The 1990s Were Worse Than You Remember

The Republican right has always contained a subcurrent hostile to multiracial democracy. In When the Clock Broke, writer John Ganz argues that this reactionary force flourished in the 1990s and is behind the emergence of Donald Trump’s right-wing populism.

Pat Buchanan celebrating a strong second-place showing to then president George H. W. Bush in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, February 18, 1992.

 (Steve Liss / Getty Images)

BYPAUL M. RENFRO

JACOBIN
07.24.2024

Review of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

In mid-January 1992 — as the USSR lay in ruins and Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge to the incumbent president George H. W. Bush was gaining steam — the economist and Cato Institute cofounder Murray Rothbard addressed the second annual meeting of the paleoconservative John Randolph Club. In his remarks, Rothbard touted the growing alliance between the libertarian and paleo movements and underscored the need for a robust “right-wing populism” to destroy the “soft Marxism” of American liberalism.

“With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us,” Rothbard exclaimed as he barreled toward the end of his speech, “we now know that it can be done. With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal.”

This “furious coda” to Rothbard’s address inspired the title of John Ganz’s important and engaging new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Through a nuanced exploration of the chaotic and contentious political landscape of the early ’90s, Ganz provides something of a prehistory of Trumpism — or a “prehistory of the American fascist movement,” as Ganz described it in a recent interview with the Baffler.

Ganz covers a lot of territory here — from a brief yet productive engagement with the theories of Antonio Gramsci to careful and compelling analyses of the POW/MIA movement (a “nationalist cult of the undead,” Ganz calls it), the late-twentieth-century politics of divorce, the pervasive anti-Asian racism of the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the racial tensions that marked early 1990s New York City.

The result is a smart, insightful, and original look at US political culture in an era of perpetual crisis and uncertainty, one that never loses sight of the material and structural conditions that help fuel antidemocratic movements.
Con Men, Kooks, and Conspiracists

It came from the swamp. Ganz’s narrative opens with David Duke, former grand wizard of the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and, it goes without saying, a virulent racist and antisemite. In 1989, Duke ran a shockingly successful campaign for the Louisiana House of Representatives before suffering a pair of very public defeats in races for the US Senate (1990) and the Louisiana governorship (1991). Yet despite Duke’s losses in the latter two contests, Ganz argues, his broad appeal among whites in Louisiana (especially the state’s northern parishes) and beyond reflected not just deeply entrenched antiblack racism and antisemitism, but also growing disillusionment with government and the diminishing fortunes of the white middle class in America.


Though Ronald Reagan had ostensibly returned the United States to glory after the “malaise” of the 1970s, his policy program of “deregulation, tax cuts, high interest rates, and scaled-back social services” — not to mention hostility to labor unions amid widespread deindustrialization and offshoring — represented a form of “open class war waged on behalf of the rich,” Ganz writes. The rich won the war. While “the income of the top 1 percent grew by almost 75 percent” during the gilded ’80s, “the average income for 80 percent of American families declined,” Ganz explains. The poverty rate — especially for women, children, and people of color — spiked, just as the burgeoning carceral state increasingly served to discipline and warehouse the poor and the dispossessed.Though many liberals may remember the Clinton years fondly — what with their (unequally shared) economic prosperity and ubiquitous anti-politics — Ganz implies that the 1992 election laid the foundation for the dysfunction and rancor that characterize the US political system today.

Against this backdrop of staggering inequality and selective austerity, con men, kooks, and conspiracists had a field day. Figures such as David Duke — and marginally less racist ones like Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Jerry Falwell — connected with a disenchanted public through talk radio, daytime talk shows, cable TV, and other less traditional media. Less-heralded characters like Sam Francis and Murray Rothbard generally liked what they saw. For them, Duke, Buchanan, and other firebrands represented the vanguard of a movement to undo the liberal order forged through the New Deal and the Cold War. Francis, for his part, endorsed a “new nationalism” to dismantle both the “managerial” regime — a forerunner of sorts to the “PMC” — and the “globalism” that flowed from Francis Fukuyama’s supposed “end of history.” In Rothbard’s words, this incipient movement sought to “repeal the twentieth century.”

All the while, as Ganz shows, more conventional, “establishment” figures struggled to meet the moment — particularly within the context of the 1992 presidential campaign. Much to the chagrin of George H. W. Bush — who expected greater adulation for helping to navigate the Cold War’s end and spawn a “new world order” — the news media and the voting public generally (and perhaps fairly) viewed the patrician as out of touch.

When President Bush visited the bedside of a firefighter injured in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, for instance, he made a peculiar reference to his Kennebunkport, Maine, vacation home, on which the first lady was overseeing repairs following a storm. “In the midst of the smoldering, gutted frames of Los Angeles,” writes Ganz, “the reference to those pesky repairs on the family compound in a genteel corner of the Northeast reached a height of bad taste only the well-born can hope to attain.”

