On Monday, the New York Times reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has accepted a job with an investment firm called 1789 Capital. The Times described the firm as focused on “products and companies aimed at conservative audiences.” Indeed, the firm funds right-wing TV host Tucker Carlson’s media company. And its website is larded with right-wing dog whistles: It champions “anti-ESG” and “deglobalization” and firmly opposes “excessive bureaucracy.”

Those values are pretty standard conservative fare, but 1789 Capital also has deep connections to a more extreme faction of conservatism: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, hard-line conservatives, many of whom identify as Christian nationalists. The founder of 1789 Capital is Chris Buskirk, who, as the Bucks County Beacon’s Jennifer Cohn reported, once served as the editor and publisher of American Reformer, the unofficial publication of the TheoBros. In the digital pages of American Reformer, TheoBro contributors have fanboyed over the authoritarian Spanish leader Francisco Franco, called Uganda’s criminalization of homosexuality “legitimate civil policy,” and declared that the United States is “not a nation of immigrants.”

Don Jr., who is as online as the TheoBros, though without the fire and brimstone, currently serves as a trustee and executive vice president of the Trump Organization. He isn’t the first person in Trump’s orbit to be connected to Buskirk. JD Vance crossed paths with Buskirk in the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

The name of the firm presumably refers to the year 1789, when the US Constitution was enacted, and, as TheoBro patriarch Doug Wilson explains in a blog post about Christian nationalism, “The Declaration acknowledged our rights are inalienable precisely because they were bestowed on us by our Creator.” Other 1789 Capital execs include Rebekah Mercer, a powerful conservative donor whose father founded the voter-research firm Cambridge Analytica, and Trump fundraiser Omeed Malik. As NewsTRACS’ Wendy Siegelman reported, in 2023, Malik’s investment company acquired Public Square, a business hub that says it “empowers like-minded, patriots to discover and support companies from a wide variety of industries that share their values.”

In addition to his new gig, the Times reports, Don Jr. will likely “still play some role in his father’s political operation.”

Correction, November 12: This post has been updated to reflect the year of the Constitution’s enactment. It was drafted in 1787, ratified in 1788, and enacted in 1789.

Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.

Erosion of the Establishment Clause

At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong. Alito wrote that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.” 

The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.

Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”

Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.

During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”

Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.  

Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It

Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:

In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. 

Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”

“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

Attack on Same-Sex Marriage

Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.

Hawkish Israel Policy

During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”

Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”

During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”

This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.

Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”

Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.

Erosion of the Establishment Clause

At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong. Alito wrote that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.” 

The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.

Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”

Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.

During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”

Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.  

Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It

Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:

In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. 

Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”

“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

Attack on Same-Sex Marriage

Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.

Hawkish Israel Policy

During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”

Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”

During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”

This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.

Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”

This story was produced in partnership with the National Catholic Reporter.

Millions of dollars in last-minute money is pouring into the battle over a pair of abortion-related ballot measures in Nebraska, and it is coming through an unusual and circuitous route.

Much of that cash is being spent by a new group called Common Sense Nebraska, which has shelled out a remarkable $4.9 million in the three weeks since it was formed—largely on ads opposing an initiative that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and supporting a separate initiative that would ban abortion.

As of the most recent campaign finance filings, the organization still had another $500,000 in the bank.

Nebraska is one of 10 states with abortion-related measures on the ballot. Last week, the National Catholic Reporter and Mother Jones reported that Catholic organizations around the country had contributed more than $1.9 million to the fight, with millions more flowing in from wealthy individuals with close ties to the church.

But what’s especially notable about the Common Sense Nebraska spending is the labyrinthine path that the money has taken. Most of the funds appear to have originated with the conservative, billionaire Ricketts family and with the conservative group CatholicVote, both of which have made the bulk of their donations since mid-October, according to state campaign finance records.

Common Sense Nebraska then routed the Ricketts and CatholicVote money to the campaigns of three local political candidates, including two incumbents running for reelection to the University of Nebraska’s board of regents. 

These local candidates, in turn, purchased massive amounts of television air time, which they then donated to the anti-abortion-rights PAC Protect Women & Children for ads about the ballot initiatives.

Elements of this arrangement were first reported last week by local news outlets, including the Lincoln Journal Star. Gavin Geis, the executive director of Common Cause Nebraska—a watchdog group unrelated to Common Sense Nebraska—told the Journal Star that shuffling money this way is not illegal but obscures the true source of donations and provides significant benefits for the political committees involved.

