Traddyland Group

How the SSPX formation trades truth and charity for tribal loyalty—and why I will not answer in kind

By Lou Massett

The Godfather line came into my head the moment I realized the "anonymous review" on Traddyland.com was most likely written by my very own brother.

Michael Corleone, in one of the final scenes of the second film, has just discovered that his older brother Fredo betrayed him to the family’s enemies. Not from cruelty. From weakness. From the small, wounded envy of a middle brother who never quite made it. Michael takes Fredo’s face in his hands, quietly, and speaks the seven words the American culture has been quoting ever since.

Here is the hostile review of Traddyland was posted under the pseudonym “Kansas Dude.”

When I finished reading it, I sat with it for about ten minutes, and then I did what any thoughtful writer would do before making an accusation. I looked at the evidence the reviewer had unintentionally left behind.

What follows is a walk-through of what I found. I am going to be careful about it. I am not going to name the person I believe wrote it. But I am going to show my work, because the process is itself part of what is worth understanding.

•  •  •

How I identified the reviewer

Every content-management system on the internet — mine runs on Wix; the specifics vary by platform but the underlying architecture is universal — requires a would-be commenter to provide a valid email address before a submission will publish. This is invisible on the front end. The reader browsing the site sees only the pseudonym. But the site itself logs, on the back end, three specific pieces of data about every submission: the email address provided, the IP address the submission came from, and the timestamp.

The email Kansas Dude used wasn’t a throwaway. It contained a distinctive alphanumeric handle the same person has used across multiple accounts for years.

People hoping to stay anonymous usually forget that old handles from college or early Hotmail days become permanent fingerprints. Aggregators quietly index them all. Also, the IP address geolocates to the specific city and state where the person named in those public records lives—roughly a thousand miles from St. Marys, Kansas.That undercuts the pseudonym itself. “Kansas Dude” is meant to suggest a St. Marys insider, someone who was actually on the ground and whose competing memory carries the weight of a witness. The IP shows he is writing from where my brother lives.

•  •  •

I cannot say with certainty that my brother wrote the review posted under the name Kansas Dude. But based on the evidence I have set out above, I believe most certainly that my brother wrote the review as it is a fact that email he registered with is linked only to his name as he used the same handle on other sites. I could be wrong. I hold that possibility open, and I will hold it open as long as he neither admits nor denies plainly. But my belief, in the paragraphs that follow, is that he wrote it. I proceed on that belief and I ask the reader to weigh it against the evidence.

I am not going to name him in this piece. I have decided against that, and I am going to spend a few paragraphs explaining why.

•  •  •

The book I have spent six years writing — and the essays I have been publishing since — make a single argument, over and over: that the community my siblings and I were raised in, the Society of Saint Pius X, teaches a distortion of Catholic charity so severe that it produces adults who cannot bear the accuracy of a description of themselves, and who will reach reflexively for slander, distortion, and anonymity to defend a version of themselves that is no longer true. The community teaches its members to lie in the name of the truth, to attack in the name of charity, and to hide behind pseudonyms in the name of God. Last week, one of my friends from over 30 years unfriended me on Facebook claiming my attacks on the SSPX are "unhinged."

If I respond to this week’s anonymous attack by publicly shaming the brother I believe wrote it — printing his name from the housetops, calling for his humiliation — I have proved his side of the argument, not mine. I have shown that the formation is stronger than the man. I have become, at the moment of provocation, exactly what the book has been trying to name.

Rather I will name the pattern the review represents, and let the reader — including the reader currently deciding whether to trust me or to trust Kansas Dude — see that the pattern is real, that it is documented in the book already, and that other people who have nothing to do with my family are watching the same pattern operate in the same community, right now, at scale.

•  •  •

One more thing about the pseudonym, Kansas Dude, itself.

The name “Kansas Dude” is a tell of a third kind, there are perhaps a hundred people in North America who could plausibly write a hostile review of Traddyland from the position of a St. Marys, Kansas insider — someone who actually attended the SSPX academy in the same era I did, someone who actually knew Fr. Ramon Angles as a headmaster in the flesh, someone who actually met Molly, the girl I wrote about. The pseudonym is designed to plant the assumption in the reader’s mind that Kansas Dude is one of those hundred: a peer of mine, an eyewitness, a competing memory of the same people and rooms.

The brother I believe wrote the review is none of those things. He never attended St. Marys Academy. He never met Fr. Ramon Angles. He never met Molly. His knowledge of the people and events depicted in Traddyland comes almost entirely from the book itself, and from years of secondhand family conversation. In relation to the specific people, places, and events the review pretends to comment on with insider authority, he is an outsider trying to pass as an insider.

This is not a small thing. It is a third deception sitting underneath the two factual distortions the review already commits — and it is corroborated, hard, by the IP evidence. The reviewer picked a pseudonym designed to suggest Kansas because he knew a Kansas voice would carry weight, in an argument about a Kansas boarding school, in a way a distant sibling’s could not. And the moment he pressed submit, his IP address gave that game away.

Kansas Dude, in the end, is not a Kansan. He is not from the SSPX hotbed. He is not, as a reader might assume, someone who lived what I wrote about. He is a family member with an axe to grind and a strong desire to look like something else.

•  •  •

The two specific factual distortions in the review are worth naming briefly, because they compound the picture.

The review claims I “label” my father a bullshitter. The word appears once, in a single passage at the end of Chapter 31, said by a wounded son at the lowest point of the book, reflectively, about a specific moment of what I experienced as betrayal. It is not a general characterization of my father — with whom the book, taken as a whole, is far more tender than the review pretends.