Buchanan’s primary challenge highlighted the lack of enthusiasm for Bush among the Republican Party’s conservative base, and the flagging economy only made matters worse for the incumbent president. As the 1992 campaign reached its crescendo in the fall, Bush “had some of the worst approval ratings since late-stage Richard Nixon and Harry Truman,” Ganz notes.

On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton often found himself betwixt and between. He hoped to distinguish himself from the seemingly passé liberalism of the Great Society and demonstrate his racist bona fides without alienating core Democratic constituencies — namely union and African American voters. And even though Clinton prevailed in the 1992 contest, it wasn’t the most convincing victory, especially given Bush’s remarkable unpopularity. Despite an Electoral College landslide, Clinton secured just 43 percent of the popular vote compared to Bush’s 37.5, while the insurgent Texan Ross Perot finished with nearly 19 percent, the best showing for a third-party presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Though many liberals may remember the Clinton years fondly — what with their (unequally shared) economic prosperity and ubiquitous anti-politics — Ganz implies that the 1992 election laid the foundation for the dysfunction and rancor that characterize the US political system today.
How We Got Here

When the Clock Broke doesn’t necessarily prove that the United States “cracked up” in the first few years of the 1990s — or that the characters and themes at the heart of American politics in this period somehow set the stage for Donald Trump’s presidential run in 2015–16. The book ends a week after the 1992 election with Trump in a limousine on his way to Atlantic City. But the link between that moment and our own isn’t drawn as clearly as it could’ve been.

Of course, the resonances between the early 1990s and the early-to-mid-2020s are undeniable. Yet without the collective trauma of September 11, 2001, or the decades-long adventurism that followed, without the global economic meltdown of 2007–8, and without the election and reelection of an African American president, would Trump have pulled off the unthinkable in 2016?

Probably not, and Ganz would likely admit as much. So how exactly did we get from 1992 to 2016 to 2024? When the Clock Broke doesn’t provide a clear answer, and maybe it’s not supposed to. But it will force readers to think more deeply about the historical circumstances and material conditions that authored our present interlocking crises.

“Identifying the thinkers who helped transform the party of Reagan into the party of Trump may be an intellectual parlor game,” Ganz writes. But as he illustrates, it can be a worthwhile exercise.

CONTRIBUTORS
Paul M. Renfro is an associate professor of history at Florida State University and the author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America and Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State.

Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country

The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It’s spending millions to make a big political push for this election — but it may be violating the law.

By Andy Kroll, Nick Surgey
July 15, 2024
Source: ProPublica

Source: Kelly Kanayama via ReligionWatch

A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.

ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of Ziklag’s members-only email newsletters, internal videos, strategy documents and fundraising pitches, none of which has been previously made public. They reveal the group’s 2024 plans and its long-term goal to underpin every major sphere of influence in American society with Christianity. In the Bible, the city of Ziklag was where David and his soldiers found refuge during their war with King Saul.

“We are in a spiritual battle and locked in a terrible conflict with the powers of darkness,” says a strategy document that lays out Ziklag’s 30-year vision to “redirect the trajectory of American culture toward Christ by bringing back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.”

Ziklag’s 2024 agenda reads like the work of a political organization. It plans to pour money into mobilizing voters in Arizona who are “sympathetic to Republicans” in order to secure “10,640 additional unique votes” — almost the exact margin of President Joe Biden’s win there in 2020. The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states.

In a recording of a 2023 internal strategy discussion, a Ziklag official stressed that the objective was the same in other swing states. “The goal is to win,” the official said. “If 75,000 people wins the White House, then how do we get 150,000 people so we make sure we win?”

According to the Ziklag files, the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations targeting voters in battleground states: Checkmate, focused on funding so-called election integrity groups; Steeplechase, concentrated on using churches and pastors to get out the vote; and Watchtower, aimed at galvanizing voters around the issues of “parental rights” and opposition to transgender rights and policies supporting health care for trans people.

In a member briefing video, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers outlined a plan to “deliver swing states” by using an anti-transgender message to motivate conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.

But Ziklag is not a political organization: It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, the same legal designation as the United Way or Boys and Girls Club. Such organizations do not have to publicly disclose their funders, and donations are tax deductible. In exchange, they are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.

ProPublica and Documented presented the findings of their investigation to six nonpartisan lawyers and legal experts. All expressed concern that Ziklag was testing or violating the law.

The reporting by ProPublica and Documented “casts serious doubt on this organization’s status as a 501(c)(3) organization,” said Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.

“I think it’s across the line without a question,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame law professor.

Ziklag officials did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Martin Nussbaum, an attorney who said he was the group’s general counsel, said in a written response that “some of the statements in your email are correct. Others are not,” but he then did not respond to a request to specify what was erroneous. The group is seeking to “align” the culture “with Biblical values and the American constitution, and that they will serve the common good,” he wrote. Using the official tax name for Ziklag, he wrote that “USATransForm does not endorse candidates for public office.” He declined to comment on the group’s members.

