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Inside Ziklag, the Christian-Right Group Trying to Sway the 2024 Election — ProPublica

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.

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“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.”

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https://www.americanoversight.org/document/records-request-to-virginias-secretary-of-the-commonwealth-office-for-communications-with-ginni-thomas

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/20/ginni-thomas-arizona-election-emails/

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Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, pressed Ariz. lawmakers to help reverse Trump’s loss, emails showBy Emma Brown

Updated May 20, 2022 at 2:36 p.m. EDT| PublishedMay 20, 2022

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, attends the swearing-in ceremony for Justice Amy Coney Barrett at the White House on Oct. 26, 2020. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Arizona lawmakers after the 2020 election to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory and choose “a clean slate of Electors,” according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

The emails, sent by Ginni Thomas to a pair of lawmakers on Nov. 9, 2020, argued that legislators needed to intervene because the vote had been marred by fraud. Though she did not mention either candidate by name, the context was clear.

Just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, Thomas urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.” She told the lawmakers that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone” and said they had “power to fight back against fraud.”

Thomas sent the messages via an online platform designed to make it easy to send prewritten form emails to multiple elected officials,according to a review of the emails, obtained under the state’s public-records law.

The messages show that Thomas, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, was more deeply involved in the effort to overturn Biden’s win than has been previously reported. In sending the emails, Thomas played a role in the extraordinary scheme to keep Trump in office by substituting the will of legislatures for the will of voters.

Thomas’s actions also underline concerns about potential conflicts of interest that her husband has already faced — and may face in the future — in deciding cases related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those questions intensified in March, when The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Thomas sent in late 2020 to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, pressing him to help reverse the election.

The emails were sent to Russell “Rusty” Bowers, a veteran legislator and speaker of the Arizona House, and Shawnna Bolick, who was first elected to the chamber in 2018 and served on the House Elections Committee during the 2020 session.

“Article II of the United States Constitution gives you an awesome responsibility: to choose our state’s Electors,” read the Nov. 9 email. “… [P]lease take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen.”

Thomas’s name also appears on an email to the two representatives on Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college met to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said.

It included a link to a video of a man delivering a message meant for swing-state lawmakers, urging them to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”

“You have only hours to act,” said thespeaker, who is not identified in the video.

By December, the claim that legislators should override the popular vote in key states and appoint Trump’s electors was also being pushed publicly by John C. Eastman, a former law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

Trump allies argued that pandemic-era changes in election administration and supposedly widespread fraud meant that elections had not been conducted in accordance with state legislatures’ directions and that, under the U.S. Constitution, the results therefore could be cast aside. Many legal experts have called those arguments unpersuasive and anti-democratic, and no state legislature complied. Efforts to persuade state lawmakers to name new electors are among the issues under examination by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Courts turned back dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies in an attempt to challenge the 2020 election outcome, and there is no evidence of voting machine manipulation or other widespread fraud.

Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to messages seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.

Ginni Thomas has insisted that she and her husband have kept their work separate, but her political activism has set her apart from other Supreme Court spouses. About a decade ago, she and Stephen K. Bannon — who later became chief strategist in the Trump White House — were among the organizers ofGroundswell,a group formed to battle liberals and establishment Republicans. Groundswell dedicated itself to “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to emails uncovered by Mother Jones at the time. “Election integrity” was among the topics discussed in the group’s first months, the emails show.

Thomas’s influence in Washington grew during the Trump presidency as her views moved into the GOP mainstream. Clarence and Ginni Thomas had lunch with Trump at the White House in 2018, then attended a state dinner the following year. Also in 2019, she and fellow right-wing activists attended a White House luncheon, where the New York Times reported that they told Trump his aides were blocking their preferred candidates for administration appointments.

Over those same years, at annual luncheons, Thomas handed out “Impact Awards” to right-wing figures. Recipients have included Meadows, then a congressman chairing the hard-right Freedom Caucus; Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe; and Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Thomas is a member of the Council for National Policy, a network of prominent conservative activists, some of whom helped press claims of election fraud. She recently said she attended the pro-Trump rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

Thomas sent the emails via freeroots.com, a website meant to give political organizers an efficient means of conducting email campaigns. The email address of the sender in Thomas’s emails is displayed as “Ginni Thomas@freeroots.com>.”

