Based Camp - Mob, Mafia, MS-13： Why Catholics Created Most US Criminal Orgs

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be with you today. Today, we are going to be asking

00:00:04.080 the question of what makes Catholics such a criminal population? Why is the Catholic soul 1.00

00:00:12.580 drawn to criminality? And if you are confused by what I mean by this, what I am saying is,

00:00:19.220 if you look at major immigrant groups throughout American history that started large-scale

00:00:26.040 criminal networks, you are looking at the Irish Mob, a Catholic group, the Italian Mafia,

00:00:34.500 a Catholic group, and modern groups like MS-13, a Latin American Catholic group.

00:00:40.740 MS-13? Oh my, I didn't even think about that. Oh, wow.

00:00:44.480 In fact, the only other immigrant population that I can think of that was able to set up

00:00:50.120 a large and persistent criminal network that was not Catholic was perhaps the Russian Mob,

00:00:57.720 but the Russian Mob was never as big as the Mob or the Mafia or even MS-13.

00:01:03.540 As an immigrant class, right? As an immigrant class. We're not including-

00:01:07.120 Right, because I'm thinking about the Yakuza. The Yakuza are falling apart.

00:01:10.720 The Yakuza never established a large foothold in the United States.

00:01:13.820 No, they did not. Yeah.

00:01:14.800 Even when I went to AI to ask it about this, I was like, maybe AI will know something about this.

00:01:20.320 It must have some great counterexamples to these Catholic groups. And keep up, 1.00

00:01:24.660 Catholics are a minority of the American population. Even still, they're only like 22%.

00:01:28.160 And historically, they were not big. We pointed this out before, but even during the revolution

00:01:34.740 in the United States, they were around 1.5% of the population. And even in the state that is

00:01:40.100 thought of as the Catholic state, Maryland, they were only around 13% of the population.

00:01:43.720 So is it that the Catholic Church itself teaches them bureaucratic organization,

00:01:48.940 like how to build a hierarchy?

00:01:49.840 We will get into that. So the only large or even remotely large non-Catholic immigrant 0.58

00:01:57.340 organized crime organization I'm able to find were the Chinese Tongs. So they emerged in the 1.00

00:02:02.020 late 19th century in Chinatowns, particularly in New York and San Francisco, as mutual aid societies

00:02:06.560 for Chinese immigrants, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But obviously, you haven't heard of the Tongs,

00:02:10.900 so they're not quite as big, right? Yeah, it's heard of the Triad?

00:02:15.660 But the Triad never really set up here. Then you have, my favorite one was, I didn't know that

00:02:20.600 there was a Jewish mob called Murder Inc. There was specifically- 0.66

00:02:24.500 It's a little on the nose.

00:02:26.060 It's a little on the nose, right? So they specialize in carrying out contract killings

00:02:31.340 and carry it out between 420,000 murders in the 1930s.

00:02:34.480 I guess that makes sense. You know, when people are like, you know, A plus plumbing co. I mean,

00:02:38.880 yeah, be straightforward about what you're selling.

00:02:42.360 Yeah, I was like, I was like, this is, this is a, a, a great counter example. And then I read more

00:02:47.980 about Murder Inc. And no, Murder Inc. worked for the Italian mafia. They were, they were set up,

00:02:54.280 it seems, even by the mafia itself. 0.97

00:02:57.300 Why would they outsource to Jews for contract killing? Just because they didn't, 1.00

00:03:00.480 they didn't want it in the family? Like that made it too awkward?

00:03:02.760 I think maybe Jews were just better at it. I can see Jews being uniquely good at contract 1.00

00:03:08.180 killing. Nothing about, I mean, look at, look at how good a job they did with the, 0.97

00:03:13.400 with the pager exploder thing.

00:03:15.860 Oh gosh, right. Yeah. They get the job done. That's true.

00:03:20.280 Okay.

00:03:20.780 You need to be secretive about something like this. I can see, you know, a, a cultural specialization.

00:03:27.840 Again, that's not saying-

00:03:29.060 I don't know. I feel like, so these days, if someone were like, Simone,

00:03:31.660 you just hire someone to kill someone. I mean, I've heard that like people who take hits in Mexico 0.96

00:03:39.140 are taking them for like 50 bucks. I feel like that's the opportunity. It's just YOLO.

00:03:43.780 Arbitrage. You want to import country. 0.99

00:03:45.740 Well, you're more frugal people, Malcolm. I mean, you don't want to-

00:03:48.800 Frugal people. I love-

00:03:49.080 I don't think I can, I can, I can't afford a Jew to kill someone. 1.00

00:03:53.120 Wait, it's your, wait, it's your whole point here that you're afraid that a Jew is going to overcharge you? 0.98

00:03:59.220 That sounds costly.

00:04:00.860 In our Inc., they're like incorporated. They have to, you know, they're paying taxes. They're going to, you know, charge me extra for that.

00:04:05.760 You know, their accounting system, you know, their, their annual filings.

00:04:09.120 They're sealed around.

00:04:09.740 Yeah. I could just find, you know, a very desperate Mexican who already does $50 contract killings and like, go for it. 1.00

00:04:18.300 I absolutely love you, Simone. You are so, by the way, this is not like, we don't have anything against Jewish people.