There are no bright lines or magic words that the IRS might look for when it investigates a charitable organization for engaging in political intervention, said Mayer. Instead, the agency examines the facts and circumstances of a group’s activities and makes a conclusion about whether the group violated the law.

The biggest risk for charities that intervene in political campaigns, Mayer said, is loss of their tax-exempt status. Donors’ ability to deduct their donations can be a major sell, not to mention it can create “a halo effect” for the group, Mayer added.

“They may be able to get more money this way,” he said, adding, “It boils down to tax evasion at the end of the day.”

“Dominion Over the Seven Mountains”

Ziklag has largely escaped scrutiny until now. The group describes itself as a “private, confidential, invitation-only community of high-net-worth Christian families.”

According to internal documents, it boasts more than 125 members that include business executives, pastors, media leaders and other prominent conservative Christians. Potential new members, one document says, should have a “concern for culture” demonstrated by past donations to faith-based or political causes, as well as a net worth of $25 million or more. None of the donors responded to requests for comment.

Tax records show rapid growth in the group’s finances in recent years. Its annual revenue climbed from $1.3 million in 2018 to $6 million in 2019 and nearly $12 million in 2022, which is the latest filing available.

The group’s spending is not on the scale of major conservative funders such as Miriam Adelson or Barre Seid, the electronics magnate who gave $1.6 billion to a group led by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. But its funding and strategy represent one of the clearest links yet between the Christian right and the “election integrity” movement fueled by Trump’s baseless claims about voting fraud. Even several million dollars funding mass challenges to voters in swing counties can make an impact, legal and election experts say.

Ziklag was the brainchild of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Ken Eldred. It emerged from a previous organization founded by Eldred called United In Purpose, which aimed to get more Christians active in the civic arena, according to Bill Dallas, the group’s former director. United In Purpose generated attention in June 2016 when it organized a major meeting between then-candidate Trump and hundreds of evangelical leaders.

After Trump was elected in 2016, Eldred had an idea, according to Dallas. “He says, ‘I want all the wealthy Christian people to come together,’” Dallas recalled in an interview. Eldred told Dallas that he wanted to create a donor network like the one created by Charles and David Koch but for Christians. He proposed naming it David’s Mighty Men, Dallas said. Female members balked. Dallas found the passage in Chronicles that references David’s soldiers and read that they met in the city of Ziklag, and so they chose the name Ziklag.

The group’s stature grew after Trump took office. Vice President Mike Pence appeared at a Ziklag event, as did former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz, then-Rep. Mark Meadows and other members of Congress. In its private newsletter, Ziklag claims that a coalition of groups it assembled played “a hugely significant role in the selection, hearings and confirmation process” of Amy Coney Barrett for a Supreme Court seat in late 2020.

Confidential donor networks regularly invest hundreds of millions of dollars into political and charitable groups, from the liberal Democracy Alliance to the Koch-affiliated Stand Together organization on the right. But unlike Ziklag, neither of those organizations is legally set up as a true charity.

Ziklag appears to be the first coordinated effort to get wealthy donors to fund an overtly Christian nationalist agenda, according to historians, legal experts and other people familiar with the group. “It shows that this idea isn’t being dismissed as fringe in the way that it might have been in the past,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and University of California, Davis law professor.

The Christian nationalism movement has a variety of aims and tenets, according to the Public Religion Research Institute: that the U.S. government “should declare America a Christian nation”; that American laws “should be based on Christian values”; that the U.S. will cease to exist as a nation if it “moves away from our Christian foundations”; that being Christian is essential to being American; and that God has “called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

One theology promoted by Christian nationalist leaders is the Seven Mountain Mandate. Each mountain represents a major industry or a sphere of public life: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology. Ziklag’s goal, the documents say, is to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains,” funding Christian projects or installing devout Christians in leadership positions to reshape each mountain in a godly way.

To address their concerns about education, Ziklag’s leaders and allies have focused on the public-school system. In a 2021 Ziklag meeting, Ziklag’s education mountain chair, Peter Bohlinger, said that Ziklag’s goal “is to take down the education system as we know it today.” The producers of the film “Sound of Freedom,” featuring Jim Caviezel as an anti-sex-trafficking activist, screened an early cut of the film at a Ziklag conference and asked for funds, according to Dallas

.

An excerpt from Ziklag’s “Declaration and 30-Year Vision for the Mountains of Influence.” The document outlines Ziklag’s mission to reshape each major aspect of American society so that it operates according to a biblical worldview. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

The Seven Mountains theology signals a break from Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson. In the 1980s and ’90s, Falwell’s Moral Majority focused on working within the democratic process to mobilize evangelical voters and elect politicians with a Christian worldview.

The Seven Mountains theology embraces a different, less democratic approach to gaining power. “If the Moral Majority is about galvanizing the voters, the Seven Mountains is a revolutionary model: You need to conquer these mountains and let change flow down from the top,” said Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and an expert on Christian nationalism. “It’s an outlined program for Christian supremacy.”