A representative of FreeRoots did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The Nov. 9 email carried the subject line, “Please do your Constitutional duty!” In addition to pushing the lawmakers to appoint electors, the email asked for a meeting to discuss pursuing an “audit” of the vote.

Under the U.S. Constitution, states appoint presidential electors “in such manner” as the legislatures direct. Historically, some state legislatures appointed electors directly, but in the modern era states have delegated that responsibility to voters. In urging Arizona lawmakers to “choose” electors after Biden had already prevailed, Thomas’s messages claimed lawmakers could intervene in that process.

The records obtained by The Post do not show any response from Bowers, whose refusal to help overturn Biden’s victory in Arizona made him the target of a recall campaign. When Trump’s legal team pressed to replace Biden electors with Trump electors, Bowers released a public statement explaining that they were asking legislators to do something forbidden by state law.

“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election. I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him,” it said. “But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”

A spokesman for Bowers told The Post that hundreds of thousands of messages were sent to the speaker’s office in the post-election period. “Speaker Bowers did not see, much less read, the vast majority of those messages, including the form email sent by Mrs. Thomas,” said the spokesman, Andrew Wilder.

:{Bolick is married to Clint Bolick, an associate justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, who worked with Clarence Thomas early in his career and has said he considers the justice a mentor.

Shawnna Bolick wrote back to Ginni Thomas on Nov. 10, 2020, “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” She gave Thomas guidance on how to submit complaints about any of her experiences with voter fraud in Arizona.}:

:{Bolick, who is now seeking the Republican nomination to be Arizona’s secretary of state, told The Post that she received tens of thousands of emails in the months after the election and responded to Thomas in the same way she responded to everyone else.

Thomas replied: “Fun that this came to you! Just part of our campaign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”}:

In the reply, Thomas’s personal email address is visible, and it matches an address she has used previously, The Post confirmed. Under her message is an unusual tag line that has appeared in other emails that are confirmed to have been sent by Thomas, including in 2021 to the staff of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “Sent from Ginni’s iPhone, a by-product of entrepreneurial free market capitalism. Competition, hard work, innovations and lack of government interference make great things possible! God bless America!”

Thomas was then serving on the board ofCNP Action, the political advocacy arm of the Council for National Policy. CNP Action was using its influence in Republican circles at the time to try to keep Trump in office. On Nov. 13, 2020, CNP Action held a workshop titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” featuring, among other speakers, Cleta Mitchell, according to an agenda that researcher Brent Allpress provided to the left-leaning watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, which published it that same month. Mitchell, a lawyer, assisted Trump in his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia.

After that workshop, the group circulated guidance to focus efforts on legislators in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities at a time such as this,” read the guidance, which was also obtained by Allpress and first published by the Center for Media and Democracy. It said to push for new electors “in states where constitutional rights have been violated and evidence of substantial fraud has been established.”

The guidance advised visiting the website everylegalvote.com “to report fraud and take action.”

Visitors to the site could click a button and be taken to freeroots.com, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That landing page urged visitors to press the “take action” button to “email every swing House and Senate leader in one easy click.”

Because that landing page is no longer online, it is no longer possible to click through on the link. But language in Thomas’s first email aligns closely with language that appears in a preview when a FreeRoots link that was archived several days after that email is shared on messaging platforms.

The site everylegalvote.com initially said that it was produced in partnership with United in Purpose,a nonprofit group known for gathering and deploying data to galvanize conservative Christian voters. That organization has hosted the luncheons where Thomas presents her “Impact Awards.”

But the reference to United in Purpose was deleted within days. It was replaced with language identifying three “Founding Sponsors”: the Texas security firm Allied Security Operations Group, the Texas nonprofit group Liberty Center for God and Country, and the online talk show “Economic War Room.”

Representatives of United in Purpose and the three sponsors of everylegalvote.com did not respond to messages seeking comment. All three sponsors have promoted election-fraud claims, according to previous Post reports.

In the month after the election, the Trump campaign and other Republicans filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the outcome. By early December, Eastman and Giuliani were telling lawmakers in key swing states won by Biden that they had the authority and even the obligation to disregard the vote and select their own electors.

