ziklag
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YT PRETTY GOOD ANALYSIS
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/the-christian-right-tried-to-make
The Christian Right tried to make a late-night talk show—and it bombed spectacularly
Eric Metaxas and his backers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to copy Fallon and Kimmel. They forgot to hire talent.
Oct 09, 2025
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The ongoing joke about Christian culture is that it’s a sad attempt to replicate everything that’s great about secular culture. Christian movies like God’s Not Dead are bad because they’re more interested in hammering you over the head with a religious message than telling a decent nuanced story (or hiring good actors). Contemporary Christian Music might be catchy but the Jesus-heavy lyrics are so predictable, South Park can spoof it with remarkable accuracy. Even attempts to make overly right-wing sitcoms are embarrassing; it becomes very clear, very quickly, that acting and writing talent are low priorities for the people writing checks.
The bottom line is that when it comes to popular culture, Christians
that are never as good as the real thing.
The same apparently goes for late-night talk shows.
According to The Guardian, a wealthy conservative group spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” developing a late-night talk show hosted by conspiracy theorist Eric Metaxas. At least four pilot episodes were filmed and they were so bad that the show was picked up by literally no one.
As you watch the “highlight” clip below, it becomes glaringly obvious the money was spent on the set and not on hiring joke-writers.
The Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk Show, and found it to be an almost exact copy of existing late-night shows, just worse: with hack jokes about tired issues and has-been, conservative guests. The show was never picked up, presumably to the chagrin of Ziklag and its investors, who had lofty expectations.
…
Unfortunately, across the four pilots, Metaxas’s comedic bent was noticeable only by its absence.
…
Ziklag claimed the show would welcome “guests who are routinely shadow banned on other talk shows”, and quoted Metaxas as saying: “It’s kind of like Stalin has air-brushed these people out of the culture.”
But the common theme among the guests was that they had been naturally phased out of existing talkshows due to their irrelevance.
…
Ziklag’s pitch to investors had promised big-name guests. It didn’t deliver apart from an interview – heavily touted by Metaxas – with film-maker Ron Howard. The interview turned out to be from a press junket, where directors or actors sit in a room for eight hours and basically anyone with a press pass can schedule time to question them.
The news here is not that Metaxas filmed the talk show. In fact,
are
and have been available since January of 2023. The news is how much money was spent on this project, who funded it, and how badly it failed.
The project was funded by a group called Ziklag.
In the Bible, the town of Ziklag is where the character David lives for a time while he’s being persecuted. It’s his safe space. It’s a place from which David can plan counterattacks. But as reporting from Andy Kroll of ProPublica and Nick Surgey of Documented showed in 2024, the Christians behind Ziklag had assets of “nearly $12 million” to make sure Republicans were mobilizing their base while also trying to purge Democrats from the voter rolls in swing states.
The Guardian got ahold of “leaked documents” from Ziklag showing that they were seeking up to $500,000 to film episodes of the talk show so that they could pitch the show to “digital distributors, networks and tv ownership groups.”
“Spoiler alert! The secular elites who currently reign over late-night tv are about to find out the joke’s on them!” Ziklag’s pitch email read. It lauded Metaxas, a conservative radio host and author who was an eager proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claiming: “His comedic bent has gone largely unnoticed until now that is…”
…
In its email, Ziklag said it was offering the opportunity to invest as part of the “Media Mountain”, a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate, a theology popular among the Christian right. The theology proposes that Christians should seek to take over seven spheres of influence in public life: religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment and business.
It’s unbelievable that people with this much money couldn’t see that Metaxas is a talentless hack—How much does it cost to buy a clue?—and believed this kind of humorless show would be an alternative for people who can’t handle the razor-sharp political satire of… Jimmy Fallon.
The producer of the show insisted to The Guardian that this whole thing is being mischaracterized. They weren’t trying to create a right-wing talk show or even a Christian one. They were trying to create a universally beloved show rather than one where Republicans were always the butts of the jokes.
Chris Himes, who produced the Talk Show, said the show was not intended to be a “rightwing late-night show”. The aim, Himes said, was “to create a broad, throwback late-night program for the entire country – not just one side”.