“The Amorphous, Tumultuous Wild West”

The Christian right has had compelling spokespeople and fierce commitment to its causes, whether they were ending abortion rights, allowing prayer in schools or displaying the Ten Commandments outside of public buildings. What the movement has often lacked, its leaders argue, is sufficient funding.

“If you look at the right, especially the Christian right, there were always complaints about money,” said legal historian Ziegler. “There’s a perceived gap of ‘We aren’t getting the support from big-name, big-dollar donors that we deserve and want and need.’”

That’s where Ziklag comes in.

Speaking late last year to an invitation-only gathering of Ziklaggers, as members are known, Charlie Kirk, who leads the pro-Trump Turning Point USA organization, named left-leaning philanthropists who were, in his view, funding the destruction of the nation: MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros; and the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

“Why are secular people giving more generously than Christians?” Kirk asked, according to a recording of his remarks. “It would be a tragedy,” he added, “if people who hate life, hate our country, hate beauty and hate God wanted it more than us.”

“Ziklag is the place,” Kirk told the donors. “Ziklag is the counter.”

Similarly, Pence, in a 2021 appearance at a private Ziklag event, praised the group for its role in “changing lives, and it’s advanced the cause, it’s advanced the kingdom.”

A driving force behind Ziklag’s efforts is Lance Wallnau, a prominent Christian evangelist and influencer based in Texas who is described by Ziklag as a “Seven Mountains visionary & advisor.” The fiery preacher is one of the most influential figures on the Christian right, experts say, a bridge between Christian nationalism and Trump. He was one of the earliest evangelical leaders to endorse Trump in 2015 and later published a book titled “God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling.” More than 1 million people follow him on Facebook. He doesn’t try to hide his views: “Yes, I am a Christian nationalist,” he said during one of his livestreams in 2021. (Wallnau did not respond to requests for comment.)

Donald Trump shakes hands with Lance Wallnau, a self-described Christian nationalist. Credit: Lancewallnau.com

Wallnau has remained a Trump ally. He called Trump’s time in office a “spiritual warfare presidency” and popularized the idea that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” referring to the Persian king who defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem. Wallnau has visited with Trump at the White House and Trump Tower; last November, he livestreamed from a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago where Trump spoke.

Wallnau did not come up with the notion that Christians should try to take control of key areas of American society. But he improved on the idea by introducing the concept of the seven mountains and urged Christians to set about conquering them. The concept caught on, said Taylor, because it empowered Christians with a sense of purpose in every sphere of life.

As a preacher in the independent charismatic tradition, a fast-growing offshoot of Pentecostalism that is unaffiliated with any major denomination, Wallnau and his acolytes believe that God speaks to and through modern-day apostles and prophets — a version of Christianity that Taylor, in his forthcoming book “The Violent Take It By Force,” describes as “the amorphous, tumultuous Wild West of the modern church.” Wallnau and his ideas lingered at the fringes of American Christianity for years, until the boost from the Trump presidency.

The Ziklag files detail not only what Christians should do to conquer all seven mountains, but also what their goals will be once they’ve taken the summit. For the government mountain, one key document says that “the biblical role of government is to promote good and punish evil” and that “the word of God and prayer play a significant role in policy decisions.”

For the arts and entertainment mountain, goals include that 80% of the movies produced be rated G or PG “with a moral story,” and that many people who work in the industry “operate under a biblical/moral worldview.” The education section says that homeschooling should be a “fundamental right” and the government “must not favor one form of education over another.”

Other internal Ziklag documents voice strong opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender rights. One reads: “transgender acceptance = Final sign before imminent collapse.”

Heading into the 2024 election year, Ziklag executive director Drew Hiss warned members in an internal video that “looming above and beyond those seven mountains is this evil force that’s been manifesting itself.” He described it as “a controlling, evil, diabolical presence, really, with tyranny in mind.” That presence was concentrated in the government mountain, he said. If Ziklaggers wanted to save their country from “the powers of darkness,” they needed to focus their energies on that government mountain or else none of their work in any other area would succeed.
“Operation Checkmate”

In the fall of 2023, Wallnau sat in a gray armchair in his TV studio. A large TV screen behind him flashed a single word: “ZIKLAG.”

“You almost hate to put it out this clearly,” he said as he detailed Ziklag’s electoral strategy, “because if somebody else gets ahold of this, they’ll freak out.”

He was joined on set by Hiss, who had just become the group’s new day-to-day leader. The two men were there to record a special message to Ziklag members that laid out the group’s ambitious plans for the upcoming election year.

The forces arrayed against Christians were many, according to the confidential video. They were locked in a “spiritual battle,” Hiss said, against Democrats who were a “radical left Marxist force.” Biden, Wallnau said, was a senile old man and “an empty suit with an agenda that’s written and managed by somebody else.”Wallnau speaks with Drew Hiss, Ziklag’s executive director, about the group’s goals for political engagement. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

In the files, Ziklag says it plans to give out nearly $12 million to a constellation of groups working on the ground to shift the 2024 electorate in favor of Trump and other Republicans.