“Your argument is that essentially we have a failed election that would require the legislature to step in and assign electors. Am I correct?” a Georgia senator asked Eastman during a Dec. 3 hearing.

“Yes,” Eastman said.

The Dec. 13 emails repeated the claim that legislators could “choose” electors.

“As state lawmakers, you have the Constitutional power and authority to protect the integrity of our elections — and we need you to exercise that power now!” the email said. “Never before in our nation’s history have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional procedures.”

The two-minute video it linked to, titled “A Word To Heroic Legislators,” has since been removed from YouTube for violating community guidelines. The video’s Web address, which is visible in the email, was included in a December 2020 newsletter written by activistGeoffrey Botkin, who appears to be the person featured in the video.

Botkin, who has published numerous podcasts and videos about the election and other matters, wrote in the newsletter that he had uploaded “A Word To Heroic Legislators” to another video hosting service. The video remains visible there.

“I’m asking you to stand up and lead heroically,” Botkin says in the video, urging lawmakers to appoint electors.

“We have to admit, legally and politically it’s way too late for other people to do it. Clever lawyers or the Supreme Court, they cannot now come to the rescue,” he continues. “This is a moment, a unique moment in American history, demanding that state legislators set America back on her foundations by using a power that you may never have known that you had — but you do have it.”

Botkin did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The video link and some of the language in the email match language that appears in an archived version of the landing page for a freeroots.com email campaign organized by Act for America, a group that has accused U.S. Muslim organizations of supporting terrorism and of trying to impose Islamic law across the country.

A representative of Act for Americadid not respond to requests for comment.

On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. On that same day, Bolick was among dozens of Arizona lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”

Bolick told The Post she signed on to that effort because she backed the idea of an audit, not because of any communication she received from Thomas.}:

Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

More from Investigations

https://www.foiaresearch.net/organization/united-purpose

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United in Purpose1 is a shadowy right-wing Christian organization, bringing together major donors, political operatives and (evangelical) Christian leaders. The organization has been involved in a massive effort to map the US voter constituency, as well as priming sympathizing church leaders in spreading political propaganda, in order to persuade people to vote for the Republican party. Besides the potential illegality of United in Purpose’s large-scale data accumulation and exploitation endeavors, its major efforts towards a politization of churches raises serious issues about the separation of powers in the U.S.

United in Purpose is headed by the convicted felon William "Bill" Dallas,2 "who was sent to prison for two years for embezzlement of funds from his previous business, the real-estate company Lucas-Dallas, back in the early 1990s," according to a Forbes article.3 The activities of Dallas and United in Purpose are described in detail in chapter 8 of Katherine Stewart’s important publication on the rise of the religious Right, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.4

Profile of United in Purpose on GuideStar.

Image Source

https://www.guidestar.org/profile/26-2495973

In a piece in The Guardian Stewart described how during his prison term Dallas became devoted to Christian politicking5:

As Dallas became acclimated to life in prison, and with the assistance of some of the “lifers” he met there, he deepened his connection to God. He got a job at the prison’s TV station, working his way up to being a producer and on-air host.

When he left prison, he says, he was in the best mental, physical and spiritual shape of his life. But he still hadn’t paid his debts. Dallas owed multiple fines and taxes – one fine alone was close to $750,000. He immediately looked for ways to make a living.

In March 1998, Dallas had a holy visitation, telling him to start a satellite network delivering ministry training programs to churches around the country. And he did – conceiving of a national network of evangelical pastors and other church leaders. As it turns out, this was exactly what the growing Christian nationalist movement needed.

With the help of Silicon Valley businessmen including Reid Rutherford and venture capitalist John Mumford, Dallas’s Church Communication Network grew with exponential velocity.

But Dallas had a bolder vision. Working with thousands of pastors allowed him to reach literally millions of congregants – and potentially millions of voters. With marketing and communications increasingly driven by data mining, he knew there had to be a better way to mobilize the nation’s conservative Christians.

Dallas soon established a fruitful partnership with George Barna, the California–based evangelical pollster. It was a match made in heaven. Dallas realized his vast network could collect data and use it to create more effective messaging. And now he had the resources to make it happen.