“These are not partisan or ‘right-wing’ shows. Think Letterman or Dick Cavett in tone: humor first, with no space for snark or ‘clapter’,” he said in an email.
“Sadly, much of late night over the past decade has shifted from being genuinely funny to becoming a vehicle for tribal signaling – even occasionally straying into messaging far beyond comedy. We believe the country deserves something better.”
Himes added: “To be clear, a ‘right-wing’ late-night show would be a terrible idea. What we’re building is something more essential: a genuinely funny, unifying alternative.”
The problem with that assessment is that the shows they made weren’t funny. Plus, avoiding politics takes away the main reason so many people enjoy late night talk shows; it’s a way of informing them about the news without being so damn boring. A show that allows right-wing guests to talk about their lives and humanize themselves could find an audience, I would think, but bringing on those guests and then ignoring politics is just a waste of everyone’s time. What’s the point of watching a late-night comedy show if it doesn’t tackle current events or ask pointed questions revolving around the guests’ relevance?
It’s also a mark of stupidity for Himes to pretend the problem with current late-night hosts is that they’re too one-sided. When Republicans with power do so much damage to the country, through cruelty and ignorance and their embrace of extremism, they deserve to be ridiculed and condemned for their actions. Anyone who claims to be in the political center, at this point in our history, is someone who doesn’t understand the stakes. They deserve to be ignored.
“The Talk Show” is hardly apolitical, though. You just have to know where to look. In one monologue, when Metaxas
about Biden possibly dropping out of the presidential race, he says “Yesterday, President—’president’—Biden shocked the nation when he said he might not run for a second term.” Metaxas literally puts air-quotes around the word “president” as if Biden wasn’t legitimately elected.
[
](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!F5wb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb5da53a0-913d-40ee-b3af-1bf186924823_1812x1014.png)
Himes is also wrong that there’s currently no “alternative” to liberal late-night hosts. Bill Maher is hardly a liberal ally at this point with his routine demonization of trans people and “wokeness.” And the most popular late-night talk show right now is Gutfeld! on Fox News—not because host Greg Gutfeld is funny but because it’s on Fox. Those shows regularly punch down by mocking the marginalized—something Metaxas has been doing for years—but even they have professional staffs.
No one needed this show. And even if there was room for another late-night host, they picked the wrong guy to helm this particular ship because Metaxas is just unlikeable.We’re talking about a guy who tweeted this in response to a thoughtless comment from Joe Biden:
[
](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FuL2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa479cf0-d4cb-4d4a-b4b0-76830680d246_1182x1130.png)
He sucker-punched a guy on a bike. He’s literally the poster boy for how white evangelicals have lost their damn minds in the age of Trump. He believes so many right-wing conspiracies, it’s hard to keep track at this point.
Which is a long way of saying Ziklag is funded by very foolish people. The sort of people who believe the problem with late-night talk shows is not enough Eric Metaxas and not enough jokes that appeal to nobody. I could have told them that for $100,000 and saved them a lot of hassle.
We shouldn’t be surprised this vanity project failed because it just reveals the rot at the center of white evangelical culture and the cynical machinery that funds it. Christian entertainment has always operated under the delusion that religious sincerity can replace substance. This show, however, exposed something darker: a movement so insulated by ideology and grievance that it no longer understands what art, humor, or relevance even look like. Metaxas’ show is a parody of itself—a joyless imitation of secular creativity, built by people who can’t tell the difference between propaganda and truth. This show is what happens when no one in your life has the decency to tell you that you’re untalented and full of shit.
When late-night comedy is done well, it’s a place to speak truth to power, as we saw with Jimmy Kimmel. But in the hands of Metaxas and his supporters, it’s a place to soothe the powerful with lies, a place where the news doesn’t matter because the producers don’t think there’s anything happening that viewers need to know about.
This project didn’t just fail because the host doesn’t know what he’s doing. It failed because there’s as much heart and soul in it as there is laughter: none. Without that passion, why the hell would anyone waste their time watching it?
