, and he struck it by believing in the alliance less.
Barrett would reject the whole ledger. He does not read his conversion as a cost. He reads it as the central gift of his life, a true faith found and a mission worth the academy he lost. By his own lights he made no bargain at all. He answered God and took up a cause. The cost-accounting that makes him the captured partner is the accounting Jones recommends for other men, the follow-the-patronage look at who supplies the platform and who cannot walk away. Run on Barrett it returns a hard number. Run on Barrett by Barrett it does not compute, because he never thought he was trading anything.
And the broker's death falls on the two of them unevenly, which closes the loop from the last pass. Talebzadeh's loss costs Jones a warmth and a convening genius, but not his base, because his base sits in South Bend under his own name. The same loss reaches deeper into Barrett, who has less to stand on if the conferences cool and the bookings thin. The partner who needed the alliance more is the partner the broker's death exposes more. Jones built a house before he ever went to Tehran. Barrett moved in.
So Jones got the better bargain, full stop, and the shape of the advantage is the moral of the whole portrait. He reached a world stage he could not have built, took the sponsor's reach, and paid for it in a coin he had already spent, his mainstream respectability, gone long before. He kept the imprint, the faith, the theory, the exit. The alliance flatters him more than it holds him, and it holds Barrett almost entirely. The two men stood on the same stage. One of them owns the ground he stands on elsewhere. The other one rents.
The ledger priced what a man can count. Reach, income, standing, the exit Jones kept and Kevin Barrett lost. The thing this question points at sits off that sheet, because no one keeps a column for it, least of all the man it bills. The cost is to the seriousness of his own mind, and it comes due slowly, in a coin he has stopped counting.
Begin with what Jones started with, since this only reads as a loss if there was something to lose. Whatever you make of his conclusions, the early shelf carried real equipment. The books engaged hard material, Augustine and the Enlightenment, the long history of lending, the birth of the modern novel, the sources of horror in fiction. He read widely and he built arguments a reader could follow, check, and fight. Even hostile reviewers grant the breadth of the reading. There was an apparatus under the polemic, and an apparatus can be tested. A claim that can be tested can be wrong, and a man who can be shown wrong is still thinking.
Look now at the audience he answers to. The Friday livestream, the Press TV segment, the appearance with Barrett, the comment threads at Unz. That room pays in attention for one thing, the naming of the enemy and the closing of the case. It rewards the clip where the culprit is identified and the whole tangled world resolves into a single hand behind every wound. It pays nothing for the qualification. Nothing for the hard case the thesis cannot quite hold. Nothing for the sentence that begins, here the evidence thins, or here my argument works and there it overreaches. A crowd shaped by grievance wants the verdict, and it wants it whole, and it treats the man who hedges as a man going soft.
Watch what that does to a thinker over years. The thesis stops being a tool he picks up for a given problem and becomes the only tool he owns. When one story accounts for the Reformation and the Kennedy killing and the Council and the sexual revolution and the wars and the Federal Reserve and the oil price, it has quit the work of history and turned into a reflex. A serious man holds his big idea loosely and goes looking for the case it fails on, because that case is where the next thought lives. An applauded man stops hunting for it. The room never asks, and it punishes him when he offers. So the muscle that doubts goes slack from disuse, and he loses the one motion that kept the mind honest.
He loses his referees in the same stroke. A scholar is sharpened by the colleague who finds the flaw and the editor who strikes the cheap line and the rival who will not let a weak link pass. Jones traded all of that, the academy that expelled him and the Catholic intellectual world that shut its door, for a media ecosystem with no referees in it, only fans and denouncers. The denouncers, the watchdog files, do not engage the argument. They condemn the man, which he can wave off as persecution, and which his audience reads as proof he struck the nerve. So criticism stops correcting him and starts feeding him. There is no longer a single person whose disagreement he is obliged to take seriously, because the only critics are the enemy and the only interlocutors are the choir.
Then the deepest part. His vast reading does not stop. It changes jobs. It used to test the thesis. Now it serves it. Every new fact arrives already sorted, filed under the verdict reached long ago, marshaled as one more confirmation that the same party stands behind the same crime. That is the death of inquiry while every outward sign of learning stays in place. The footnotes keep coming. The breadth keeps showing. The prose stays confident. The thinking stops moving. A man can sound more learned each year and be discovering less, and from the lectern the two look identical.
Jones built his life on Logos, on the conformity of the mind to what is real, on truth as the thing worth losing a career over. Reality is mixed. It is full of contingency and exception and the case that ruins a clean theory. To stay faithful to it a man has to let it talk back to him, has to sit with the part that does not fit. Jones built a platform where reality cannot talk back, where every broadcast ends with the enemy named and the room satisfied and nothing left open. The structure he stands on rewards the opposite of what Logos asks. He set out to serve fidelity to the real and assembled a machine that pays him to stop checking. The thing he prizes most is the thing his situation quietly takes.
Hand any serious mind a captive, adoring, grievance-shaped audience and it pays this tax. The left runs its versions. The respectable center runs its own, gentler, better camouflaged versions. The platform does the damage whatever the content. And the loss stays hidden because from the inside it feels like the reverse. More certain. More sweeping. More vindicated by each week’s news. The man feels himself growing sharper at the very hours he is growing duller, and the cheering covers the sound of the thing going quiet. You cannot grieve a faculty you no longer notice you had.
Against Barrett, Jones got the better of it, and that holds. This is the line the deal left out. What he traded was not on the table when he signed, and he pays it now in small installments he cannot feel, the slow narrowing of a mind that was once wider than the use he puts it to. The reach was real and the reach was bought cheap. The price was his own seriousness, drawn down a little at a time, and the room that took it claps louder the more of it is gone.
