A lesson from the 20th century is that intellectuals sometimes choose to serve monsters. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all found thinkers willing to sing their praise even as they murdered millions. On the spectrum of evil and death, Donald Trump, a crass, ignorant would-be authoritarian, is not in their league. And yet already, under Trump’s rule, people have died—and already lives are being ruined by the tens of thousands. As all this happens, crankish right-wing intellectuals have been drawn to Trump’s scepter as moths to a flame.
A case in point, not exactly a household name but not entirely unimportant, is Chad Pecknold.
The Postliberal Project
Pecknold is a professor at the Catholic University of America and a self-proclaimed postliberal, that is, a member of the small coterie of (mostly Catholic) intellectuals—Patrick Deneen preeminent among them—who reject liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights and state neutrality in favor of a political order grounded in shared moral, religious, and national traditions. “[L]iberalism has failed America,” Pecknold boldly states.
In 2022, he joined Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, and Gladden Pappin, a who’s who of the postliberal right, at a conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he called for a public orientation to God expressed in national holidays and civic liturgies. The closing speaker was JD Vance, then a Senate candidate, who told the audience they were on the vanguard of a new Republican Party. Pecknold’s ideas circulate among the people who now govern.
Pecknold’s core belief is that America has been experiencing a “torrential downhill slide into immorality and false religion” and that we are in danger of “losing our country to internal threats.”
A People, Not an Idea
What is the chief source of this threat? You guessed it: Immigration!
America, Pecknold tells us, “is not an idea, it is a PEOPLE.” With the unchecked influx of strangers, that “PEOPLE” is facing disintegration. The migration crisis, he writes, has “thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt.” In its rejection of America as a creedal nation in favor of one defined by heritage and inheritance, postliberalism slides inexorably into nativism.
The source of the trouble, in Pecknold’s view, is that “American Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, have been so captivated and captured by the implicit open borders theology of liberalism that too many have forgotten how to think like Christians—and like Americans.” Contrary to the precepts of liberalism, statesmen have a “sacred duty,” he says, to restrict who may remain in a country. Accordingly, he maintains, we must reject the constitutional precept of birthright citizenship under which anyone born here, including to parents lacking documentation, is automatically a citizen. At stake is nothing less than whether “our laws permit Americans to have a country or not.”
In the post on X in which he declared America is not an idea but a “PEOPLE,” Pecknold defined nationhood by shared faith, heritage, history, and language, and argued that seeing America as a people points logically toward closed borders. But the implication of this definition is that millions of Americans—among them Hispanics, many his fellow Catholics, as well as Jews, Muslims, nonbelievers, and the children of immigrants—belong to the nation only provisionally, if at all. These groups are not, as the now fashionable expression on the right would have it: “Heritage Americans.”
Choosing Caesar
All this right-wing nuttery is interesting in and of itself. But there is a special twist. Turning his words into deeds, Pecknold has recently taken leave from Catholic University to sign up as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent body of ICE. “I am excited to confirm I’ve joined the Trump Administration,” he said in a statement. “It is truly an honor to serve my country in this capacity.”
Earlier this year, Pecknold endorsed a policy paper from the Budapest-based Axioma Center, which declared, “Mass deportations may be a legitimate response to mass migration.” The department he has joined as a flack is engaging in precisely that—mass deportations—and in the cruelest ways imaginable. Among other things, after removing Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of lawfully present Haitians, his department has been rounding them up, forcing them to wear ankle monitors, and shackling some as it deports them to chaos-ridden Haiti, where they are subject to gang warfare, robbery, and murder. Making merry of its own actions, DHS posted a video, set to Haitian music, of shackled Haitians being force-marched onto a deportation flight.
Haitians, of course, are not the only victims. Tens of thousands of other law-abiding and tax-paying American residents have been wrenched from their homes or seized on the streets and, pending deportation, imprisoned in squalid DHS facilities lacking basic sanitation, decent food, and health care. Others have been dispatched to distant tyrannical countries, many of them in Africa, to which they have no connection, where they do not speak the language, and face imprisonment, torture, and death. Already, in less than two years, dozens of people have died in ICE captivity. (As of late September, the Associated Press counted at least 58.) And already, American citizens have been shot and killed in the street for protesting.
Can there be a Christian defense of such depredations? Pecknold is now in charge of offering one. The Church itself, meanwhile, is somewhere else entirely. Late last year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a “special message,” its first since 2013, opposing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and condemning the “dehumanizing rhetoric” that has accompanied it. The vote was 216 to 5. Pope Leo XIV called it “a very important statement” and urged people of goodwill to heed it. It is hard to read Pecknold’s hiring, at a moment of open conflict between the administration and the Church’s hierarchy in America, as anything other than an effort to give the government a Catholic voice to set against the bishops—and lend its actions theological legitimacy.
It bears noting that Pecknold’s taste for cruelty predates his involvement with DHS. Within minutes of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020, he tweeted a meme with the caption “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” Coming under fire, he quickly deleted the offending tweet and then insisted, preposterously, that it had nothing to do with Ginsburg. A theologian who gloats at a fellow American’s death, then lies about it, has been well prepared as a spokesman for a department that mocks the people it deports.
As for that mass deportation program, there has been no bigger disgrace in our country since the internment of Japanese Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It is the organization behind this enormity, DHS, to which Pecknold—cloaking himself in Christian piety—has proudly hitched his name and reputation. Under Donald Trump, our country has indeed been experiencing a “torrential downhill slide into immorality.” In that slide, Pecknold has enlisted as a defender of the indefensible, a mouthpiece for an evil governmental body doing evil things. For his pains, he has managed to make himself a curious footnote in the history of a low, dishonest decade.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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The attack on a fundamental principle of America—that we should be free to practice religion (or not), the principle that brought the original English settlers here, is bad enough
But if *I* were an immigrant, instead of a descendant of those Euro-Americans, I’d be doubly insulted by the claim that immigrants worship some secular liberalism
According to Pew, an approximately equal percentage of immigrants profess Christianity as we “Heritage” Americans, but they’re much more likely to attend services. Approximately ½ the share of immigrants profess no religious connection but what has Vance and the rest of the “Blood and Soil” crowd so upset is that a larger share of immigrants observe Biddhism, Hinduism and Gawd Forbid, Islam
So it seems perfectly clear: the justification for hating on immigrants is not for their failure to be religious, nor their failure to be Catholic or other Christians, but simply hatred of people who thought their sincere beliefs had a place in a confident, thriving America
As a bona fide “heritage American,” these people make me wonder whether the anti-papists were right to oppose the mass immigration of Catholics into a fundamentally Protestant country. Jews and Buddhists don’t cause this kind of trouble. (Of course this is blaming all Catholics for a few bad jelly beans.)