QAnon conspiracy theorists have long fancied themselves “digital soldiers” whose skills at posting dank memes and owning libs on the internet plays a key role in former President Donald Trump’s purported operation to take down the global network of satanic pedophiles that supposedly secretly runs the world.
Dave Hayes, who built a reputation as a leading “decoder” of Q posts under the handle “Praying Medic” until he was booted from most major social media platforms for spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation, takes his role as a “digital soldier” very seriously. Appearing on fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist Greg Harvey’s livestream program Monday, Hayes said that he and other QAnon activists are the online equivalent of the special forces in the military who have been trained to overcome any obstacle in order to achieve their objective.
“The thing that we have to realize as anons is that we went through a three-year course of training and equipping to detect, expose, and help wake other people up to the realities of corruption through Q,” Hayes said. “Q’s operation … was a training course to teach us how to do research in such a way that we could detect corruption and then find a way to make that information available to the public.”
“We have been trained for years to do exactly what we’re doing,” he continued. “Even though we don’t necessarily know what’s coming in the future, we have been trained to deal with whatever comes. It’s like being in the special forces in the military. Special forces groups don’t necessarily know what plans, what attacks, what kind of opposition they’re going to face when they go into a certain territory. When they’re doing an operation, they don’t necessarily know the troop strength that’s going to oppose them, they don’t know how well armed their enemy is, but they rely on their training, they rely on the fact that they are trained and equipped, and they’re able to overcome whatever obstacle is set in front of them.”
“We’re the same way,” Hayes boasted. “We have been trained by God, we have been trained by Q to adapt, improvise, and overcome. We’ve been equipped. We’ve been trained. We’re relatively smart people. We can see through the BS narratives, generally speaking. We know how to research and come to the truth, and we can make that information publicly available. So even though we don’t necessarily know the obstacles that we’re going to face in the future, we can rely on our training. We are well trained, well equipped, and we are more than up to the task to face down whatever they send our way.”
Musician-politician Sean Feucht sponsored a series of events in Washington, D.C. over the 9/11 weekend that combined high-energy worship with dominionist theology and Christian nationalist politics.
In addition to a video address from former President Donald Trump, Feucht’s events featured personal appearances by Sen. Josh Hawley, R.-Mo., radio host and so-called Stop the Steal activist Eric Metaxas, New Apostolic Reformation leader Ché Ahn, and California pastor-politician Rob McCoy, a close ally of Christian nationalist political operative David Lane.
During much of the COVID-19 pandemic, Feucht has held large outdoor worship rallies around the country in what he says is an attempt to spark spiritual revival, which dominionist leaders say is a precursor to societal “transformation.” These “Let Us Worship” rallies began as a protest of pandemic-related restrictions on church gatherings.
Hawley, who has appeared with Feucht previously, spoke at Sunday evening’s event in the nation’s capital and said he brought his kids “to see what a move of God looks like.” Hawley told the crowd that “We serve a king who is on the throne, and his kingdom is ever advancing,” before praying that God would “release the greatest revival in American history.” He and Feucht prayed that the U.S. Supreme Court will use an upcoming case to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Ahn, a leader in the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation and head of Harvest International Ministries based in Pasadena, California, spoke at Feucht’s events on Saturday and Sunday. He predicted that “the greatest revival in the history of the church” would be “birthed out of ’Let Us Worship.’” On Jan. 5, one day before the Capitol insurrection, Ahn appeared at a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., where he told the crowd that Trump would stay in power and that they would “rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.”
Ahn actively promoted gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder in the failed attempt to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose pandemic-related restrictions on church gatherings were rolled back after Ahn took the issue to court. At Saturday’s rally, Ahn declared, “We are now in the battle for the soul of this nation,” adding, “Socialism, Marxism, is coming.” He said pastors will play an important role in leading resistance, because “we believe there is a higher authority than Stalin or Newsom or President Biden.”
“There is a higher authority,” Ahn said. “Jesus is Lord over the nations.”
At the Saturday evening rally, religious-right author and pundit Eric Metaxas repeatedly promoted Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that it was a “conspiracy theory” that President Joe Biden was elected. He cited Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address calling for a “new birth of freedom” in the U.S. after the Civil War. Metaxas said those words had been “prophetic” and apply to the revival stirring in the country today.
