The Enemy Within
Part I of V
Chicago at night. ICE officers in full tactical gear dressed for World War III rappelled from a helicopter onto the roof of an apartment building. They smashed down doors, threw flashbangs, ripped parents and children from their beds and arrested dozens of people. No warrants. No probable cause. Across the country, we’re seeing a similar shock-and-awe approach to immigration enforcement, the impact of Donald Trump’s promise to conduct the “largest deportation in history.”
Trump said these raids “clean up the blood of our country” and protect it from “the enemy within.” But this very phrase he is invoking a man he has likely never heard of: Augustine of Hippo. And an idea that is built on a 1,600-year-old mistruth, perhaps a lie?
After the Visigoths destroyed the city of Rome in 410 CE, the Romans began to wonder if their new Christian faith had doomed them. Had Christianity angered the old gods? Augustine, the philosopher-turned-Christian-bishop, rushed to defend the empire’s new religion. Rome was sacked not because it was too Christian, he said. It was because it wasn’t Christian enough.
The Visigoths, recent refugees in Rome who were soldiers, were also Christians. But their Arian faith interpreted Jesus as the son of God, not God himself. Augustine called theirs a heretical, immoral faith, and argued that this was the true cause of the sack of Rome. He sent a warning: There are wolves within, and sheep without.
This mistruth gave birth to a myth that endures to this day: Rome fell because of a broken moral compass, betrayed by an “enemy within.”
You could tell the real story of why Rome was sacked in a few pages but Augustine takes a thousand pages and blames everyone across the entire cosmos. He drags in Osiris, to Hermes, Aristotle, Cicero, the rich, the poor, everyone. He turns a political dispute and bureaucratic failure into an eternal war between light and darkness and this is what has persisted.
The City of God became the playbook for theocracies. It showed rulers how to frame crises as insoluble unless its citizens were homogenized under the Church’s version of Christianity. Charlemagne’s “holy” wars of conversion against the Saxons; the Inquisition’s torture and murder of Jews and Muslims; the Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing of American Indians; and the Third Reich. Each flourished under the same tools and rules: purify a nation to save it. Multiculturalism became a liability.
In 1776, an influential book about Rome’s decline landed in America. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the first modern account built on primary sources rather than theology. Gibbon wrote that “The freedom of inquiry was abolished by the same edicts which proscribed heresy; and the authority of the Church was irrevocably established by the civil power.”
A dark cloud of superstition, he wrote, “was finally spread over the human mind, and the liberty of the Roman world was oppressed by a new and intolerant dominion.” It was a warning against the fusion of religion and empire that was read by the writers of the Constitution and would shape the First Amendment twenty years later.
Gibbon’s book remains popular and is still cited today. Mostly, it is manipulated for political metaphor.
The Harvard and Oxford-educated historian Niall Ferguson is one of the most high-profile manipulators of this metaphor. In his 2015 Boston Globe op-ed, “Paris and the Fall of Rome,” he quoted Gibbon’s description of the Goths sacking Rome as if it were a script for modern terrorism. “Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless.” He’s pushing the metaphor civilization is much more fragile than we think. We are all Romans now, and the barbarians are already inside the gates!
In an earlier Vanity Fair piece, Empire Falls, Ferguson had laid the foundations of his armageddon fetish. “With the decline of Christianity, Europe is also experiencing a rise in what politicians euphemistically call ‘antisocial behavior.’ This new primitivism is the extraordinary surge in the popularity of tattoos, once associated with the unruly Picts of the Far North. In this modern decline and fall, it seems, at least some of the barbarians come from within the empire.”
Barbarian antisocial tattoos? It might be funny if he were joking. The people of Brooklyn need to tread carefully.
Real Late Antiquity scholars noted that Ferguson’s Rome talk isn’t evidence-based history, and the consensus is that it’s emotional stagecraft designed to make modern immigration feel like an existential threat. The old “barbarians at the gate” He’s a fellow at Stanford’s right wing Hoover Institution, not a specialist in the period, and his storytelling only serves the purpose to stoke fears on immigration.
And now Ferguson isn’t just writing about decline, he’s built a new institution around it. The University of Austin, co-founded with Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, the controversial company that provided software and data-integration to ICE. This so-called brave new home for “free thought,” is run by culture-war personalities and Ferguson isn’t just sitting on the board, he’s front and center shaping it.
So what you get is a school designed to teach his worldview straight to the next generation -the same Rome-is-falling script, the same talk about outsiders threatening the empire.
In 2025, conservative think tanks with “America First” agendas devoted to promoting anti-immigrant, pro-white Christian policies have poured millions into Fall of Rome content. There are podcasts, documentaries, essays, and social media posts from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Tucker Carlson. Even Putin pops up. Of his war on Ukraine, he declared, “We are fighting not just for our land, but for our moral values…The spiritual space of Holy Rus’ is being torn apart.”
So, when Trump stood before military leaders at Quantico on September 30, 2025 and warned “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within… We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big [problem] — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Augustine’s ghost was standing proudly behind him.
If you think it’s accidental that Trump’s raids primarily target Latino families, who historically represent ‘traditional’ family values by virtue of being deeply Christian, it’s not. Immigration law may be written in neutral terms, but its enforcement has never been neutral. The effect is predictable. The goal of Christian Nationalism has never been morality. Consolidation in king. One church, one color. White Jesus against the brown one.
To be continued…
The real reason Rome was sacked? The Goths were unpaid Roman soldiers whose wages stopped coming one too many times. Also, when Goths arrived as refugees, they were treated like sh*t.