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PressReader.com
https://www.pressreader.com › usa › the-guardian-usa › 20251009 › 281788520259090
A rightwing late-night show may have bombed - PressReader
3 days agoThe Talk Show With Eric Metaxas, Ziklag wrote, will "change that forever". The email said the show needed $400,000 to $500,000 to film five pilot episodes, "which will be presented to digital distributors, networks and tv ownership groups". The Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk
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MSN
'Audible groans' as Christian nationalist org's late-night ... - MSN
The Guardian reports Ziklag claimed the show would welcome "guests who are routinely shadow banned on other talk shows," and quoted Metaxas as saying: "It's kind of like Stalin has air ...
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Cracked.com
This Christian Nationalist Late-Night Show Bombed Massively in Its ...
4 days agoHowever, after shopping the show to that same cabal of godless network executives, Ziklag failed to find a buyer. According to The Guardian, which suffered through all five pilot episodes of The Talk Show with Eric Metaxas that earned a stern "pass" from even the most Rupert-Murdoch-owned networks, "The Talk Show was a terrible product, memorable only for dreadful humor and snooze ...
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friendlyatheist.com
https://www.friendlyatheist.com › p › the-christian-right-tried-to-make
The Christian Right tried to make a late-night talk show—and it bombed ...
3 days agoThe Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk Show, and found it to be an almost exact copy of existing late-night shows, just worse: with hack jokes about tired issues and has-been, conservative guests. The show was never picked up, presumably to the chagrin of Ziklag and its investors, who had lofty expectations. … Unfortunately, across the four pilots, Metaxas's comedic bent ...
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inkl
A rightwing late-night show may have bombed - but the… - inkl
4 days agoDanny Bonaduce (left) appears on the Talk Show with Eric Metaxas. Photograph: Obtained by the Guardian A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right's ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture. News of the ...
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Documented
Documented | How the Christian Right Is Twisting the Legacy of an…
Nov 5, 2024Internal videos produced by Ziklag, obtained by the Guardian and Documented, detail Ziklag's 2024 election strategy, pledging $800,000 to "focus on rallying the church behind biblically based voting using Eric Metaxas' new documentary, Letter to the American Church."
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Democracy Now!
https://www.democracynow.org › 2024 › 7 › 30 › inside_ziklag_andy_kroll_propublica
Ziklag Exposed: Secretive Christian Nationalist Network Tries to Purge ...
Jul 30, 2024Ziklag Exposed: Secretive Christian Nationalist Network Tries to Purge Voters in Battleground States Story July 30, 2024 Watch Full Show Volume 90%
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ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org › article › inside-ziklag-secret-christian-charity-2024-election
Inside Ziklag, the Christian-Right Group Trying to Sway the 2024 ...
Jul 13, 2024Democracy Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors ...
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Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Ziklag_(organization)
Ziklag (organization) - Wikipedia
Ziklag is a Christian dominionist organization named after the biblical city of Ziklag. Its membership is exclusively for individuals with a net worth over $25 million as well as faith-based interests.
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The Federal News
All about Ziklag, secret Christian society backing Trump, to achieve ...
A secretive Christian nationalist organisation called Ziklag seems to be influencing the 2024 Presidential elections in the US, certain investigative reports have revealed. The ultra-conservative group, founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ken Eldred just after Donald Trump's election as the US president in 2016, is said to have one aim - to reshape American society based on biblical ...
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rww 10/18/2024
by
- Frederick Clarkson @ Religion Dispatches: Packed with Threats of Political Violence, Media Largely Ignore the NAR’s ‘Million Women’ Rally in DC
On October 12th one of the most remarkable political statements of any religious leader in this or any election season was broadcast live from an all-day rally of tens of thousands of people on the Washington Mall. The event, called A Million Women, was staged by some of the leading apos
- Andy Kroll, Phoebe Petrovic and Nick Surgey @ ProPublic: JD Vance Campaign Event With Christian Right Leaders May Have Violated Tax and Election Laws, Experts Say
Ziklag and the Courage Tour, the far-right groups that hosted the Republican vice-presidential nominee, are charities that can’t legally intervene in political campaigns.