Metaxas told Feucht’s followers that God is the “only hope” of defeating the country’s enemies:
The way to honor those who died in the cause of freedom … we cannot honor them unless we deal with why they were killed. We have to stand up for freedom now, and we have to stand against the enemies of the freedom now. … We today have to stand and fight for freedom. And the enemies of freedom, whether they are atheists in the Communist Party in China or whether they are radical Islamists who hate us or the Taliban or people in this country who have bought into a woke Marxist ideology that is fundamentally anti-American, that will hurt the poor, and that is against the God who gave us the freedom that we have.
California pastor-politician Rob McCoy, who has falsely claimed that the election was “stolen” from Trump, also spoke Saturday evening, exhorting, “Church, awaken! It is time to take back the country and the world!”
Jay Koopman, an associate pastor at Ahn’s church, interrupted Sunday’s worship event with a call for people in the crowd who struggle with same-sex attraction to raise their hands so that people near them could surround and pray for them to be “set free.” Koopman also led an altar call, and Ahn made a pitch for money to support plans for ”Let Us Worship” events around the country next year that they hope will draw 20,000 to 30,000 people each.
Excerpts from the Sept. 11, 2021 “Let Us Worship” rally at which former President Donald Trump’s video was also shown:
Excerpts from Sen. Josh Hawley’s appearance at the Sept. 12 “Let Us Worship” rally:
Radical right-wing pastor Greg Locke appeared on the “Voice of Healing” radio program last week, where he insisted that he must use his Sunday services to preach about politics because the Democrats are trying to impose “tyranny” and take away the rights of Christians. The host of the program, a self-proclaimed “apostle” named Michael Petro, readily agreed, declaring that what the United States needs now is “a violent church.”
Locke and Petro kicked off the conversation by agreeing that the 2020 presidential election was incontrovertibly stolen from former President Donald Trump.
“I’ll go to my grave believing [the election was illegitimate],” Locke said. “Everybody else is starting to realize it, but the left wants to cover it up. … The forensic science proved that the man won by a landslide. Trump won, and Biden’s just as fraudulent today as he ever has been. I tell people that, and people can’t stand that. It’s got us a lot of vitriolic push back, but it’s the facts. God’s never in his word one time even remotely told me to submit to something that I know to be deception. Never. So, people [are] like, ‘Just accept it.’ No, I can’t accept it. Because God doesn’t want me to accept nonsense and lies. We know what happened, and it was nefarious.”
“People have to be put in jail,” replied Petro. “People have to be held to an account now because, to me, it really was a treasonous act.”
Later in the interview, Locke complained about people who criticize him for using his church services to scream about politics and spread conspiracy theories.
“Here’s the problem they don’t understand,” Locke said. “If we don’t call out corrupt politics, we’re not going to have a platform from which to preach about Jesus Christ. They’re gonna take it away. … If we don’t push back, then I think people are beginning to realize, ‘Wow, we are gonna fall to tyranny.’”
“I’m getting to preach at some of the largest political gatherings on the planet, and I get to talk about Jesus,” Locke bragged. “So, God’s using politics as a platform for his glory.”
“We’ve crossed a line,” Petro agreed. “There’s no going back. We’ve got to get in the fight now because the Democratic Party just isn’t going to tolerate Christianity at all at this point. It’s either sink or swim, and I believe that the Lord is calling a violent church out.”
A coalition of Trump-supporting right-wing state and national organizations calling themselves “Virginia Fair Elections” is holding a so-called “election integrity summit” in Richmond, Virginia, this Friday and Saturday. “Election integrity” is the benign-sounding phrase adopted by a wide range of pro-Trump so-called “Stop the Steal” activists who are campaigning for new state-level voter suppression laws, defending existing ones, and opposing federal voting rights protections.
Members of the coalition sponsoring the Virginia event include:
Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, a massive think tank and promoter of right-wing policies. The Heritage Foundation has long been an aggressive advocate for voter suppression efforts. Hans von Spakovsky, manager of its “Election Law Reform Initiative,” took part in former Rep. Michele Bachmann’s “Election Integrity” conference earlier this year, which featured the conspiracy theorists of The Gateway Pundit. Von Spakovsky was a member of former President Donald Trump’s short-lived sham “Election Integrity Commission” to which von Spakovsky had urged administration officials not to appoint any Democrats or “mainstream” Republicans.
