Politics & Stuff

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https://projects.propublica.org/christian-nationalism-origins/

In the beginning — in this case, the 1970s — some Christians feared their influence in society was waning. The Supreme Court had outlawed school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings and had legalized abortion.

In response, religious figures began to organize around the idea that they had a duty to bring Christianity back into public life. Several Christian-influenced organizations, including Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and James Dobson’s Family Research Council, were soon formed and went on to shape Republican policies for decades to come. Evangelical Protestants of different denominations joined forces and united with conservative Catholics, like Paul Weyrich, the founder of the think tank the Heritage Foundation, to advance their shared political goals. Under the banner of “pro-family politics,” the New Christian Right movement fought against abortion access, feminism and gay rights as attacks on traditional family values.

Inside a red-rimmed sports arena, more than 15,000 evangelicals gathered with conservative activists to discuss how to get Christians more involved in politics.

They had come to an event known as the National Affairs Briefing because the evangelists Billy Graham and Bill Bright reported that God had issued each of them the same warning: America had only 1,000 more days of freedom. After speaking with the pair, televangelist James Robison said God had urged him to host a conference that would “refocus the direction of America.”

The sea of believers roared as Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took the podium.

“This is a nonpartisan gathering, and so I know that you can’t endorse me,” Reagan said. “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”

The moment underscored an important shift in American politics, helping to cement evangelical Christians as a reliable conservative voting bloc.

But while Reagan took the spotlight, backstage in Dallas, Robert Billings, a Reagan campaign adviser who had helped found the Moral Majority, nodded to a less prominent visionary: R.J. Rushdoony, the father of a more extreme movement known as Christian Reconstructionism.

“If it weren’t for his books, none of us would be here,” Billings remarked, as recalled in an essay by Gary North, an economic historian and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.

“Nobody in the audience understands that,” replied North.

“True,” said Billings. “But we do.”

The conversation at the National Affairs Briefing shows the early influence of previously obscure elements of the Christian right that have surfaced in recent years. Other groups and figures that emerged in that period remain influential. Robison and Dobson became spiritual advisers to former President Donald Trump, helping him gain support among religious voters. The Heritage Foundation recently crafted Project 2025, a plan to concentrate executive power and promote far-right policies should Trump win the presidential election. Trump has disavowed the plan, though some members of his administration worked on it.

The idea that Christians should be in power has become a central mission of today’s Christian right, but the idea was taking root decades ago. In remarks strikingly similar to today’s rhetoric, Bob Weiner, founder of a major ministry focused on college campuses, said in 1985, “We should be the head of our school board. We should be the head of our nation. We should be the senators and the congressmen. We should be the editors of our newspapers. We should be taking over every area of life.”

As Billings and North noted backstage at the National Affairs Briefing, the New Christian Right owed a lot to another movement, known as Christian Reconstructionism. The fundamentalist movement held that all aspects of society, including government, education, economics and culture, should conform to a strict interpretation of the OId Testament. Though less recognized, Reconstructionism heavily influenced the more mainstream New Christian Right and its aspirations for Christians to infiltrate systems of power.

Up until the 1970s, the way many evangelicals believed the world would end gave them little incentive to get involved in politics. When the rapture came, the faithful would ascend to heaven, leaving the troubled world behind. That sense of remove began to fade due to the influence of Reconstructionists, who, by contrast, believed they had to build God’s kingdom before Christ would return — which required political action.

The movement’s founder, Rushdoony, received less acknowledgement from politicians, in part because of his extreme views, which included justifying slavery, denying the Holocaust and endorsing the death penalty for homosexuality and adultery. But with Reconstructionists’ prolific writings about what Bible-centered institutions should look like, including Rushdoony’s 1973 book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” adherents provided instruction manuals for the modern Christian right. Reconstructionists wanted to eliminate public education by slowly dismantling it, and they led the way in developing Christian schools and promoting homeschooling. Thanks in large part to that leadership, their principles spread.

Amid the swampy summer air, scores of evangelical preachers and Christian leaders crowded onto the stone steps of the Lincoln Memorial to sign “A Manifesto of the Christian Church.” The document detailed their beliefs and the policies they would promote, such as fighting abortion, homosexuality and the teaching of evolution as a “monopoly viewpoint in public schools.”

A group called the Coalition on Revival had brought representatives from many denominations to the memorial. Its mission: to “rebuild civilization on the principles of the Bible.” Founder Jay Grimstead anticipated they’d have more political success by uniting evangelicals across denominations and persuasions.

“Christians are everywhere, and we’re going to exert our influence in all walks of life,” Grimstead bellowed to the crowd.

The Coalition on Revival helped evangelicals set aside their differing end-times beliefs and move toward political action by focusing on Reconstructionists’ ideas for reshaping society. Positions articulated in the manifesto, such as denouncing the “state usurpation of parental rights,” foreshadowed some of today’s policy debates.

In the 1980s, as evangelicals became more active in politics and megachurches sprang up across the country, some charismatic Christians — a subset of Protestants who incorporate supernatural elements like faith healing and prophecies — were increasingly moving away from traditional denominations and into independent churches. Those churches were connected by informal networks in which some leaders were considered apostles and prophets. The shift captivated C. Peter Wagner, a seminary professor who specialized in helping churches grow. He considered it the biggest change in Christianity in centuries, called it the New Apostolic Reformation and helped it flourish.

Starting in the late 1990s, Wagner held seminars to shape its tenets and cultivate new leaders. Key to his success was his partnership with Cindy Jacobs, a spiritual leader considered a prophet by some, who helped Wagner understand the world of charismatics.

NAR leaders adopted dominionism and promoted it to their followers. They also advanced the idea of “strategic spiritual warfare,” in which church leaders directed prayers to battle demons they believe control physical territory and influence world affairs. The rapid growth in independent charismatic churches has helped NAR become a formidable political force on the right. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee in 2008, attended a church that frequently welcomed NAR leaders to give guest sermons. But the NAR rose to national prominence in 2016 after their leaders united behind Trump.

