1). “To Understand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the 'TheoBros': These extremely online young Christian men want to end the 19th Amendment, restore public flogging, and make America white again”, Nov/Dec 2024, Kiera Butler, Mother Jones, at < https://www.motherjones.com/
2). “Christian Nationalist 'TheoBros' Want To Take Over Government”, Oct 24, 2024, Leeja Miller, Why America with Leeja Miller, duration of video 23:34, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
3). “Freedom Caucus leader endorses radical proposal for North Carolina to hand its electoral votes to Trump: Rep. Andy Harris said the damage caused by Hurricane Helene in pro-Trump counties would justify the extraordinary maneuver”, Oct 25, 2024, Kyle Cheney, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
4). “Self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of Retribution’ calls for pro-Trump protest at empty Pa. Capitol”, Oct 24, 2024, Jordan Wilkie | WITF, Lancaster Online, at < https://lancasteronline.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introductionby dmorista: Republican strategists and operatives, knowing full-well that a majority of the American population is opposed to their Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth agenda, are using a variety of methods to try to coerce or trick the population into accepting their program. Mother Jones has provided a 4-part series on the far-right Christo-Fascists who dearly want to impose a harsh Theocratic Regime on the U.S. (See, “Under God: The Christian nationalist plan to take over America”, Mother Jones, Oct 9, 2024, various authors, at < https://www.motherjones.com/
Here in this discussion I present Item 1)., “To Understand JD Vance, ….”, (it is the second article in the Mother Jones series). It highlights the development of a new and much more hardline cadre of right-wing Christo-Fascists who are considerably more ambitious and intend to take control of the U.S. and impose a particularly harsh regime with public flogging, repeal of the 19th Amendment (the women's right to vote), the leadership of a “Christian Prince”, execution for heretics, and the imposition of the Ten Commandments to replace the U.S. Constitution. The article notes that there are plenty of tie-ins between J.D. Vance and this movement dubbed the Theobros “.... the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.” J.D. Vance is the desired leader for cabals like the TheoBros, far preferable to Trump, and they certainly have high hopes that the Trump / Vance ticket will take power and that Trump won't last all that long.
For those who prefer video presentations in Item 2)., “Christian Nationalist 'TheoBros' ….”, leftist attorney Leeja Miller looks at some of the same issues discussed in Item 1). She digs in further with some excerpts from foundational texts of the new Chrstofascist movement.
Item 3)., “Freedom Caucus leader ….”, and Item 4). “Self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of Retribution’ ….”, look at some practical political aspects of the far-right push to seize power. Item 4).begins stating that:
“The chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus says the North Carolina Legislature should consider allocating the state’s presidential electors to Donald Trump even before votes are counted in the swing state.
“Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Thursday that such a step by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature 'makes a lot of sense' given the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in the western part of the state. Counties in that region are expected to vote heavily for Trump.
“Potential difficulties with voting in the hurricane-damaged area would be a basis for the state Legislature to declare in advance that Trump should win the state’s 16 electoral votes, Harris said at a Republican Party dinner in Maryland’s Talbot County. (Emphasis added)
“ 'You statistically can go and say, “Look, you got disenfranchised in 25 counties. You know what that vote probably would have been,” ' Harris said during an exchange with a speaker at the dinner. 'Which would be — if I were in the Legislature — enough to go, ‘Yeah, we have to convene the Legislature. We can’t disenfranchise the voters.” '
“Harris’ comments were in response to a keynote speech by Ivan Raiklin, a pro-Trump activist who has long embraced a radical strategy of state legislatures guaranteeing Trump’s reelection if they deem the 2024 election tainted by fraud and corruption. Raiklin posted a video of his full speech on X as well as a separate clip of his exchange with Harris.
“In his remarks, Raiklin argued that in addition to North Carolina, Republican-controlled legislatures in New Hampshire, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia and Wisconsin could take similar steps by meeting on Election Day and awarding their electors to Trump. Harris asked Raiklin how he could justify his plan in other states that were unaffected by storm damage.” (Emphasis added).
Item 4). takes us back to the Rod of Iron Ministries (that I posted material on here on October 15th at “Bizzare Ceremony at a Far-Right Wing Church; that is the Current Iteration of the Unification Church (the Moonies)”, TCS, at < https://ongoingclassstruggle.