Conservative Partnership Institute, the new organizational home for former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Conservative Partner Institute is also a sponsor of an “election integrity” coalition led by Cleta Mitchell, a Team Trump lawyer who was on the notorious phone call during which Trump tried to bully the Georgia secretary of state into “finding” enough votes to overturn the presidential election results. Mitchell, who signed a Dec. 30 letter from right-wing leaders urging Senate Republicans to contest Electoral College votes from battleground states won by Biden, has helped mobilize right-wing opposition to the For the People Act, proposed federal legislation that would overturn many new voter suppression measures enacted by Republican-controlled state
The Election Integrity Network, a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute that is listed separately as an event sponsor. The network’s website has raised money to fund litigation and “audit” efforts in Georgia, where the group claims the certified results from the 2020 election are “not accurate.”
The Virginia Institute for Public Policy, an affiliate of the State Policy Network, a network of state-level think tanks that advocate for right-wing policies. The State Policy Network is currently chaired by Carl Helstrom, a vice president at the Bradley Foundation, whose role in funding election disinformation was recently documented by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in “The Big Money Behind The Big Lie.”
The Middle Resolution, a group created by Virginia business executives in 2009. In a blog post days before the 2020 election, Middle Resolution President Craig DiSesa praised Trump as a “fighter” and claimed that if Democrats controlled the White House, “tyranny will rein free in this country and political and religious freedom will be a thing of the past.” The Middle Resolution PAC is backing Virginia GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin in this year’s gubernatorial election.
The summit schedule also includes these workshops:
Election Integrity Training for Election Workers and Poll Watchers
Emergency Project to Document Potential Illegal Registrations
Vulnerable Voters Training
Recruiting, Scheduling, and Deploying Poll Observers
Preparing for the Post Election, War Rooms, and Recounts
Researching How Your Local Election Office Conducts YOUR Elections
The summit has also been promoted by the Conservative Action Project, an affiliate of the secretive and influential Council for National Policy, and by Evangelicals for Trump.
Among the scheduled speakers at the Richmond “summit” is Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official and former state attorney general. Cuccinelli was recently named a senior fellow for Immigration and Homeland Security at the Center for Renewing America, which has promoted efforts to whitewash the history and reality of systemic racism in the U.S. and pushed right-wing activists to take over school boards. Cuccinelli is a former general counsel of the FreedomWorks Foundation; FreedomWorks is also promoting right-wing coalition efforts to resist federal voting rights protections. Cuccinelli’s anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice, and climate-denialistrecord contributed to his defeated by Terry McAuliffe in the 2013 election for governor.
Religious-right groups and leaders are playing their part in the right-wing movement’s aggressive campaign to restrict teaching about systemic racism in American history, culture, and institutions.
Under the guise of protecting children from the supposed threat of “critical race theory”—an academic analytical approach to examining structural racism—the campaign against teaching about racism has taken form in incendiary right-wing media segments, attacks on teachers and school officials, and state and federal legislation.
In the hands of right-wing activists—pushed by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, former President Donald Trump, and other Republican officials, “critical race theory” as a term has lost all meaning. Instead, it has become an all-purpose label with which to smear teachers and liberal politicians as anti-white, Marxist, or America-haters—and to justify the whitewashing of U.S. history.
This discourse around critical race theory appears designed to inflame racial resentment and mobilize conservative white voters for local, state, and federal elections—a goal shared by religious-right groups that have joined the anti-CRT propaganda blitz.
One enthusiastic participant is Intercessors for America, a network of pro-Trump self-described “prayer warriors” that was closely aligned with the Trump White House and Trump aide Paula White. This summer, the network’s leader, Dave Kuban, portrayed critical race theory in terms of spiritual warfare. IFA is also distributing a “Critical Race Theory Action Bundle” including a toolkit that encourages religious-right activists to run for their local school boards using critical race theory as a campaign theme.