00:04:24.460 Like, this is just-

00:04:25.180 Or Mexicans. I just, I watched this really depressing YouTube video on contract killings in Mexico and was like shocked at the price of human life. 1.00

00:04:33.480 They got to get their act together. I don't know, man.

00:04:35.860 You're saying we should move to Mexico? I'm not saying we should move to Mexico. I'm just saying if someone put a gun to my head and said I needed to hire a contract killer and get something done quickly, I'd probably go to a Mexican. 1.00

00:04:47.960 So the question comes from all this, and I really tried to play with AI to see if AI could think of anything.

00:04:53.560 Okay.

00:04:53.760 Why is it, and I have a number of hypothesis around why this may be, why is it that predominantly, not just the predominant criminal organizations in the United States were Catholics, but every large scale Catholic immigrant wave into the United States created a large scale criminal organization.

00:05:12.200 That those three waves were the only large scale Catholic immigrant waves into the United States, the Irish, the Italians, then the Hispanics.

00:05:20.760 Those are the only ones, you know, so every time they came, they also set this up.

00:05:25.480 This isn't to say that there wasn't a German Catholic wave, and I think there was a French Catholic wave, but they, and there was a Canadian Catholic immigrant wave, but all of these were fairly small.

00:05:35.540 Also, they don't really matter in terms of studying this phenomenon.

00:05:39.520 So what are your thoughts before I go into this, if you're going to make any guesses?

00:05:42.740 I'm just guessing that exposure to a large functional bureaucracy and organization that included management of people and, and all of that may have been the equivalent to giving someone an MBA in entrepreneurship, or at least like organization creation in a way that other religious experiences simply didn't.

00:06:07.980 And people didn't go to college, and people didn't go to college really on, on mass at all until very recently.

00:06:12.280 So you were able to do what you were exposed to, and the vast majority of people were not exposed to scenarios in which non-immediately related people did business together, except for in the Catholic church.

00:06:26.280 Because even Protestant churches, it was like, okay, well, this is your, your preacher and their, you know.

00:06:31.420 Well, keep in mind that most of the Catholic crime networks were family based. 0.63

00:06:35.020 They were, they were, but they still organized in a much more hierarchical and functional fashion.

00:06:40.500 So I, I think that that is a huge part of it.

00:06:43.420 So first.

00:06:44.840 Family emphasis or the Catholic church?

00:06:46.980 As we've pointed out, no, no, the, the Catholic social structures.

00:06:50.180 Okay.

00:06:50.660 So if you look at like the backwoods people who were descended from, which we talk about in various episodes, they were significantly more violent than any of the Catholic immigrant ways. 1.00

00:07:00.520 Because they were much quicker to jump to murdering their neighbors.

00:07:04.560 They were much quicker to, as we've pointed out, a common thing was in their culture was to have sharpened nails.

00:07:09.600 It was easier to pull out people's eyeballs.

00:07:11.860 Like they were very.

00:07:12.480 Those were the people who enjoyed fighting.

00:07:13.920 But yeah, I mean, they were generally seen almost as akin to savages.

00:07:17.300 Like they were a minute, like a wild animal problem.

00:07:20.500 Yeah. 0.90

00:07:20.640 Whereas complaints about Catholics were like, oh, they're bringing all this crime and they're taking jobs and they're too many kids. 0.99

00:07:26.500 But like, it wasn't like, these people are rabid raccoons. 0.99

00:07:29.380 Please get them away from me.

00:07:30.700 It was a complaint.

00:07:32.100 Do not.

00:07:32.680 It's like, it's like having a bear walk by your house.

00:07:35.140 Exactly.

00:07:35.660 Yeah.

00:07:35.820 Very, very different.

00:07:37.320 Disdain for both.

00:07:38.760 Bias against both. 0.99

00:07:39.860 But different flavors.

00:07:40.900 Well, so what we see here, I think, is that this other group, which was also not too dissimilar from the Western Americans or Western style Americans that settled like the Midwest and the, sorry, the far West of the United States.

00:07:56.420 These groups were much, were existed in much tighter clans than the Catholic groups did.

00:08:03.180 Their, their family clan based structure didn't go that far outside of immediate family.

00:08:08.520 So there was no motivation to set up these larger scale criminal networks or no ability to set up these larger scale criminal networks that Catholics had because of their familiarity with large scale hierarchies and inter-familial hierarchies. 0.95

00:08:25.180 So that's one thing.

00:08:25.980 It was just their organizational ability, but it was their, their, the other issue you had is that when you had violent people with, with violent or rambunctious tendencies, it was in the Americas. 0.53

00:08:38.420 What you often had them do is go to the, the far West or go to the frontier territory.

00:08:46.340 They didn't, they didn't prefer to settle in already settled urban areas.

00:08:50.860 They didn't prefer to settle in large cities, but Catholics actually overwhelmingly preferred settling in large cities.

00:08:57.860 Very unlike many immigrant groups throughout American history. 1.00

00:09:02.080 If you look at every one of the Catholic immigrant waves, they settled in major urban environments, the Irish, the Italians, and the Hispanics.

00:09:11.140 New York and Boston.

00:09:12.200 Yeah, absolutely.

00:09:13.140 Yeah.

00:09:13.280 Yeah.

00:09:13.620 And this created an environment where other sort of violent groups would leave cities and go to the frontiers.

00:09:19.240 The Catholics did not. 0.99

00:09:20.540 Now, one of the questions could be is why did Catholics become urban specialists within the American context?