The mob stormed the Capitol. They beat police officers, smashed windows and flooded inside, disrupting the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Outside, on the steps and the scaffolding set up for the inauguration, the crowd seethed. The air filled with tear gas and shouts of “1776” and “Hang Mike Pence.” A gallows loomed on the lawn.

And on a stage by the southeast corner of the Capitol, a group of people looked on, blowing shofars and speaking in tongues. They raised their hands toward the sky as they prayed. While some of their followers joined the assault on the building, these leaders of the NAR stayed put, battling in the spiritual realm. One man intoned that he saw a massive serpent with its tail over the Senate and asked God to dispatch angels to yank the demon out.

Flags rippled throughout the crowd: U.S., Confederate, Gadsden, militia and Trump flags — and one used by the NAR. White with a green pine tree and the words “An Appeal to Heaven,” the flag became associated with the movement thanks to Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader known as an apostle, who began promoting it in 2013. Colonists had flown the flag during the American Revolution. The NAR sees it as a symbol of spiritual revolution, a visual prayer for God to create a truly Christian nation. One rioter used the flag to push past police. Another entered the Capitol wearing the flag as a cape. Police later recovered it, soiled with blood and mace.

Sheets had not traveled to Washington, but as the riot raged on, he led a prayer call online with several thousand people listening. Someone held a phone to a microphone so Sheets’ words could ring out at the Capitol.

“We ask you, by your spirit, to hover over the Capitol now and bring order from the chaos,” he said. “This violence, and the spirit of violence and the spirit of wrath, does not produce righteousness. We take authority over it now.”

Jacobs later posted on social media that she condemned “what happened inside the Capitol.” In a statement provided by his ministry, Sheets said, “Those conducting the gathering were concerned when the unrest began. They asked me to join them in praying for peace and protection for all present.”

The NAR helped popularize the concept that Christians should conquer the seven spheres of society: family, religion, government, arts and entertainment, business, education and media. The idea took off in the 2010s when Lance Wallnau, a pastor considered an NAR prophet, repackaged the concept as the Seven Mountain Mandate. Wallnau wrote he learned about the concept when Loren Cunningham, an evangelical leader, told him that God had separately given Cunningham and Bright the same seven arenas in a message decades before. It was an evolution of Reconstructionists’ dominion theology.

Wallnau has popularized the mandate into a powerful framework for conservative evangelicals to influence all aspects of society by taking “territory” and, as he told an audience in September, “penetrating the systems and the culture and the organizational environment of what’s around you in a community.” The mandate has guided some Christians as they built media empires, Christian schools and businesses, and as they sought elected office.

On a hot fall day, a couple hundred evangelical Christians sporting shirts and hats with Trump slogans and Bible verses gathered on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. For hours, they communed inside a cavernous convention center. They worshiped. They sang. They swayed and spoke in tongues. They listened as speakers shared prophecies and conspiracy theories about election integrity. They spoke of the devil and demons and their individual mandate to cast out the forces of evil by voting for Trump. At midday, the Republican nominee for vice president, JD Vance, graced the stage, lending the event the campaign’s imprimatur.

It was the fifth stop of Wallnau’s swing-state Courage Tour, which blended charismatic Christianity, conspiracy theories and conservative politics in an effort to deliver Trump back to the White House.

Years earlier, during the 2016 campaign, Wallnau visited the then-candidate at Trump Tower. He claimed that after he left, God told him to read Isaiah 45: “Thus says the Lord to Cyrus, His anointed, whose right hand I have held — to subdue nations before him.”

Just as God had chosen the heathen Persian emperor Cyrus to restore the Jewish people from exile, Wallnau wrote in an October 2016 op-ed, God had chosen Trump to restore conservative Christians’ cultural power.

“I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” he wrote.

Wallnau and others saw it as a prophecy that justified evangelicals’ support for Trump, a twice-divorced man with a history of adultery, who bragged about sexual assault and whom hundreds of people said had cheated them in business dealings. Wallnau’s prophecy played a critical role in coalescing evangelical voters behind Trump.

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Ziklag, an invitation-only charity organization for rich Christians, aims to take dominion over what it sees as the seven major spheres of public life, which it calls “mountains”: business, science and technology, family, arts and media, church, education and government. Credit: Nesma Moharam, special to ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ziklag-secret-christian-charity-2024-election

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.

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.

Conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, seen speaking at an event with then-President Donald Trump, received funding from Ziklag for her efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Credit:Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

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.”

Edited October 31, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,085]

1 hour ago, NikkiCFC said:

You know older people here always say how it was all much better under communist Tito 😏 

Nikos Zachariadis- Tito's dagger stabs the People's Democratic Greece in the back

https://www.idcommunism.com/2018/07/nikos-zachariadis-titos-dagger-stabs-the-peoples-democratic-greece-in-the-back.html

Note: The article below, written by Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece from 1931 to 1956, was published in the newspaper-organ of the information Bureau of the Communist and Workers Parties- "For a lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy" on 1/8/1949. In the article, Zachariadis refers to the role of Josip Broz Tito's leadership during the struggle of Greece's guerrilla Democratic Army (DSE) against the bourgeois Greek Army and the imperialists, between the years 1946-1949. 

Tito's dagger stabs the People's Democratic Greece in the back

By Nikos Zachariadis.

"Dimokratikos Stratos" magazine, Issue 8, August 1949.
Translation: In Defense of Communism.
 

The People's revolutionary movement in our country has faced- in December 1944 with the armed english intervention- and faces serious difficulties in the harsh road towards victory.

 

Every inhabitant of Greece knows that monarcho-fascism would not be able to hold out even for a few months had it not been for the all-round and open aid of the American and British imperialists to the Greek reactionaries.

Our main difficulties rise from the fact that the Anglo-American imperialism is stubbornly trying to retain a foothold in Greece, both because the country is highly important to them for strategic reasons, as well as because they are trying to turn it into a vital military bridge head against the People’s Democracies and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s intentions towards this direction are well-known.

