“The Main Thing”: Zionist and Deep State Infiltration of Catholic Media Outlets

A “Federal Agent” Infiltrates a Trusted Catholic Magazine

Around the end of the third week of September, 2026, I received a message from the editor of a small Catholic magazine. I’ll call the magazine “Faith and Culture,” and its editor “Paul.” Someone had sent Paul a letter regarding something I had written in Faith and Culture, and I was invited to reply.

Letters to the editor are part of writing for magazines. This letter, however, was different. First of all, it was not a letter in response to my regular Faith and Culture column. It was in response, rather, to my response to letters to the editor that Paul had received regarding my column from a couple of months before. In my experience, editors almost never let letter exchanges drag on past the initial letter-and-response round in a single issue. Why the Faith and Culture editor would make an exception for this particular letter, I was never told.

A hint came, however, with the second odd thing about the letter. It was from, as Paul put it, a “federal agent.” The letter was filled with Washington propaganda about Ukraine, the usual Deep State pabulum that fills the pages of captured outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post and echoes through the nightly broadcasts of Zionist-captured CBS. The letter writer denounced my “conspiratorial theorizing” in service of “pro-Kremlin talking points,” for instance. Why? I had pointed out Washington’s role in orchestrating coup after coup in Ukraine, and in maneuvering the puppet Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a proxy war. These are not conspiracies, but facts. What the Kremlin says about the CIA’s and State Department’s actions in Ukraine has nothing to do with anything.

The “federal agent” was not finished. “The main thing about the Ukraine war is that Russia started it in 2022 by sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the border with the aim of destroying an independent Ukraine. No amount of insipid pettifoggery can alter this fact,” he wrote.

I sent Paul my detailed reply to this letter. In it, I pointed out to readers that the writer, a man who identified himself as one “Ian Begg” of Herndon, Virginia, was a federal agent. The fact is salient, I argued, because readers ought to know that a self-styled “federal agent” is using the pages of a Catholic magazine to propagandize the faithful.

Paul soon wrote back to me:

“We cannot identify Begg as a federal agent,” he informed me in part. “In order for us to print his letter, I had to agree not to include reference to his position. I'm sorry, I should have mentioned that. So I've modified your reply to remove identifying him as such.”

Paul invited me to “tinker with” the edited, sanitized version he sent me, but I was not allowed to say that Ian Begg was a fed.

I had been doing a bimonthly column for Faith and Culture for seven years or so, and had been contributing to the magazine off and on for a good five years before that. I knew Faith and Culture, and Paul, to be consistent in not playing political games with anyone. The magazine pulled no punches, and neither did I. I was always free to speak my mind, not just in my columns but in the many blog posts I did for the magazine’s website. I was, therefore, shocked that Paul would have agreed to let Begg lie by omission to Faith and Culture readers.

“I’m sorry,” I replied to Paul, wondering what was going on, “but I’m not going to shadowbox with people. If Begg wants to fight, let him fight in the open, fairly and like a man. It’s an abuse of [Faith and Culture] and an insult to readers for a fed to do stealth propagandizing. I won’t be a part of it. If you’re running the letter, I am calling him out as a federal agent. It’s ‘the main thing’.”

Paul, with no explanation of broader circumstances, replied with one sentence: “Then we can't run the letter as it would be a flagrant violation of my agreement to mention his position.”

I tried a compromise tack. Begg’s letter had been paired with one by another angry reader (who called me “Goebbels” for suggesting that the Israeli government knew that the October 7, 2023 attack was imminent). I responded in detail to that letter, and at the end of my reply I included one short paragraph:

“As for Ian Begg, readers deserve to know that ‘the main thing’ is not mentioned in his letter at all. My brothers and sisters in Christ, your government is lying to you.”

Paul never replied. When the next issue of Faith and Culture came out with no explanation or even mention of what had happened, and when no explanation of the Begg incident was forthcoming from Paul or anyone else at the magazine, I resigned from the editorial board and also gave up my bimonthly column. No one from Faith and Culture ever told me, even cursorily or indirectly, why a “federal agent” had been given free rein to lie to Catholics in the pages of a Catholic magazine.

I looked for information about Ian Begg in Herndon, Virginia. I found property records indicating that a fifty-one-year-old man by that name had a Herndon address, but I found nothing else about any likely Ian Begg online. If Begg was a “federal agent,” then where was his official government photo and job description?

Also shown as connected to Begg’s Herndon address was one Kimberly Begg, aged forty-nine. Kimberly Begg is listed as the president of the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, located in Herndon. Her profile says that she is married to a man named Ian, and that she has appeared on Newsmax, EWTN, CBN News, and in the Wall Street Journal. Kimberly Begg’s name also shows up at the New York Times, the establishment conservative mainstay The Federalist, and in connection with Grove City College and Belmont Abbey College, among other mainstream conservative outfits.

I contacted Kimberly Begg at her Clare Boothe Luce Center address looking for information about Ian Begg. Was he really a federal agent? If so, at which agency does he work? I asked Kimberly to forward my message to Ian, if she knew him, so that I could verify these and other facts. As of this writing, there has been no reply.

