The fascinating backstory behind a bizarre State Department Substack post

Last week, the State Department published a strikingly radical screed on its official Substack. Titled “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” the piece accused Europe’s governments of waging “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself.”

These Western nations, according to author Samuel Samson, have turned on their own heritage: abandoning democracy in favor of a repressive liberalism that threatens to snuff out the heart of their own civilization.

“The global liberal project is not enabling the flourishing of democracy. Rather, it is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people,” Samson writes.

Samson asserts that German and French criminal investigations into far-right factions are politically motivated repression, but provides no evidence to support this extraordinary claim about the internal politics of key allies. He inflates the (real) problems with free speech law in Britain, while whitewashing the only authoritarian state in the European Union (right-wing Hungary). He presents a bizarre intellectual history of the Declaration of Independence, replacing Jefferson’s chief influences (Enlightenment liberals) with Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

The essay isn’t just poorly argued: It has policy implications. Samson both insults and threatens allied governments, implying there will be some kind of US punishment if European states do not change their policies on free speech, election administration, and (for some reason) migration.

“Secretary Rubio has made clear that the State Department will always act in America’s national interest. Europe’s democratic backsliding not only impacts European citizens but increasingly affects American security and economic ties, along with the free speech rights of American citizens and companies,” he writes. “We will not always agree on scope and tactics, but tangible actions by European governments to guarantee protection for political and religious speech, secure borders, and fair elections would serve as welcome steps forward.”

Samuel Samson’s title is “Senior Advisor for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor,” but he is not an experienced diplomat. In fact, he is a 2021 college graduate with no background in European affairs or foreign policy. His last job was “Director of Strategic Partnerships” (a fundraising position) for American Moment, a right-wing organization dedicated to identifying Trump-aligned young people for junior staff jobs.

But while Samson’s path to shaping US-European relations is unconventional, it is hardly unintended. His own publicly available writing suggests that it is the result of a deliberate strategy — an effort to seed the US government with radical opponents of philosophical liberalism who aim to replace it with a form of illiberal Christian government.

Samson described this strategy, in a 2021 essay, as “the infiltration of liberalism’s powerful institutions by right-wing post-liberal agents.” He said the strategy was worth pursuing, and that American Moment was an organization dedicated to turning the basic idea into “tangible action.” (Neither State nor American Moment responded to requests for comment.)

His ascent in the State Department is concrete evidence that this radical right strategy of “entryism” — a small group trying to join another organization with the attempt of changing it from within — is yielding dividends.

So when the State Department published Samson’s piece on its Substack, it sent an unmistakable message not just to Europe but to likeminded right-wing radicals: They could begin more openly planting their flag atop conquered territory.

About a decade ago, Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule became famous for advocating an idea called “integralism:” basically, a right-wing Catholic doctrine that calls for the abolition of the barrier between church and state.

He viewed liberalism, in the philosophical sense, as an abomination, its obsession with rights and freedoms fundamentally corrosive of the “traditional” moral values that Vermeule believes are essential for human flourishing. The only solution was to infuse the state with religious values — specifically, conservative Catholic ones.

But how could you possibly get to such a society in the United States, where 20 percent of the population is Catholic — most of whom are themselves not Vermeule disciples? His answer, which he calls either “ralliement” or “integration from within,” is an entryist campaign targeting the bureaucracy. You get a few key people into positions of power, and then they quietly nudge the citizenry toward a place where they will accept some kind of “postliberal’ state.

“The vast bureaucracy created by liberalism in pursuit of a mirage of depoliticized governance may, by the invisible hand of Providence, be turned to new ends, becoming the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good,” Vermeule wrote in a 2018 essay.

These arguments helped make Vermeuele a leading voice in the so-called postliberal movement: a loose group of right-wing religious conservatives who shared his radical critique of our current political institutions (if not his integralist solution). Postliberal ideas became particularly popular among young conservatives, who felt that the pre-Trump conservative consensus was exhausted and out of date.

Samuel Samson was one of them.

After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, he took a one-year junior fellowship at the Thomistic Institute — a Catholic think tank in Washington, DC, associated with the Dominican order of monks. During that fellowship, he penned a piece for the American Spectator in which he endorsed Vermeule’s strategy for taking liberalism down.

Calling Vermeuele’s ideas “the popular blueprint for America’s burgeoning post-liberal right,” Samson wrote that “I believe the offensive strategy is…worth our effort.” His concern, however, is that the strategy risks corruption: that young bureaucrats and Hill staffers residing in Washington will be corrupted by living in a place defined by liberal values.

“The strategy’s offensive nature requires its agents to dwell for extended periods, even lifetimes, within the nucleus of American liberalism,” he writes. “As such, the strategy brings agents into full contact with the temptations of liberalism — sirens singing alluring songs of pleasure, sexual license, material gain, power, prestige, and social inclusion — beckoning the agent to direct the project to new, less-wholesome ends.”

Samson’s solution to this danger is for radical entryists to engage in study. “Read great books of the Western, Christian, and Classical traditions — as well as those that oppose them,” he writes. “Yes, the practical skills of networking, legislating, and orating are important too, but detached from speculative truth, they are all functionally worthless.”

Somewhat ironically, Samson’s next move was to become a fundraiser. But the organization he would work for, American Moment, was one that Samson believed furthered the Vermeule mission.

Founded in 2021 by three young conservatives — Saurabh Sharma, Nick Solheim, and Jake Mercier — American Moment was inspired by an essay written in 2020 by now-Vice President JD Vance.

Vance argued that the conservative movement was trapped by its own donors: that the entire professional infrastructure of the right was forced, by power of money, into organizations who supported the open approach to trade and migration that the Trump movement opposed.

“Real change,” Vance wrote, would require that we come to grips with the fact that so much of Conservatism, Inc. depends on the status quo.”

Sharma, Solheim, and Mercier built American Moment to try and end that dependence: to build a cadre of populist junior staffers. With Vance on their board, they created a database of like-minded young people to hire for early career positions, a fellowship program to bring young right-wing populists to DC, and even hosted social events to create a more robust right-wing youth culture in the capital.

Their efforts have been reasonably successful. American Moment worked on Project 2025, and Sharma is currently serving as a special adviser to the Presidential Policy Office (which supervises hiring of executive branch political appointees).

American Moment is not exactly as Samson described it before he worked there. While his 2021 essay claimed it was built to implement Vermeule’s integralist ideas, its leaders took a more ecumenical approach. They elevated conservatives from all sorts of different right-wing subcultures, not just Catholic postliberals, so long as they had the right Trump-friendly policy views.

“The basic approach of, ‘Well, we’re going to do our -ism and do politics that way’ falls apart,” Sharma told Politico’s Ian Ward in 2023. “You’re basically signing yourself up to be a loud but ultimately defeated minority.”

Yet the fact that an integralist like Samson was able to succeed there, and then use it as a jumping-off point to a senior position in the Trump administration, suggests it facilitated the success of Vermeule-inspired righties.

Attempts to build a more Trump-friendly set of conservative cadres would invariably create opportunities for radical young right-wingers, especially if they were already thinking about entryist strategies for politics. That elements of the top leadership were sympathetic — most notably Vance, a self-described “postliberal” deeply influenced by Vermeuele’s ideological allies — surely helped things along.

The State Department op-ed, in short, is not a one-off. It is a sign that a truly radical ideological movement has begun successfully executing on its stated strategy for entering the political mainstream.

This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.