 

However, foreign imperialism’s positions in Greece were badly shaken last year by the military defeat of monarcho-fascism in the Grammos-Vitsi area and by the collapse of its strategic plan for 1948. The People’s revolutionary movement and the Democratic Army were extending and consolidating their positions in Peloponnese, Rumeli, Thessaly and on the islands of Samos and Eubeia. Also in a number of other islands, including Mytilene, Ikaria, Kefalonia and Crete, monarcho-fascism had been proved unable, despite its immense superiority, to exterminate our movement.

The reactionary forces in our country were in a critical position. The reports of the highest monarcho-fascist military leadership, such as the ones by General Papagos, Vendiris, Tsakalotos and others openly admitted that the army morale had been shaken. Hundreds of soldiers and officers were executed. King Paul himself spoke about the moral crisis in the army. The Athens clique was facing severe economic difficulties and the political crisis was steadily sapping the foundations of monarcho-fascism. Both foreign and Greek political actors, people who were by no means our friends, began to realise that the only way out for the reactionaries was to reach a peaceful settlement and conclude an agreement.
 

The treachery of the Tito was disclosed at the very moment when the crisis of monarcho-fascism was sharpening. Tito’s treachery meant serious new difficulties for our people’s democratic movement, for it multiplied the determination of the Anglo-American imperialists to retain, at all costs, their hold on Greece for the very purpose of making full use of the treachery by Tito and extending their bridge in the Balkans. At the same time the Tito clique’s treachery raised the deflated hopes of monarcho-fascism. These are the consequences of Tito's treason. It was a stab in the back of our movement.

 

It is a fact that no one celebrated Tito's treason against our movement more than the Greek monarcho-fascists and their imperialist despots. The people’s democratic movement of our country has never, since the time of the first occupation, known of such a cunning and abhorrent enemy as the Tito clique.

 

Tito clique's Great Serbia chauvinism in relation to the resistance movement in Greece was evident as far back as 1943 and was presented with the following position (of the Yugoslav Communist Party): The KKE follows an erroneous policy and betrays the struggle. Zachariadis is a traitor too. The people of the Aegean Macedonia could only win their liberation within the framework of Yugoslavia. The corollary of this was that it was the prime duty of all Macedonian patriots to fight against the Communist Party of Greece and EAM and instead to collaborate with the Tito agents.

This was the directive followed by Tito’s man in Aegean Macedonia, Tempo (Bukmanovic); this was the directive applied in practice by their chief agent, Goce. Today is it being carried out by Goce-Koramidjiev gang. During all these years the Tito clique sent thousands of its agents into the Communist Party of Greece and into EAM in order to undermine the Communist Party of Greece and break the unity of the people’s liberation movement.

We must say openly that the Greek reaction and Anglo-American imperialism could not have found a better ally than the Tito clique in their struggle against the people's revolutionary movement in Greece.

 

[…]

 

We must point out here an extremely characteristic detail: In October 1944 when the British landed in Greece, Tempo, who had a major role in the provocative movement against the Communist Party of Greece, informed the Communists of Aegean Macedonia that he has asked Tito for two divisions to occupy Thessaloniki. This was before the December events and the British were not sure that they could hold Greece. Now it's very clear that the British imperialists would prefer Tito to take Thessaloniki.

 

Back then, in October 1944, the British parachuted weapons onto the airport of Ghrupista. These were subsequently sent on to Vapsori by Tito’s agents - Tempo, Goce and Pios - to be used against ELAS. During the Hitler occupation Goce and Pios formed groups of Macedonian and collaborated with Tempo. Today, we consider an established fact that, as a consequence, Evans, the then representative of the British military mission in Macedonia, insisted on the network of these groups being extended. It was at the help of these groups that Goce, Pios and Keramidjiev carried out their disruptive activities against the people’s liberation movement in Greece.
 

In December 1944 Tito, who dreamt of snatching Thessaloniki from people’s democratic Greece, did nothing to help us fight the British, in spite of all his earlier pompous statements. If anything, he stepped up his slander campaign against the Communist Party of Greece, especially within the people of the Aegean Macedonia.

The result of Tito's policyt was mass emigration of Macedonians to Yugoslavia thus depriving Aegean Macedonia of its Macedonian population.

 

Incidentally, the Greek monarcho-fascists have been trying to the same thing for many years, hoping to change the ethnical composition Aegean Macedonia. From their side, Tito and Kolysevski were trying to recruit agents from these refugees who, after the necessary training, are sent to Greece to operate against the Communist Party of Greece, EAM and our people’s revolutionary movement.

 

Since 1943 the Greek Communist Party and revolutionary movement have been two fires: on the one side the foreign imperialists and monarcho-fascist, on the other- the Tito clique and its executive organ, the Goce- Keramidiev gang which had and still has hundreds of Yugoslav intelligence servicemen in Aegean Macedonia. In 1944, acting on orders from Skopje, Goce crossed over to Yugoslavia with his detachment. Today Goce and Keramidjiev have their headquarters in Skopje.

Time and again the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece drew the attention of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party to the counter-revolutionary actions of these agents, proved by irrefutable documentary evidence, and demanded that their activities should be stopped. The Central Committee of the Yugoslav Party, however, did not do a thing to cut short these provocation actions.

It has been proved beyond doubt that Christos Vlachos, who in 1947 in Thessaloniki killed Yiannis Zevgos, a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Greek Party, was an agent of the Yugoslav intelligence, service and had received his instruction from Skopje. He arrived in Thessaloniki on orders of the Yugoslav intelligence, placed himself at the disposal of General Zervas, an agent of the British Intelligence Service, and later murdered Zevgos. Five monarcho-fascist officers, some of them murderers of the people, escaped to Yugoslavia from a war prisoner’s camp with the help of Rankovic. The Central committee of the Yugoslav Party stated that it knew absolutely nothing about this, even though we gave them details of the date and the exact spot where the monarcho-fascists had crossed the border. Border officers and soldiers had informed us that the monarcho-fascists had crossed into Yugoslavia.