That toolkit was produced by former Trump administration official Russ Vought and his Center for Renewing America organization. Vought also appeared on a June 17 IFA prayer call, where he talked about helping lead Trump administration efforts to ban critical race theory within the federal government, in part by identifying what he saw as suspicious buzzwords. “In this context, the words ‘anti-racism’ does not mean that you’re against racism. It means that you’re for racism,” he claimed. “It means that you’re for racial discrimination to deal with equity or disparities that you identify.”
But Kubal was not to be outdone. On his June 24 call, Kubal shared a “prophetic word” that he said “the Lord gave me for the nation at this time as we battle critical race theory.”
Kubal’s and Vought’s messages are evidence that “critical race theory” means both anything and nothing as used in the moral panic manufactured by right-wing political operatives and media outlets. During that June 24 call, Kubal described critical race theory as more than a school curriculum or human resources policies, calling it “an attitude and a mindset,” adding, “depending on your theology, you could call critical race theory a spiritual stronghold, you could call it a spirit that has been released upon our nation.”
He also gave the term an evil Marxist backstory. In Kubal’s telling, critical race theory is the grandchild of critical theory, developed by Marxists in the 1930s to “tear down objective truth” and pit people against each other. He said critical theory was transformed into critical legal theory in the 1970s by people who twisted Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of hope and “pivoted it to focus on the oppressed/oppressor paradigm that the critical theorists talked about 40 years before this.”
“Bringing the demonic Marxist theory into modern day is what critical legal theory did in the 1970s,” Kubal said, adding that critical race theory is “a worldview that relies on the idea that there are two categories of people—the oppressed vs. the oppressor,” with race as the “dividing force in people’s lives.”
Kubal warned that even some Christian believers are being “duped” into a worldview that turns politics into religion and places too much emphasis on the pursuit of justice:
There’s a whole new generation of activists who have been taught that injustice is the only lens to view life. They’re committed to activism because they feel themselves are victims or that other people were victims, and somehow they’re responsible for injustice. Politics has become the new religion. You know, even many believers have been duped into this false outlook to the point where they value justice over regeneration. They care more about racial oppression than spiritual damnation. It’s a very serious moment in the church today, as so many people have been swallowed up by this thought of injustice and pulled into the fight of the oppressed and oppressor, seeing that as the only lens to view life.
Kubal also portrayed critical race theory as a “demonic lie” from which people need to be saved:
As we pray about the lie of critical race theory, now understanding the history of critical race theory, we’re going to pray that the eyes of the church would be opened to this demonic lie and that people would be able to see it for what it is—darkness—so that they could turn and see the light, that they would be delivered form the power of Satan.
During that same June 24 call, Kubal displayed two graphics that he said explain how the “spiritual forces” behind critical race theory use “negative emotions” to make people see themselves as victims or oppressors. He said the graphics help explain “what happens in people’s lives when religion is replaced by politics and politics becomes the religion of the day.”
“This is a spiritual battle,” he said, claiming that the only “antidote” to the “victim mindset” of critical race theory is “identity in Christ.”
Kubal shared the same graphics in his July 1 blog post, where he criticized Christians who “become social justice warriors desiring to right the wrongs of injustice,” claiming they have “chosen to care more about social injustices and spiritual damnation.”
Kubal’s call built toward the revelation of the “prophetic word” that he said God sent America through him:
This is an age of exposing and dividing. Be cautious of what you listen to and how quickly you come to conclusions. For the true church will hear my voice in these days. The truth is available. Do not be afraid or dismayed at what you see. I will prevail, and you will conquer. This is a day of great deception. But deception comes by choice. Free will to turn to true reality is still intact. You were born for this moment. Did you expect there would not be a spiritual battle? The current personnel of the army of God is sufficient. Everything I am doing is to expose truth, the structures, and the powers that rule this world. Will you listen to the truth? Or will you listen to the lie? My concern is for my people, the ones who have turned to me. They are the ones I love. Where they go, they will lead the nation. There is a remnant of my church left in this nation. They must remain true to me, focusing not on circumstances, but on me. Joy will only be found with this perspective. My joy will be your strength. Your concern for your family, your children, your grandchildren is natural. But you must rest in me. You must trust in me.