“Should Democratic nominee Kamala Harris win the race for president, Ivan Raiklin would have Pennsylvania supporters of Donald Trump descend on the Capitol in Harrisburg on Dec. 1 in an attempt to overturn the results.
“His goal, and that of other Trump supporters pushing false narratives about election fraud, is to pressure state lawmakers into appointing an alternate slate of electors to vote for the former president in the Electoral College.
“ 'I'm probably going to show up myself, with or without anybody,' Raiklin said to a crowd of a couple hundred people, at most.
“He spoke at the Rod of Iron Ministries’ Freedom Festival, a pro-gun and pro-Trump event in northeastern Pennsylvania at which speakers repeatedly said Democrats were demonic and pushed anti-Semitic and racist conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory. They declared that Trump is favored by god and that Democrats run an unseen but massive election rigging political machine.
“Raiklin calls himself Trump’s Secretary of Retribution and speaks about plans to use sheriffs to arrest an extensive list of officials involved in certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory when Trump is returned to office.” (Emphasis added)
It would be naive to think that this upcoming election will resolve the problems of our society and that a Harris / Walz administration will smoothly take power without facing some degree of armed resistance from the right. If Trump / Vance wins we can expect a pretty quick dive down into the maelstrom of fascism.
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To understand JD Vance, you need to meet the “TheoBros”
Our November+December issue investigates the Christian nationalist movement that aspires to take over government at all levels, from school boards and state legislatures to Congress and the Supreme Court. Read the series of stories here.
On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.
Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.
For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.
In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.
For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.
In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.
The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”
“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism—but a lot of us find that terrifying.”
The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.
And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.
With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.
Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.
Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”
Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.
Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.
“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)
Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”
In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.
Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.
But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.
Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”
In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”
Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.
Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.
“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”
For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”
In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”
Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.
Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”
On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”
But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”
An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.
Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”
New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”
One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.
That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”
One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”
Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”
The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”
Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”
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William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”
Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.
Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.
When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.
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We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”
“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”
We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.
In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”
In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”
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Freedom Caucus leader endorses radical proposal for North Carolina to hand its electoral votes to Trump
Rep. Andy Harris said the damage caused by Hurricane Helene in pro-Trump counties would justify the extraordinary maneuver.
Rep. Andy Harris, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said North Carolina's Republican-controlled Legislature could unilaterally assign the state's 16 electoral votes to Donald Trump. | Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP
Updated:
The chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus says the North Carolina Legislature should consider allocating the state’s presidential electors to Donald Trump even before votes are counted in the swing state.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Thursday that such a step by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature “makes a lot of sense” given the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in the western part of the state. Counties in that region are expected to vote heavily for Trump.
Potential difficulties with voting in the hurricane-damaged area would be a basis for the state Legislature to declare in advance that Trump should win the state’s 16 electoral votes, Harris said at a Republican Party dinner in Maryland’s Talbot County.
“You statistically can go and say, ‘Look, you got disenfranchised in 25 counties. You know what that vote probably would have been,’” Harris said during an exchange with a speaker at the dinner. “Which would be — if I were in the Legislature — enough to go, ‘Yeah, we have to convene the Legislature. We can’t disenfranchise the voters.’”
Harris’ comments were in response to a keynote speech by Ivan Raiklin, a pro-Trump activist who has long embraced a radical strategy of state legislatures guaranteeing Trump’s reelection if they deem the 2024 election tainted by fraud and corruption. Raiklin posted a video of his full speech on X as well as a separate clip of his exchange with Harris.
In his remarks, Raiklin argued that in addition to North Carolina, Republican-controlled legislatures in New Hampshire, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia and Wisconsin could take similar steps by meeting on Election Day and awarding their electors to Trump. Harris asked Raiklin how he could justify his plan in other states that were unaffected by storm damage.
“It looks like just a power play,” Harris said. “In North Carolina, it’s legitimate. There are a lot of people that aren’t going to get to vote and it may make the difference in that state.”
Asked to elaborate on his remarks, Harris issued a statement through his campaign: “As I’ve repeatedly said, every legal vote should be counted. I would hope everyone could agree that legal American voters whose lives were devastated by the recent storms should not be disenfranchised in the upcoming voting process.”
