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EXTREMISM MOJO

To Understand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the “TheoBros”

These extremely online young Christian men want to end the 19th Amendment, restore public flogging, and make America white again.

Kiera Butler November+December 2024 Issue

*Our November+December issue investigates the Christian nationalist movement that aspires to take over government at all levels, from school boards and state legislatures to Congress and the Supreme Court. Read the series of stories here.

On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.

For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.

In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.

The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”

“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism—but a lot of us find that terrifying.”

The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.

Clockwise from top-left: Douglas Wilson, Joel Webbon, Josh Abbotoy, Andrew Isker, William Wolfe, and Brian SauvéYouTube

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”

Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)

Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”

:In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.}:

Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.

Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”

Melek Zertal

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.

Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.

“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.

Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”

On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”

But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher of American Reformer. (The publication’s cofounder, Nate Fischer, later clarified to Mother Jones that Buskirk’s listing in the filing had been a clerical error, and that he was actually a board member of American Reformer.) In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and theAmerican Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”

In his keynote at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

*Correction, September 19: An earlier version of this article inaccurately described Chris Buskirk’s role at American Reformer.

Update, January 14: After this story was published, Nate Fischer, CEO of New Founding and co-founder of American Reformer, clarified toMother Jonesthat Buskirk’s listing in tax filings as the editor and publisher ofAmerican Reformerhad been a “clerical error (presumably copying his bio fromAmerican Greatness, where he was editor and publisher)” and that Buskirk was actually a board member ofAmerican Reformer. The sentence has been revised.*

{Read our full investigation into the rise of Christian nationalism.*}:

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AN 9 25

The Guardian reports the Friday National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. hosted a wide variety of far-right religious extremists, from men-only secret societies to theocratic right-wing pundits and associations.

Other event speakers were closely associated with the secretive Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an invitation-only, Christian ultra-nationalist network with “undercurrents of neo-fascist accelerationism,” according to a Middlebury Institute report.

Mingling and mixing among the theocrats, however, were Trump officials.

“NatCon is filled with extremists touting white nationalism and conspiracy theories,” said Heidi Beirich, the chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “What is notable is how Trump administration officials and allies are key players in the event, showing that it is near impossible today to distinguish the far right from the administration.”

IFrame Content

One speech by White house “border czar” Tom Homan contained warnings for the city of Chicago, which Trump is threatening to douse with federal agents and national guard troops, as he already has in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

“I said two months ago, we’re going to flood the zone and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Homan told the crowd. “In Chicago, it’s coming. So, watch what happens in the very near future.”

The Guardian reports Trump’s deputy attorney general, Harmeet Dhillon, gave her own speech in which she characterized the justice department’s civil rights division as “the president’s shock troops.”

“We’re the front guard. We are going to go first and clear the way for others to do their work,” said Dhillon, who has assigned civil rights lawyers to investigate anti-genocide campus protests and perceived “anti-Christian bias.”

Other administration figures speaking at NatCon included Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and Small Business Administration leader and former senator, Kelly Loeffler.

These Trump officials shared screen time with leading figures of the so-called “new right,” an anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist far-right movement “whose reactionary views have undergirded the Trump administration’s actions,” according to the Guardian. They also shared space with Society for American Civic Renewal Co-founder Charles Haywood — a regular engagement farmer on X — who recently posted: “Has a single (subcontinent) Indian ever accomplished anything of truly major note in the modern period?”

The Guardian reports the conference also featured “prominent faces from the universe of thinktanks surrounding the Trump administration who have signed on to, or even devised the Project 2025 agenda that has provided a blueprint for Trump’s actions in its first months.” This included Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, whose speech “leaned into male grievance and anti-immigrant sentiment,” according to the Guardian.

Read the full Guardian report at this link.

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The president of the rightwing Claremont Institute and another senior Claremont official are both closely involved with the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”, and which experts say is rooted in extreme Christian nationalism and religious autocracy.

The revelations emerge from documents gathered in public records requests, including emails between several senior members of SACR: Claremont president Ryan P Williams; its director of state coalitions and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor; and others including former soap manufacturer and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood.