On the call, Kubal prayed that the church and God-fearing men and women would “rise up,” mentioning Loudon County, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., where some residents recently disrupted a school board meeting with raucous complaints about critical race theory and transgender-embracing policies in county schools.
IFA and the Center for Renewing America are far from the only religious-right groups joining the right-wing push to whitewash the history and reality of systemic racism in the U.S. Hillsdale College featured Chris Rufo, a right-wing think-tanker credited with launching the anti-critical race theory campaign, in the monthly Hillsdale newsletter, Imprimis. Rufo claimed that the goal of critical race theory advocates is an “equity-based form of government” that would see private property, individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech abolished and replaced by “race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority.”
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank closely aligned with the religious right, is also among those pushing anti-critical race theory rhetoric. Heritage’s political action arm is promoting its own anti-critical race theory toolkit and is asking conservatives to urge members of Congress to support legislation to ban “racist teaching” in schools and “racist training” in the military.
The enthusiastic engagement of religious-right groups and leaders in the campaign to whitewash U.S. history is no surprise, given the movement’s near-complete alignment with Trump, and what recent scholarship has revealed about religion, Christian nationalism, and racial attitudes. Robert P. Jones, a pollster and author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” has documented that “the more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely he or she is to identify as a white Christian.” Jones said recently that battles around critical race theory “are really fights to prop up what has always been a biased and inaccurate version of the country’s history—a lie really.”
Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House aide and self-styled impresario of far-right nationalist movements who was recently dubbed the “Insurrectionist-in-Chief” by The New Republic, is helping promote a revival of Promise Keepers, the patriarchal Christian “men’s ministry.”
As Mark Wingfield reported in Baptist News Wednesday, the 2021 version of Promise Keepers is promoting a hard-edged culture-war message similar to other religious-right ministries who warn that the United States is at war with itself. Promise Keepers’ current president Ken Harrison, a former Los Angeles police officer, promoted the organization and its upcoming event on the April 23 episode of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, prompting Bannon to praise Promise Keepers for promoting the “warrior ideal of Christian men.”
Promise Keepers, founded by former football coach Bill McCartney, made a splash in the 1990s with gatherings in football stadiums and a huge 1997 rally on the National Mall dubbed “Stand in the Gap.” Following that model, for two days in July, Promise Keepers is planning to gather 80,000 Christian men at Dallas Cowboys stadium. Harrison said that his group will host “10,000 underprivileged boys” who “don’t have fathers,” adding that “this’ll be their first chance to see what men look like—real men.”
The public-facing ideology of the 1990s Promise Keepers might have been described, as it was by one journalist, as “Dad is still in charge, but he’s kinder, gentler, and a lot more spiritual.” But even then its leaders talked about engaging in spiritual war, which, as the late People For the American Way President Arthur Kropp noted in 1994, echoed the language of the “cultural war” waged by then-presidential hopeful and former White House aide Pat Buchanan. Right Wing Watch reported in 2015, as Promise Keepers celebrated its 25th year, “[t]he group’s current militarized language and imagery matches the increasingly violent rhetoric of resistance and revolution from the far right.”
That is certainly true today. Harrison told Bannon that the globalists and Chinse communists that Bannon constantly rails against are advancing their agenda by “destroying the identity of the American people.” Harrison warned that “passive Christian men” have not been “standing up for what’s right,” enabling the LGBTQ movement to advance beyond “homosexual marriage” to “men putting on dresses and being called women and playing on women’s basketball teams.”
“Where are the Christian men?” Harrison asked, asserting that the July stadium gathering will shake Christian men out of their “complacency.” Bannon asked Harrison how Christian men had become so complacent. “We taught cheap grace,” Harrison replied, adding that Jesus preached that people would be judged by what they did after they are saved.
Those who can’t get to Dallas to attend the event in-person will be able to watch online, Harrison informed listeners. He said that a Promise Keepers virtual event last year drew 1.2 million viewers, a number that provoked Bannon to jump in and exclaim, “This is what I keep telling everybody. We got the votes. We have the muscle. You just have to engage and be relentless about not backing down. You cannot back down one inch. We won this thing in November.”
