Kathryn Joyce, Salon

After a pause came the reveal: That hadn't happened in China, but in New York City's Staten Island; the hero wasn't a Chinese meatpacker, but a young warehouse worker named Chris Smalls; the villain wasn't the Chinese government but Amazon.com. The speaker went on, quoting from Karl Marx about "masters and workmen" and the "spirit of revolutionary change" before clearing his throat to deliver another correction: Apologies, that was actually Pope Leo XIII.

This speech about the "spirit of revolutionary change" wasn't happening at a Bernie rally or a DSA meetup, but a conference at a conservative Catholic university.

Both jokes were preface to a larger punchline, one that's particularly relevant after the 2022 midterm elections: This wasn't happening at a Bernie Sanders rally or a Democratic Socialists of America meetup, but a decidedly conservative conference at Ohio's Franciscan University of Steubenville, a center of U.S. right-wing Catholic thought. The speaker (and conference organizer) was Sohrab Ahmari, a Catholic writer best known for his 2019 polemic against conservatives insufficiently committed to the culture wars. The conference, "Restoring a Nation: The Common Good in the American Tradition," was a showcase for the modestly-sized but well-connected Catholic integralist movement, part of the broader current of conservative thought known as postliberalism. ...

Last spring, as the right began using the word "grooming" as a slur against LGBTQ people and their allies, journalist Melissa Gira Grant noted at the New Republic that the word provided a way to "say both the quiet and the loud part." Contorting a term long used to describe real instances of child sex abuse into a weapon to be deployed against LGBTQ people and commonplace policies — for example, that their existence can and should be acknowledged in schools — was the "loud" part. It was a shocking but pithy means of demonization; as Gira Grant wrote, the "right is using the reality of child abuse to raise unfounded fears and panic about criminal and predatory behavior hiding in plain sight." The quiet part was the secondary implication: If one's "enemies" really are "an ill-defined yet pervasive threat to children, what wouldn't be justified in stopping them?"

This week, that quiet part got noticeably louder, as right-wing activists escalated the already-dangerous rhetoric of "grooming" — language that multiple social media platforms have banned from use as an insult related to LGBTQ issues — and graduated into claims that LGBTQ people and liberals are literally kidnapping and trafficking children.

There's a backstory: Last week in Virginia, some 12,000 high school students at close to 100 schools walked out of their classes to protest new guidelines proposed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin on how Virginia's public schools should handle transgender students. In 2020, Virginia's General Assembly passed legislation requiring school districts to adopt policies granting students access to bathrooms and facilities that correspond with their gender identity, using students' requested names and pronouns, and protecting students' privacy related to sensitive issues like gender or sexuality. But to Youngkin, who was swept into office last fall on a wave of anger around "parents' rights," those guidelines were "a big mistake" that "excluded parents" from vital decisions, as the governor told "Fox & Friends" last weekend. ...

This week, an old interview surfaced of Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano calling for people who have abortions to be prosecuted for murder. The comments came from a 2019 radio interview in which Mastriano was asked whether a "fetal heartbeat" bill he'd sponsored in the state Senate, which would have banned abortion after six weeks, would mean that anyone who obtained abortion after that point in pregnancy should be charged with murder.

This article first appeared in Salon.

"Let's get back to the basic question there," Mastriano replied. "Is that a human being? Is that a little boy or girl? If it is, it deserves equal protection under the law." When the interviewer asked whether that meant he was calling to prosecute abortion as murder, Mastriano removed all doubt, saying, "Yes, I am." ...

During Donald Trump's Sept. 17 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, members of the audience began to sway in time with the music playing over the loudspeakers and pointed their index fingers in the air as the former president talked about the supposed disintegration of the United States. That salute, as it turned out, is tied to the massive conspiracy theory QAnon (or, more specifically, with a QAnon offshoot movement called Negative48 that has spent much of the last year waiting for the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr.). The song was an instrumental track that did not originate with the QAnon movement but has become associated with it after being reposted online under the title "Wwg1wga" — the abbreviated movement slogan "Where we go one, we go all."

In the week after his Ohio rally, Trump went on a Q-curious spree, posting a video on his Truth Social page that featured multiple QAnon slogans and images of the ex-president holding a playing card with the letter "Q" on it or striding through the center of a giant upper-case Q with a flagpole over his shoulder. On Friday, at another rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, he seemed to invoke QAnon's main themes and language — claiming that his own MAGA movement was "standing up against" "sick, sinister and evil people from within our own country" — even as the event's security team tried to stop attendees from pointing their fingers in the air.

All of this amounts to a stunning escalation of Trump's involvement with the conspiracy theory, after years of flirting with quasi-endorsements of it or coy claims that he had only barely heard of it. In that time, as journalist Mike Rothschild writes in "The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything," QAnon metastasized, absorbing old conspiracist claims, applying its logic to new developments and ultimately coloring huge swaths of mainstream Republican politics as well. In a new edition of the book released last month, Rothschild writes that QAnon is "no longer the cool, secret club that you had to speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It [is] just 'conservatism' now." Rothschild spoke with Salon this week. ...

MIAMI — Republican politics may be about to get a lot more churchy than they already are. On Monday, the second day of the National Conservatism conference here, conference organizer Yoram Hazony, chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation, called on conservatives, repeatedly, to "repent." This chastisement was focused in large part on what Hazony — also the author of "The Virtue of Nationalism" and the recent "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" — considers excessive squeamishness on the political right to discuss what he sees as the Christian roots of the United States.

This might come as a surprise to many Americans who have watched the increasingly overt and forceful alliance between the Republican far right and Christian nationalism. But Hazony envisions something on a broader societal level: the restoration of Christianity as the "public culture" of America, meaning that Christian values and observances are assumed to reflect the will of the majority, and while non-Christians should not face active discrimination they also should not expect to see their values reflected in the public square. Hazony himself is Jewish, but has argued for the past several years that only such a restoration of public Christianity — through things like a return to Bible instruction in public schools — can stave off the threat of "woke neo-Marxism." Toward that end, he argued, Republicans need to be even more explicit than they already are.

"When politicians come and stand on this stage," he asked, "do they mention the Bible? No, never." He continued, seeming to directly reference a quote from the speech that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had delivered on the opening night of the conference: "Do they mention God? Yes, yes they do. They'll always say the same thing: 'Well, our rights come from God, not government.' OK, fair enough. Can you tell me, when did God give you those rights?" There was an answer to that question, he continued: "We got these rights from God in the Bible." ...