We have captured dozens of Yugoslav intelligence officers. In December 1948 two Yugoslav agents, Gounaris Menos and Gallios Mitsos, were detained in Prespa. These agents disclosed the names of the Yugoslav intelligence officers who had sent them and the assignment they had been given.

The Communist Party of Greece has at its disposal other damning proof of the treachery and disruptive activity of the Tito clique against the revolutionary movement in Greece. The nationalist gang of the treacherous Yugoslav leadership was always a mortal enemy to the Communist Party and people of Greece. Recent events are fresh evidence that the Tito clique helped and is continuing to help Greek and international reaction against the Greek people more and more openly.

In its communiqué of July 6, 1949 the General Headquarters of the Democratic Army stated that on July 5, 1949 monarcho-fascist troops used Yugoslav territory in order to bypass units of the Democratic Army in the Kaimakchalan area. The same day the “Free Greece” telegraph agency, basing itself on an official document (the report of lieutenant colonel Petropoulos, commander of the monarcho-fascists’ 516th battalion, to General Grigoropoulos, commander of the 3rd army corps), reported that on July 4, 1949, that is, on the eve of the day when the monarcho-fascists crossed Yugoslav territory, a meeting of Yugoslav and monarcho-fascist Greek officers had been held in the area of Popovolossi and Kaimakchalan. This meeting was attended by British and American officers. The Tanjug agency did not refute this fact, neither did the representative of the British Foreign Office when asked about this meeting. Again, neither did Tito deny it in his speech at Pola (Istria), on July 10, 1949. Like the Tanjug agency, he merely tried to refute the fact that an agreement had been reached allowing the monarcho-fascist to use Yugoslav territory.

Such was the Belgrade version when the United Nations Balkan Commission in Athens published its communiqué on July 21, 1949. The sole aim of this communiqué was to cover up Tito’s collaboration with the monarcho-fascists, a collaboration that had been laid bare by the General Headquarters of the Democratic Army and the Free Greece radio on July 6, 1949. This communiqué of the Balkan Commission is highly significant since, to begin with, for the first time in its history the Commission admitted that the monarcho-fascists had violated the Yugoslav frontier in the Kaimakchalan area on many occasions. It claimed, however, that this had been done by artillery and aircraft and not by infantry. Secondly, the communiqué admitted that a meeting of monarcho-fascist and Yugoslav officers had been held in the Kaimakchalan area.

After the Tito clique’s betrayal of the Greek people’s liberation struggle had been exposed in the eyes of progressive mankind and the Yugoslav people, the Yugoslav leaders found it necessary to mobilise yet another provocateur. On July 24, following the example of Tito and Djilas, Kardelj also made a statement to Tanjug on the Greek question. He denied everything: the agreement with Tsaldaris, the negotiations in the Kaimakchalan area, and the use of Yugoslav territory by the monarcho-fascists. He concluded by giving the Jesuit assurance that the Belgrade Government “continues to sympathise” with the movement of the Greek people, but that it “cannot force its assistance on them” and that “the agents of the Information Bureau who slandered Tito” are responsible for this.

We have never doubted the sympathy of the Yugoslav people. As for those who are responsible, “The Times” makes it clear when it writes that in his statement at Pola, Tito gave the Americans the necessary guarantees in advance for the dollars which he needs.

 

Nikos Zachariadis

In order to mask their treachery, the traitors Tito, Djilas, Kardelj and company would have the world believe that morale of the Greek democrats is at a low ebb and that they are losing confidence in victory. As a matter of fact these Titoites are doing everything to undermine the morale of the Greek democrats. Tito’s treachery and his long-standing subversive activities against the people’s democratic movement in Greece are causing us serious difficulties. Tito has a deadly hatred for the Geek people’s liberation movement and is viciously fighting against it. But he is mistaken, and so are his monarcho-fascist allies and their common masters, if they think that they will be able to crush us.

 

Throughout Greece – in Rumelia, Thessaly, Peloponnese, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace and on the islands – the Greek Democratic Army is continuing its struggle against the enemy with unshaken courage in the face of enormous difficulties. A broad strike movement covering tens of thousands of factory and office workers is gaining strength in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of peasants who are literally starving to death in the cities where they have been forcibly driven by the monarcho-fascists, hate the Athens Government with all their soul. Reaction in Greece is in the throes of an economic, political and moral crisis from which it can find no way out. The Greek Democratic Army will come face to face with monarcho-fascism in the great battles that will be fought in Grammos and Vitsi.

We are fight because we want peace, because we want to establish democracy and the independence of Greece. Reaction is out for war. It wants to crush us at all costs and is using the Tito clique for this purpose. Thanks to the assistance and solidarity of progressive mankind, including the Yugoslav people, the people of Greece will be victorious both in war and will win a people’s democracy and national independence.

Edited October 31, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,085]

Memorials dedicated to communist guerrillas unveiled by the KKE in northern Greece 

https://www.idcommunism.com/2024/10/memorials-dedicated-to-communist-guerrillas-unveiled-by-the-kke-in-northern-greece.html

With two events held in the northern provinces of Florina and Kastoria on Sunday 27 October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) unveiled two new memorials dedicated to the struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece, the communist-backed guerrilla army which fought against the bourgeois forces and their imperialist allies during the 1946-1949 Civil War.

Both events were attended by the General Secretary of the CC of the KKE Dimitris Koutsoumbas. 

 

In the small village of Kottas, close to Florina, Koutsoumbas stated: “This event was a due honor towards the heroic fighters, the 311 dead of the Democratic Army, who gave their lives here on the heights, around the village of Kottas, for the freedom and honor of the people, at the peak of the class struggle in Greece back then. We honor their memory. We continue their struggle, we continue the fight”.

Hundreds of KKE members, supporters and local residents attended the unveiling of the monuments, shouting slogans such as “neither in exile nor in prisons did the Communists ever bend” and “A century of struggle and sacrifice, the KKE in the vanguard”.

