Culture
Breitbart Discovers Pope Leo Is a Culture War Columnist With a Better Hat
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
James Pinkerton, a senior columnist at Breitbart News, published a piece this week arguing that Pope Leo XIV is single-handedly undercutting the legitimacy of the French revolutionary left through a series of quiet symbolic actions, which Pinkerton described as 'striking at the root,' presumably because 'filing an amicus brief' did not have the same medieval weight.
The column does not specify which quiet actions. It does not need to. The quiet is the point. When a man with a papal ring and a balcony does something quietly, Pinkerton is there to explain it loudly on a website that sells My Pillow adjacent products in the sidebar.
Pinkerton's central argument is that the left, should it gain power, is murderous, and that Pope Leo, by existing and occasionally gesturing toward Christian tradition, is reminding everyone of this in a way that no sitting American politician has managed. Tucker Carlson, to his credit, tried. He went to Moscow. He interviewed a vending machine. He did not get the encyclical.
The column takes the position, stated with full confidence, that the Pope is performing a sophisticated ideological flanking maneuver on the French left, which is the kind of sentence that requires a person to have already decided what they believe and then read backward into every papal statement until it agrees. This is not journalism. It is horoscope writing with a Vatican dateline.
Pope Leo XIV, for his part, has so far declined to describe his ministry in terms of American online media strategy. Vatican spokesman Father Matteo Bruni told reporters this week that the Holy Father's priorities remain 'the pastoral care of the faithful, the promotion of peace, and the defense of human dignity,' which Breitbart will no doubt publish next week under the headline 'Pope Goes HARD on Globalist Left.'
What Pinkerton has actually produced is a document that reveals more about Breitbart than about either the Pope or France. The site has spent fifteen years arguing that institutions are corrupt, experts are frauds, and tradition is under assault. Now it has found an institution, run by an expert, that is upholding tradition, and it has decided this institution is secretly on its side and doing culture war correctly. This is the equivalent of a man who has complained about airlines for two decades discovering that one flight landed on time and concluding that the pilot is, philosophically, a libertarian.
The French left, for its part, remains unaware that it has been quietly defeated by a pope. Several of its members are currently running for regional office. One of them won a seat on a municipal water board last Tuesday, which Pinkerton has not yet addressed but presumably will.
The column closes by describing Pope Leo as a figure who 'reminds us of what the left truly is,' a sentence that does the work of an argument without being one, in the way that a throw pillow with a quote on it reminds you to live laugh love without explaining how.
The Pope's hat remains bigger than everyone else's. This part, at least, is not in dispute.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2026/09/26/pinkerton-pope-leo-attacks-the-root-of-left-wing-radicalism-in-france/