“By contributing airtime to ballot initiatives, candidates can shield donors from disclosing their support for the proposal and give them a financial advantage over their opponents due to federal rules that give candidates discounted airtime,” Geis said.

None of the candidates participating in this funding arrangement—University of Nebraska Regents Jim Scheer and Robert Schafer, and state legislative candidate Tanya Storer—responded to requests for comment for this story.

The sudden spending by Common Sense Nebraska has greatly increased the amount of money available to abortion rights opponents in the state. Through early October, Protect Women & Children, the PAC leading the anti-abortion ballot push, had raised and spent just over $4 million on the two initiatives. Almost all that money came from the Ricketts and another wealthy family, the Peeds; both families are well-known donors to Nebraska’s Catholic dioceses. But since Common Sense Nebraska was established on Oct. 14, it has raised an additional $5.4 million, almost all of which ended up going to Protect Women & Children in one form or another.

Of that $5.4 million, Common Sense Nebraska has donated $3.2 million to Scheer. Scheer, in turn, purchased $3.2 million worth of commercial airtime, which he then donated to Protect Women & Children for anti-abortion ads.

Another $687,000 of Common Sense Nebraska funds went to Schafer, who donated $667,000 worth of advertising time to Protect Women & Children. And Common Sense Nebraska contributed $283,000 to Storer’s campaign, which has made $231,000 worth of in-kind advertising donations to the Protect Women & Children.

Common Sense Nebraska has also donated $781,000 directly to Protect Women & Children, including donations as recently as Nov. 1. More donations may have occurred that have yet to be filed with the state campaign finance system. 

The majority of the money moving through Common Sense Nebraska’s coffers—$3.9 million—was donated by Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts. Another $830,000 was donated by the group CatholicVote on Oct. 21 and 23.

The Ricketts family are prominent Catholics, and Joe Ricketts has given millions to the Catholic Church in Nebraska, including an estimated $34 million on the creation of a Catholic religious retreat center. The Ricketts family is also well known for their ownership of the Chicago Cubs baseball team and their involvement in Nebraska state politics. Joe Ricketts’ eldest son, Pete Ricketts, a Republican, previously served as the governor and is currently Nebraska’s junior senator.  

Under the leadership of its president, Brian Burch, CatholicVote has become a major player in conservative Catholic political circles. Like much of the MAGA-aligned right, the Wisconsin-based organization was initially reluctant to embrace Donald Trump. In 2016, it refused to endorse him, saying he was “problematic in too many ways.”

More recently, CatholicVote has touted Trump’s praise for the organization. In 2020, the group drew national media attention for using geofencing to capture Catholics’ cell phone data while they were attending Mass. The $10 million project then sent targeted political ads to Catholics in battleground states. In this cycle’s Republican primary, CatholicVote hosted a rally for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis but eventually endorsed Trump.

Initially a project of the Catholic branch of the Christian Coalition, CatholicVote later became part of the Fidelis Center for Law and Policy, founded by Burch in 2005. Fidelis’ most recent tax documents, from 2022, indicate revenue of $9.4 million—up from $4.8 million the previous year.

Cliff Maloney is the founder of Pennsylvania Chase, a door-knocking, “ballot chasing” operation meant to encourage conservative voters in that crucial swing state to return mail-in ballots. The 32-year-old is also, of late, the face of a particularly bumbling public attempt to root out supposed illegal voting—one that, despite him having already been heartily scolded by a group of nuns for intimating they were involved in election fraud, he’s largely refusing to retreat from.

As one nun wrote, “His insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet.”

As has been widely reported, Maloney tweeted on October 22 that one of his organization’s staff members visited an address in Pennsylvania where 53 voters are registered. 

“Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there,” he wrote, adding, “Our attorney’s [sic] are reviewing this right now. We will not let the Dems count on illegal votes.” The post has been viewed 2.8 million times, and also featured repeatedly in Twitter/X’s conspiracy-addled “Election Integrity” community.

But the Benedictine Sisters of Erie do live there, and the very next day the nuns issued a sternly-worded press release in which their prioress, Sister Stephanie Schmidt, pointed out that Maloney could have done the barest amount of due diligence before accusing the nuns of nonexistence, voter fraud, or a puzzling combination of the two. 

“We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie,” Schmidt said, per the release. “A free republic depends on free and fair elections. It depends equally on a discerning and conscientious citizenry who do not unquestioningly accept the word of anyone who has a social media platform.”