The first monument is located in Kottas, where a mass grave of Democratic Army fighters has ben found and refers to those who fell mainly during the last battles in the broader area, in August 1949.

The second one is located in the village of Kallithea, in Prespa, close to the Museum dedicated to EAM-ELAS and DSE and refers to the fallen heroes of ELAS (Greek People's Liberation Army) and the Democratic Army during the 1941-1949 period, that is during the  Anti-Nazi resistance and the Greek Civil War.  

 

  IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©   

[Vesper 30,085]

😃

[cosmicway 1,333]

8 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

You know older people here always say how it was all much better under communist Tito 😏 

Well, some may always fancy Tito.
But here is Freud psychology at play again. The old man was 21 years old during Tito's time, he could go to Brijuni island and chase the beauties. So it was better and why not Tito as well ?
The same with Papadopoulos for the Greeks, Salazar for the Portuguese.

[cosmicway 1,333]

7 hours ago, Vesper said:

Memorials dedicated to communist guerrillas unveiled by the KKE in northern Greece 

https://www.idcommunism.com/2024/10/memorials-dedicated-to-communist-guerrillas-unveiled-by-the-kke-in-northern-greece.html

With two events held in the northern provinces of Florina and Kastoria on Sunday 27 October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) unveiled two new memorials dedicated to the struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece, the communist-backed guerrilla army which fought against the bourgeois forces and their imperialist allies during the 1946-1949 Civil War.

Both events were attended by the General Secretary of the CC of the KKE Dimitris Koutsoumbas. 

 

 

In the small village of Kottas, close to Florina, Koutsoumbas stated: “This event was a due honor towards the heroic fighters, the 311 dead of the Democratic Army, who gave their lives here on the heights, around the village of Kottas, for the freedom and honor of the people, at the peak of the class struggle in Greece back then. We honor their memory. We continue their struggle, we continue the fight”.

Hundreds of KKE members, supporters and local residents attended the unveiling of the monuments, shouting slogans such as “neither in exile nor in prisons did the Communists ever bend” and “A century of struggle and sacrifice, the KKE in the vanguard”.

The first monument is located in Kottas, where a mass grave of Democratic Army fighters has ben found and refers to those who fell mainly during the last battles in the broader area, in August 1949.

The second one is located in the village of Kallithea, in Prespa, close to the Museum dedicated to EAM-ELAS and DSE and refers to the fallen heroes of ELAS (Greek People's Liberation Army) and the Democratic Army during the 1941-1949 period, that is during the  Anti-Nazi resistance and the Greek Civil War.  

 

  IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©   

Historian -war hero Chris Woodhouse disputes all this.
The communists were not so popular in Greece.
For the very early days after the liberation there are no opinion polls but he says there is no reason for the two major parties the conservative people's party and the liberals to have lost support - since neither of them was accused of being a quislig party and they were involved in the resistance,
In elections held later the atmosphere was a Mc Carthy sort of atmosphere but nevertheless the results verify him.

The communists were about 15% in all probability.
But from October 1944 when Greece was liberated to December when the communists attempted the ir coup d' etat everybody liked the Soviet Union and Stalin - because of the Soviets were allies.
It was the war time alliance and you could see Soviet flags in the balconies in Kolonaki district (also Holywood movies praising the USSR).
Then the communists were armed whereas Greece had no army - just a few soldiers.
There was the British contingent in Athens who finally held the communists but between commies - Greek army the analogy was 5 to 1 or 10 to 1.
So to the commies this relative superiority in arms is the same as ... popular support.

In 2015 during the economic crisis I don't know.
The Syriza commies can claim they won - but now the red camp was split in two.
Yet a little later the Syriza lot went to visit Trump and bowed to their knees infront of him.

But the orthodox commies are not making any progress.
They have strange ideas. They won't cooperate even with their Syriza cousins.
They are afraid some unexpected revisionism will creep in.
Back in the days they were dying for a popular front.
But it was different. They reckonned a popular front will take Greece out of NATO into the neutralist camp. Then the Soviet tanks will move in -no problem. Then we catch the popular front dupes and execute them - simples. But now they hate popular front.




 

 

 

Edited October 31, 2024 by cosmicway

[cosmicway 1,333]

7 hours ago, Vesper said:

Memorials dedicated to communist guerrillas unveiled by the KKE in northern Greece 

https://www.idcommunism.com/2024/10/memorials-dedicated-to-communist-guerrillas-unveiled-by-the-kke-in-northern-greece.html

With two events held in the northern provinces of Florina and Kastoria on Sunday 27 October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) unveiled two new memorials dedicated to the struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece, the communist-backed guerrilla army which fought against the bourgeois forces and their imperialist allies during the 1946-1949 Civil War.

Both events were attended by the General Secretary of the CC of the KKE Dimitris Koutsoumbas. 

 

 

In the small village of Kottas, close to Florina, Koutsoumbas stated: “This event was a due honor towards the heroic fighters, the 311 dead of the Democratic Army, who gave their lives here on the heights, around the village of Kottas, for the freedom and honor of the people, at the peak of the class struggle in Greece back then. We honor their memory. We continue their struggle, we continue the fight”.

Hundreds of KKE members, supporters and local residents attended the unveiling of the monuments, shouting slogans such as “neither in exile nor in prisons did the Communists ever bend” and “A century of struggle and sacrifice, the KKE in the vanguard”.

The first monument is located in Kottas, where a mass grave of Democratic Army fighters has ben found and refers to those who fell mainly during the last battles in the broader area, in August 1949.

The second one is located in the village of Kallithea, in Prespa, close to the Museum dedicated to EAM-ELAS and DSE and refers to the fallen heroes of ELAS (Greek People's Liberation Army) and the Democratic Army during the 1941-1949 period, that is during the  Anti-Nazi resistance and the Greek Civil War.  

 

  IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©   

 
D' you know Zachariades recanted ?
In the seventies he wanted to return to Greece and did n't mind even if they put him to trial.
But the Soviets were holding him prisoner in Siberia, with two tanks outside his house continuously watching for years.
In the end he hanged himself.

