CatholicVote president warns of growing alliance between radical left, Islamist movements
CatholicVote President and CEO Kelsey Reinhardt argued that the ideologically opposed movements have formed a tactical coalition based on shared hostility toward the foundations of Western civilization.
CatholicVote President and CEO Kelsey Reinhardt warned Aug. 18 that radical left-wing groups and Islamist political movements are forming a growing alliance that she said seeks to weaken the foundations of Western civilization.
In a statement titled “The Unholy Alliance You Weren’t Supposed to Notice,” Reinhardt described the partnership as a “red-green alliance,” an informal coalition that she said has become increasingly visible on university campuses and in political organizing and Democratic primary campaigns.
“It is not a formal organization. It has no single headquarters,” Reinhardt wrote. “But it is real, it is growing, and its ambitions are not modest.”
The two movements hold sharply different positions on several key issues. Reinhardt said the radical left champions “women’s autonomy, sexual liberation, and secular governance,” while Islamist political theology “holds to the authority of Sharia, traditional gender roles, and the supremacy of religious law.”
Despite those “irreconcilable visions,” Reinhardt argued, the two movements have found common cause in what they oppose.
“What binds them is not a shared vision of the future,” she wrote. “It is a shared enemy: the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, our natural law tradition, our ordered liberty and our understanding of the human person as made in the image of God and therefore possessed of an inherent dignity that no state can confer or revoke.”
Reinhardt said Muslim reformers and scholars have warned about the alliance for years. She cited Egyptian writer Dalia Ziada, who has described the partnership as a “sinful marriage.” She also pointed to Muslim reformer and journalist Asra Nomani and Hudson Institute researcher Zineb Riboua, both of whom have examined cooperation between Islamist organizations and progressive political movements.
“The alliance is tactical, not philosophical,” Reinhardt wrote. “It is a coalition of grievance rather than a community of belief.”
She argued that both the radical left and Islamism exploit the freedoms and institutions of Western societies to undermine them.
“Both strategies share a common logic: exploit the openness of the system to close it,” she wrote.
As examples of the coalition’s growing political influence, Reinhardt cited the recent successes of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Both are Muslim progressive politicians, and Mamdani identifies as a democratic socialist.
“We should be clear-eyed about what this means,” the CatholicVote president wrote. “This is a revolutionary coalition whose constituent elements, for all their internal contradictions, agree on one thing: the civilization that produced constitutional self-government, freedom of conscience, and the inherent dignity of the human person must be dismantled.”
Catholics in particular should “not be surprised by this,” Reinhardt wrote, but should recognize that civilians can lose their religious and moral foundations and ultimately be lost.
She invoked Pope Benedict XVI’s warning against ordering public life “as if God does not exist,” arguing that removing faith from the public square does not produce a neutral society but creates a vacuum that other ideologies will fill.
“The cut flowers of Western culture can look beautiful for a long time after they have been severed from their roots,” she wrote. “But they do not last.”
Reinhardt urged the faithful to respond not with fear or silence but instead with discernment, courage, and prayer. That response, she said, requires Catholics to discern and publicly proclaim truth while rejecting “the moral blackmail that labels clarity as bigotry and principle as hatred.”
“And our answer is also prayer: prayer for conversion and renewal by rebuilding of a culture that remembers what it owes to the tradition that formed it,” Reinhardt wrote. “That work begins in families. In parishes. In the daily choices of ordinary Catholics who refuse to let their children grow up as cut flowers.
“The civilization being contested is not ours to own,” she concluded. “It is ours to pass on.”