00:09:27.440 And.

00:09:27.520 Were they just settling around established parishes?

00:09:29.940 Is that it?

00:09:30.580 I think that Catholic culture more broadly is more amenable to urban life than Protestant culture.

00:09:39.200 Specifically, if you look at the core difference between Catholic and Protestant culture, it is how do you determine what is true?

00:09:45.940 And Catholics would say, well, what is true is a person should spend their entire life studying that thing and then be certified by a central authority. 0.56

00:09:53.120 So we know who has actually spent their life studying that thing.

00:09:55.440 And then the Protestants will say, well, what if the central authority becomes corrupted?

00:10:00.380 And this is, as we pointed out, the core conflict we had in the United States over COVID.

00:10:04.660 Right.

00:10:05.060 The progressives are saying, who do you determine?

00:10:08.000 Trust the scientists, trust the academics, trust the government.

00:10:10.520 Yeah.

00:10:10.720 And the more rural Americans, mostly coming from Protestant groups, said, no, the central bureaucracy could become corrupted.

00:10:16.200 It's better to make these decisions on your own.

00:10:18.120 Well, this leads to a much more individualistic framing and not wanting the law or the government in your business with the communities that had the more Protestant framings.

00:10:30.680 And so they were much more quick to abandon cities for the frontier.

00:10:35.780 And it is also why Catholics concentrated in cities.

00:10:39.140 It also made Catholics have more trust for bureaucratic institutions and organizations.

00:10:45.300 You see this in Catholics when they left violent crime. 1.00

00:10:50.900 One of the classic Catholic jobs in the United States was being a cop. 0.98

00:10:54.740 You know, the stereotype of the Irish cop comes from this.

00:10:58.200 Harrison, why haven't you called?

00:10:59.660 You know how I worry.

00:11:01.480 I'm giving it up, Maggie.

00:11:02.960 I'm quitting the force. 0.92

00:11:04.360 It seems like every time we frame a rich black guy, he's back out on the streets in no time. 1.00

00:11:08.720 Not another word of that kind of talk, Harrison Yates.

00:11:11.180 I know you.

00:11:12.540 Framing rich black men for crimes they didn't commit is in your blood. 0.98

00:11:16.100 Wiping that rich, smug smile off their faces is the only thing that puts a smile on yours. 0.95

00:11:20.660 You're a good cop, Harrison Yates.

00:11:22.740 You don't have to question that.

00:11:24.660 And you're a good wife, Maggie.

00:11:26.580 Where are you going?

00:11:27.920 I think I've got a little more work to do.

00:11:29.600 And not just that, but you also have, even today, Catholics disproportionately in the legal profession and hugely disproportionately on the Supreme Court.

00:11:40.040 As we pointed out, one of the recent Supreme Courts, it was like eight out of nine of them were Catholics or something like that.

00:11:46.200 Just an insane number when you consider what a small population is.

00:11:48.880 Yeah, like the rest are Jewish, which also makes sense. 0.99

00:11:51.100 The rest are Jewish, yeah.

00:11:52.120 So huge degree of cultural specialization around bureaucracies is why they did this.

00:12:01.020 But, so, so, bureaucratic specialization, urban specialization, family networks not being drawn to the countryside, and...

00:12:10.740 Now, what else are you going to do?

00:12:12.400 The next...

00:12:13.200 Let's form a crime syndicate.

00:12:15.420 Is while Catholics distrusted, or had a unique trust of bureaucracies, they also had a unique distrust, especially early immigrant waves, of government bureaucracies.

00:12:27.400 And the question is, is why?

00:12:30.080 And it's many majority Catholic countries that produce major U.S. Catholic crime groups had histories of weak or corrupt governance, fostering distrust of legal institutions. 0.52

00:12:39.660 In southern Italy, particularly Sicily, centuries of foreign rules, Spanish bourbon, and absent state protection led to the rise of the Sicilian mafia as a parallel power structure.

00:12:49.880 This cultural skepticism of authority carried over to the United States, where Italian immigrants viewed police and government as extensions of an oppressive system, making organized crime a viable alternative for resolving disputes and gaining power. 0.87

00:13:01.760 So, it's like honor-based crime, honor-based justice.

00:13:07.880 But it's not just that.

00:13:09.380 So, I love how this is from an AI.

00:13:11.380 It frames them as being oppressed. 0.86

00:13:13.400 But I don't need Catholics to be oppressed to know that Catholics create terrible governments. 0.97

00:13:17.060 If you look around the world today, this is why I'm so confused by people like Nick Fuentes, who want to turn the U.S. into a Catholic.

00:13:22.680 Like, he wants to create, he's a Catholic integralist, which means he thinks the entire world should be ruled under a Catholic, this sort of hell of fate. 0.80

00:13:29.380 Yeah.

00:13:29.880 But I'm like, even if you are a Catholic, like, if you're a sane person, you must be able to see how much worse Catholic-majority countries are to live in than countries that are ruled by Protestants. 0.99

00:13:42.020 If you look at Europe, if you look at Latin America, if you look at, like, wherever you go, when Catholics are in charge, the country typically is very, very poor, very, very corrupt, very, very bureaucratic. 0.96

00:13:55.720 The politicians are almost always super distrustworthy and grifty.

00:13:59.420 This is just a trend throughout Catholic countries.