MAGA Catholic and Deep State Psyops in America

In August, 2026, Stephen Herreid resigned from his job as political editor of Zeale News after that organization’s parent company, CatholicVote, restricted coverage of Israeli violence against Christian residents in the West Bank. Herreid appeared on Tucker Carlson’s program later in August to detail the reasons for his resignation. In July of 2026, Herreid said, CatholicVote CEO Kelsey Reinhardt attended a Napa Institute conference where she met, as LifeSite News reports, with CatholicVote donors as well as with her predecessor, Brian Burch. Burch left CatholicVote to become Washington’s ambassador to the Holy See. Burch’s boss, President Donald Trump, is presently bombing the Iranian people on behalf of the Israeli West Bank terrorists’ chief backer, and the author of the Gaza genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Reinhardt disputed Herreid’s characterization of events, but Herreid’s response indicates that Reinhardt was probably lying. It seems clear that pressure came from Washington, via its envoy to the Vatican, to restrict coverage of Israeli crimes in the pages of Catholic news outlets.

Reinhardt took the CatholicVote CEO job after working as “executive director of the ACI Group,” which is “a global network of Catholic news agencies operated by EWTN News.” EWTN has long been a mainstay of conservative Catholicism in the United States and a reliable supporter of Republican causes. In 2024, it collected more than 110 million dollars in donations, which it used to produce, among other things, “The World Over,” a nightly broadcast hosted by FoxNews contributor Raymond Arroyo. Arroyo, along with fellow Fox powerhouses Laura Ingraham and Rachel Campos-Duffy, has been instrumental in garnering much of the Catholic vote in America for Donald Trump. Arroyo has also hosted cheerleaders for Trump and Netanyahu’s war against Iran. For example, Walid Phares–who as late as October of 2026 was still calling for air strikes against, and a revolution in, Iran–has appeared on Arroyo’s EWTN program. Arroyo himself appears to be a supporter of the murder of children in Palestine.

EWTN is a sometime-Zionist Republican group masquerading as a Catholic organization. CatholicVote is almost certainly an information channel for conveying Washington’s position to Catholic voters in a positive light, and for concealing the crimes against the Palestinians that Washington is funding. But the long-running Zionist psyop known as First Things magazine may be, in many ways, even more morally compromised than either of those outfits, and more compromised even than Faith and Culture infiltrated by “federal agent” Ian Begg.

First Things is edited by Rusty Reno, a Christian theologian who adopts a decidedly unorthodox position regarding the Jewish people and God’s plan for salvation. Such theological dilections are academic, perhaps, but what is apparent throughout the First Things stable is a trenchant adherence to the precepts of militant Zionism, along with a biblically-themed Washingtonian nationalism which rah-rahs whatever murderous scheme the Pentagon has concocted in a given month. Gerald McDermott, David P. Goldman–there are any number of Zionist sympathizers plying their trades at First Things. In September, 2025, First Things senior editor Matthew Schmitz wrote an essay about serial child rapist and Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein. In Schmitz’ view, there was nothing really worth mentioning about any of that. The whole thing, he wrote, was a “myth.”

This November, First Things hosts a lecture by Yoram Hazony, who argues that “only the Old Testament can save America.” The logo for this talk is a Ten Commandments tablet from which the Ten Commandments have been erased, and which has instead been sheeted over with an American flag motif. Yoram Hazony, a “neo-Zionist,” is more concerned about “antisemitism” than about the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Among the most veteran of First Things’ Zionist Pentagon, apart from the magazine’s late founder and power-worshipper Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, is George Weigel. In October, 2026, Weigel took to First Things to accuse Candace Owens, who has been outspoken about Israel’s murderously criminal behavior in Gaza, of “the sin of anti-Semitism.” This attempt to distract readers’ attention away from bullet-riddled children in Gaza was hardly Weigel’s first psy-op rodeo. Weigel is a co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front that has wreaked havoc worldwide and was very helpful in launching the Pentagon’s proxy war in Ukraine. As soon as that war had begun in earnest in February of 2022, Weigel was working the media fronts at EWTN, explaining the National Endowment for Democracy view–what might also be called the Ian Begg view–of the Ukraine conflict. Weigel is a co-founder of the Friends of Israel Initiative, a frequent guest on Raymond Arroyo’s EWTN show, a frequent contributor to the Zionist, MAGA Catholic front operation CatholicVote (Zeale), and, still today, a silent champion of Israel’s Gaza campaign.

George Weigel has also written approvingly of the work of Kimberly Begg, of Herndon, Virginia.

Cleansing the Temple of Caesar and His Servants

Ian Begg, the “federal agent” who attempted to use Faith and Culture as a vehicle for Deep State propaganda, remains a mystery. Also mysterious is why an editor at Faith and Culture’s would have agreed to allow Begg to go undercover in his magazine in order to hoodwink the faithful with the party line. I would welcome an explanation, on the record, anytime, from Faith and Culture and also from the “federal agent” Ian Begg himself.

Much less mysterious is the extent to which Catholic and Catholic-heavy media outlets in the United States have been infiltrated by apologists for the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Israeli government, including the latter’s ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Many Catholic publications proclaim a pro-life position. It should not be a matter of political calculus to say whether the lives of innocent people in Palestine are as valuable as the lives of any other human being anywhere else in the world.

For many First Things contributors, for Zeale’s bosses, and for other outlets that claim to be Catholic or to have strong Catholic ties, however, the question of Palestinian life is not biblical or catechetical, but Washingtonian. “The main thing” is that George Weigel and his fellow Deep State operatives in the Catholic media world–including, perhaps, Ian Begg–pretend to serve one Master, but in fact serve quite another.