When reached for comment by Mother Jones on November 1, Maloney refused to admit any error, and insisted that a “staff member”—possibly a receptionist, he thought, “or whatever the politically correct term is these days”—at the monastery had deceived his ballot chaser into believing no one lived on the property as part of a deliberate plot “to paint [Pennsylvania Chase] as ‘election deniers.'”

“Did you ask the nuns why their staff member lied?,” he wrote in a Twitter direct message. “Not one reporter has included that in their story. Sad, really.” 

Maloney repeatedly referred to the sisters as “the pro trans, pro Ukraine group,” and didn’t directly respond to my efforts to clarify why. (The Benedictine Sisters of Erie have hosted sister nuns from Ukraine to speak about religious life in a country under siege. A handful of them also joined a “read-in” supporting a local library after it faced complaints over stocking LGBTQ+ children’s books.)

“I’m Catholic,” he explained at one juncture, adding that he used to sing in a campus choir. “They are nuns. The problem is their staffer bold face lying. No one wants to report that.”

When reached for comment on Maloney’s latest claims, Sister Linda Romey OSB, the monastery’s coordinator of communications and development, reiterated to Mother Jones that no one would have told ballot chaser that “no one lives” in the place where they live. “Our receptionists are our sisters,” she explained. “And there is no sister who would say no one lives at the monastery where we have been living since we built it in the late 1960s. We have been in Erie since 1856.”

“None of our sisters had such an interaction with the canvasser,” she continued. “If he had come in and spoken with a sister he would most likely have been invited to prayer and possibly a meal—hospitality is one of our values.” 

“That said,” Sister Romey added, “even if Mr. Maloney’s canvasser did come into our monastery (which means he was buzzed in) and spoke with someone, I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood. But even so, once the misinformation was corrected, the appropriate thing for Mr. Maloney to do would have been to simply acknowledge the error and post an apology for the accusation and for violating our sisters privacy by posting their personal information online.” 

“I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood.”

‘Mr. Maloney can insist all he wants but his insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet,” she told Mother Jones. “It is an outright falsehood that he continues [to] promote… The fact is that PA CHASE and Mr. Maloney cannot admit they made a mistake and take responsibility for posting misinformation. It’s that simple.” 

Maloney claims that, in the wake of his post about the monastery and the blowback that followed, his ballot chasers have been subject to threats and “defamation,” as he put it, at the hands of media organizations. “Death threats… vile comments,” he wrote. (Ellipses his.) “The uniparty is unhinged.”  

“It’s a lynching of Republican ballot chasers and I won’t stand for it,” he wrote.

Pennsylvania Chase is sponsored by the Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, whose funders include libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in the state, a longtime Rand Paul supporter who has thrown his financial weight behind electing Donald Trump. (He also owns a stake in TikTok.) Pennsylvania Chase has set ambitious goals to increase Republican turnout, with support from characters like Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. 

Maloney is not unfamiliar with controversy; as The Spectator recently reported, he was previously the president of Young Americans for Liberty, a right-wing student group, before being removed from that position in 2021 over allegations of sexual misconduct against him and other leaders. Maloney denied those allegations at the time; as Spectator reporter Jacqueline Sweet noted, he also “voluntarily surrendered his Pennsylvania teaching credentials” after being charged in 2022 with raping a first-year student at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown in 2013 when he was a resident assistant there; a jury acquitted him last year of four counts, and the other two were dismissed by a judge after the jury could not reach a verdict on them.

Immaculate may appear to be all about evil nuns. In the movie’s grisly opening, four nuns break a runaway sister’s leg. Another holy mob tries to skewer the protagonist, Sister Cecilia, like a shish kebab just after she takes her final vows—and before she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Halfway through the film, Cecilia catches two sisters slicing off a mouthy novitiate’s tongue. Candles burn, incense wafts, and their habits conceal evil intentions.

But the real villain is the parish priest. A former geneticist who’s found his calling trying to engineer the next messiah, he inseminates Cecilia with DNA pulled from—wait for it—one of the nails used to crucify Jesus Christ. Producer and lead actor Sydney Sweeney said she and the rest of the crew behind Immaculate “never really looked at a lot of nun films.”