Edited October 31, 2024 by cosmicway

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

Ooof I dont think any of the presidents really helped Kamala during this election.

[cosmicway 1,333]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

https://projects.propublica.org/christian-nationalism-origins/

In the beginning — in this case, the 1970s — some Christians feared their influence in society was waning. The Supreme Court had outlawed school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings and had legalized abortion.

In response, religious figures began to organize around the idea that they had a duty to bring Christianity back into public life. Several Christian-influenced organizations, including Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and James Dobson’s Family Research Council, were soon formed and went on to shape Republican policies for decades to come. Evangelical Protestants of different denominations joined forces and united with conservative Catholics, like Paul Weyrich, the founder of the think tank the Heritage Foundation, to advance their shared political goals. Under the banner of “pro-family politics,” the New Christian Right movement fought against abortion access, feminism and gay rights as attacks on traditional family values.

Inside a red-rimmed sports arena, more than 15,000 evangelicals gathered with conservative activists to discuss how to get Christians more involved in politics.

They had come to an event known as the National Affairs Briefing because the evangelists Billy Graham and Bill Bright reported that God had issued each of them the same warning: America had only 1,000 more days of freedom. After speaking with the pair, televangelist James Robison said God had urged him to host a conference that would “refocus the direction of America.”

The sea of believers roared as Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took the podium.

“This is a nonpartisan gathering, and so I know that you can’t endorse me,” Reagan said. “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”

The moment underscored an important shift in American politics, helping to cement evangelical Christians as a reliable conservative voting bloc.

But while Reagan took the spotlight, backstage in Dallas, Robert Billings, a Reagan campaign adviser who had helped found the Moral Majority, nodded to a less prominent visionary: R.J. Rushdoony, the father of a more extreme movement known as Christian Reconstructionism.

“If it weren’t for his books, none of us would be here,” Billings remarked, as recalled in an essay by Gary North, an economic historian and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.

“Nobody in the audience understands that,” replied North.

“True,” said Billings. “But we do.”

The conversation at the National Affairs Briefing shows the early influence of previously obscure elements of the Christian right that have surfaced in recent years. Other groups and figures that emerged in that period remain influential. Robison and Dobson became spiritual advisers to former President Donald Trump, helping him gain support among religious voters. The Heritage Foundation recently crafted Project 2025, a plan to concentrate executive power and promote far-right policies should Trump win the presidential election. Trump has disavowed the plan, though some members of his administration worked on it.

The idea that Christians should be in power has become a central mission of today’s Christian right, but the idea was taking root decades ago. In remarks strikingly similar to today’s rhetoric, Bob Weiner, founder of a major ministry focused on college campuses, said in 1985, “We should be the head of our school board. We should be the head of our nation. We should be the senators and the congressmen. We should be the editors of our newspapers. We should be taking over every area of life.”

As Billings and North noted backstage at the National Affairs Briefing, the New Christian Right owed a lot to another movement, known as Christian Reconstructionism. The fundamentalist movement held that all aspects of society, including government, education, economics and culture, should conform to a strict interpretation of the OId Testament. Though less recognized, Reconstructionism heavily influenced the more mainstream New Christian Right and its aspirations for Christians to infiltrate systems of power.

Up until the 1970s, the way many evangelicals believed the world would end gave them little incentive to get involved in politics. When the rapture came, the faithful would ascend to heaven, leaving the troubled world behind. That sense of remove began to fade due to the influence of Reconstructionists, who, by contrast, believed they had to build God’s kingdom before Christ would return — which required political action.

The movement’s founder, Rushdoony, received less acknowledgement from politicians, in part because of his extreme views, which included justifying slavery, denying the Holocaust and endorsing the death penalty for homosexuality and adultery. But with Reconstructionists’ prolific writings about what Bible-centered institutions should look like, including Rushdoony’s 1973 book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” adherents provided instruction manuals for the modern Christian right. Reconstructionists wanted to eliminate public education by slowly dismantling it, and they led the way in developing Christian schools and promoting homeschooling. Thanks in large part to that leadership, their principles spread.

Amid the swampy summer air, scores of evangelical preachers and Christian leaders crowded onto the stone steps of the Lincoln Memorial to sign “A Manifesto of the Christian Church.” The document detailed their beliefs and the policies they would promote, such as fighting abortion, homosexuality and the teaching of evolution as a “monopoly viewpoint in public schools.”

A group called the Coalition on Revival had brought representatives from many denominations to the memorial. Its mission: to “rebuild civilization on the principles of the Bible.” Founder Jay Grimstead anticipated they’d have more political success by uniting evangelicals across denominations and persuasions.

“Christians are everywhere, and we’re going to exert our influence in all walks of life,” Grimstead bellowed to the crowd.

The Coalition on Revival helped evangelicals set aside their differing end-times beliefs and move toward political action by focusing on Reconstructionists’ ideas for reshaping society. Positions articulated in the manifesto, such as denouncing the “state usurpation of parental rights,” foreshadowed some of today’s policy debates.

In the 1980s, as evangelicals became more active in politics and megachurches sprang up across the country, some charismatic Christians — a subset of Protestants who incorporate supernatural elements like faith healing and prophecies — were increasingly moving away from traditional denominations and into independent churches. Those churches were connected by informal networks in which some leaders were considered apostles and prophets. The shift captivated C. Peter Wagner, a seminary professor who specialized in helping churches grow. He considered it the biggest change in Christianity in centuries, called it the New Apostolic Reformation and helped it flourish.

Starting in the late 1990s, Wagner held seminars to shape its tenets and cultivate new leaders. Key to his success was his partnership with Cindy Jacobs, a spiritual leader considered a prophet by some, who helped Wagner understand the world of charismatics.

NAR leaders adopted dominionism and promoted it to their followers. They also advanced the idea of “strategic spiritual warfare,” in which church leaders directed prayers to battle demons they believe control physical territory and influence world affairs. The rapid growth in independent charismatic churches has helped NAR become a formidable political force on the right. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee in 2008, attended a church that frequently welcomed NAR leaders to give guest sermons. But the NAR rose to national prominence in 2016 after their leaders united behind Trump.