Jonathan Evans, a former professional football player who serves as chaplain of the Dallas Cowboys and co-chaplain of the Dallas Mavericks is listed as a speaker at the July event. Other speakers include:
Jerry Boykin, a retired lieutenant general who is the executive vice president of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council and a member of the leadership council of the pro-Trump Pentecostal network POTUS Shield. While he was still on active duty, Boykin was rebuked by then-President George W. Bush for portraying U.S. military involvement in the Middle East as a religious war. Boykin has a record of strident anti-Muslim remarks; Boykin and his religious-right allies tried to portray criticism of Boykin’s extremism as anti-Christian persecution.
James Robison, an anti-LGBTQ televangelist who was active in the founding era of the religious right 40 years ago, when he urged “God’s people to come out of the closet.” Robison is a hugefan of former President DonaldTrump, who he said God was using to usher in “the greatest spiritual awakening in history.” Before the 2016 election, he said that conservative Christians could make “demons shudder” by voting politicians out of office.
Harrison told Bannon that he preached about Promise Keepers to a group of 150 Black pastors in Houston, Texas, just before the start of the pandemic, and claimed that they told him, “It’s about time a white man talked to Black people like you do,” claiming that most of the pastors told him they were voting for Trump but “they couldn’t let their congregations know because they’d be thrown out.”
“There’s such an undercurrent of people who are sick and tired of the evil in this country,” he said, adding that men who come to the stadium event will realize they are not alone and will “give themselves permission to stand up and lead and stand for the truth and stop putting up with all the nonsense that the leftists are trying to tell us—that we’re bad people, we’re racists, we’re misogynists, we’re porn addicts.”
“The global media’s going to be down there looking to attack us,” Harrison told Bannon. “And you’re right; they’re trying to blame everything on the evangelical right when actually we’re the solution, not the problem.”
On Wednesday’s edition of his “TruNews” program, radical right-wing conspiracy theorist and End Times broadcaster Rick Wiles declared that the United States is under the control of “Satanic Zionists.”
“The reason the ruling deep state of America hates the Russian people and wants to destroy them?” Wiles said. “It is the satanic Zionist power that overthrew the Russian government in 1917, did a human blood sacrifice of the Romanov family—a satanic ritual where they slaughtered the Romanovs, it was a satanic blood sacrifice—that same group of satanists that overthrew the Russian people in 1917, that’s what controls America today.”
“That spirit right there is what is destroying the United States of America, destroying our freedom, destroying our culture, that spirit right there,” Wiles bellowed. “That’s what’s making war against Russia. They overthrew it, they got free, they got out from under its bondage. And so who is under its bondage now? The American people. We’re under the bondage of that same satanic spirit.”
“Who is always attacking us?” Wiles asked his co-hosts. “The Zionists. There’s nobody else attacking me. Zionists. It’s not every Jewish person, it’s the Zionists, it’s the satanic Zionists. They are satanic. Old Henry Kissinger is one of them, old Alan Greenspan is one of them. Who has weakened America? Greenspan and Kissinger. Now they want war with Russia because the Russian people got free of their chains and bondage and returned to Christ. That’s what it’s about. The Russian people returned to Christ.”
Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, spoke at the America First Political Action Conference Friday night, where they shared the stage with AFPAC founder Nick Fuentes, the leader of a white nationalist youth movement whose record of bigotry and extremism has led to him being banned from social media platforms and from CPAC, the right-wing political conference being held nearby in Orlando. Gosar’s appearance at AFPAC did not disqualify him from speaking at CPAC on a Saturday morning panel.
AFPAC held its inaugural conference last year with a speaker line-up that read as a who’s who of white nationalist and hard-right figures. Right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin returned to this year’s AFPAC, which she claimed had triple the number of attendees as last year’s event.
“We have God on our side,” said Fuentes in his keynote address, repeatedly invoking God and Jesus in support of his anti-immigration, anti-globalist, anti-Republican-establishment, white nationalist and Christian nationalist “America First” agenda.
America is not an idea, Fuentes said at AFPAC, but a particular people in a particular place. “If America ceases to be this people, if America ceases to retain that English cultural framework and the influence of European civilization, if it loses its white demographic core, and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ, this is not America anymore,” Fuentes said.