Ron DeSantis ally Chris Rufo has close ties with ‘dissident right’ magazine

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/chris-rufo-im-1776-far-right-desantis)}:

The trove also contains an “internal” SACR “mission statement” with a far more radical edge than the public “vision” now recorded on the organization’s website.

That document speaks of recruiting a “brotherhood” who will “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and who “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise”; whose “objectives” include to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime”.

The document does not indicate that such “renewal” will take place through participation in electoral contests, and nor does it make mention of the US constitution.

Along with the financial links between the SACR and Claremont – the Guardian previously reported Claremont’s $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 – the documents raise questions as to what extent SACR is an initiative of the Claremont Institute, and to what extent its participants have abandoned liberal, secular or democratic politics.

The Guardian contacted Ryan Williams, Claremont’s president, for comment on his involvement in SACR, and on the extent of Claremont’s ties to the organization.

In an email he said: “While the Claremont Institute acted as a fiscal sponsor to help the Society for American Civic Renewal establish itself as an incorporated 501(c)(10), that was the end of any corporate collaboration between the Claremont Institute and SACR.”

He added: “As a founding board member of SACR in my personal capacity, obviously I think that a fraternal order dedicated to civic and cultural renaissance and rooted in community, virtue, and wisdom is a very good thing.”

Williams also confirmed that he continues to serve as a SACR board member.

The Guardian also contacted Scott Yenor and Boise State University for comment.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, said of the SACR documents: “Their planned regime is obviously far from a multiracial democracy. The documents appear to be describing a religious autocracy.”

Laura K Field, a writer, political theorist and senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a Washington thinktank, said the documents expressed “extreme Christian nationalism” where “a particular kind of Christianity should dominate as an ideal, and that it should dominate permanently”.

Yenor and SACR

Scott Yenor is a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University and simultaneously the senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute.

His Claremont appointment came in February 2023. Media reports at that time indicated that Yenor would be working closely with the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and DeSantis-aligned legislators; when the job was announced the governor’s wife, Casey Desantis, tweeted: “Thrilled to welcome Scott Yenor from the Claremont Institute to his new home in Tallahassee.”

Reporting in the New York Times last month put Yenor at the center of a network of activists tied to Claremont and other rightwing nonprofits to wage an “anti-DEI crusade” against diversity, equity, and inclusion measures in educational institutions, corporations and public agencies.

Unreported until now is Yenor’s place as an ideological and organizational leader in SACR, and the radical nature of that organization’s aims as understood by he and other core members.

SACR is structured as a 501(c)(10) body under the section of US tax law that provides nonprofit status for organizations “with a fraternal purpose”.

In 2020 the umbrella organization was incorporated in Indiana with Charles Haywood as principal, and the first local lodge was established in Dallas, Texas. Subsequently, three local lodges were established in Idaho: in Boise and Couer d’Alene in 2021, and Moscow in 2022.

Idaho company filings show that Scott Yenor became president and the only listed principal officer of the Boise lodge on 5 August 2023.

Secrecy at SACR

But emails indicate that he had taken a board role in the national organization even earlier than that date.

On 25 January 2023, lawyer Clyde Taylor – now at Wagenmaker Law but until 2019 an associate at the rightwing litigation firm the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty – wrote to Haywood and Skyler Kressin about their trademark application for the SACR logo.

Haywood forwarded the lawyer’s email to Yenor, Claremont president Williams, and Nathanial “Nate” Fischer, copying in Kressin on two addresses including one hosted at SACR’s sacr.us domain.

“We should probably have a board meeting to discuss this, finances, etc,” Haywood wrote in response to Yenor, suggesting Yenor and the others he copied in were members of that body.

Haywood added a suggestion on encrypted messaging services, indicating an imperative of secrecy inside SACR. “I vote we create a new Signal group and have a board meeting. Any takers?” he said. The group was then set up.

The Guardian reported last August that on his website Haywood has repeatedly envisioned serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” which might at some point find itself in conflict with the federal government.