Under the Constitution, state legislatures have the power to choose how to allocate their votes in the Electoral College. All 50 states assign their electors based on the popular vote of their citizens.
North Carolina election officials have attempted to address challenges voters are facing in the state’s western counties. They’ve added new early voting sites and expanded the ability for displaced voters to obtain absentee ballots outside their home county. The Trump campaign has supported measures to ease voting in light of the hurricane.
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) told reporters on Friday he hadn’t heard about any plans for the state Legislature to take the steps discussed by Raiklin and Harris. Asked about Harris’ comments, McHenry said, “It makes no sense whatsoever to prejudge the election outcome. And that is a misinformed view of what is happening on the ground in North Carolina, bless his heart.”
The retiring congressman described a “massive amount of work” going into ensuring everyone in the storm-affected counties can vote.
“I’m confident we’ll have a safe and fair election in North Carolina, and then everyone that wishes to vote will have the opportunity,” he said.
The leaders of the N.C. Senate and N.C. House — state Sen. Phil Berger and state Rep. Tim Moore, both Republicans — did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Trump campaign.
Democrats weighed in on Harris’ statements throughout the day.
Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the Freedom Caucus chair’s comments during a media gaggle Friday, saying: “America deserves to have leaders who respect the importance of one of the pillars and foundations of our democracy, which is free and fair elections, and that they are not manipulated by elected leaders for the sake of their own political future or their own political strategy for how they themselves want to succeed.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, insisted the state’s “electoral votes will reflect only what the people say at the ballot box.” He got some backing from Democratic state legislators and even from his GOP predecessor, former Gov. Pat McCrory, who said that following the path described by Rep. Harris would be “a grave mistake.”
U.S. House Democrats also quickly sounded the alarm over their Republican colleague’s comments.
“Extreme Republican leaders are openly advocating that North Carolina’s electoral votes be given to Donald Trump without an election,” said Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees election policies. “For the first time in North Carolina’s history, voters could be denied their right to choose the president. This blood-chilling scheme, suggested by the chair of the so-called House Freedom Caucus, is anti-American.”
Raiklin became a figure of interest to the House Jan. 6 select committee and special counsel Jack Smith for his December 2020 tweet dubbed “Operation Pence Card.” In the tweet, which Trump retweeted at the time, Raiklin laid out a strategy in which then-Vice President Mike Pence could ensure Trump reclaimed the White House. Raiklin has not been accused of wrongdoing and has become a regular at Republican events as well as hearings on Capitol Hill and the nearby federal courthouse.
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Self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of Retribution’ calls for pro-Trump protest at empty Pa. Capitol
- Jordan Wilkie | WITF
Should Democratic nominee Kamala Harris win the race for president, Ivan Raiklin would have Pennsylvania supporters of Donald Trump descend on the Capitol in Harrisburg on Dec. 1 in an attempt to overturn the results.
His goal, and that of other Trump supporters pushing false narratives about election fraud, is to pressure state lawmakers into appointing an alternate slate of electors to vote for the former president in the Electoral College.
“I'm probably going to show up myself, with or without anybody,” Raiklin said to a crowd of a couple hundred people, at most.
He spoke at the Rod of Iron Ministries’ Freedom Festival, a pro-gun and pro-Trump event in northeastern Pennsylvania at which speakers repeatedly said Democrats were demonic and pushed anti-Semitic and racist conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory. They declared that Trump is favored by god and that Democrats run an unseen but massive election rigging political machine.
Raiklin calls himself Trump’s Secretary of Retribution and speaks about plans to use sheriffs to arrest an extensive list of officials involved in certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory when Trump is returned to office.
There are both legal and practical problems with his plan.
“The protesters will find empty chambers,” said Kyle Miller, a former senior Democratic staffer in the state legislature. “They will find a pretty empty building, in fact. There will not be anyone in the House at all.”
Miller is now the state director for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit good governance group aiming to prevent the rise of authoritarianism in the United States.
He noted the Legislature simply won’t be in session. The entire state House is up for election every two years, while the Senate cycles through staggered four year terms. Though the Pennsylvania constitution says the term for newly elected members begins on Dec. 1, it also says the legislative session doesn’t start until the first Tuesday in January.