It appears that they never really looked at a lot of actual nuns, either. Immaculate is hardly the first horror film to commit this sin. Nuns, with their unmistakable silhouettes, have long been made caricatures by the horror genre, revealing that, long before JD Vance became a VP candidate, society was never comfortable with unmarried, childless women, much less those living communally. The fact that nun horror is most often set in earlier eras—­usually back when nuns were sporting habits and chanting in Latin—feels like a middle finger to these women, who had some measure of self-determination in a world long before the Western women’s rights movement.

Tales of satanic nuns are older than film itself. For centuries, the expectations imposed on cloistered women were as constricting as the social roles available to them and the walls surrounding them—and speculation ran wild. Some of these accounts went on to inspire late-20th-century nunsploitation films, like Convent of Sinners in 1986, which laid the foundation for modern movies like Immaculate.

These days, nuns are an endangered species. The numbers peaked at about 180,000 American sisters in 1965, but declined to fewer than 36,000 by 2023. In 2009, more than 90 percent of American sisters were age 60 or older. While nun characters have appeared in films of all stripes, from a soul-searching novice in Ida to Whoopi Goldberg’s comedic turn in Sister Act, the horror genre seems especially, and lucratively, fixated on them. The Conjuring series, which includes The Nun and The Nun II, is one of the highest-grossing horror franchises of all time. Nuns also star in—or haunt—such recent releases as The First Omen (2024), Sister Death (2023), Deliver Us (2023), and Consecration (2023).

“[Nuns] are figures that, for Americans, are very other,” said Ryan Duns, a Jesuit priest and author of the new book Theology of Horror. “And there’s a fascination with that.” Yet nun horror films reflect society’s larger discomfort with these independent women and conveniently ignore that for many real-life nuns, forgoing secular marriage and childbearing has freed them to perform invaluable academic, artistic, and social justice work.

Today’s nun horror can best be understood through its progenitor: nunsploitation. This genre, often as blood-soaked as it is pornographic, was popularized in ’70s Europe, largely as a critique of the Catholic religion. Whereas the church believed that vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience could bring women closer to God, these films seemed to posit that such strictures were more likely to turn women into wanton, slutty psychopaths.

Italian director Joe D’Amato clearly had a score to settle in his 1986 flesh flick Convent of Sinners, which he made under the name Dario Donati. The film liberally draws from Denis Diderot’s 18th-century novel La Religieuse, a seminal work of anti-­Catholic criticism. Convent of Sinners is one of three major film adaptations, with Jacques Rivette’s The Nun (1966) and Guillaume Nicloux’s The Nun (2013). Rivette’s take is considered an arthouse classic, and Nicloux’s premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, but Convent of Sinners aimed lower. A foremother of today’s nun horror, the film features exorcism, sexual hysteria, and lots of ominous harpsichord, plus a ­demon-purging douche.

For many women in the past, “marriage, prostitution, and the convent were about the only choices.”

Unlike today, when evil nuns tend to appear in the background, they’re often front and center in early nunsploitation films. In Convent of Sinners, heroine Susanna faces off against a predatory lesbian abbess and her scorned second-in-command. The former wants to show Susanna the ways of the flesh; the latter is so jealous that she poisons Susanna and stages her alleged possession. An opening intertitle quotes La Religieuse: “What need has Christ of so many foolish vergins [sic] and the human race of so [many] victims?”

La Religieuse excoriated cloistered life as repressive and intolerable. According to Craig A. Monson, author of the 2010 book Nuns Behaving Badly, there was some truth to that assessment. For many women in the past, “marriage, prostitution, and the convent were about the only choices,” Monson explains, and each came with (usually male) supervision. A woman’s purpose was dictated either by her husband, her male relatives, a brothel owner, or the church. The Council of Trent in the mid-1500s, which called for “the enclosure and safety of nuns,” stipulated that unless approved by a bishop, a nun could not “go out of her convent, even for a brief period, under any pretext.” There was no such thing as a mental breakdown for being shut away against your will, but there was such a thing as demonic possession.

Still, while filmmakers like D’Amato may have had some valid points about Catholic repression, they loved to show as much female nudity and sexual violence as possible while making them. Convent of Sinners opens as Susanna is graphically raped by her father and ends with a still of her lifeless, topless form. All the frames in between feature more naked breasts than a French beach in June. As a novice, Susanna sheds her secular clothes and puts on special underwear in front of the entire convent. Later, in a bathing area, the sisters frolic naked, splashing each other with water and giggling. While two nuns are doing laundry, one laughs to her companion, “Whenever I have to wash these, I think of dirty habits.”