- Tim Dickinson and Nikki McCann Ramirez @ Rolling Stone: ‘Mass Exorcism’: Christian Supremacists Take Over the National Mall
Last week’s MAGA-inflected spectacle cast Kamala Harris as demonic, and Trump an avatar of biblical justice.
- Angry White Men: ‘The World Is Ours’: Joel Webbon Claims Christians Are ‘Destined To Colonize The Stars’
Bigoted Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon declared on an Oct. 16, 2024 livestream that the world rightfully belongs to Christians, such as himself, as they were promised “dominion” over it. Webbon also stated that Christians are “destined to colonize” not just the world, but also “the stars.”
- Shawn Musgrave @ The Intercept: Trump’s Big Lie Attorneys Are Back
In lawsuits filed across the country, attorneys who worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat are alleging rampant voting fraud.
- Pema Levy @ Mother Jones: Trump Has a Plan to Win Without the Votes—and the Fight Is On to Stop Him
Elections are supposed to be decided at the ballot box. But this year, Donald Trump’s campaign appears to be trying to win on a different field of battle. With dozens of lawsuits already filed across the country, the Republicans are using state and federal courts as a key pillar of their strategy to retake the White House.
- Hafiz Rashid @ The New Republic: DeSantis Lawyer Sounds Alarm About Administration’s Authoritarian Turn
Last week, a lawyer who worked for the Florida Department of Health resigned, and a letter obtained Thursday by the Miami Herald indicates that he didn’t like the state agency’s decision to prosecute television stations for airing political ads.
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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.
[In Los Angeles, Your Chic Vacation Rental May Be a Rent-Controlled Apartment](https://www.propublica.org/article/los-angeles-housing-rent-controlled-apartments-vacation-rentals)
“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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foia virginia kay coles jamesUIP CPI ziklag... no response? 8 22
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.alternet.org/2022/01/chrisitan-nationalism/
Most of the far-right extremist movements that arose online and then in real life over the past decade—the alt-right, white nationalists, and other authoritarian proto-fascists—have been generally ecumenical and areligious in their rhetorical appeals and organizing, other than their frequent expressions of antisemitism. But that’s beginning to change, as Jack Jenkins explored this week at the Washington Post.
With “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes leading the way, it’s becoming much more common to hear them embracing Christian nationalism—an ideology long embraced by the larger radical right, particularly the so-called “Patriot” movement. Moreover, a number of these white nationalists appear to be pushing even farther into a particularly ugly—and previously stagnant—brand of religious nationalism: Christian Identity, the bigoted theological movement claiming that white people are the true “Children of Israel,”that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and that all nonwhite people are soulless “mud people.”
As Jenkins reports, since the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Fuentes’ white-nationalist “America First” organization has increasingly employed Christian nationalist rhetoric: Chanting “Christ is King” at the antiabortion “March for Life” last week and at anti-vaccine protests, using crucifixes as protest symbols, and similar rhetorical appeals. In a speech at the America First conference in Orlando in March at which he declared America “a Christian nation,” Fuentes warned his audience that America will cease to be America “if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.”
“Christian nationalism—and even the idea of separatism, with a subtext of White, Christian and conservative-leaning [influences]—took a more dominant role in the way that extremist groups talk to each other and try to propagandize in public,” Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told Jenkins.
Christian nationalism has long been a feature of the nation’s extremist right, dating back to the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and its later version in the 1920s.Fuentes’s rhetoric “could have come word-for-word from a Klan speech in 1922,” historian Kelly J. Baker told Jenkins. “The Klan’s goal here was patriotism and nationalism, but it was combined with their focus on White Christianity.”
