Calvin Robinson is a shepherd without a flock. After his failed attempt to obtain a curacy in the Church of England, he was ordained as a deacon in the Free Church of England in 2022, from which he departed the following year to join the Nordic Catholic Church. In 2024, he switched again, heading to America to join the Anglican Catholic Church, which booted him in January 2025 for imitating Elon Musk’s hand-to-heart salute, apparently not trusting Robinson’s protestations of innocent edge-lording. In May, he was granted a temporary license by the Reformed Episcopal Church. It was revoked 9 days later.
On February 4, it was announced that Robinson has discovered a new home, although how long it lasts is anyone’s guess (perhaps we could get a Robinson version of Liz Truss’s thawing lettuce?). For those counting, that’s Robinson’s fifth denomination in as many years.
Throughout his holidaying in various communions, Robinson moonlit as a media commentator, always sporting his collar on TV. Lacking sheep, Robinson has been in search of an audience. He decided to fleece the herds of social media. His ongoing intellectual and moral implosion is a cautionary tale for our time: A priest without a church, wearing clerical robes and the prefix “Father” in order to imply divine approval for his dopamine-driven 21st-century version of medieval scape-goating with some “just asking questions” Holocaust stuff sprinkled in for seasoning.
Robinson didn’t start off this way. In his engaging and entertaining GB News appearances, podcast interviews with the likes of Matt Fradd, and speeches at events such as the March for Life, Robinson focused on defending the traditional Christian perspective on marriage, sexuality, family, and abortion. He presented himself primarily as a defender of Christian values in a culture hostile to Christianity. But as the post-October 7 wave of Jew-hating sentiment began, Robinson saw an opportunity and began to pivot and, lacking both a formal media platform and a pulpit, he leaned in.
Let’s skip ahead to the inevitable protestations for a moment. If you’re a fan of Robinson, you might insist that he, like so many others, was merely appalled by Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks and abhorred the civilian casualties in Gaza. You might claim that this isn’t actually about Jewish people—it is just the IDF’s war against Hamas. There are certainly public commentators who make good faith criticisms of Israel—Ross Douthat of the New York Times, for example, wrote a column titled “How Israel’s War Became Unjust,” yet faced no accusations of antisemitism. But Robinson is not Douthat, and he is not acting in good faith.
There are three groups of people who talk obsessively about “Zionism.” One group has good faith criticisms—agree with them or not—of the war, of the Israeli government, of the US relationship with Israel, etc. The second is people with a pre-existing agenda—anti-Israel and anti-Jew—who saw October 7 as an opportunity to move the Overton window in their direction. Those people are rarely good at hiding what they truly believe, and even where their outrage is genuine, it is part of a much larger, genuinely sinister worldview. Calvin Robinson is in the third group of people: a grifter who watched antisemitism get popular online, straightened his clerical collar, and hopped on the bandwagon.
Q: How Many Germans are still alive from WWII? Fewer than 100,000.
Q: How many Holocaust survivors are still alive from WWII?
A: Approximately 196,000.
Robinson captioned the screenshot: “The math ain’t mathing.” In other words: The official story of the Holocaust is a lie, and my Grok Q & A proves it. The post accomplished precisely what he hoped it would: It was reposted over 1,500 times.
Of course, Robinson knows what he is doing here. The math ain’t mathing because those results, which incidentally cannot be reproduced, aren’t accurate. Anyone over 80 is technically “still alive from WWII,” which is over three million people in England and over 6 million in Germany. If he is attempting to refer to soldiers who fought in World War II, there are of course fewer of them than there are Holocaust survivors because the Nazi war against the Jews included children (around 1.5 million were murdered). There has been debate amongst historians about which people specifically constitute “survivors,” but Robinson wasn’t engaging in a historiographical debate, as everyone who read his post immediately recognized.
The Holocaust is a favorite topic of Robinson recently. On February 5, he bizarrely claimed that “To Christian Zionists, there is the Gospel and the Jewish Holocaust.” The idea that acceptance of a historical event (Yad Vashem has documented the names of 5 million of the 6 million who perished in the Holocaust) is held by Christian supporters of Israel as equivalent to the Gospel is not only slanderous and nonsensical, but a category error. People accept all sorts of historical facts as true without elevating them to the level of “Gospel.”
In this instance, many are sensitive to what folks like Robinson are deliberately doing because they recognize that it isn’t about the numbers. It’s about questioning the Holocaust and signaling to those who do that you are on the same page as they are. There aren’t any fierce online X debates about the death count at Hiroshima or the Somme, and for good reason. Robinson is just trawling for engagement, and he’s using the Holocaust to do so. Shameless doesn’t start to describe it.
When directly confronted, Robinson will no doubt attempt to dodge and insist that he is not playing the game that he is obviously playing. I didn’t deny the Holocaust, he will claim. I merely pointed out that who qualifies as a “survivor” is a matter of debate. Scan the comments and check out the reposts. Robinson’s followers knew exactly what he was saying, and so did he. Each post like this attracts followers of a specific kind, and Robinson posts more slop like this in order to keep them happy. Moral suicide by audience capture, with his “plausible deniability” being so weak that I’m not even sure he buys it himself.
Calvin Robinson is a cautionary tale. It started with just a few posts on Israel and Zionism, an attempt by a media commentator and avid social media user to toss in a theologically relevant take or two. Take it or leave it, but reasonable (if opportunistic) comment. But then the algorithm kicked in, and he noticed which posts got the most traction. His dopamine surged. There was an appetite for this stuff, and the bloodier the red meat was, the more reaction he got. Followers arrived in droves—Robinson was getting woke to the Jews! He kept at it. How ‘bout that Holocaust, huh? And now he can’t get off the treadmill.
If you told Father Calvin Robinson in 2020 that he would be making posts like this in 2026, he probably would have been outraged. And yet: Here he is—a bot-boosted cautionary tale for us all. The sheep are leading the “shepherd” rather than the other way around, and they are collectively heading in a very dark direction indeed.