That was when United in Purpose, based in Southlake, Texas, came into play. The organization, whose principal officer is Dallas, was founded in 2009 "by two Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Reid Rutherford and Ken Eldred, and registered with the IRS as a tax-exempt 'non-partisan organization that actively supports Christian involvement in the civic arena,'" according to Anne Nelson, author of The Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.6

By 2012 United in Purpose had compiled information on ca. 180 million Americans in a database, including psychometric data, allegedly by strategically buying existing constituent lists from unknown sources and synchronizing the data therein, according to a 2012 NPR report, among other reasons to identify non-voters, particularly non-voting Christians.7 Apparently United in Purpose also graded its constituents on the basis of relevant psychometric characteristics in order to single them out for targeting. According to NPR7:

You get points if you're on an anti-abortion list or a traditional marriage list. You get a point if you regularly attend church or home-school your kids. You get points if you like NASCAR or fishing. “If [your score] totaled over 600 points, then we realized you were very serious about your faith,” [William] Dallas says. “Then we run that person against the voter registration database. ... If they were not registered, that became one of the key people we were going to target to go after.”

The digital security specialist Chris Vickery discovered data from United in Purpose being accessible on a cloud storage in December 2015, basically every registered US voter (191 million voter records). “300GB of voter data, which includes names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, party affiliations, and logs of whether or not they had voted in primary or general elections. The data appears to date back to 2000.”8 It has been speculated by Vickery and others familiar with the matter that this data set found its way into theRepublican database, called Data Trust Voter Vault, as reported by a seminal 2020 documentary about the religious right and big data in the US, People You May Know, by Charles Kriel and Katharina Gellein Viken.9 According to Chris Vickery in People You May Know10:

There’s a company named Data Trust that is very close to the Republican Party, the GOP in America, so much to the point that I would say they could be considered the same entity. And then they add state voter files to, I assume, corroborate what’s in the RNC database. Then they add consumer purchasable data, such as from Experian. … Then they add lists that the candidate -- the campaign itself gives to them.

Sean Eib of Graphika, who had been analyzing Vickery’s evidence, stated in the documentary11:

Are these records the same as the GOP data trust? This is supposed to be the GOP’s central location for all their data. If you look at their total number of profiles, they’re pretty much neck and neck. Well, you went up by five million, you went up by five million. You’re not acknowledging a connection, but it seems like you guys sure do seem to get records all at the same time. It does not seem like it makes a whole lot of sense that an evangelical group would need 191 million profiles. There aren’t that many evangelicals in America. I think it's somewhere a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical, which would be like 75 million. So there’s definitely a lot of people that are in there that didn’t sign up for it.

Propaganda pastors

Besides the massive data gathering and psychometric grading efforts, reaching out to pastors and getting them to spread political messages has also become a major part of William Dallas' undertakings. According to a piece by Katherine Nelson in The New York Times, quoting Dallas12:

In a 2016 interview on Daystar TV, Mr. Dallas was even clearer: “We have a ministry consultant who will work with each church to help them get their people out to vote on Election Day.”

Furthermore, "United In Purpose is working with volunteers from organizations such as the Family Research Council to make calls and knock on doors," called "champions," according to NPR, presumably on the base of the data both organizations have gathered.7

Erik Prince's father Edgar Prince (1931-1995) had co-founded the Family Research Council, an ultra-reactionary anti-choice and anti-LGBTIQ hate group and lobby organization,13 together with the evangelical Christian leader James Dobson in 1983,where young Erik subsequently became an intern.14 The Family Research Council is currently headed by the ordained Southern Baptist pastor Tony Perkins, who is closely affiliated with former US Vice President Mike Pence, and had previously led the "plutotheocratic" supergroup Council for National Policy (CNP),6 an umbrella organization and networking group for high-level right-wing to far-right operatives. Bill Dallas, from 2014 to at least April 2020, was first a normal CNP member and then a "Gold Member."15

The CNP was co-founded by Paul Weyrich, from the 1970s until the 2000s arguably the most important éminence grise in the project to merge the secular and religious right in order to take over the Republican Party. The CNP is a big tent structure that consolidates many disparate elements of the secular and religious right and organizes meetings periodically to synchronize their various programs. A former Republican congressman, Bob McEwen, who also sits on the board of United in Purpose, is currently the president of the CNP.16

Trump era

In the Trump era, Dallas became a key figure in rallying U.S. evangelical churches behind the future president and the MAGA campaign. According to Katherine Stewart17:

[Bill] Dallas has also become a behind-the-scenes power player; he took a lead role in organizing the June 21, 2016, closed-door gathering between then presidential hopeful Donald Trump and more than 1,000 evangelical leaders from around the country. That gathering, which took place at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, marked a turning point in Trump’s political fortunes.