00:14:01.860 And so now the question could be, like, okay, so I can understand why they distrust bureaucracy when they come into the United States, or government bureaucracy, but why do Catholic countries have a tendency to be very, very corrupt and poor?

00:14:15.140 That's an interesting question.

00:14:17.260 Do you have thoughts on that before I go into my theories?

00:14:19.660 I mean, maybe, like, having large families produces less focus on outward economic production that would support, like, tax revenue in a city, and more just there's focus on family, which means that the area itself doesn't appear to be so wealthy.

00:14:42.660 What do you think?

00:14:43.300 Part of it is close to something you call that.

00:14:46.820 It's called amoral familialism.

00:14:49.200 And specifically what it means is preference for members of a family or for nepotism over what is in the best interest of the community.

00:14:58.300 Right. Okay.

00:14:59.540 And Catholic culture produces this much more than other cultures. 0.97

00:15:03.480 In Latin America, for example, I would be considered a less moral person for not hiring my incompetent brother into, like, a government position if I was a leading figure within the government, within my family's own moral framing. 0.94

00:15:18.220 Yeah, like, to be like, you douche.

00:15:21.220 Yeah, you're supposed to be there for your sibling, right?

00:15:24.580 Right. Instead, yeah. Whereas, like, in our upbringing, that would be seen as, I mean, even your family is like, you know, what, you don't have a job right now? Well, don't come home.

00:15:34.360 Rapidly anti-Nepodist.

00:15:35.160 Yeah. Yeah, they're like the complete opposite of that. That's so interesting.

00:15:38.580 And so the question can be, like, well, okay, then why is Catholicism like this, right? Like, this is a very weird thing, considering it's not, like, a key part of the faith, and Catholic cultures are hugely divergent, you know, whether you're talking about Irish or Italian or American.

00:15:54.400 They're very different, yeah, culturally.

00:15:56.900 Yeah, but why do all of those three cultures feature a degree of amoral familialism?

00:16:01.640 I mean, but don't you think just in general, I mean, maybe this isn't true, because, I mean, Puritans also had large families, and you didn't see this necessarily in Puritan culture.

00:16:11.660 But they also believed in the inherent wretchedness of humans. So, okay, here's what I'm going to say. It's one, the large family. And I think any large family is going to, to a certain extent, be a little bit incestuous. Look at Elon Musk. He works so much with his family and his brother, right? Like, they work together a lot. The Kardashians work together.

00:16:27.520 Like, so, I think in general, he's more like a traditional clan-based culture.

00:16:31.940 They work together. But what's different about Catholicism is, like, for example, Calvinism is, like, well, people are wretched. Like, you sort of don't give people the benefit of the doubt. Whereas Catholicism is all about penance and forgiveness. 0.93

00:16:46.920 And so, even if someone is a failed son, like, it's still kind of your obligation to keep him in the fold and to give him opportunities, because we must give him the opportunity to show penance and to right the wrongs. What do you think?

00:17:04.980 I disagree with that. I do not believe that that's what causes it. I think what leads to it is actually a cultural evolutionary pressure created by the way the Catholic Church operates.

00:17:18.220 I think that if you look historically, if you go to, like, older Catholic regions, they were basically ruled by the Church.

00:17:24.700 And the Church had a very good system to prevent a moral familialism, which was not allowing people in leadership positions to have families or children.

00:17:35.180 You had the Church celibacy, right? This is a core part of Catholicism.

00:17:38.640 I would argue that this celibacy of Church members meant that Catholicism didn't need to evolve the same cultural disdain for nepotism that other cultures needed to evolve.

00:17:51.640 So, as Catholic countries secularized, they didn't have the pre-evolved disgust.

00:17:57.500 Okay, because they protect, it already has an inbuilt protection for nepotism, meaning that an intrinsic distaste for nepotism wasn't evolutionarily selected for.

00:18:09.680 Exactly.

00:18:10.020 In the same way that it was in Protestant cultures, where their societal framework didn't have inbuilt protections against nepotism.

00:18:18.020 Yes, I think that the higher degrees of nepotism came down from not having protection against nepotism.

00:18:25.120 But if you want to read more on a lot of these theories, we talk about them in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, where we go deeper on this particular topic.

00:18:30.460 But I just find this topic to be particularly fascinating.

00:18:33.100 So I think that that is part of what led to this.

00:18:36.900 I also think that there is less, and this is somewhat to your perspective here, there is less moral accountability in systems that are overly deontological, like Catholic systems can be.

00:18:52.660 And so there is...

00:18:53.900 Right, because consequential systems are like, you failed, you're out.

00:18:56.800 Whereas deontological, it's like, well, you know, you meant well.

00:19:00.380 You tried, you did all the right things.

00:19:01.960 You did something that led to the suffering of others, like installing an incompetent family member.

00:19:07.580 You are responsible for the downstream consequences of this.

00:19:10.600 Whereas the majority of Catholic cultures would say what matters is if your actions had righteous intent, not the consequences of your actions. 0.99

00:19:21.080 And it is very easy to frame helping your idiot family member as righteous intent, instead of the downstream consequences of that. 0.97

00:19:33.000 And it's also true that this can be used to justify criminality within immigrant populations that feel discriminated against. 0.99

00:19:41.640 They're like, well, I'm just trying to help my community, which you often saw groups like the mafia and the mob and, well, some Latin American gangs doing.

