Video: Is There a Traditionalist Groupthink?

Herewith my latest video, in which I consider things as apparently diverse as Feminism, White Supremacy, the New Age Movement and ponder the possibilities for online cults or cult-like behaviour.

I also ask whether Traditionalist Catholicism can succumb to Groupthink . . .?

This episode is a follow-up to the previous one on Taylor Marshall and the Normalisation of the Outrageous.

For the point of that video was never to criticise Dr. Marshall as a person—I hardly know the man’s work—but simply one particular act of his online behaviour. This act struck me as outrageous and, it seems to me, ought to strike more people as outrageous—were outrageous things not now being normalised by Twenty-First Century Internet ‘culture’.

Indeed, by way of explaining those last unusually sharp sentences, we will also feature that episode (below) with what I said about it:

Here is a video wherein I suggest the great Hilaire Belloc would be shocked by the American Traditionalist YouTuber Taylor Marshall recently denouncing the Latin Mass Superiors of the Fraternity of St. Peter and Institute of Christ the King as being, in effect, cowards.

Marshall would seem to suggest they need “hair on their chests” and are overly-concerned with effeminate finery. He would seem to have the superior path, knowing better than these seasoned soldiers and moreover his own opinion polls are wheeled out to “prove” his point!

Watching this left me aghast.

As I explain on the video, I hardly know Dr Marshall’s work, as I watch little YouTube. (I would far prefer to be curled up with an old book from Belloc!)

Thus the video is not meant to address Marshall and his work as a whole. For that I am ill-equipped to comment!

Rather I focus on Marshall’s remarks pertaining to the Fraternity and Society. For both his comments themselves and the uncritical way many seem to lap Marshall up trouble me. I am disturbed as I know Belloc would be disturbed and, as I argue in the video, virtually all pre-Vatican II Catholics would be.

But to be fair to Dr Marshall, as I try to be in the video, I suspect he means well, but is moving too fast, succumbing to the manic pressures of our abnormal times.