Related Articles
Authoritarian movements don’t spring up out of nowhere. They require a certain set of conditions on the ground, like a growing class of people who feel frustrated, disempowered, and out of place. They require major investment, above all in the disinformation and distraction that keeps supporters in line with a project that will ultimately harm them. And they can also use a bit of dumb luck. To an extent that has not been fully appreciated, that’s what the pandemic was for the anti-democratic movement that brought Donald Trump back to the presidency in the 2024 election.
These thoughts came together for me with particular force at a gathering I attended in Las Vegas a year before the election. One part of the event was crazy in an age-old way in a country that has a long history of producing tin-foil hats and entrepreneurial grifters intent on separating people from their money. Another part was crazy in a more sinister, more political way than I would have imagined I would see in my lifetime. The organizers and the participants were, in a sense, products of the same pandemic that the first Trump administration disgracefully politicized and weaponized, but their efforts contributed significantly to the same movement that brought Trump back to power.
I followed up the event in Las Vegas with a post-election event in Phoenix that draws on some of the same crowd. I am sorry to report that electoral victory has not made them gracious toward their many perceived enemies. Nor has it diminished their appetite for conspiracy theories, violent fantasy, and strongman politics.
The following is an adapted excerpt from the forthcoming book Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, which will be published on February 18, 2025.
LAS VEGAS, AUGUST 2023. The documentary film team from Germany meets me in the hotel lobby near the Strip. They are young, vigorously athletic, tall, mostly blond, and dressed in hipster grunge. They are vegetarian, drink moderately if at all, and are devoted to their early morning workouts at whatever hotel gym they happen to find themselves, like a perfectly Teutonic Fantastic Four. They have spent much of the past year traveling and filming in conflict zones around the world. They laugh and tell me about their Starbucks game, which they call “Starbies,” where each of them orders something crazier than the last. They are here to show their viewers some of the glorious weirdness of America, and they are in a good mood. I am happy to have been invited to accompany them as a guide of sorts. With Trump facing, at this time, ninety-one felony counts across four criminal cases and his supporters growing increasingly surly, I am especially eager to get their take on what we are about to experience here in Las Vegas.
We bundle into the team van, drive about a half hour from the Strip, and spill out in a parking lot crammed with pickup trucks and midsize SUVs. We head into a public park whose grounds are dominated by enormous white tents. A large placard announces the event: Reawaken America. The setting is somewhat atypical for the ReAwaken America Tour, as I know from prior experience. The organization usually prefers to host their roving events at megachurches.
Outside it is scorching, with temperatures in the low hundreds; thankfully, the tents are lightly air-conditioned. Inside the tent complex, the mood is collegial, with the sense of kindred solidarity that comes with shared struggles against a common enemy.
The first thing I notice is that the T-shirts are getting nastier. SIZE MATTERS blares one man’s shirt over enlarged images of bullets of various calibers. It’s RINO season, reads another, with an image of Trump carrying a long gun. Another man’s T-shirt features dozens of white male soldiers and the words DIVERSITY IS DESTRUCTION across the bottom. Quite a few bear slogans associated with QAnon, along with numbered fragments of text from the Bible that are associated with battle. To be sure, I see plenty of the old standbys: GOD, GUNS AND TRUMP, a few F*CK BIDENS, and a MAKE MEN MEN AGAIN on a man who glares around the room like he wants to start a fight.
And then there is BLITZKRIEG. The Germans find this genuinely shocking, and I see them attempting to capture the wearer on video as he sits in his seat.
The first tent, closer to the entrance of the complex, is filled with rows of booths hawking “non-woke” books for children, anti-vax books for all ages, membership in evangelistic communities led by “prophetic” entrepreneurs, drinking water purifiers and nutritional supplements, the Epoch Times, a conspiracy-filled far-right media outlet affiliated with China’s Fulan Gong religious movement and whose CFO was later arrested and indicted for a $67 million money-laundering scheme (he has pleaded not guilty), Trumpy swag, and a whole lot of survivalist gear. At one booth, women are raising donations for the January 6 insurrectionists, cast here as heroes unfairly imprisoned “in the D..C. Gulag.” As I walk past the menacing T-shirts and through to the entrance of the second, much more capacious tent, I estimate that today’s attendance is just south of two thousand. Most ReAwaken America tour stops, including one I recently attended at a California megachurch, draw crowds of this size or larger.
The man behind ReAwaken America is Clay Clark, a Tulsa, Oklahoma–based entrepreneur and business coach who discovered a whole new angle on life during the COVID pandemic. When his media production company began to run short on business in 2020, he knew who was to blame. He filed suit against the city of Tulsa for its mask mandates, and quickly gained prominence in the rapidly emerging anti-pandemic movement. Like so many who came of political age in that moment, he soon discovered cures that the government was supposedly hiding. He also maintained that the COVID vaccines contained “luciferase,” a dreadful compound allegedly made of Jeffrey Epstein’s DNA.