Haywood has also expressed a desire to recruit “shooters” to help defend the “extended, quite sizeable, compound” he occupies on the western fringe of Carmel, Indiana. According to documents lodged with the city of Carmel, the latest construction project on Haywood’s compound is a six-bedroom faux-classical mansion with a central library room that occupies both of the building’s floors.

He has funded SACR through his Howdy Doody Good Times foundation to the tune of at least $50,000, according to 2021 and 2022 tax filings, along with at least $50,000 to the Claremont Institute.

In the same report, the Guardian revealed that Kressin, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, appears to serve a key administrative role in SACR. Idaho and Texas company records show that Kressin incorporated lodges in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Dallas; serves as a director of the Coeur d’Alene and Dallas lodges; and was named as the principal officer of the parent organization on its 2020-2021 tax return.

The Guardian reported last September that Fischer, a Claremont Lincoln fellow, was president of SACR’s Dallas lodge and owns a firm that has won hundreds of thousands of dollars in government ammunition contracts. He also owns another firm that helped produce videos in which Claremont chairman Thomas Klingenstein exhorted rightwingers to join in a “cold civil war” against “woke communists”.

The Guardian contacted Nate Fischer, Skyler Kressin and Charles Haywood for comment.

Neither Kressin nor Haywood responded. Fischer did not respond directly, but on Friday morning on X, formerly Twitter, he left a 900-word post offering some material from internal SACR documents, admitting that the Guardian’s reporting had led him to the conclusion that “this is a good time to share more about the organization.

SACR’s mission: ‘dominance’ and ‘authority’ in an ‘new aligned regime’

Another document suggests reasons that SACR’s leadership might want to avoid scrutiny: in internal discussions. “Civic renewal” appears to equate to regime change in America.

The document is one of two Yenor attached to a 27 April 2021 email, sent from his Boise State email address to a personal email address. The email text simply says “print”.

The SACR document contains two versions of the organization’s “mission statement” – one “public” and one “internal” – along with a list of “objectives” for the organization.

Its authenticity as a working document is indicated by the current “vision” articulated on SACR’s website, which currently features what appears to be a reworked version of the “public” mission statement.

The 2021 document envisions “a vigorous civic renewal that will reflect the past while facing the future”, while the website sets out a “new thing for a new day, informed by the wisdom of the past but facing the future”. Each version promises to “reclaim a humane vision of society”.

A harder-edged “internal” mission statement, however, stands in stark contrast to these anodyne public presentations.

It first announces: “Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society’s decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.”

The document says the organization’s founders are “un-hyphenated Americans, and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.”

It says: “We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance” of their beliefs.

In terms of recruiting, the document says: “Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.”

Further down, the document specifies five organizational “objectives” that encompass nepotistic business practices, the grooming of new and emerging “elites” within SACR, and, experts say, an apparently insurrectionary political project.

The first objective is to “identify and provide formation for local elites … capable of exercising authority and who are aligned with our goal of complete civic renewal”, and warning that “concrete temporal achievements, not furthering intellectual discussion”.

The second objective is to help those local elites build “fraternal networks which will advance both the members of those networks and our collective goals” including “direct preferential treatment for members, especially in business”.

The third objectives to coordinate across the “fraternal networks” to bring “political awareness” to matters such as “hiring and promotion; award of contracts; internal policies and procedures; and leadership succession”.

A fifth objective is to “collect, curate and document a list of potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime”, who would likely not be founding participants, but “ … men who grow up in the system”.

Asked what an “aligned regime” might look like, Williams, the Claremont Institute’s president, wrote: “It would, more likely than not, be some form of the US constitutional order, but with much higher fidelity to that order before it was corrupted and subverted by modern progressivism.”

Perhaps ominously, a fourth objective is to “defend fraternal networks, our own and allies, against attacks by those opposed to civic renewal, and strongly deter such attacks”, though no details are offered on what form this defense or deterrence might take.

Although the document makes reference to America’s founding, Field, the Niskanen fellow, said that it contradicted its spirit.

“George Washington, Jefferson, [and] Madison all embraced religious pluralism very explicitly, and the constitution reflects that,” she said.

“This is anti-constitutional, and I think many, many faithful Christians would say it’s anti-Christian.”