The author Anne Nelson specified in People You May Know18:

On June 21, 2016, they invited a thousand fundamentalist leaders to New York City to meet Trump on his home ground, and they cut a deal. And the deal was pretty transparently that they would lend their ground troops, their data operations, which were very advanced, and their strategists to the Trump campaign in exchange for three vital elements. One was allowing them to fully participate in the selection of federal judges. One was an evangelical council that was dominated by members of the Council for National Policy.

Katherine Stewart furthermore revealed that once Trump had won the presidential race, Dallas became a member of the steering team of Project Blitz, a massive effort to change legislation across the U.S. towards a right-wing Christian direction.19

In the run-up to the 2021 presidential campaign, The Intercept reported in 2020 that16

... United in Purpose received $75,000 from the Wellspring Committee, the same mysterious nonprofit that financed the television advertising campaign to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Another major donor to UIP is Maj. Gen. Vernon B. Lewis Jr., who retired from the military to foundMPRI, a defense contractor sold to L-3 Communications, and another defense consulting firm called Cypress International.

All the negative press did not deter United in Purpose from its activities, however it further obfuscated its already opaque existence. As of 2021, United in Purpose is still active, although its two websites show only a single front page, without any content or information being accessible. The domain unitedinpurpose.events leads to a website with a front page stating simply:The Ziklag Group.20 [Thanks to @hiporadic for this clue.]

According toThe Intercept, United in Purpose16:

... was crucial in connecting Trump to evangelical leaders in 2016, and it promises to be one of the most vital weapons in Trump’s reelection arsenal this year. At first, the effort may seem like a throwback. Participants in the group include televangelist preachers and anti-gay activists. David Barton, a historian that serves on the board of UIP, sells box sets of DVDs arguing that America was founded as a fundamentalist Christian nation with no separation of church and state. But the group, whose supporters include major donors to conservative causes, pastors, and political operatives with decades of winning elections, is serious about serving as the tip of the spear to maintain control of the White House. UIP’s 2020 election plan — which it calls “Ziklag,” a town referenced in the Bible — is a multipronged effort to connect Trump with evangelical leaders and increase support among minority voters through appeals to faith-based messages and church outreach.

Front page of unitedinpurpose.events as of 2021.

Image Source

https://unitedinpurpose.events/

Links

United in Purpose, https://www.unitedinpurpose.org.

United in Purpose, https://unitedinpurpose.events/

1.United in Purpose, https://www.unitedinpurpose.org.

2.“United in Purpose,” GuideStar, https://www.guidestar.org/profile/26-2495973.

3.Thomas Brewster, “Right-Wing Company Of Convicted Embezzler Turned Christian Linked To Huge Leaks Of US Voter Records,” Forbes, January 4, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/01/04/191-million-leak-bill-dallas-christian-anti-abortion/.

4.Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury, 2020), https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Power_Worshippers/Vd2yDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.

5.Katherine Stewart, “How a data-backed Christian nationalist machine helped Trump to power,” The Guardian, March 3, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/03/bill-dallas-christian-nationalist-right-donald-trump.

6.a. b. Anne Nelson, The Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right (Bloomsbury, 2019). (unpaged digital edition).

7.a. b. c. Barbara Bradley Hagerty, “To Get Out The Vote, Evangelicals Try Data Mining,” NPR, February 27, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/02/27/147504999/to-get-out-the-vote-evangelicals-try-data-mining.

8.Thomas Brewster, “191 Million US Voter Registration Records Leaked In Mystery Database,” Forbes, December 28, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/12/28/us-voter-database-leak/.

9.Charles Kriel & Katharina Gellein Viken, People You May Know, Documentary, UK, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12606876/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3. [ca. 0:13:46].

10.Kriel & Gellein Viken, People You May Know, [ca. 0:13:48].

11.Kriel & Gellein Viken, People You May Know, [ca. 0:21:00].