Having lighted on a plot that went all the way to Davos and involved every bad actor imaginable — Bill Gates, Black Lives Matter, the World Economic Forum, the Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramović, along with a nefarious climate activism movement — Clay resolved to spread the word through his movable conference series. In publicity materials for its gatherings, ReAwaken America bills America’s political and spiritual challenges as a battle between “the Great ReAwakening” and “the Great Reset,” the Holy Bible versus the evil masterminds behind COVID-19.
Other key figures in the ReAwaken syndicate include Mike Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser; Mike Lindell, the pillow man and election fraud funder; Eric Trump, who speaks frequently at these events; and Trump’s longtime mentor Roger Stone. Sean Feucht, the guitar-strumming spirit warrior, often drops in to lead the crowd in song, and maybe raise some extra cash — at a previous ReAwaken America Tour, a woman who claimed to be a representative of his ministry, Let Us Pray, was selling stickers bearing the organization’s name for $5 apiece. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered presentations at several ReAwaken America events before launching his run for president (with a massive wad of cash at his back thanks to the support of his VP pick, billionaire-divorcee Nicole Shanahan, along with Timothy Mellon, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, who is also a Trump megadonor).
Speakers scheduled for appearance in Las Vegas include Alex Jones, the infamous purveyor of the most heinous conspiracy theories; Sherri Tenpenny, identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the top twelve most influential COVID deniers; the podcaster and conspiracist Mel K, who pushes elaborate fairy tales involving global treachery; Jackson Lahmeyer, who founded Pastors for Trump, which claims to have over seven thousand pastor members across the nation; Peter Navarro, a former adviser to Trump who was convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt; and a squadron of demon-haunted apostles and prophets from the Christian nationalist movement.
The Las Vegas conference is the third such event I have attended in person, and it is by a significant measure the most bloodthirsty. The rhetoric coming from the podium is even more violent than the slogans on the T-shirts.
Clay Clark, speaking at a breakneck pace, cheerfully gets the conspiracy machine cranked up like an auctioneer on crystal meth: “The World Economic Forum has the logo 666, look it up, their logo is 666, and if you’re new to reading the Bible, in the Bible it tells you where Satan lives. The Bible tells you in the book of Revelation, it tells you Revelation 9-11, okay, that Satan dwelleth by the former temple of Apollo. Satan dwells where the former temple of Apollo is. Who knows that? Revelation 9-11. Okay? And it also tells you that Satan dwells where Antipas was partnered. And Geneva is the location of that, and that is the location of the World Economic Forum, and that is the location of the World Health Organization, and that is the location of the United Nations, and that is the location of SERVE, and SERVE’s logo is 666, are we all on the same page here?”
Clay hands off the microphone to Mike Flynn, who describes the “global alliance against the United States America.” He offers a variant of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory — the idea that devious elites are plotting to replace good (white) Americans with aliens, Jews, or other undesirables. With the help of Alex Jones, this kind of garbage has spread faster than fidget spinners through the far-right propaganda-sphere.
Stew Peters, a former bounty hunter and anti-vax conspiracist with a large online following, steps up to the podium next, and the gathering takes a grisly turn. “When [Anthony Fauci] is convicted after a short and fast but thorough trial, he will hang from a length of thick rope,” says Peters. The audience roars their approval. “When [Hunter Biden] is convicted . . . he will get . . .
Death!” More roars.
“We all have one common enemy, his name is Satan, and right now his minions are trying to run the country,” Peters continues. “Liberals, democrats, communists, lizard things, we got a lot of words for these creatures.”
He demands the “restoration of the rightful president of America.” What does he want the anointed one to do once restored? Revenge, cold and bloody. “All we need is a body of water, a length of rope, and a heavy millstone.” “What we want is Nuremburg trials 2.0.” “We are going to see extreme accountability. Natural accountability,” he shouts, his voice getting louder. “Permanent accountability with extreme prejudice!”
One of the German team members asks me, uneasily, “Are we safe here?” I reply that this place is probably no more dangerous to us personally than the rest of Las Vegas. I believe this to be true, but it sounds hollow even as I say it. “So the danger is to the rest of the country,” he says, nodding.
The racism, too, is more transparent than usual. “Big Fani. Big fat Fani. Big fat Black Fani Willis,” Peters shouts as he launches into an attack on Fulton County DA Fani Willis and on the Georgia judge who is presiding over Trump’s criminal charges in that state.