00:19:50.200 They are not as dedicated to it as the mafia and the mob were, which historically really tried to give back to their community and build, you know, charities and stuff like this.

00:20:01.180 So I think that that's part of it as well, is that it's easier to create moral explanations for immoral acts within this framework and still maintain a high degree of status.

00:20:12.760 That was an interesting thing about the Protestant cultures that were more rough and tumble as well, which is if you resulted to criminality within these cultures, you would often lose your status. 0.58

00:20:26.560 It was the low status individuals who were into crime, even if you go like the Old West or something like that.

00:20:32.460 Whereas, you know, as we see in any movie about like the mafia or the mob or something like that, these individuals were highly respected in their communities, incredibly respected in the way that like Old West bandits just weren't.

00:20:47.500 Like Old West bandits may have been romanticized, but they were not.

00:20:50.980 Yeah, only much later too.

00:20:53.160 Yeah.

00:20:53.440 Not at the time.

00:20:54.480 Were they not romanticized at the time?

00:20:56.060 Maybe Bonnie and Clyde, like some famous ones were, but I don't, yeah, I think more of it's a post-hoc thing, but maybe I'm wrong.

00:21:04.420 I could be wrong.

00:21:05.360 I'm often wrong.

00:21:06.880 I'm typically wrong.

00:21:09.540 Are you asking, Grock?

00:21:11.140 Yes.

00:21:11.680 It says, Old West bandits were indeed romanticized in their own time.

00:21:14.800 No way.

00:21:15.540 In nature, we're varied.

00:21:18.140 You had media and dime store novels in the 1860s and 70s.

00:21:22.320 Yet, in some communities, bandits were seen as symbols of resistance against powerful institutions and cultural context.

00:21:29.060 The post-Civil War area was turbulent with economic inequality and distrust of centralized power.

00:21:34.320 Wow.

00:21:36.320 And they're here saying contemporary sources like the National Police Gazette and dime novels, The James Boys in Mississippi, 1881, show a blend of condemnation and fascination.

00:21:46.700 So, yeah, they appear to have been romanticized even within the time.

00:21:49.580 Were they the school shooters of the past?

00:21:52.320 So, this romanticization, I would argue they are much more.

00:21:57.160 You do not have, about school shooters, comic books being made.

00:22:00.100 Oh, that's fair.

00:22:01.380 You know what these are.

00:22:02.680 We have comic books made about any criminals now, like fan fiction?

00:22:05.720 Not really, actually.

00:22:06.660 This wasn't an underground romanticization.

00:22:09.000 But the point I'm making is there's a big difference between romanticization and acceptance within a sort of an elite class within society, whereas the mob and mafia bosses were seen as more cultural equivalents to the head of a bank or something like that.

00:22:26.520 It's not an anti-cultural institution, which is really fascinating to me.

00:22:33.440 Interesting.

00:22:34.220 Thoughts from you, Simone?

00:22:36.880 No, keep going.

00:22:38.080 This is enlightening to me.

00:22:39.580 Well, another thing that we find is familial and communal structures.

00:22:44.700 So, I'm just going to go a bit deeper into this.

00:22:48.660 Cultures in Catholic-majority countries emphasize strong familial and community ties, which can be exploited for criminal organization.

00:22:55.260 The Italian-American mafia, for example, readied on blood ties and loyalty-based hierarchies modeled on Sicilian traditions.

00:23:03.400 Irish gangs often operated as extended, quote-unquote, clans with deep community roots.

00:23:08.900 MS-13 was less hierarchical and draws a sense of brotherhood and shared Salvadorian identity, particularly among war-displaced youths.

00:23:16.080 These cultural traits, loyalty, hierarchy, and collective identity, facilitate the organization of cohesion for large-scaled criminal enterprises.

00:23:23.140 In contrast, other Catholic groups that didn't form organizations, like Polish immigrants, often integrated into the broader labor movements, e.g. unions, rather than forming criminal networks.

00:23:33.920 Now, I think when you read that, then my question is, then why don't Mormons create criminal organizations? 1.00

00:23:39.460 I was thinking that at the beginning of the episode.

00:23:41.580 Like, if we're talking about, you know, very good organized groups that get stuff done, it's all about the Mormons. 0.98

00:23:48.080 They do so much more.

00:23:49.340 So, you could argue that the early Mormon church, as many communities did, was a criminal organization.

00:23:56.800 This is why people kept chasing them out of their communities, you know.

00:24:00.240 No, they did.

00:24:01.040 I mean, yeah, sure they did.

00:24:02.440 Yeah.

00:24:02.720 But, I mean, I know they did it because they thought they were weird, not because they were committing crimes or requiring.

00:24:09.300 Why was Joseph Smith in jail?

00:24:11.240 Because they had busted up a printing press, like, that was saying bad things about them.

00:24:16.000 Okay, but that's more like, you're slandering us, we're going to vandalize your printing press company, not like, nice printing press company, shame if something happened to it, and then, like, demanding protection money.

00:24:25.840 You know what I mean?

00:24:26.400 It was less shrewd, but it was certainly a criminal act determined to control and terrorize a local population.