12.Katherine Stewart, "God’s Red Army," November 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/midterms-christian-right-election-day.html.

13.Catherine Brown and Ulrich Boser, "The DeVos Dynasty: A Family of Extremists," Center for American Progress, January 23, 2017, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/default/news/2017/01/23/296947/the-devos-dynasty-a-family-of-extremists/.

14.“Erik Prince,” Militarist Monitor, https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/erik-prince/.

15."April 2020 Membership Directory," Council for National Policy, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7241474/CNP-Membership-Directory-April-2020.pdf.

16.a. b. c. Lee Fang, “Inside the Influential Evangelical Group Mobilizing to Reelect Trump,” The Intercept, May 23, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/05/23/coronavirus-evangelical-megachurch-trump/.

17.Stewart, The Power Worshippers, https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Power_Worshippers/Vd2yDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22more+than+1,000+evangelical+leaders+from+around+the+country%22&pg=PT159&printsec=frontcover.

18.Kriel & Gellein Viken, People You May Know, [ca. 1:02:40].

19.Katherine Stewart, “A Christian Nationalist Blitz,” The New York Times, May 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/opinion/project-blitz-christian-nationalists.html.

20."The Ziklag Group," https://unitedinpurpose.events/.

GUK https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/03/bill-dallas-christian-nationalist-right-donald-trump

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How a data-backed Christian nationalist machine helped Trump to power

Donald Trump attends the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington – one of many things that links him and a network of conservative Christian nationalists.

With help from a vast evangelical network and data on almost the entire US voting population, the Christian right may have found the boost it needed

Katherine Stewart

Tue 3 Mar 2020

By his own account, Bill Dallas grew up in an unhappy household. His mother had been sexually abused by her father and had her first pregnancy aged 17. Dallas’s dad was an alcoholic and a depressive who died at 51. Dallas was an intense, obsessive child, dogged by feelings of inadequacy. You could say he was wired for the bitter schema of sin-and-salvation religion.

But despite his challenging start in life, he had clear talents. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, known for its vast academic offerings. He dreamed of becoming an actor and after graduating with honors, he moved to San Francisco. Blessed with photogenic looks, he modeled for “a major retail chain”. Soon Dallas was at the center of an energetic social whirl. He and his friends rented stretch limos and people gave him the nickname “Mr GQ”. Soon his connections started to yield fruit – and temptation. Dallas found his way into real estate and then the money began to pour in. But even as he accumulated outward signs of success, Dallas couldn’t shake the anxieties at his core. Then, things really fell apart.

Dallas has publicly offered few details of his crimes, but he was convicted of grand theft embezzlement and sentenced to prison. He was fined $772,000 in connection with illegal contributions to six candidates for city offices in Oakland.

As Dallas tells the story, he spent time in Susanville and then San Quentin prisons, moving into a cell on the fourth tier of North Block. It was there that his life began to turn around.

His prison experiences launched him towards a network of thousands of pastors, on the steering committee of Project Blitz, and in the cockpit of Christian nationalism’s taxpayer-subsidized, data-driven voter turnout machine.

Working with thousands of pastors let him reach millions of congregants – potentially millions of voters

In March 1998, Dallas had a holy visitation, telling him to start a satellite network delivering ministry training programs to churches around the country. And he did – conceiving of a national network of evangelical pastors and other church leaders. As it turns out, this was exactly what the growing Christian nationalist movement needed.

With the help of Silicon Valley businessmen including Reid Rutherford and venture capitalist John Mumford, Dallas’s Church Communication Network grew with exponential velocity.

Religious leaders pray with Donald Trump after he signed a proclamation for a national day of prayer.

Religious leaders pray with Donald Trump after he signed a proclamation for a national day of prayer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Dallas soon established a fruitful partnership with George Barna, the California–based evangelical pollster. It was a match made in heaven. Dallas realized his vast network could collect data and use it to create more effective messaging. And now he had the resources to make it happen.

Dallas set up United in Purpose (UiP), and by November 2016, he had thousands of conservative churches in reach. These “strategically cultivated support for a variety of pro-life, pro-family, limited government candidates in swing states,” according to Barna – all bound by the idea that “politics was one of the life spheres in which their faith should have influence”.

