The Strange, Imaginary World of TradCatKnight

TradCatKnight is insane.

I'm not saying that based on his views or positions per se.

I'm not even sure what his views really are, beyond some variation on traditionalist Catholicism. Nor do I care.

Rather, I'm referring to the fact that he's constructed an imaginary social media world for himself based on fake friends, followers, subscribers, page views, likes and comments.

He incessantly bills himself as the "most popular traditional Catholic social media site on the web." This is partly "true," I guess, in so far as it's based on certain automatic rankings and metrics. But those are in turn based on the fact that he's purchased the likes, etc. from sites that sell them.

Yeah, you can actually do that, and it's much cheaper than you would think.

The video below highlights the scam in detail. The video has been out for a while but was just reposted by the blog CallMeJorge. Also, Frank Walker of Canon212 just referred to it, as well as revealing that TradCatKnight had just subjected him to an assault of threatening emails.

99% of TradCatKnight's social media interactions are fake. You can easily verify this for yourself by going to his Facebook page.

Check out, for example, his Facebook post headlined "TradCatKnight: Latest Endtime Videos (May 28th, 2016)." It has 479 likes (or hearts or shocked faces, etc.), but only 1 share and 2 comments.

Don't you think that's a bit odd?

Now, look at the likes. Many of the "people" have no profile pictures and have similar sounding names - "Donna Taylor," "Sharon Taylor" and "Helen Taylor" in rapid succession. These follow a bunch of thin accounts from third-world countries that appear to have no links to Catholicism whatsoever.

You'd think the "click farms" could do better than that. I mean, come on, $10 for 1,000 fake likes only buys you Taylors?

This sort of pattern is repeated across all of his social media platforms, such as for example, Twitter, where he supposedly has 302k followers.

Right.

It's absolutely indisputable what is happening.

Okay, so what does TradCatKnight get out of this?

Well, he's constantly soliciting donations. But to be honest, he appears to have so few actual followers, I can't imagine he raises much money from them.

If I had ten real followers but lied to them that I really had a million followers, I assume that still wouldn't help me very much.

The one thing TradCatKnight has done is to lure (based on his pumped up popularity) a number of well-known and respectable Catholics to participate in his podcasts. To be fair, some of those podcasts are informative and worthwhile, as one might imagine they would be since they are, after all, interviews with well-known and respectable Catholics.

TradCatKnight has also used his "fame" to get himself on a number of other radio shows and podcasts.

Here's one with David Duke.

Sorry, that was a low blow.

But other than that, as far as I can tell, TradCatKnight seems to have channeled whatever small amount of donations he gets into buying more fake followers.

So, he's not a fraudster per se, at least if you define "fraudster" as someone who actually makes money.

Rather, he has constructed an imaginary social media empire for himself in his own mind.

Now, obviously, he has harmed some people - the Catholics who have wasted their time on his shows and the (probably very few) Catholics who have donated to his "apostolate."

But on the main, it's a castle built on air. He can brag about his castle, sure. But there are very few real people listening to hear that brag.

So, one might ask, what's the point?

There is no point. TradCatKnight is insane.

The video, above, claims that he's doing the work of Satan. With respect, I think that's over the top. Or maybe there are other things going on that I'm not aware of.

What I do know is that TradCatKnight is an obviously intelligent man who may very well be a faithful Catholic. But somewhere along the way, he lost it.

It happens, I guess.

Hey, I gained two (two!) Twitter followers, yesterday, and it didn't cost me a cent.