This worldview was a powerful animating force at the Jan. 6 insurrection, embodied by the moment when the self-described “Patriots” entered the vacated Senate chambers, took over the dais, and proceeded to share a prayer led by Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley.
captured by The New Yorker shows the moment: One insurrectionist shouts, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” The men bellow “Amen!” Then Chansley begins to lead them in prayer, saying: “Thank you heavenly father for gracing us with this opportunity tostand up for our God-given inalienable rights.” He also thanks God for allowing them to “exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”
He concluded: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to bereborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”
As historian Katherine Stewart explained in the New York Times:
A final precondition for the coup attempt was the belief, among the target population, that the legitimacy of the United States government derives from its commitment to a particular religious and cultural heritage, and not from its democratic form. It is astonishing to many that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack on the constitutional electoral process styled themselves as “patriots.” But it makes a glimmer of sense once you understand that their allegiance is to a belief in blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
A number of the groups, notably the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the insurrection similarly voiced their affinity for Christian nationalism. The morning of Jan. 6, as Jenkins reports, a group of Proud Boys led by Ethan Nordean—the primary leader of the men who later spearheaded the siege of the Capitol, were seen praying together.
At a gathering of Proud Boys near the Washington Monument on Dec. 11
by independent journalist Dakota Santiago for Religion News Service,Nordean had spoken about “sacrificing ourselves for our country” while speaking at an impromptu Proud Boys rally near the Washington Monument, according to footage provided to Religion News Service (RNS) by independent journalist Dakota Santiago.
Nordean—a notorious street brawler nicknamed “Rufio Panman”—described an epiphany he had during a protest about Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross:
I had a moment of realization where I was like, “You know what, I’m going to be diehard about everything in my life. I’m gonna be real.” Because everything that we have sacrificed—because you know how hard it is in this environment that we live in—it is time that you rise to the occasion. Be real.
Now you may not believe in that, but it’s important in the very least for my case for me, because this man did this thing. Just as we sacrifice ourselves for our country. A man provides and protects even when he’s not loved. That is what we do. We are hated but we do it in anyway, we keep showing up every day and we protect these people from these tyrannical dictators.
The same religious fervor has intensified in the aftermath of the insurrection, particularly as “Patriot” movement believers and their mainstream Republican enablers have doubled down with a gaslighting narrative insisting that what happened Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection, it was a righteous protest by Real Americans.
That narrative has been ardently adopted by Christian nationalists like the Trump supporters interviewed earlier this month by NPR:
Outside on the walkway, Murray Clemetson stands with an armful of hand-made signs he brought to church, such as, "Set the DC Patriots Free" and "We Are Americans, Not Terrorists." The law-school student and father of three —all home-schooled— was at the "Stop The Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., last year.
"The only insurrection that happened on Jan. 6 was by the agent provocateurs, paid actors, and corrupt police and FBI," he says, disputing all the evidence made public in the more than 700 criminal cases that the rioters were Trump fanatics.
The church the interviewers reported from is Ken Peters’ Patriot Church in Tennessee, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian nationalist congregations. Peters is a rabidly pro-Trump pastor who has appeared onstage in recent months with Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” conspiracy theorist who claims Donald Trump was the victim of election fraud. Peters also spoke to the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 at a pre-rally for the next day’s “Stop the Steal” protest that devolved into the Capitol insurrection.
Peters’ predilection for linking arms with violent white-nationalist thugs like the Proud Boys manifested itself in summer 2021 in Salem, Oregon, outside a Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by Peters’ “Church at Planned Parenthood” campaign. A phalanx of Proud Boys provided “security” for the event, including notorious brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, currently in jail awaiting trial on assault charges.
The sermon Peters delivered during NPR’s visit to his church turned asimilarly convenient blind eye to Donald Trump’s manifest flaws as a Christian hero."We consider the left in our nation today to be a giant bully,” Peters said. “And when there is a bully on the schoolyard and somebody rises up and punches back, 'Hallelujah!' So we are thankful for Trump."
Then he added: "But you know what? If Trump passes away tomorrow, God forbid, does that stop us? Does that slow us down? Not one bit. We'll be looking for the next guy to lead the way."
Indeed, the long-term determination of Christian nationalists to impose a narrow sectarian view on American government and society are reflected in its legislative assault on state laws, an attempt to reshape U.S. laws from the ground up as well as the top down. Their program “Project Blitz,” revealed by journalist Frederick Clarkson in 2018—a detailed and complex system of proposed legislation with which Christian nationalist beliefs are gradually embedded within state laws—is only one example of the breadth and depth of their assault on liberal democracy.