The initiative catapulted Dallas into the upper echelons of power. He appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s leaked 2014 membership list for the Council for National Policy. When Donald Trump met privately with evangelical leaders in June 2016, Bill Dallas helped organize the event.

The organization’s inner circle included some familiar names. These included David Barton, who acts as a “director”, contributing two hours per week to the cause but drawing no salary – according to UiP’s form 990s. Jim Garlow, the politically connected preacher, is another “director”. And the seasoned Republican operative Robert D McEwen – commonly known as Bob – received a salary of $18,000 for two hours’ work a week in 2017.

It’s not surprising to see David Barton’s name pop up here: he’s the Where’s Waldo of the Christian nationalist movement. Garlow, is recognizable from California’s rightwing political scene; a key force behind the passage of California’s 2008 anti– marriage equality amendment known as proposition 8.

Trump addresses the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington after his impeachment acquittal.

Trump addresses the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington after his impeachment acquittal. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

Bob McEwen is a telling addition. His lobbying work has put him in the company and on the payroll of a number of international political figures. He has longstanding ties to the Fellowship Foundation, also known as “the Family”, which organizes the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gathering of about 4,000 participants, hosted by members of Congress. That breakfast has long served as “a backdoor to American power”, according to Jeff Sharlet, who executive produced a Netflix documentary on the Family. The Family “[dispatches] representatives to build relationships with foreign leaders,” explains Sharlet. “The more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have.”

In December 2015, Chris Vickery, an information technology specialist who hunted for data breaches as a hobby, came upon a massive database on 191 million US citizens. It contained data belonging to registered voters, from cellphone numbers to evidence of gun ownership. A second breach contained even more detailed information – including income levels, whether the person was a fan of Nascar, had a “Bible lifestyle”, or had an interest in hunting or fishing.

After some sleuthing, Vickery thought he had a clear idea of where it all came from. It linked, he said, to Pioneer Solutions Incorporated, a company run by Bill Dallas. It also linked to a campaign titled “Champion the Vote”, run by UiP.

What we do is we track to see what’s going to make somebody vote either one way or not vote at all

But the real significance of Vickery’s discovery was the number of voters UiP had access to information on.

“We have about 200 million files, so we have pretty much the whole voting population in our database,” said Dallas. “What we do is we track to see what’s going to make somebody vote either one way or not vote at all.”

UiP assigns points to each individual in its database for characteristics that line up with conservative religious voting patterns. Individuals receive points if they are members of conservative churches or if they homeschool their children. They also get points if they appear to oppose marriage equality or abortion rights, or if they hunt, fish, or follow Nascar.

“If [your score] totaled over 600 points, then we realized you were very serious about your faith,” Dallas explains.

UiP’s first mission is to ensure all 600-pointers are registered to vote. For the 2012 election cycle, it aimed to register 5 million conservative Christians – a number Dallas believed could decide the presidency. In 2008, as he has pointed out, key states such as Florida, North Carolina and Missouri were decided by slim margins. Registering conservative Christians could make a difference.

Audience members pray before Trump at the Values Voter Summit in 2019.]

To do that, Dallas was able to access a ready army of volunteers, many recruited from organizations such as the Family Research Council or conservative churches.

All major political operations now rely on big data and activist networks in election campaigns. One key difference, however, is that UiP’s voter turnout machine is at the top of a long pyramid that largely operates in the religious sphere, almost all of which is exempt from taxes and shielded from public scrutiny.

Eldred said the upcoming midterm elections were about 'judges, judges, judges'

So where does UiP get its financing and other forms of support? One source of support, no doubt, is UiP chairman and tech multi-millionaire Ken Eldred. Eldred has donated generously to Republican campaigns, including those of Rick Perry and the disgraced former Alabama hopeful Roy Moore. At a breakfast hosted by UiP in 2018, Eldred said the upcoming midterm elections were about “judges, judges, judges” before leading the audience in prayer that “the Lord Jesus Christ would be the King of America once again”.

According to UiP’s own paperwork, their biggest funder by far is a single individual: Maj Gen Vernon B Lewis Jr. Lewis led a distinguished career in the army and, when he retired, co-founded two businesses. The first – a military training and education company – was fined $3.2m to resolve allegations of false labor charges on a contract to support the US army in Afghanistan.