The mob stormed the Capitol. They beat police officers, smashed windows and flooded inside, disrupting the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Outside, on the steps and the scaffolding set up for the inauguration, the crowd seethed. The air filled with tear gas and shouts of “1776” and “Hang Mike Pence.” A gallows loomed on the lawn.

And on a stage by the southeast corner of the Capitol, a group of people looked on, blowing shofars and speaking in tongues. They raised their hands toward the sky as they prayed. While some of their followers joined the assault on the building, these leaders of the NAR stayed put, battling in the spiritual realm. One man intoned that he saw a massive serpent with its tail over the Senate and asked God to dispatch angels to yank the demon out.

Flags rippled throughout the crowd: U.S., Confederate, Gadsden, militia and Trump flags — and one used by the NAR. White with a green pine tree and the words “An Appeal to Heaven,” the flag became associated with the movement thanks to Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader known as an apostle, who began promoting it in 2013. Colonists had flown the flag during the American Revolution. The NAR sees it as a symbol of spiritual revolution, a visual prayer for God to create a truly Christian nation. One rioter used the flag to push past police. Another entered the Capitol wearing the flag as a cape. Police later recovered it, soiled with blood and mace.

Sheets had not traveled to Washington, but as the riot raged on, he led a prayer call online with several thousand people listening. Someone held a phone to a microphone so Sheets’ words could ring out at the Capitol.

“We ask you, by your spirit, to hover over the Capitol now and bring order from the chaos,” he said. “This violence, and the spirit of violence and the spirit of wrath, does not produce righteousness. We take authority over it now.”

Jacobs later posted on social media that she condemned “what happened inside the Capitol.” In a statement provided by his ministry, Sheets said, “Those conducting the gathering were concerned when the unrest began. They asked me to join them in praying for peace and protection for all present.”

The NAR helped popularize the concept that Christians should conquer the seven spheres of society: family, religion, government, arts and entertainment, business, education and media. The idea took off in the 2010s when Lance Wallnau, a pastor considered an NAR prophet, repackaged the concept as the Seven Mountain Mandate. Wallnau wrote he learned about the concept when Loren Cunningham, an evangelical leader, told him that God had separately given Cunningham and Bright the same seven arenas in a message decades before. It was an evolution of Reconstructionists’ dominion theology.

Wallnau has popularized the mandate into a powerful framework for conservative evangelicals to influence all aspects of society by taking “territory” and, as he told an audience in September, “penetrating the systems and the culture and the organizational environment of what’s around you in a community.” The mandate has guided some Christians as they built media empires, Christian schools and businesses, and as they sought elected office.

On a hot fall day, a couple hundred evangelical Christians sporting shirts and hats with Trump slogans and Bible verses gathered on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. For hours, they communed inside a cavernous convention center. They worshiped. They sang. They swayed and spoke in tongues. They listened as speakers shared prophecies and conspiracy theories about election integrity. They spoke of the devil and demons and their individual mandate to cast out the forces of evil by voting for Trump. At midday, the Republican nominee for vice president, JD Vance, graced the stage, lending the event the campaign’s imprimatur.

It was the fifth stop of Wallnau’s swing-state Courage Tour, which blended charismatic Christianity, conspiracy theories and conservative politics in an effort to deliver Trump back to the White House.

Years earlier, during the 2016 campaign, Wallnau visited the then-candidate at Trump Tower. He claimed that after he left, God told him to read Isaiah 45: “Thus says the Lord to Cyrus, His anointed, whose right hand I have held — to subdue nations before him.”

Just as God had chosen the heathen Persian emperor Cyrus to restore the Jewish people from exile, Wallnau wrote in an October 2016 op-ed, God had chosen Trump to restore conservative Christians’ cultural power.

“I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” he wrote.

Wallnau and others saw it as a prophecy that justified evangelicals’ support for Trump, a twice-divorced man with a history of adultery, who bragged about sexual assault and whom hundreds of people said had cheated them in business dealings. Wallnau’s prophecy played a critical role in coalescing evangelical voters behind Trump.

Christianity is certainly the most anti-Trump reliigion ever.
Jesus Christ may have been a communist - even though communists hate him:

If he is the son of God as we believe then he knows everything and he also knows about communism so he is Social Democrat like Gerhard Schroeder - Segolene Royal.
If not then he was a misguided communist.

The snipet "give unto Caesar" does n't prove anything, like the capitalists think it does.
But whatever the case, a Christian supporter of Trump is an anomaly - these people will burn in hell and made into sish kebap.

But here is the catch.
Christians are against sex.
Like I said before my head at school who was a devout orthodox believed fizzy orange drink was too sexy - he allowed only blue bottles.
We of course did not follow.
So this anti-sex lot have commandeered the situation and you see what you see.

 

 

Edited October 31, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,085]

How the U.S. Election Matters for the Rest of the World

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/us-election-world.html

The world doesn’t pick the U.S. president, but it will live with the consequences of whether Americans elect Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald J. Trump. It’s a decision that will have globe-spanning consequences, from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to climate change and global trade.

The world wants to know: What kind of superpower will America be in the years to come? Was Trump an aberration, or was President Biden?

I spoke with my fellow Times foreign correspondents about what’s at stake. One thing is clear: This election polarizes the world as much as it does the United States — but sometimes in unexpected ways.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vesper 30,085]

Inflation Is Basically Back to Normal. Why Do Voters Still Feel Blah?

Consumers still give the economy poor marks, though the job market is strong and price increases have faded for months.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/business/economy/inflation-prices-economy.html

Updated inflation data set for release on Thursday are expected to show that price increases have more or less returned to a normal pace. Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

Grocery inflation has been cooling sharply, but Tamira Flamer, 27, says she hasn’t noticed. What she knows is that paper plates and meat remain more expensive than they were a few years ago.