00:24:34.920 You know, so, with Mormons, they kept being kicked out of communities because what they basically, and keep in mind, from the perspective of these communities, Joseph Smith was just a guy running a scam, right? 0.93

00:24:46.040 Like, his whole thing would have been seen as close to, you know, a snake oil salesman or, you know, reading out of a hat with, like, gold tablets and stuff like that.

00:24:55.380 That sounds like a con artist, especially if he's occasionally pulling money from local community members, busting up presses that say bad things about him.

00:25:04.780 And then, if you look at the Mormon territories, they had incidents of even just, like, murdering people who went through their territories because they weren't sure if they were, they had, you know, armed conflicts with the United States government.

00:25:17.220 Yeah, we're talking massacres, even of, you know, people.

00:25:21.220 Yeah, no, no, they did a lot of really bad stuff, and what, the reason I mention all of this is Mormonism doesn't subdivide into hierarchies as effectively as Catholicism subdivides into hierarchies, where the church would have to decide to do something criminal itself for Mormonism to do something criminal.

00:25:43.620 Was the only subdivided hierarchies in early work was the giant MLM scams that are run throughout the church, and very commonly run, if you keep in mind, but they just don't break with the church's central teachings, so they're okay to do.

00:25:58.560 Whereas, you know, the Catholic church, even within these time periods, would have been telling the mob and the mafia when they went to confessions, you know, you should really stop doing this.

00:26:07.540 And the mob and the mafia guys would be like, yeah, but I can just confess, right?

00:26:11.360 And they're like, well, I mean, technically, but the church doesn't want you doing this.

00:26:15.900 And they'd be like, well, I'm helping the community, you know, the society at large doesn't care about us.

00:26:19.940 And I would assume that some, you know, given that we know, you know, the Jesuits who promoted things like communist revolutions and stuff like this, I wouldn't be surprised if some were condoned by local parishes.

00:26:31.580 So I had this moment of, you know, I should probably look into this a bit more, and it is so much worse than I thought.

00:26:37.720 So the Vatican Bank has been linked to mafia activities through allegations of money laundering.

00:26:43.020 A prominent case involves Robert Calvi, known as God's Banker, who was closely tied to the Vatican Bank, found dead under Blackfire's Bridge in London in 1982.

00:26:53.440 Investigations suggest that the Sicilian mafia, particularly the Cologne clan, used Vatican Bank to launder money.

00:27:00.060 Journalist Mariah Antoni Calabra's book, La Mina de Mafia, details how Calvary's activities connected the mafia into Vatican financiers.

00:27:09.720 Then you have Michelle Sonata, another financier with Vatican Bank ties, was implicated in selling over one billion in counterfeit securities to the Gambino crime syndicate in New York.

00:27:21.940 Posts on X claim that Sonata acted as a go-between for the Vatican Bank and the mafia, though there is not conclusive without further evidence.

00:27:29.460 Then you have Archbishop Paul Marconis, president of the Vatican Bank from 1971 to 1989, who was accused of facilitating financial dealings with mafia-linked figures.

00:27:41.700 Then the mafia using Catholic rituals to bolster its legitimacy, often with the support from local clergy.

00:27:50.200 For instance, the mafia members have been documented leading processions with statues of the Virgin Mary or financing religious events to project an image of piety and community leadership.

00:28:01.220 In southern Italy, particularly Sicily and Calabria, these practices were common until recent church reforms.

00:28:07.200 Even if the central Catholic authority would have said, no, don't do this.

00:28:11.620 You're not going to get that as much as in Mormonism. 0.86

00:28:14.020 You're going to get much more pushback and much more, hey, don't do this.

00:28:17.640 It also wouldn't have made sense to other U.S. cultural groups.

00:28:23.860 Again, think about something like the backwards cultural group, right? 1.00

00:28:30.420 The idea that one family would achieve so much status that they were now policing a bunch of other families, that family would suddenly have a target on their back by everyone else in the community because they think they're better than everyone else.

00:28:44.900 Whereas within Catholic culture, you wouldn't necessarily reflexively everybody lets turn on whoever is the strongest right now.

00:28:52.180 You would see that reflexively was in backwards culture. 0.99

00:28:57.000 So I think that that's another thing that allowed these networks to build up.

00:29:01.700 Repercussions were very different.

00:29:05.460 Repercussions were very different.

00:29:07.080 And also something to keep in mind is a lot of these groups had existing organizations like them in the countries that they came from.

00:29:15.420 So they're just replicating a business model that they were very familiar with to begin with.

00:29:20.900 But it was made necessary by the incompetence of Catholic governments.

00:29:25.540 If you have a particularly corrupt and incompetent government, you're going to be much more likely to try to build a shadow or counter government.

00:29:33.240 Particularly in the cases of the Sicilians and the Irish, it wasn't even their own government that needed to be incompetent because they were ruled by other people who had conquered them.

00:29:42.500 One thing I'm also thinking about is the, it was Arctotherium, right?

00:29:49.520 Who wrote about non-linear ethnic niches and we did an episode on them.

00:29:52.920 Yeah.

00:29:53.480 That a really common theme was that this is dirty work that no one else wants to do.

00:29:58.900 Which criminal activity, that, that, that doesn't, that's about right.

00:30:02.180 Like no one, no one else wants to do it.

00:30:04.320 Plus you have, you have the ability to exploit cheap or non-paid labor much more easily, which I could also see like Catholic networks and families.

00:30:12.420 And because so much of this was family-based, there probably was a lot of unpaid labor.