Lewis’s other company, Cypress International, consults with the US Department of Defense and other federal government agencies, and claims to have “a deep understanding of business opportunities in the defense and homeland security sectors.”

Trump prays between Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, and Pastor Andrew Brunson, at the council’s annual gala in Washington in October.]

Lewis also founded the Lone Star Eagle, which offers syndicated content from Breitbart News Network and the Daily Caller. His contributions in the political arena are notable. He was a top sponsor for the Faith, Family and Freedom gala dinner for the 2019 Values Voters Summit. At that dinner, Trump delivered a lengthy address with the customary mix of falsehoods, boasting, and invective, and was received with multiple standing ovations.

On March 7 2016, Dallas and Eldred appeared with Marcus and Joni Lamb on a Christian broadcasting network, to deliver a clear message to viewers: vote – the “right” way.

Lamb cut straight to what that meant. “Recently same-sex marriage became the law of the land,” he said, knitting his fulsome eyebrows. “And principally it happened because Christians didn’t vote in the presidential election, and supreme court justices who were very liberal were appointed to the bench.”

Dallas was the guy with the numbers and a plan: “Ninety million Christians, OK, and 39 million don’t get involved,” he said. “If they got involved, eventually the fragrance of this country would have a Christ-like fragrance.”

In response to a question about what churches can do, Dallas continued: “They can go to championthevote.com. We’ll help the pastor determine who is registered or not registered in their congregation.” Referring to UiP’s special toolkit for pastors, Dallas says: “We provide … like I make my brownies, ‘just add water’ – tools. Contact us! We have a ministry consultant who will work with each church to help them get their people out to vote on election day.”

UiP’s pastor-focused initiative, Project 75, aims at “mobilizing 75% of church members to VOTE”. The program features a Church Voter Lookup Tool, which promises to “run your church database all at once.” It provides reports on what percentage of a congregation is registered to vote, what percentage actually voted in the last election, and after each election, they provide a follow up reports to track progress.

UiP was at the epicenter of a dense web of faith-based initiatives aimed at turning out conservative Christians for Trump and Pence. The religious right is not a single organization, and yet it is surprisingly well organized. It may be perceived as a grassroots movement, not answering in a formal way to a command-and-control hierarchy. But it is the big-picture strategists who are, to a largely under-appreciated degree, acting as its architects and engineers.

In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Dallas appeared on Andrew Wommack’s Truth & Liberty Coalition broadcast to discuss the Trump-Russia scandal.

Virginia Thomas, the wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has hosted awards for United in Purpose.]

“Christians, we don’t have the right to sit back and not engage. We have a duty and a responsibility,” said Dallas. “It is so important how we lay the foundation of the judges, both at the supreme court level and at the federal levels, so that we get the right judges in place.” Referring to a Christian nationalist voter awareness event, which would be taking place at Wommack’s Charis Bible College, Dallas said: “This is the Super Bowl where Christians are going to gather in our country.”

At some point in 2018, the website for United in Purpose was scrubbed. All that remained was a splash page.Nevertheless, its profile within the Christian nationalist movement continued to climb. UiP was a co-sponsor of the 2018 Values Voter Summit in Washington DC, alongside the Family Research Council and other top organizational players.

UiP also doles out awards to hard-right leaders. At a ceremony in 2017, which took place at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, awardees included the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo; Frank Gaffney, who has warned of a Muslim Brotherhood plot to infiltrate the conservative movement; and Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn. Other awards went to Sean Hannity and Richard Viguerie. The awards were introduced by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the president of Liberty Consulting and the wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. In 2018, it was Fox News host Mark Levin’s turn to collect UiP’s outstanding impact award.

It remains to be seen whether UiP’s visibility outside of the Christian nationalist hothouse will increase as the 2020 presidential election approaches. In early 2018, before it was taken down, a question appeared on the UiP website: “Is it possible to transform American culture by bringing together conservative Christian organizations to act in unity to reach their shared goals?” The answer was “a resounding YES”. And, it said, it was “Just getting started…‘Transformation through Unity’ is a reality that is building momentum as we look to 2018, 2020 and beyond.”

This is an editedextract from The Power Worshippers:Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart (Bloomsbury, $28.00) on 3 March

UIP united in purpose

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