A prominent conservative getting money from Ziklag is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer and Trump ally who joined the January 2021 phone call when then-President Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to flip Georgia in Trump’s favor.

Mitchell now leads a network of “election integrity” coalitions in swing states that have spent the last three years advocating for changes to voting rules and how elections are run. According to one internal newsletter, Ziklag was an early funder of Mitchell’s post-2020 “election integrity” activism, which voting-rights experts have criticized for stoking unfounded fears about voter fraud and seeking to unfairly remove people from voting rolls. In 2022, Ziklag donated $600,000 to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which in turn funds Mitchell’s election-integrity work. Internal Ziklag documents show that it provided funding to enable Mitchell to set up election integrity infrastructure in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Now Mitchell is promoting a tool called EagleAI, which has claimed to use artificial intelligence to automate and speed up the process of challenging ineligible voters. EagleAI is already being used to mount mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states, and, with Ziklag’s help, the group plans to ramp up those efforts.

According to an internal video, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s clean the rolls project,” which would be one of the largest known donations to the group.

Ziklag lists two key objectives for Operation Checkmate: “Secure 10,640 additional unique votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and remove up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.”

In a recording of an internal Zoom call, Ziklag’s Mark Bourgeois stressed the electoral value of targeting Arizona. “I care about Maricopa County,” Bourgeois said at one point, referring to Arizona’s largest county, which Biden won four years ago. “That’s how we win.”

For Operation Watchtower, Wallnau explained in a members-only video that transgender policy was a “wedge issue” that could be decisive in turning out voters tired of hearing about Trump.

The left had won the battle over the “homosexual issue,” Wallnau said. “But on transgenderism, there’s a problem and they know it.” He continued: “They’re gonna wanna talk about Trump, Trump, Trump. … Meanwhile, if we talk about ‘It’s not about Trump. It’s about parents and their children, and the state is a threat,’” that could be the “target on the forehead of Goliath.”

The Ziklag files describe tactics the group plans to use around parental rights — policies that make it easier for parents to control what’s taught in public schools — to turn out conservative voters. In a fundraising video, the group says it plans to underwrite a “messaging and data lab” focused on parental rights that will supply “winning messaging to all our partner groups to create unified focus among all on the right.” The goal, the video says, is to make parental rights “the difference-maker in the 2024 election.”

According to Wallnau, Ziklag also plans to fund ballot initiatives in seven key states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Montana, Nevada and Ohio — that take aim at the transgender community by seeking to ban “genital mutilation.” The seven states targeted are either presidential battlegrounds or have competitive U.S. Senate races. None of the initiatives is on a state ballot yet.

“People that are lethargic about the election or, worse yet, they’re gonna be all Trump-traumatized with the news cycle — this issue will get people to come out and vote,” Wallnau said. “That ballot initiative can deliver swing states.”

The last prong of Ziklag’s 2024 strategy is Operation Steeplechase, which urges conservative pastors to mobilize their congregants to vote in this year’s election. This project will work in coordination with several prominent conservative groups that support former president Trump’s reelection, such as Turning Point USA’s faith-based group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition run by conservative operative Ralph Reed and the America First Policy Institute, one of several groups closely allied with Trump.

Ziklag’s website outlines its three major operations and which mountains each one targets. Credit: Screenshot by ProPublica

Ziklag says in a 2023 internal video that it and its allies will “coordinate extensive pastor and church outreach through pastor summits, church-focused messaging and events and the creation of pastor resources.” As preacher and activist John Amanchukwu said at a Ziklag event, “We need a church that’s willing to do anything and everything to get to the point where we reclaim that which was stolen from us.”

Six tax experts reviewed the election-related strategy discussions and tactics reported in this story. All of them said the activities tested or ran afoul of the law governing 501(c)(3) charities. The IRS and the Texas attorney general, which would oversee the Southlake, Texas, charity, did not respond to questions.

While not all of its political efforts appeared to be clear-cut violations, the experts said, others may be: The stated plan to mobilize voters “sympathetic to Republicans,” Ziklag officials openly discussing the goal to win the election, and Wallnau’s call to fund ballot initiatives that would “deliver swing states” while at the same time voicing explicit criticism of Biden all raised red flags, the experts said.

“I am troubled about a tax-exempt charitable organization that’s set up and its main operation seems to be to get people to win office,” said Phil Hackney, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on tax-exempt organizations.

“They’re planning an election effort,” said Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division. “That’s not a 501(c)(3) activity.”

GNOSTIC    ANTINOMIANISM 

‘Bad Faith’ sounds the alarm on the past and future of Christian nationalism

Filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones trace the origins of Christian nationalism from the Ku Klux Klan to the election of Donald Trump.