The review claims I depict Molly as a girlfriend who never loved me and blame outside forces for her rejection. Any reader of Chapters 12 through 24 knows that Molly and I dated seriously for years, exchanged letters throughout my time at boarding school, met each other’s families, discussed marriage, and that our relationship ended after a sequence of specific pressures the book documents. The book portrays her with grief and grace. It does not blame her. It does not blame others — it documents what happened, and lets the reader form their own view.

In both cases, the review is not describing the book I wrote. It is describing a book the reviewer wishes I had written, in which the reviewer could simply dismiss it.

•  •  •

The most striking thing is that the review repeats, almost move for move, a pattern the memoir already documented with the same sibling five years ago. Chapter 31 of Traddyland records how our brother—Jarred in the book—when I asked him to help resolve the conflict between Nellie and Guy, said he did not want to get involved, but then went and told Nellie that Guy had accused her of “insurance fraud,” setting in motion the schism that would tear our family apart. Had he not gotten involved, the whole thing would have blown over. Sins of the tongue—slander, detraction, gossip—had always been an issue in our family, and no one was more prone to them than Jarred. That is a documented fact from 2021. What we are seeing now is Jarred trying to cover up for his part in the schism within our own family. “Jarred” is a pseudonym, but he is a real person. He is the sibling whose distinctive email handle appears in publicly-available background-check records under his own name, whose IP address is consistent with his residence, whose location is roughly a thousand miles from the Kansas the pseudonym Kansas Dude is meant to suggest, and whose version of family history this week’s review defends line by line.

•  •  •

This is what I mean when I say the community formed us to do this.

My siblings and I were raised, from earliest childhood, inside a Traditional Catholic movement that fused two extraordinary claims: that outside its walls there was no salvation, and that inside them, absolute loyalty to the tribe was the highest expression of the Fourth Commandment — obedience — under pain of mortal sin. Truth and charity, in that formation, ceased to be the ends of the moral life. They became instruments of tribal defense. You could — and were sometimes required to — lie to preserve the loyalty. You could — and were sometimes required to — attack in the name of charity. You could — and were sometimes required to — hide behind anonymity in the name of God. I am not alone in noticing the larger pattern this fits into.

In late July, Dr. Taylor Marshall — the American Catholic apologist, YouTuber, and author of Infiltration, who has spent much of the last decade publicly defending the SSPX against its critics — sat in front of a camera and told his large audience that he and his wife and their eight children had spent weeks being harassed online, in coordinated fashion, by SSPX faithful. His offense was not that he had attacked the Society. It was that he had failed to fully endorse its July 1st episcopal consecrations at Écône, which the Vatican then declared schismatic. For that measured hesitation — for the sin of declining to march in lockstep — a mainstream Catholic apologist and his family were dragged across social media for the better part of a month. Marshall’s word, said aloud on his own show, was that the treatment was uncharitable, and that this uncharity was itself, in his view, a spiritual problem inside the movement.

Christine Niles, the Catholic journalist whose Forward Boldly podcast has covered SSPX abuse cases for years — and who, in the interest of full disclosure, is one of the four podcasters who has hosted me since Traddyland was published — has been documenting a version of the same phenomenon for far longer than Marshall has. Niles has reported publicly, and repeatedly, on the vitriol and coordinated hostility directed at anyone inside the traditionalist Catholic community who names its scandals plainly, and on the way its most zealous defenders respond to any accurate description of institutional failure — whether by former members, by mainstream Catholic media, by law enforcement, or by their own bishops — with attacks that would be recognized in any other setting as harassment.

Marshall is a mainstream conservative Catholic. Niles is traditionalist-adjacent. I am a former member who now writes about the movement from outside. We do not share a lane. We share, apparently, the same observation.

And now, apparently, we share the same experience. Marshall’s family. Niles’s inbox. My website comment section.

That formation devours the truthfulness of everyone it touches. It devoured Taylor Marshall’s harassers this summer. It has been devouring the anonymous accounts Christine Niles has been dealing with for years. It devoured, in another mode, the priests whose serial abuse of children the Kansas Bureau of Investigation is still, in its seventh year, quietly investigating; whose twenty-year French sentences are on the record in a court in Bordeaux; whose thirty-page testimony was filed to the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne last month by another survivor with a doctorate and no reason to lie.

And it has, this week, devoured the truthfulness of the brother I believe wrote a hostile anonymous review of my book on my own website. He is not a monster. He is what that formation produces when it is not resisted — even in a man with an accomplished life, a family, and, I still believe, a serious desire to do what he believes is right by the tradition we were raised in.

I love him. I would still, at this hour, take his phone call. I hope one day he calls.

But the review he almost certainly wrote is not that call. It is the opposite of it. It is the formation talking through him, at the exact moment when the man in him could have chosen otherwise.

•  •  •

Michael Corleone said the words to Fredo then, months later, gave the order. He got what he wanted. He also lost, in that same order, the last thing in his life that could still have saved him. Every viewer of the film understands, by the closing frame, that the vengeance was the disease.

St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians nineteen centuries before Coppola’s cameras, said the thing about all of this we needed to hear before Michael did what he did:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

To the brother I believe wrote it: I know it was you. I could be wrong. I do not believe I am. Either way, I will not print your name from the housetops. What I will do is show my work, name the pattern, and pray — the way I was actually taught to pray, before the formation took the prayer and turned it into a weapon — that one day you will see the truth in charity.

Charity is patient.

Charity is kind.

Charity does not hide behind a pseudonym.

The name of Kansas Dude, you may keep.