The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West is trying to stave off eviction from Trisulti, an eight-hundred-year-old monastery outside Rome, where its founder hopes to offer courses like “Cultural Marxism, Radical Jihad, and the C.C.P.’s Global Information Warfare.”
At a café in a mountain town east of Rome, Benjamin Harnwell was wondering which of the five thousand applicants to his right-wing “gladiator school” he could introduce to a reporter without embarrassment. He thought of four, and dialled one up. “A journalist is looking to speak to some students,” he said into the phone, “and I don’t want him to wind up talking to some skinhead.” He listened, a religious medal rattling against his chest, his slicked-back hair shining. Harnwell hung up, saying that he’d been kidding about the skinhead thing. He then sped off in a white Fiat Punto, heading to the Certosa di Trisulti, a vast, eight-hundred-year-old charterhouse that is both his home and the site of his school.
castle Several years ago, encouraged by his friend Steve Bannon, the strategist behind President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, Harnwell, a forty-five-year-old British Catholic, began leasing the monastery, for about a hundred thousand dollars a year, from the Italian Ministry of Culture. Bannon has long been trying to foment populist insurgencies across Europe, and he viewed Trisulti as the perfect location for the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, in which a new class of right-wing “culture warriors” would be trained. The aim, Bannon said, was “to generate the next Tom Cottons, Mike Pompeos, Nikki Haleys: that next generation that follows Trump.”
Set high in the mountains and decorated with frescoes, the monastery is a lonesome outpost on Bannon’s European frontier. With Trump’s defeat and Bannon’s 2020 arrest, on wire-fraud charges (he was pardoned), the work of setting up the school feels newly urgent. Harnwell spent the past two years battling lawsuits, and now the Italian government is trying to evict him. He has until June to appeal, before the carabinieri drag him out. Bannon blames “corrupt bureaucracy,” saying, “This is the sort of thing you expect from third world countries, not a founding nation of Western Civilization.”
If the plan goes ahead, gladiatorial training in the Catholic conservative arts will be offered to about seventy-five students, who will receive academic credits, toward a master’s degree, from an as-yet-undisclosed Catholic university in the States. Students were to have resided in old monks’ cells (no Wi-Fi), among a few lingering brothers. Applicants range in age from eighteen to eighty and include Italian academics and former U.S. marines. “We want people who have a sense that Western civilization is under threat,” Harnwell said.