While the overwhelming majority of attendees at ReAwaken America events are white, people of color are not entirely absent. They show up in similarly themed T-shirts and are featured on the podium. At a ReAwaken America tour stop I attended the previous year in San Marcos, California, I spotted in the audience several dozen individuals wearing caps or T-shirts that spelled out LEXIT, an acronym for a faith-based organization that encourages Latino voters to exit the Democratic Party and support Republican candidates instead. In Las Vegas, the presence of a smattering of people of color in the audience doesn’t stop speakers like Peters from linking Blackness with everything bad in America or displaying an interest in lynching-style retribution.
Even the preachers invited to speak at the event seem exceptionally focused on making their enemies feel the pain. The Black pastor Mark Burns, a stalwart warm-up act at Trump rallies, follows Peters onstage. There is no acknowledgment of Peters’s anti-Black racism, but there is plenty of additional rhetorical bloodshed. “This is a God nation, this is a Jesus nation, and you will never take my God and my gun out of this nation,” he says. “I have come ready to declare war on Satan and every race-baiting democrat that tries to destroy our way of life here in the United States of America.”
Jews are not entirely absent from the event, either, although their religious identity may be like that of Roseanne Barr, who was born to a Jewish family but has gone on to push Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic tropes. Introduced from the stage by Clay Clark as “sure to offend, challenge, trigger and force you to wake up to the mind control of your underlings,” Barr opened her fifty-minute religious confessional with the declaration that “I am here to do some spiritual warrior stuff with you guys today.” Then she begins to shout. “It’s time for the heavens to open and people to receive, people to receive the truth about Jesus!” She continues in ever-higher registers, “No weapon formed against us shall have dominion, it shall not proffer. On earth as it is in heaveeeeeeeeen!!!” She screeches for some time, then moderates her tone. “That’s our task, to lift this place from the hell they’ve created for our children!”
Who is the “they” she’s talking about? It’s “the people who own every cent in this world and also keep track of it,” she explains. For the record, Barr recently put one of her two L.A. homes on the market for $3.5 million and then purchased an additional home before decamping to her forty-six- acre macadamia nut farm on Hawaii’s Big Island.
In Las Vegas, as at other ReAwaken America tour stops, Jews, or at least their supposed cosmopolitan alter egos, inevitably come in for abuse. In preparation for the tour stop in Miami, the organizers invited Charlie Ward, who had praised Hitler for “warning us,” and Scott McKay, a “Patriot streetfighter” who has expressed openly pro-Hitler views on Rumble. They were meant to share the stage with Eric Trump, who had appeared on podcasts with each man on numerous occasions.
“Hitler was fighting the same people we’re trying to take down,” McKay had said. “These people are so elusive and slippery and cunning that we ended up having World War II.”
When the clips were publicized on MSNBC, McKay and Ward were disinvited. Even so, as my German friends can easily pick up, the dog whistles keep playing the old fascist tunes, and you don’t even need a dog to hear them. Mike Flynn, Clay Clark, Peters, and conspiracy podcaster Mel K all identify the archvillains as “globalist billionaires.” The masterminds are “the IMF, the World Bank, and financial elites,” Ms. K intones. In case there was any doubt about what these villains look like, she and the others repeatedly name George Soros and “the Rothschilds.”
Flynn takes back the floor to hawk his latest book, The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare (CG5GW). The point, he says, is “to prepare Americans and freedom loving people everywhere for our current global wartime reality.”
Clay Clark pops up again to say that there is hope for persecuted real Americans after all. You just need to put your money in the right place. As ever at these events, the transition from demonizing to fleecing is seamless — at least for those who are cashing in. Clark introduces the audience to the head of a company called Beverly Hills Precious Metals. The man from L.A. offers the promise of a financial bolt-hole for the coming apocalypse. “Typically people are saying, I’m going to turn my 401K or my IRA into one of the gold or precious metals, and not have it be a taxable asset,” he says. “You can do that now for minimal fees.”
The fact that some number of people here have retirement accounts with enough money on hand to consider precious metals investment strategies strikes the Germans as curious. The amounts under discussion — you can start with as little as $100! — are perhaps more revealing, I reply. There appear to be few genuinely poor people in this crowd, but apart from those on the podium or their support staff, no obviously rich people, either — at least as far as the eye can tell.
You can see it in the parking lot, which features neither clunkers nor Range Rovers. You can see it in those clothing choices that are not conspiracy-themed: Tommy Bahama shirts for men, department-store clamdiggers and light jewelry for the women. The attendees are older than the average American — I’m going to guess the median age is fifty — and they look on balance slightly overfed but not in a terribly unhealthy way. Many appear to spend a fair amount of time outdoors. Even the one woman who lets me know she has a vacation home in Las Vegas doesn’t look like the kind of urban professional that populates the law firms and banks in America’s big cities. They are in a sense what is left of the non-college-educated middle class in a country that has left that class behind in a cloud of dust.