00:30:16.240 So then you end up creating these moats based on even just those two factors.

00:30:21.680 So that could be it.

00:30:22.360 Plus I imagine like cheap credit, which is another really big factor of this.

00:30:27.340 Yeah.

00:30:27.740 Like you're probably getting family support as, as these syndicates expand, for example.

00:30:33.520 Yeah.

00:30:33.680 You're probably getting cheap credit for lack of a better term.

00:30:37.940 I mean, what did the mob do, but often lend money, right?

00:30:40.640 Like they, to a certain extent, even specialized in it.

00:30:43.860 Yeah.

00:30:44.000 Yeah.

00:30:45.380 So no, I think that you're, you're absolutely right here.

00:30:47.840 And I've also noted before in episodes where people say that like Jews are nepotistic.

00:30:52.100 I'm like, Jews are nowhere near as nepotistic as Catholics. 0.83

00:30:54.680 Catholics are by far the most nepotistic in the United States. 1.00

00:30:57.760 What?

00:30:58.140 What was the name of the family structure you talked about?

00:31:01.320 Like non-amoral?

00:31:03.340 Amoral familialism.

00:31:04.840 Amoral familialism.

00:31:06.040 Okay.

00:31:06.140 But, but, but, well, this is the interesting thing. 0.71

00:31:08.160 Well, people would be like, yeah, but Catholics are more nepotistic to family members and Jews are more nepotistic to any Jew. 0.99

00:31:13.500 And I'm like, that's just not true.

00:31:14.880 I have seen.

00:31:15.920 It's also hard for me to say it's nepotism if it's like another Jew instead of a family member. 1.00

00:31:21.540 I don't know.

00:31:22.340 Yeah.

00:31:22.780 Well, I would say that something to keep in mind is I'm not anti-nepotism.

00:31:27.240 Nepotism to me actually makes a lot of sense.

00:31:29.340 Well, that was another thing that came up in the discussion of non-linear ethnic networks was that the nepotism that took place within them, that is to say that, you know, like the, the, the Thai people would only hire Thai people.

00:31:39.720 And, you know, the, the, the nail salon training center started to only train in Thai, like classes, not in English.

00:31:45.960 But like, the point is, you know, that they're culturally aligned, like it's a smart move.

00:31:49.960 You don't have to do.

00:31:50.620 No.

00:31:50.760 Yeah.

00:31:50.960 It's not just a cultural alignment, but like, why would you not do more vetting on somebody who is culturally more distant from you?

00:31:57.640 It's not just the vetting either.

00:31:58.940 I mean, the vetting is pre-done and you have, you have more trust in the vetting, but also there's more of, there's, there's a higher cost to, to disappointing the person who hires you because your cousin's reputation is on the line.

00:32:12.140 Your family's reputation is on the line.

00:32:14.020 Like you're not just disappointing a stranger.

00:32:15.840 Your entire family is going to dunk on you forever.

00:32:18.100 If you, if you make them look bad.

00:32:20.140 Yeah.

00:32:20.620 Yeah.

00:32:21.560 Is important.

00:32:23.340 Yeah.

00:32:24.260 All right.

00:32:24.860 Well, I think we have come to an answer on this.

00:32:27.800 I am really excited.

00:32:29.500 I got the chance to talk this through with you.

00:32:31.540 I thought this would be a spicy topic.

00:32:33.000 One of the things that always gets me about this particular topic is why like people would aspire to Catholic majority countries when they live in such poverty and do such a bad job governing. 0.75

00:32:45.360 Like this, this is something.

00:32:46.400 Yeah.

00:32:46.420 Well, but you know, this is something Dan has wanted to come on the podcast and talk about eventually is, is, you know, maybe something different than a GDP, you know, that that's focused more on like how many kids are people having?

00:32:57.780 Or are they, they have fewer kids to Latin America.

00:33:01.360 Now they are now Catholics are, but historically, when you're talking about like in general, this impoverishment, I mean, they, maybe I agree with what you're saying. 1.00

00:33:09.820 Like, like Southern Europe has way fewer, way lower fertility rate than Northern Europe.

00:33:13.560 Like Latin America has a way lower fertility rate now than, than America, especially when you control for income.

00:33:20.020 And, and the question is, is I really, it's like half of the countries in Latin America are below America now.

00:33:24.020 And the rates dropping like way faster when you control for income.

00:33:26.320 And the question is, is with all of this, what, what I just don't understand.

00:33:31.220 And, and what I'm pointing out here is how like a human living today can look at the consequences of being a Catholic majority country and want to attempt to replicate that. 0.98

00:33:43.000 Which I actually think is one of the reasons why this criminality comes out as well is that when morality is community enforced, it's easy to create alternate forms of morality instead of when morality is self-enforced.

00:33:57.060 And was in Catholic communities, morality is more community enforced than individually self-reinforced.

00:34:03.160 Well, I think in any system, when rules or norms are exogenous, that is to say imposed from the outside, rather than endogenous, you get lower fidelity and adherence, like just in general.

00:34:17.920 Just how, when, you know, you're paid to do a hobby that you used to like, you don't like it as much.

00:34:22.140 Like it just, it's not ideal in my view for anything to be exogenous when you can help it.

00:34:28.160 Yeah.

00:34:28.660 Well, and, and I think, well, you know, we have a lot of Catholic fans.