“I feel like it’s been rough,” said Ms. Flamer, a mother of two who drives for Amazon, while standing outside a Dollar General near her home in Norristown, Pa., on Sunday.

Ms. Flamer, an undecided voter who says she is most focused on economic issues, underscores a challenge for Vice President Kamala Harris as the presidential election barrels toward its final days.

Voters say that they are very focused on the economy as they head to the polls, yet surveys suggest that they feel relatively glum about its recent track record. That could hurt Ms. Harris while helping her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.

The lingering pessimism is also something of a puzzle. The job market has been chugging along, although more slowly, overall growth has been healthy and even inflation is more or less back to normal. Inflation data released on Thursday showed that prices have increased by a mild 2.1 percent over the past year.

Confidence has crept back up as inflation has cooled, but it remains much lower than it was the last time the economy looked as solid as it does today. That is true for both the University of Michigan’s confidence index and a separate measure produced by the Conference Board, an organization that conducts business and economic research.

Here’s a glimpse at what might be happening.

Consumers may focus more on price levels than price changes.

There’s a simple reason that many people still feel iffy about the economy: sticker shock.

Although prices are now climbing much more slowly, costs for necessities like groceries and housing are much higher today than they were a few years ago. Many households still feel that burn when they go to pay the bills.

In fact, surveys show that consumers correctly understand that inflation is slowing. The University of Michigan’s inflation expectations measure, and another produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, both show that consumer expectations for future inflation have been slowly moving down.

But they are also annoyed that prices are higher than they were before the pandemic; that levels are up, even if they are no longer rising as quickly.

“It’s not that they’ve lost touch with reality,” said Joanne Hsu, director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan, explaining that consumers often raised the issue of high price levels during their interviews. “High prices continue to weigh down their personal finances, and that remains very frustrating.”

Wages have climbed faster than prices for many consumers, but that is not true across the board. And people tend to see raises as something that they have earned, whereas they see price increases as something that is being done to them — perhaps even unfairly.

Housing affordability is also bad.

The grocery store is not the only place where prices are noticeably higher. Housing costs have climbed a lot in recent years. And for people who are hoping to buy a first home, affording one has become much more difficult since 2020.

That’s partly because of Federal Reserve policy. Central bankers lifted interest rates sharply in 2022 and 2023 to restrain demand and wrestle inflation back under control. Those elevated official borrowing costs feed into higher mortgage rates — making it much pricier to buy a home on borrowed money.

And while the Fed cut interest rates in September, and is widely expected to lower them at least one more time this year, analysts do not expect the central bank to cut rates to the rock-bottom levels that prevailed in 2020 and throughout the early 2010s.

The reasons for that are positive: America’s economy is doing well. Even if consumers say they feel bad in surveys, they have shown a willingness to keep spending, and U.S. growth is much stronger than what countries like Germany or China are experiencing.

Given that, the Fed may not need to set rates at historically low levels to keep activity chugging along, the way it did before.

“We’re not going back to 3 percent mortgage rates — even 4 percent is a pipe dream,” Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate, said in an email. “The path of mortgage rates will depend on economic growth and inflation, but the new normal over the next couple years will be mortgage rates in the fives and sixes.”

Neither interest rates nor home prices are part of inflation — rents are — but housing is both the typical household’s biggest expense and a crucial avenue for building wealth and eventually getting ahead in America. That makes it important for the nation’s economic psyche.

There’s a clear partisan divide.

Some of the sour attitude boils down to simple partisanship.

Republicans tend to be much more optimistic when a Republican is in office. Democrats also tend to be slightly happier when a Democrat is in office. But they have not displayed the same kind of night-and-day difference.

Since President Biden has been in office, Democrat’s confidence level in the University of Michigan index has been about 15 percent higher on average than it was when Mr. Trump was incumbent. Republican confidence, by contrast, has taken a staggering 56 percent hit.

And the bulk of that decline happened right after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, though there was a smaller, second leg down after inflation began to pick up.

But partisan preferences do not simply shape economic confidence. Sentiment could help to feed into politics. And that’s one reason today’s wobbly confidence matters.

The end result could shape the election.

Surveys suggest that many Americans are prioritizing the economy as they think about their vote. A national New York Times/Siena College poll of the nation’s likely electorate taken in late October found that 27 percent of respondents had ranked the economy as the most important issue in deciding their vote this election — making it the No. 1 issue in America.

Another 4 percent of voters specifically prioritized inflation and the cost of living, more than those who prioritized foreign policy, taxes or climate change.

Both candidates are focused on prices as they head into the race’s final stretch. Ms. Harris’s campaign subtitled its economic blueprint “A Plan to Lower Costs and Create an Opportunity Economy.” Mr. Trump has been promising to cut costs by lowering gas prices to less than $2 per gallon. (Industry experts have serious doubts about whether policy could bring gas prices down that much.)

This week’s economic reports are final glimpses at the economic data voters will get as they head to the polls, putting Thursday’s inflation figures and jobs numbers set for release on Friday in the spotlight.

This could clearly be an economy election — but a complicated one, as inflation cools, growth remains solid and Americans, nevertheless, remain unconvinced.

Edited October 31, 2024 by Vesper

[NikkiCFC 8,286]

So even Jesus Christ was a commie. That's it guys, shut down the internet. 

[cosmicway 1,333]

2 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

So even Jesus Christ was a commie. That's it guys, shut down the internet. 

The commies could have declared him one of theirs.
But like Robespierre of the French revolution they did n't.
The pope and the patriarchs declared themselves above the incorruptible and above Stalin and that was unacceptable.

[Vesper 30,085]

Trump is going around cosplaying as a garbabe man, but still wearing a dress shirt and a tie.

madness

 

Trump's truck stunt backfires as he misses door handle twice and nearly falls over

Donald Trump was seen struggling to open a truck door and nearly fell over in a humiliating video from his garbage stunt in Green Bay, Wisconsin

https://www.express.co.uk/news/us/1969578/donald-trump-truck-stunt-backfires