Beirich, the extremism expert, said the mission statement and objectives were “essentially a stealth plan to replace everything about the current government with a religious autocracy”, with the addition of an effort to “fashion young people behind closed doors for the eventual takeover of the regime, right?”

“They’re going to grow them up as Christian autocrats.”

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an 10 24

Founded by the late Harry V. Jaffa, a former speechwriter for then-Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), back in 1979, the Claremont Institute was once a very mainstream conservative think tank. But in recent years, Claremont has taken a far-right ultra-MAGA turn — repeatedly praising former President Donald Trump, promoting Christian nationalism, and arguing that democracy and traditional conservatism have outlived their usefulness.

In 2021, Claremont's American Mind website published a controversial essay by senior fellow Glenn Ellmers, who wrote, "Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term." Ellmer's piece was slammed as dangerous and troubling by many Never Trump conservatives, including writers for The Bulwark.

Claremont remains fully committed to Trump and the MAGA agenda. In an article published on October 22, The Guardian's Jason Wilson details Claremont Chairman's Thomas Klingenstein's activities as a GOP megadonor and his efforts to put Trump back in the White House.

READ MORE:[Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools

Klingenstein, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) figures reported by Wilson, has contributed more than $10 million to Republicans in 2024.

"Klingenstein has been one of Claremont's largest donors for decades," Wilson explains. "As the Institute has made its hard-right, pro-Trump drift in recent years, Klingenstein has continued to publicly describe U.S. politics with extremist rhetoric, calling it a 'cold civil war,' and has encouraged right-wingers to join the fight to defeat what he calls 'the woke regime.' His spending puts him at the forefront of a class of donors who are explicitly supporting more extreme and polarizing politics in Trump's Republican Party."

The Guardian reporter adds, "The largesse has already dwarfed his contributions in previous election seasons. The money has gone exclusively to Republicans, and has included seven-figure donations to at least four pro-Trump PACs in recent months."

Wilson notes, however, that Klingenstein's donations to the GOP in 2024 may be more than $10 million — as FEC data obtained by The Guardian only reflects donations made as of early July.

READ MORE:[Conservative think tank linked to 'shadowy' group pushing 'extreme Christian nationalism'

"His heightened giving has coincided with Claremont's embrace of Trumpism, which writers — including Laura Field — have argued has transformed it from a respected conservative think tank into a propaganda juggernaut that envisions a radical remaking of the U.S. along far-right lines," Wilson warns. "The Guardian has reported extensively on the Claremont Institute's ties to radical far-right politics. Claremont's president is one of the senior figures there who are members of the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the U.S. government with an authoritarian 'aligned regime.' Claremont has also provided direct funding for SACR." GUK

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an 3 24

For many years, the Claremont Institute had a reputation for being a conventional conversative think tank.

Claremont was founded in 1979 by students of the late Harry V. Jaffa, who had been a speechwriter for the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona). The Claremont of the 1980s and 1990s was right-of-center but not far-right.

In recent years, however, Claremont has taken a decidedly MAGA turn that many critics, including Never Trump conservatives, have described as radical and extreme.

The Guardian's Jason Wilson, in an article published on March 11, examines Claremont's ties to the far-right Christian nationalist group, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).

Wilson describes SACR as a "shadowy" group and "an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the U.S. government with an authoritarian 'aligned regime,' and which experts say is rooted in extreme Christian nationalism and religious autocracy."

"The revelations emerge from documents gathered in public records requests, including e-mails between several senior members of SACR: Claremont President Ryan P. Williams; its director of state coalitions and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor; and others, including former soap manufacturer and would-be 'warlord' Charles Haywood," Wilson explains. "The trove also contains an 'internal' SACR 'mission statement'” with a far more radical edge than the public 'vision' now recorded on the organization's website."

The "mission statement," according to Wilson, calls for a "renewed American regime" that will recruit a "brotherhood" and "understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise."

READ MORE:[These MAGA Republicans long for a 'Red Caesar' to 'impose a dictatorship' on America

"The document does not indicate that such 'renewal' will take place through participation in electoral contests, and nor does it make mention of the U.S. Constitution," Wilson notes. "Along with the financial links between the SACR and Claremont — the Guardian previously reported Claremont’s $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 — the documents raise questions as to what extent SACR is an initiative of the Claremont Institute, and to what extent its participants have abandoned liberal, secular or democratic politics."