“America is a Christian nation,” he said. “And that’s not just a slogan. When I say that America is a Christian nation, I’m saying that Jesus Christ is the son of God and this is one nation under that God.” Fuentes and other AFPAC speakers were interrupted by chants of “Christ is king!”—Blaze TV’s Jon Miller after declaring that the movement’s opponents “hate Christ.”
Fuentes was at the rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, he told the AFPAC crowd. When he saw “patriots” surrounding the building and police retreating and heard that politicians were “scurrying” to safety, “I said to myself, ‘This is awesome!’”
“We have been beat up and betrayed and spit on, stepped on, for decades, and to see the tables turned for once was a little bit refreshing actually,” he said.
“We need a little bit more of that energy in the future,” he said, referring to people rising up with torches and pitchforks. Then he smilingly disavowed violence, adding, “I think that will stand up in court.” The country was not founded by following the rules, he said, praising the “light hearted mischief” on display at the Capitol.
Besides, he said, the Capitol is not a sacred temple of democracy, but the seat of an “evil empire.” Fuentes said the real struggle in American politics is between a populist America First movement and “the evil people that now rule this country”—a regime that in his telling includes media, Hollywood, academia, the “deep state,” the national security apparatus, the “billionaire class,” Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, and Big Energy. Mocking the messages from the conservative establishment, he said the real battle is not to “stave off socialism in America” but a battle between “the globalist American regime and the people that they rule.”
Fuentes took part in the 2017 Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville and so-called “Stop the Steal” eventsafter the 2020 election. In 2018, Fuentes said that violence against racial and ethnic minorities would be an acceptable trade-off for restoring “a core American identity centered around ethnicity and race” and ending the “gang-rape of America by the Third World.”
At AFPAC, Fuentes denounced “anti-white agenda of the mainstream media” and “the creation of a new racial caste system in this country with whites at the bottom.” He said this is a sovereignty issue because it is an attack on the country’s white “demographic core.” Black Lives Matter is “challenging the very existence of the United States of America as it is and the historic American nation,” Fuentes said. “This challenge to the existence of our country must be matched and exceeded with equal ferocity and intensity in defense of America.”
“White people founded this country,” he declared. “This country wouldn’t exist without white people. And white people are done being bullied.” He acknowledged that the U.S. is a multicultural society and said it would only work if white people were treated with the same dignity and respect they deserve.
That was also a major theme of his AFPAC speech in which he said the biggest threat to the America First movement comes from politicians who use the movement’s rhetoric and draw from its energy while promoting an establishment agenda. Among his targets were right-wing Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Madison Cawthorn, the latter of whom Fuentes mocked for talking about “standing up” for principles even though he uses a wheelchair.
Fuentes described former President Donald Trump as the “rightful ruler” of the Republican Party and leader of the America First movement, someone whose trash-talking showed people that he is a “real human being” and not someone “grown in a petri dish in a laboratory at the Heritage Foundation” and “groomed for power by the same establishment that we are fighting against.”
Fuentes touts his movement as the real followers of Donald Trump. Like other right-wing activists, he is calling for Republican politicians who did not stand with Trump after the 2020 elections—“traitors”—to be defeated in primaries.
But he will not accept just any challenger. He mocked Catalina Lauf, a Republican who has promoted a pro-Trump and America First message in announcing her challenge to impeachment-supporting Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. Fuentes dismissed Lauf’s promotion of her status as a daughter of legal immigrants from Guatemala, suggesting that immigrants who come to the U.S. to pursue the American Dream are basically selfish. Fuentes criticized conservatives who differentiate between legal and illegal immigration, saying all immigration is a challenge to the power, influence and sovereignty of “native” Americans.
Fuentes closed his remarks by asserting that “We have God on our side” and that “God has the final victory.” And he declared, “This is the real America First movement and we are inevitable!”
King and Gozar spoke before Fuentes took the stage.
Steve King, who was defeated by primary voters in 2020 after his House Republican colleagues took action against him following years of racist rhetoric, was introduced with a video that included a clip of him declaring, “I have nothing to apologize for.”