I fall into conversation with a woman who is wearing a T-shirt with the Bible verse Ephesians 6:11, and the words “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” This passage is especially popular with today’s spirit warrior charismatics, and from what I can glean from our conversation, she communes with the Holy Spirit every Sunday. She briefly tells me her life story: She runs her own hair salon but revenue has flatlined. Her marriage fell apart a decade earlier, and one of her kids no longer speaks to her.
“I think they got to him,” she says. “Who?” I ask. “Them,” she says distractedly, gesturing toward some presumably evil plot taking place outside the tent. “The homosexual lobby.”
When she speaks of her son, her expression is so forlorn that I feel a certain sympathy. The spirit warrior creed is undoubtedly her answer to the frustrations of her own life, a means of securing the joy and self-respect she struggles to maintain at work and is unlikely to find in her turbulent home life. But then she blames it on the “gay agenda” and would no doubt support a nihilistic strongman to smash it. It is perfectly understandable that some people develop the urge to burn it all down. But that doesn’t make it a victimless crime.
PHOENIX, DECEMBER 2024. I am in the enormous convention hall among some 20,000 cheering attendees at AmericaFest, an annual gathering sponsored by Turning Point USA. Under a sea of black MAGA hats, the men seem to favor business casual attire; as for the women, every fingernail is polished and every cheek is bronzed. The crowd is significantly younger than that at ReAwaken America, but the vibe feels quite familiar. Several of the speakers at AmericaFest are regulars on the ReAwaken America tour, including Roger Stone, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, and Turning Point’s founder, Charlie Kirk. And their spiel hasn’t changed.
Kicking off the four-day conference, Kirk gives credit to God for Trump’s triumph. But he is also quick to give credit to his own organization which, under his guidance, activated a robust pro-MAGA youth movement, mobilized conservative pastors around the country, and targeted low-propensity voters. “The less you vote, the more likely you are to support President Trump,” TPA Data Manager Ben Larrabee explains at a breakout session later that day.“He is truly a president of forgotten Americans.”
As speaker after speaker entertains the crowd it is clear that religion is a major theme. But it isn’t the gospel as many if not most American Christians would have heard it. “Divine providence works through Donald Trump as its instrument,” says Steve Bannon. Eric Hayes, a field representative for the organization’s activist arm, Turning Point Action, advises, “There is absolutely no biblical justification to vote Democrat.”
Lucas Miles, head of Turning Point USA Faith, which works with pastors and churches, summarizes the thesis of his book Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity (Humanix Books). “I’ve made it my mission to eradicate woke-ism from the American pulpit,” he says. Righteous pastors are putting together “a kind of a digital Nicene Creed and Council,” he says, referring to the fourth century gathering that established many of the doctrines associated with Christianity. Since then, “heretical” versions of the faith “came in with the social gospel, came in with the ‘historical Jesus’ movement,” he said. “Came in with liberation theology and Black liberation theology.”
“Unfortunately, we have a generation of pastors who have, many of them, have been indoctrinated by progressive seminaries,” he says. “We have to decide which Jesus we believe in.”
The pandemic took the crazy in the wellness world to a whole new level, and this conference is eager to mine the new vein of health skepticism and conspiracism. Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former running mate and funder who reportedly received over $1 billion dollars from her divorce settlement with Google cofounder Sergey Brin, tells the crowd that “corruption is now dictating most of the major functions of government” and “we are short-circuiting at a cellular level” because “big tech is in bed with big pharma.” The convention hall is filled with vendors peddling health hacks and miracle cures: “adaptogenic” coffee, Laetrile supplements, and vibrating platforms that supposedly burn fat, promote weight loss, and help prevent cancer.
Speaker after speaker makes it clear that vengeance is the essence of the new religion. The far-right commentator Jack Posobiec who infamously spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, named Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Liz Cheney, Alvin Bragg, and “the backstabbing snake RINOs in the House and Senate because if we catch any of you than all will be brought to accountability.”
“When President Trump is going there to implement his policies, we must destroy any person who is trying to stop those policies from making their way into our lives,” said Kari Lake, who recently lost her bid for Arizona governor and has been tapped by Donald Trump to lead Voice of America. Nominee for FBI director Kash Patel, Bannon assured the audience, “understands who needs to be investigated. The January 6 Committee and the Biden White House.”
“Trump’s retribution,” he promised, “will be the golden age.”
Power has not softened the base of this movement. It’s not just blood that they’re after; they want a show. This is the thing that Trump surely understands best. Policy simply doesn’t matter. You can kill off grandma through vaccine denial, take away health insurance, bust unions, drive up inflation, and reward your billionaire friends with policies that benefit their bloated bottom lines. None of that matters as long as you give the people the pleasure of a good performance, where they can project their frustrations and resentments on the targets they have been trained to hate.
From Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing on February 18, 2025. Copyright © 2025 Katherine Stewart. All rights reserved.