In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, a man holds a Bible as supporters of Donald Trump gather outside the Capitol in Washington. The Christian imagery and rhetoric on view during the Capitol insurrection sparked renewed debate about the societal effects of melding Christian faith with an exclusionary breed of nationalism. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

May 30, 2024

By Jim McDermott

(RNS) — In 1980, conservative political operative Paul Weyrich approached evangelical Christian leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson with a proposal: If they would mobilize their believers to begin voting Republican, he would help them in their quest to roll back many of the civil rights protections they chafed against. Over the next 40 years, Weyrich and his Council for National Policy would guide these groups to greater and greater political success while slowly radicalizing them into a potent force — the Moral Majority — whose particular ideas of Christianity and Christian values drove nearly all their voting decisions.

Weyrich was not subtle in his motivations for a reigning political class, telling a group of evangelical leaders in 1980 that “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

In “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones trace the origins of Christian nationalism from the Ku Klux Klan in the 19th century through the creation of the Moral Majority, the sudden rise of the tea party and the election of Donald Trump. What they uncover is an essential aspect of our current political situation, one that puts evangelical Christianity in new light.

Where many liberals have long dismissed evangelical Christians and their fundamentalist beliefs as ridiculous and absurd, Ujlaki and Brown work to understand them on their own terms — and discover not hypocrisy but a deeply consistent, radically dualistic theology that, for many, is worth defending, even to the point of violence.

Religion News Service spoke with Ujlaki by phone in Los Angeles about the making of “Bad Faith” and the story it tells of how a large swath of religious voters came to believe that President Joe Biden is in league with the devil while Trump is essential to the spiritual salvation of America. The film is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Tubi and other platforms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What initially made you want to tell this story?

When Trump got elected, I was shocked. Nobody thought he had a chance. He was obviously a joke. It was never going to happen. When he got elected, I realized I didn’t really know anything about what was going on. I was in a bubble.

Stephen Ujlaki. (Photo by Jon Rou/courtesy of Loyola Marymount University)

More than anything, my wanting to make the film was just to find out: How did he do it, how did he win, and who were the Christian evangelicals (who supported him)? But then I discovered all of this plotting, all of these deals, and the fact that those behind them were anti-democratic from the beginning.

The heart of the film is the story of Paul Weyrich and the deal he made with evangelical Christian leaders to use abortion to motivate their people to begin to vote for Republicans. How did that all work?

There were a couple of congressional elections in which the people who were running for office were very anti-abortion. And Weyrich, who had been a Catholic, found that they were successful campaigns, more so than they should have been. Abortion was very successful in ringing people’s bell.

Evangelicals had nothing against abortion. Frankly, they thought it was a good way to keep the Black population down. The Southern Baptist Convention applauded Roe v. Wade in 1973. But Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson agreed to start telling people this is bad, in return for which they were going to get help turning back all the progressive things they hated that the Supreme Court had done and that Lyndon Johnson had done. The Great Society, all of those progressive things that gave a lot of us hope in the 1960s and ’70s were anathema to them, and they were determined to turn that back. So they would faithfully help elect Republicans, and they would get rewarded.

It (abortion) was a great way to cover the fact that they were really trying to stop integration. It’s much better to say that we’re trying to defend the rights of the unborn.
I was surprised to learn that Christian evangelicals were not always so politically engaged.

For many, many years they were completely opposed to political involvement. The public square was the devil’s playground. To convince them to get involved and to vote Republican, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson applied the Manichaeanism of their theology. There’s a good and bad; there’s evil, and there’s God. The Republican Party is the party of God, and the Democratic Party is the party of the devil. They got that.

But this has nothing to do with theology, nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with God or with Jesus. I don’t even consider Christian nationalism as a religion. What is its ethos? What is its morality? It’s actually amoral, which is why it uses the church. The church lends it that moral, ethical authority that it doesn’t have otherwise.

Jesus is anti-democratic and God likes authoritarian governments? It’s the antithesis of anything Christian.

Would it be fair to say Christian nationalism’s goal is fascism?

“Bad Faith” poster. (Courtesy image)

Yes. It’s pure fascism. It’s pure power. They have been wanting and plotting the same thing for 40-plus years. They were incredibly adept at concealing what their motives were. You had to decode what they were saying. When they were talking about re-creating the kingdom of God on Earth, if you thought they were talking about something theological and spiritual, you would be mistaken. They were talking about replacing democracy with theocracy.

The one exception, and this to me is like the smoking gun in the film, was the Weyrich Manifesto (“The Integration of Theory and Practice,” 2001). Born of his complete frustration with the knowledge that his followers were never going to be the majority, Weyrich argued the only way they were going to create a Christian nation was to bypass democracy. They had to weaken and destroy it, creating a vacuum, which leaves room for the strongman to appear.

If you look around you at the divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that exist today in this country, you will realize how incredibly successful they have been in executing their plan. It’s been like a slow-motion revolution in a way, happening bit by bit all over the place.

And yet even so, Donald Trump seemed like such a reach for people concerned about goodness and morality.

Everything he stood for was against what they believed in. A number of people were saying they would do it but they would be holding their noses, because they didn’t really believe in it.