King praised attendees, saying that if you had to go somewhere and find the people to start a country from scratch, it would be the people in that room. He encouraged them to get married and have a lot of babies and raise them as the next America First generation. “We can restore this country, and we can do it with our babies, and we can do it with our values,” King said.
King defended the Confederate battle flag as an emblem of “Southern pride” and said those who have “turned it into a symbol of evil slavery” are out to destroy western civilization. He said the U.S. derives its strength from free enterprise capitalism, Western civilization, and “Judeo-Christianity.”
King belittled the movement for reparations for slavery, saying that it disregards “the price that was paid in blood” to end slavery during the Civil War. He said that “three African Americans have acknowledged this to me”—two of them being right-wing media personalities and conspiracy theorists Diamond and Silk.
King read a prayer spoken by English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, which dedicated the settlers to raising up “godly generations” that would “take the kingdom of God to all the earth.”
King was followed by Gosar, whose introductory video included a clip of him on the floor of the House of Representatives in January where he challenged the counting of Arizona’s Electoral College votes.
“We’re in the fight of our lifetime,” Gosar said, warning about “shadowy elites in the deep state” colluding with Big Tech to “usurp” the White House from Trump, “the people’s president” and disenfranchise his supporters.
Gosar said the Republican Party can run and win on an America First agenda, including immigration and ending “censorship” of Big Tech. Gosar mentioned deplatformed right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who was in attendance, saying she had been “relegated to a third-class citizenship” and “unpersoned,” calling her a “our canary in the coal mine.”
Gosar said the U.S. is experiencing a “climate crisis of intolerance” led by angry, violent communists who suppress free speech, votes, and citizens. He said the “China virus” was “weaponized” against Trump and the American people.
“The Biden administration is gearing up to attack Americans” and “put America last,” Gosar claimed. But “men don’t gripe about fairness,” he said, praising the “high energy” and “stoic spirit” of the America First movement.
In her remarks, Malkin sounded similar themes, slamming “Con Inc. and their funders” and telling people, “Unless you’re praying to God, you better get off your knees.” She called out CPAC’s “audacity” for choosing “America Uncancelled” as this year’s theme, saying that CPAC had cancelled half the people in the room.
“Red Elephants” podcaster Vincent James and Blaze TV’s Jon Miller also spoke. James focused heavily on Republicans he said betrayed Trump and have repeatedly stabbed right-wing voters in the back. He called for a “true right-wing opposing force” and said Republicans have to assert “sovereignty” over states and counties they control, adding, “We cannot be afraid of the idea of secession.”
Fuentes has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks, as do followers of his white nationalist America First movement. At some point during Gosar’s remarks, clearly visible on the livestream was a Star of David that someone in the audience was apparently projecting onto the side of the lectern.
For years we have watched as radical right-wing conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles has used his “TruNews” program to endlesslyrail against Democrats for allegedly attempting to install a communist, Marxist, or socialist regime in the United States.
It was therefore a little surprising to hear Wiles declare on his television program Monday night that he is thinking about running for president in 2024 on a platform centered on seizing the wealth of the billionaires in this country and redistributing it to the poor.
Wiles said that someone must run on a populist platform of breaking up large technology companies in the United States, making it illegal to be a billionaire, confiscating their assets, and redistributing their wealth, and he might just be the one to do it.
“When you use your money and power to change my life, to take away my rights, to try to force things on me that I object to, that I find morally repulsive, when you try to restrict my free speech, when you try to promote population control, you want to pump vaccines into my body, when you want to change society, you know what? You’re my enemy,” Wiles declared. “The only way you’re able to do it is because you’re a billionaire. So then we need to take away your billions.”
“There needs to be a populist movement in this country,” he continued. “Let’s break up the tech companies. Let’s take the billions. I want to take Bill Gates’ billions and give it to the poor. I want to give it to the poor. I want to strip them, completely strip them, and give it to the poor. I want Jack Dorsey’s money. I want [Mark] Zuckerberg’s money. I want to give it to the poor.”
“I might run in 2024,” Wiles added. “I might run on that platform. Take the money from the rich give it to the poor. That might be my platform in 2024. I’m gonna bust up the tech companies. I’m gonna take the money from the billionaires and give it to the poor. I might run in 2024 with that platform.”