"The use of Christian symbols, iconography, Scripture in efforts to dominate and exclude are as old the republic itself," Rev. Fred Davie, executive vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told Trevor Hughes of *USA Today*. "It's deeply baked into our nation. It's deep, but it's also been proven time and time again to be wrong."
While many Christian nationalists are grounded in more traditional evangelical views, there is also a component who are cynically embracing religious fervor as a way of broadening their community of white supremacists and expanding their recruitment base.
"For them, it's just shorthand for identity," Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Hughes. "There absolutely is a connection between far-right political extremism and far-right religious extremism, but I doubt these people are showing up at church every Sunday and reading their Bibles."
Research sociologist Matthew DeMichele told Hughes that many of today's religious displays are an "intense redeployment of old tactics."
"People don't want to say that this is a country founded on white supremacy. But we know that to be true," DeMichele said. "It's very important to understand that it's not new for white supremacists to have a Christian identity. But it is intriguing there has been the strengthening overlap of the white nationalists and those of Christian Identity."
The striking aspect of the surge of Christian nationalism has been its ability to unify sectors of the radical right, from militia-oriented “Patriots” to bigoted white nationalists to conspiracists like the authoritarian QAnon cult.Alex Newhouse, deputy director of theCenter on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies . Besides faith, told Jenkins that social media have been powerful vectors for this confluence.
“This unification is pretty unprecedented,” Newhouse said. “The infusion of Christian nationalism throughout that unification process has been particularly interesting and, in my opinion, is going to end up being pretty dangerous.”
Newhouse particularly has noticed a sudden uptick, since 2019, of interest in Christian Identity, the infamous religious movement long associated with neo-Nazis, particularly the Aryan Nations operation in the northern Idaho Panhandle between 1978 and 2000, which was an Identity church. Newhouse noted that Christian nationalist appeals may “disguise a much more dangerous uptick in adoption of Christian Identity.”
One of the leading voices in this resurgence of Identity beliefs, Newhouse says, is Kyle Chapman, the cofounder of the Proud Boys-affiliated Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knightswho later attempted to create an explicitly racist and antisemitic offshoot called “Proud Goys.” (Chapman is currently awaiting trial in Idaho on charges of assaulting a health-care worker when he was hospitalized last November.)
Newhouse said Chapman has been interacting with Christian Identity influencers on the encrypted chat platform Telegram, while “blasting out Christian Identity propaganda.” Another key Trumpist figure—Qanon influencer GhostEzra,who has 300,000 followers on Telegram—posted explicit Identity messages. Identity theology—including references to the “two seedline theory,” which claims that Eve also mated with Satan in the Garden of Eden and thus gave birth to Jews—has been popping up with regularity on QAnon and Proud Boys channels on Telegram, Newhouse reported.
“There’s this gradual move toward a more revolutionary, burn-it-all-down posture, and I think Christian Identity for a lot of these people has become a way for them to organize their thoughts,” he said.
As Stewart explained in the NYT,Christian nationalist beliefs are not merely spreading among far-right extremists. Perhaps even more pernicious is their spread among mainstream conservatives in the media and especially within the Republican Party:
National organizations like the Faith & Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group, which bring together prominent Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts. Whether the public will take notice remains to be seen.
As I’ve observed previously (while reviewing Stewart’s excellent review of Christian nationalism, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism):When viewed through the lens of its real-world outcomes, fundamentalist Christianity is less a coherent theology than it is a form of spiritual or religious totalitarianism, one that requires abject submission to what is actually a very perverse and narrow interpretation of the meaning of Scripture.
This approach translated naturally into political authoritarianism—the kind that Donald Trump practices. And Trump in turn has proven very adept at feeding the psychological needs of the kinds of personalities that adhere to such movements.
Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people’s children, and celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms.
We can only be grateful that he is out of power now. And it will be incumbent on everyone who treasures their democratic institutions to do everything in their power to defend them against this lethal tide of extremism now.
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https://www.foiaresearch.net/organization/united-purpose
no lnx many
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/.
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