Then you had his spiritual adviser, a charismatic, Paula White, who had befriended Trump a year or so earlier and was his sort of secret adviser. She started the ball rolling by telling her group that Trump had become a Christian. That was one attempt to deal with the thing. But more was needed.

Then, looking in the Bible, another charismatic Christian came up with the idea that God sometimes uses pagans to accomplish good works on behalf of the Jews. King Cyrus was this horrible pagan who did all kinds of bad things, but he was very good for the Jews.
And so Trump becomes reinterpreted as, in a sense, part of salvation history?

The notion was that looking at the Bible, we see that what was really happening was God using Trump in order to redeem America and bring it back to God. And as (evangelical Christian and former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security) Elizabeth Neumann says in the film, the notion that they could be living out the prophesies got evangelical Christians so excited they all got behind this notion of Trump as King Cyrus. That’s what God was doing. That was the answer. They figured it out.

There comes a point in the film where you interview a man who seems very thoughtful about Biden’s desire to unify the country. But then his conclusion is that it’s impossible because good and evil cannot work together.

That’s one of the scarier parts of the film. Because he seems like a reasonable, intelligent person, and yet he’s deeply convinced of this, even sad about it, not triumphant. It’s simply a fact, good cannot unify with evil.

The notion that over half the country is in fact demonic and evil, and evangelical Christians are the holy ones and should be allowed to do whatever they need to do in order to take control from the devil, it’s incredible when you think about it.

Watching the film, it certainly sounds like the leaders of the Christian nationalist movement see civil war, or something like it, as the path to power.

That’s right. That’s the only way they’re going to get it. They’re not going to get it through democracy, they’re never going to be the majority. They are going to weaken and destroy and then conquer. That’s the game plan.

It’s so hard, people aren’t willing to accept the fact there are sizable numbers of people in this country who don’t believe in democracy. And the national media doesn’t know how to deal with it. They’re constantly accommodating, normalizing, and not fulfilling what I would take to be the mandate of proper newsgathering. They call them “conservative” in The New York Times. They’re not conservative. These are seditionists, treasonous, anti-democratic.

People with this kind of liberal notion of fair and balanced think we’re not going to be over the top like them. But the thing is, one is following the rules and the other isn’t.

It’s so difficult, because you don’t want people to be so terrified that they think it’s hopeless. You don’t want to have to think “I better stay out of this.”

On the contrary, what it should show you is that you need to fight for your democracy if you want to keep it.

RNS is the recipient of an ongoing grant from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, founded and led by Todd Stiefel, who is an executive producer of “Bad Faith.”

U.S. Christian Money Funds African Homophobia

BY DAVID ROSEN

 MAY 29, 2024

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Photo by Diana Vargas

Daniel Volman concludes his excellent recent article for CounterPunch, “Why African Homophobia is Still the Real Western Import,” with these words:

African homophobes say they are standing up to the West and saving the continent and the world from homosexuality, but they are just serving their own selfish interests and the interests of right-wing Christian nationalists in the West.

Few Americans are aware just how significant is the role of “right-wing Christian nationalists” in promoting and sustaining the reactionary sexual politics prevalent within many African countries. It is estimated that more than 20 U.S. Christian groups are actively subsidizing campaigns against LGBT people as well as opposing access to safe abortions, contraceptives and comprehensive sexuality education.

The British-based openDemocracy estimates that these groups have spent at least $54 million in their campaigns in Africa since 2007.  It notes, “Between 2008 and 2018, this group sent more than $20m to Uganda alone.”

OpenDemocracy singles out the Fellowship Foundation as the U.S.’s big spender at $34.5 million.  It dubs the organization “a secretive US religious group” whose associate, David Bahati, wrote Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.  It was founded in 1942 and, until 2023, hosted Washington’s annual National Prayer Breakfast at which every president since Dwight Eisenhower attended.  For the last 25 years, the Fellowship hosted Uganda’s National Prayer Breakfast and, in 2022, Pres. Yoweri Museveni spoke.

Among the leading U.S. organizations that have funded anti-gay and other conservative campaigns in Africa include:

+ Billy Graham Evangelistic Association = $7.6 million.

+ Human Life International = $4.1 million.

+ Bethany Christian Services = $3.3 million.

+ Focus on the Family = $1.9 million.

+ Intervarsity Christian Fellowship = $1.1 million.

Exodus International (aka Exodus Global Alliance) was founded in 1976 as a proponent of what was dubbed “ex-gay” conversion movement.  It argued that conversion therapy programs, based on religious and counseling methods, could make gay individuals straight.  The strategy was embraced by leading anti-gay spokesmen, including Archbishop Henry Orombi, chair of the Africa Host Committee of the 2010 Lausanne Congress; pastor Martin Ssempa; and David Bahati, the sponsor of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.