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, warns that the "mission statement" raises troubling questions about SACR.

Beirich told The Guardian, "Their planned regime is obviously far from a multiracial democracy. The documents appear to be describing a religious autocracy."

*Read the Guardian's full report at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/claremont-institute-2664245651/

an 8 23 no lnx

This 'creepy' men-only group is feeding an 'apocalyptic view of America' to a conservative think tank

Alex Henderson August 22, 2023

Founded in 1979, the Claremont Institute was once a mainstream conservative think tank along the lines of the Heritage Foundation. But in recent years, Claremont has taken an ultra-MAGA turn and become a bastion of extreme ideas and conspiracy theories.

A key figure in Claremont is attorney John C. Eastman, known for promoting a game plan for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In an article published by The Guardian on August 22, journalist Jason Wilson examines a "secret men-only" group with "financial ties" to Claremont: the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), founded by former industrialist Charles Haywood.

Wilson reports, "SACR's most recent IRS filing names Haywood as the national organization's principal officer… SACR's public-facing presence is confined to a slick one-page website advertising the organization's goal as 'civilizational renaissance' and a society 'with strong leadership committed to family and culture.' The site claims SACR is 'raising accountable leaders to help build thriving communities of free citizens' who will rebuild 'the frontier-conquering spirit of America.'"

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, describes the website's rhetoric as "palingenetic ultra-nationalism," which, Wilson notes, is "a feature of fascism that proposes a revolution as a means of national rebirth."

Haywood, according to Wilson, has been featured on Claremont's podcasts. And Haywood is so far to the right that even Rod Dreher, a former American Conservative columnist, has described him as "seriously bats***t crazy."

Wilson reports, "One idea (Haywood) has repeatedly raised on the website is that he might serve as a'warlord'at the head of an 'armed patronage network' or 'APN,' defined as an 'organizing device in conditions where central authority has broken down' in which the warlord's responsibility is 'the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest.'The 'possibilities involving violence' that APNs might face, Haywood writes include 'more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it.'"

READ MORE: Why disbarment could be the least of MAGA lawyer John Eastman’s problems

Haywood openly praised the January 6, 2021 rioters in an article published by The Worthy House on March 21, 2021. Haywood wrote, "The protest was pretty awesome in every way. Its most precise analog in American history…. is the Boston Tea Party.'

https://archive.is/6eSlQ

The Niskanen Center's Laura K. Field believes that Claremont has taken a dangerous turn — including its association with SACR.

Field told The Guardian, "Some of the Claremont Institute's leaders have taken on an apocalyptic view of America and think we're already in a situation where our society is more conflict-ridden than we were before the Civil War."

Field, discussing Claremont's ties to SACR, warned, "What's creepy about the local-level stuff is that this country has a history of local autocracy.… The way they're acting undermines the rule of law."

READ MORE: How a far-right MAGA think tank is feeding Ron DeSantis' 'anti-woke' obsessions: report

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.

lnx

founded in 1979, the Claremont Institute was once a mainstream conservative think tank along the lines of the Heritage Foundation. But in recent years, Claremont has taken an ultra-MAGA turn and become a bastion of extreme ideas and conspiracy theories.

A key figure in Claremont is attorney John C. Eastman, known for promoting a game plan for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

POLL:Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, describes the website's rhetoric as "palingenetic ultra-nationalism," which, Wilson notes, is "a feature of fascism that proposes a revolution as a means of national rebirth."

Wilson reports, "One idea (Haywood) has repeatedly raised on the website is that he might serve as a 'warlord' at the head of an 'armed patronage network' or 'APN,' defined as an 'organizing device in conditions where central authority has broken down' in which the warlord's responsibility is 'the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest.' The 'possibilities involving violence' that APNs might face, Haywood writes include 'more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it.'"

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Feds to MTG: Tell us more about that anti-Islam, Nazi-adjacent provocateur who used your credit card

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