00:34:31.020 I suspect one will explain that to us on, on discord.

00:34:34.420 No, school us in the comments.

00:34:36.160 Also, please like, and subscribe.

00:34:37.440 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:34:39.340 Yeah.

00:34:39.500 Like and subscribe and all that, but why the, the drive to, you know, convert people into a religious framework or attempt to create a country under a religious framework.

00:34:49.840 That in every single modern context has led to poverty and unhappiness in the populations where it is dominant.

00:34:58.540 Like I, I don't get in, in low fertility rates as well.

00:35:02.760 Like I don't get the drive.

00:35:04.640 One thing I have heard from some Catholics, so this, this could be an explanation here is it's like the church was infiltrated by a malevolent group that wanted to tear down the Catholic tradition from the inside. 0.55

00:35:17.680 But if that's the case, like the core of the Catholic church is the papacy.

00:35:22.180 And if the papacy has been used to destroy the Catholic church, it's sort of self-invalidating.

00:35:26.900 I guess what they would say is, well, we're trying to create a new form of Catholicism.

00:35:31.020 Yeah.

00:35:31.220 I mean, I think the, the, the Catholic, the Catholics that are watching this podcast that we talk to at least, their communities do not at all resemble other Catholic communities that I'm familiar with in the past.

00:35:43.600 And these are strong communities.

00:35:45.100 They are smart.

00:35:46.860 Like, I'm like, I'm all like this, let's, this, this should be Catholicism now.

00:35:50.740 These people are amazing.

00:35:51.840 I like it.

00:35:52.780 I want more of them.

00:35:53.940 Let's go.

00:35:54.520 So I think that over time, the Catholic church is going to shift or you'll have splinter factions.

00:36:02.080 I don't know, but I'm totally in favor of at least the Catholics that we know who trying to create something. 0.86

00:36:08.900 Well, and I think everybody needs to create something new.

00:36:10.900 So that's not something unique to Catholicism, you know, what survives, you know, Protestantism, what if it's, what if it's techno-Puritanism, right?

00:36:17.000 You know, what survives of Mormonism is likely going to need to be something different than what Mormonism looks like today.

00:36:21.720 So, so that's not a bad thing that there is this internal drive for the recreation of a Catholic identity around what I'd even call is, is because the way that Catholics approach this is really interesting to me.

00:36:37.020 Like, while we're neo-traditionalists, i.e. we take some traditional ideas and we re-spin them, what Catholics will often do is create new traditions while assigning a false antiquity to them to create things that... 0.75

00:36:51.120 Well, and Jews do that too.

00:36:52.820 And while Mormons do that too, come on, Malcolm. 0.99

00:36:55.120 Okay, a lot of groups do that.

00:36:55.920 We'll make this a Catholic thing.

00:36:57.080 Well, Jews, Mormons are less focused on the antiquity, giving their traditions value. 0.98

00:37:03.680 Oh, no, I mean, like, the Egyptians and the Israelites, like that, and the, you know, early Native Americans are really...

00:37:08.620 Come on, Malcolm.

00:37:09.280 Oh, true, true, true, true.

00:37:10.460 Don't you even...

00:37:11.080 Note here, the reason why I had forgotten that Mormons do this all the time is because when Mormons do it, it's so laughably bad that in my head I assume that, like, nobody actually believes it, whereas when Catholics do this, it's pretty convincing. 0.99

00:37:28.680 And so, you know, there's that moment in the...

00:37:30.680 Where I'm like, oh, this tradition has a lot of antiquity, then I look into it, and I'm like, oh, no, we just made this up, like, 20 years ago or, like, 100 years ago.

00:37:37.700 So, it's...

00:37:40.700 Not to knock on Mormons.

00:37:45.140 Not to knock on any of these groups.

00:37:46.760 I love them all, but...

00:37:48.700 All right.

00:37:49.440 Love you to death, Simone.

00:37:50.400 Have a spectacular day.

00:37:52.580 I love you too, Malcolm.

00:37:54.980 I cannot begin to tell you how much I look forward to these conversations.

00:37:58.440 Like, they're such the motivation for me the other day.

00:38:01.320 Really?

00:38:03.720 This is exciting.

00:38:05.620 A lot of people look forward to them as well.

00:38:07.700 Isn't that nice?

00:38:09.180 Yeah.

00:38:09.900 Cool, smart people too.

00:38:12.420 Read the comments on some of our videos, and I'm just impressed.

00:38:18.120 No, no, we get on my quality audience.

00:38:19.580 Smart people.

00:38:20.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:21.040 This is not normal YouTube video comments, at least for the videos that I watch that aren't our...

00:38:28.220 Well, maybe it's just the ones of ours that haven't gone viral that you're getting all the nice comments on, and on the viral videos you're getting standard YouTubers.

00:38:35.620 Yeah, yeah, there is a little bit of that going on, yes.

00:38:41.260 All right.

00:38:41.700 You know.

00:38:42.740 The dreams of parents and other girls are doing this as well.

00:38:48.540 I love to see you next week.

00:38:50.100 I love you.

00:38:59.340 I love you.

00:39:03.440 My ghost keeps going!

00:39:05.440 I'm going!

00:39:07.440 I need to get my ghost!

Based Camp - June 02, 2025

Mob, Mafia, MS-13： Why Catholics Created Most US Criminal Orgs

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