Raiklin and others who envision a role for the Legislature in overturning election results, seem to have missed that second part.
Miller said calls to action based on false, and sometimes intentionally false, information can lead to violence.
“The concern is not that the Legislature's actually going to overturn the will of Pennsylvania voters,” Miller said. “But in believing that is possible, these supporters are going to up the ante and they are going to raise the rhetoric to a point where political violence becomes possible.”
Freedom Festival [photos]
Greg Stenstrom spoke at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival about an inaccurate legal theory that would allow the state legislature or Congress to overturn election results should Vice President Kamala Harris win election on November 5. Stenstrom has worked with other conspiracists, notably Leah Hoopes, to raise doubt about the integrity of U.S. election administration.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
A voter registration tent at the entrance to the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival. The sign, which tells hunters to vote or be hunted, follows a the rhetorical strategy used throughout the weekend of instilling fear based on conspiracy theories about the evil nature of U.S. government. The only salvation, as described by event speakers, is through electing Donald Trump.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
Leah Hoopes, center, speaks during the media availability during the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival. Hoopes works closely with fellow election conspiracist, Greg Stenstrom, to attempt to prove massive election fraud across Pennsylvania. So far, they have been unsuccessful.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
A banner at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival the size of an 18-wheeler bed and shares a message in support of Donald Trump and states he was saved by Jesus Christ from assassination on July 13 in Butler County, PA.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
Michael Flynn, a retired Lt. General in the U.S. Army who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor under Donald Trump for the first 22 days of his administration, shakes hands with Rod of Iron festival goers before screening his new biographical documentary. Flynn uses the screenings to raise money for himself, in part to offset extensive legal fees due to criminal investigations into his discussions with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
The 'Trump Truck' of pastor Sean Moon, who leads the Rod of Iron ministries.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
A banner for King Bullethead, the rap pseudonym for Rod of Iron pastor Sean Moon. Imagery and statements claiming Donald Trump is protected by god and heaven's preferred candidate for U.S. president were abundant throughout the festival weekend.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
Leah Hoopes, left, discusses conspiracies about U.S. elections while Rod of Iron festival goers aim a BB gun in the background.
- Jordan Wilkie / WITF
The absurdity of Raiklin’s plan only feeds into the narrative. He and other self-described true patriots envision themselves fighting a cabal of corrupt institutionalists. Failing to overturn the election results, impossible though it may be, would only confirm the impression that politicians can’t be trusted.
“A lot of people will say, well, the Republicans in Pennsylvania State Senate are toxic, feckless, stone cold, coward, gutless, simp turds. And that's a true statement,” Raiklin said.
In order to convince them to overturn election results, he recommended “the most peaceful, patriotic, legal, moral, and ethical motivation of your state legislature to do the right thing. Large scale.”
Raiklin is not alone in thinking, or at least claiming, that the Legislature can pick who gets Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes, regardless of how the state votes for president.
Greg Stenstrom is an activist who operates mostly out of Montgomery County and claims to have found massive fraud in elections administration both from 2020 and the upcoming election. He believes Democrats stole the 2020 election and are prepared to do so again.
“On November 5th and 6th, they probably are going to announce that Kamala Harris won, whether she wins or not,” Stenstrom said to the Rod of Iron crowd.
He told the crowd to take that in stride, because both the Legislature and Congress will have an opportunity to change the results and put Trump in office.
Though 147 Republicans in Congress attempted to do just that on January 6, 2021, they failed, and a reform to the ECRA passed in 2022 shuts the door on the same strategy this time around.
The Pennsylvania Legislature has no role in certifying state level election results, according to Miller and state Senator Amanda Cappelletti, D-Montgomery County. As the minority chair of the Senate State Government Committee, she responded to questions on behalf of Democratic state senators.
“[T]he General Assembly lacks the authority to take action to overturn the popular vote and appoint its own slate of presidential electors,” Jason Gottesman, press secretary for House Republican leader Bryan Cutler wrote in an email to LNP/WITF.
Neither House Speaker Joanna McClinton’s office nor Senate Pro Tem Kim Ward’s office responded to questions for this story.
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