Often forgotten, before the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA), launched his political career, he was a lawyer advising Exodus International.  According to CNN, he “partnered with the groups to put on an annual anti-gay event aimed at teens.”

in 2013, Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus, posted a public apology for the “pain and hurt” his organization caused by promoting conversion therapy. He shut the organization down, accepting the fact that “conversion therapy” did not work and had been condemned by leading medical groups.  As he admitted, “I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced.”  He added:

I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents.

After Exodus formally ending, many within the organization regrouped as the Restored Hope Ministry.  (Pray Away, a 2021 documentary by Kristine Stolakis, examines Exodus.)

Bethany Christian Services was founded in 1944 and is one of the U.S.’s largest Protestant adoption and foster care agencies. It operates in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, Ghana and South Africa. It long opposed placing children with LGBT adoptive parents but, in 2021, announced that it would begin providing services to same-sex parents.

According to one source, Bethany has close ties to the family of former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.  Between 2001 and 2015, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, run by DeVos and her husband, gave $343,000 to Bethany.  In addition, between 2012 and 2015, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, run by the Sec. DeVos’s father-in-law, the billionaire founder of Amway Richard DeVos, and his wife Helen, gave Bethany $750,000.

Family Watch International was founded in 1999 as Global Helping to Advance Women (Global HAWC) by longtime anti-LGBT and anti-choice activist Sharon Slater, a Mormon.  It has close ties with anti-LGBT movements in Uganda and Nigeria. According to The Guardian, it backed Uganda’s anti-gay laws. However, on its website it declared, “Family Watch has never supported any efforts in Africa to promote anti-homosexual bills.”  It has been a strong supporter of conversion therapy and opposes “Comprehensive Sexual Education,” age-appropriate and medically accurate information on topics related to sexuality.

But, as Emerson Hodges, research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), points out, “Family Watch International’s plays downs its role in the anti-gay legislation, including the death penalty for someone revealed to have had homosexual relations.” He stresses: There’s a hypocritical, a sort of “cognitive dissonance,” that’s like: These groups want to be proud for what they are doing, they want to be named and recognized for what they are doing by powerful figures in these foreign countries, but don’t really want the backlash for being the reason why people are being violently attacked.

Looking deeper, he notes, “If you look at the groups that are doing this anti-LBGTQ work in African, you’re looking at “old-guard” groups – Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, World Congress of Families.”  He added, “They’re very much old guard, they were part of an extensive battle to keep sodomy laws in the U.S. and prevent gay marriage. If you look at the old-guard groups, there are clearly using old-school rhetoric.”

Hodges singles out Scott Lively as the most prominent of the “old-guard.”  Lively is an attorney, author (e.g., The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party), a rightwing Christian activist and a long-term anti-LGBTQ+ crusader.  In the 1990s, he was the assistant director of the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), a branch of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition.  In 1997, he founded the Abiding Truth Ministries (ATM) that promoted campaigns like “Take Back The Schools Campaign” that sought to “eject the ‘gay’ movement from California schools.”

Lively went to Uganda in 2002 to speak out against pornography, denouncing what he called “the globalists who use the sexual revolution and the Planned Parenthood Federation and the global homosexual movement” to accumulate power and control population. Going further, he insisted that these forces were backed by the financier George Soros and were “infiltrating” Uganda, including “introducing pornography” to the country.

In 2007, Lively declared:

… homosexuality is destructive to individuals and to society and it should never publicly promoted. The easiest way to discourage gay pride parades and other homosexual advocacy is to make such activity illegal in the interest of public health and morality.

In March 2009, Lively joined Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer as speakers at a Kampala anti-LGBT conference organized by the Family Life Network, “Exposing the Truth behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda.” Brundidge was a self-described former gay man who led “healing seminars”; and Schmierer was a board member of Exodus International whose mission was “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality.”

Lively gave a five-hour presentation that was broadcast on local television.  In it, he claimed that homosexuals were aggressively recruiting Uganda’s children and argued that human rights protections shouldn’t be extended to these “predatory’ figures.”  He denounced gay men in no uncertain terms:

They’re sociopaths. There’s no mercy at all. There’s no nurturing. There’s no caring about anybody else. This is the kind of person that it takes to run a gas chamber. Or to do a mass murder. The Rwandan stuff probably involved these guys.

Lively got even more extreme in his denunciations of “gay” people in a 2017 post: “Ultimately, the ‘gay’ agenda is simply a sub-plot of the larger Satanic agenda and now that LGBTQ goals appear nearly fully realized, the hidden hands behind them (both human and demonic) are coming into view.”  Going further, he added:

We are witnessing the end-game before our very eyes but few recognize what they are seeing. What is next in the LGBTQ agenda is transhumanism, the redefinition of humanness and emergence of human/animal/machine chimeral forms.

He concluded, noting “Satan is fashioning a final comprehensive counterfeit alternative to the creation over which Man finally assumes that he has accessed the Tree of Life and is persuaded that he is God, destroying himself and ‘goodness” itself in the process.”

David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion:  The Transformation of 1950s New York’s Forbidden into America’s New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015).  He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com.