Many nunsploitation films masqueraded as sex-positive propaganda, but leave it to men to fetishize a ­population of women who have opted out of sexual life altogether. (A nunsploitation sex scene is comparable to two “sexy nun” costumes from your local Spirit Halloween come to life and robotically feeling each other up.) These films also serve as anti-Catholic vehicles, casting nuns as repressed to the point of psychosis (or, gasp, lesbianism). The church might not look great, but neither do these filmmakers’ opinions of women. The best sisters in these films end up dead like Susanna, doe-eyed martyrs to a supposedly progressive cause.

Sigmund Freud famously posited that certain men are unable to be aroused by the women they love and unable to love the women who arouse them. This “psychical impotence,” more commonly known as the Madonna-whore complex, sums up the cinematic nun nicely. She is either too pure, forced by some evil external force to the brink of ruin, or, as with the oft-used Mother Superior trope, she is the one doing the ruining. The moral of the Conjuring franchise—which wildly fictionalizes the lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, two real-life Catholics and paranormal investigators—is that no evil can truly harm those with enough faith in the Christian God. The franchise’s The Nun and The Nun II have become easily the most successful nun horror films, grossing more than $630 million to date. While it’s refreshing to see our pious protagonists not being brutalized, sexualized, or exorcised, these women are barely human in an entirely different, even nostalgic way: They’re practically divine.

This franchise seems to be an effort to memorialize the days when nuns were shut away and, quite literally, holier than thou. “Catholicism has not historically modernized the way that other religious traditions have. There’s something atavistic about it,” Duns, the Jesuit priest and academic, told me when I asked why horror movies are still so obsessed with habit-sporting nuns and collared fathers. “These are people who dwell in our midst, but they’re tied to a past we don’t quite understand.” He pointed out that this must have felt especially true after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, which, in an attempt to collapse the distance between clergy and laypeople, dictated, among other things, that Mass could be conducted in vernacular languages and nuns’ traditional floor-length habits could be jettisoned. “All of a sudden,” Duns noted, “you show up to Mass the next week and the priest is facing you, he’s now speaking your language, and the liturgy that had composed your sense of space, time, and the sacred has evanesced.” So why does the big screen always show habited nuns chanting in Latin?

The Nun films, set in the decade before Vatican II, seem to long for these bygone rituals while exploiting them. In the first film, one nun tormented by Valak—a demon who manifests as a nun—is so pious that she would rather kill herself than be a vessel for evil. Another nun, Sister Irene, takes her vows to become “a true bride of Christ,” and is able to weaponize an actual vial of Jesus’ blood. The Nun II takes this even further. Turns out Sister Irene is a direct descendant of St. Lucy, the patron saint of the blind, and the visions she’s been having are holy rather than delusional. (Convenient!) This time, the power of her prayer turns barrels of wine into demon kryptonite, Christ’s blood.

Because convent life “is this weird, sealed, matriarchal thing,” Elle Carroll, the author of Vulture’s “18 Essential Nunsploitation Films,” tells me, “there’s this automatic assumption that insane things must be going on. They must be up to something, be it truly everything from demonic possession to silly, softcore-porn lesbianism.”

In reality, the something many nuns have gotten up to over the centuries is innovation, unencumbered by wifely duties or childbirth. Intentionally or otherwise, Catholic nuns were the original female separatists, and convents were often the best option for self-sufficient women. Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana flourished as a singer, organist, and composer from within her convent in 17th-century Italy. Hildegard of Bingen, who made groundbreaking contributions to music and medicine in the 12th century, was a Benedictine nun. The 20th-century artist Corita Kent, who joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 at age 18, made indelible contributions to pop art with her political serigraphs and advocated for Catholic progressive reform during Vatican II.

“They must be up to something…from demonic possession to silly, softcore-porn lesbianism.”

Their self-government opened opportunities to develop scholarly, artistic, or technical pursuits that Monson, the author of Nuns Behaving Badly, says “would not have been readily available in the world.” He acknowledges that some nuns “got their jollies out of being super-pious,” but others were “more intellectual, whether it was in music or in writing or in becoming accountants—even running the finances” for their convents.

The Roman Catholic Church is still one of the biggest charitable organizations in the country, and without its legions of female volunteers, these efforts would grind to a halt. Many nuns see such good works as a specific part of their calling—take the Dominican Sisters of Hope, based just north of New York City, who name “poverty, eco-justice, civil rights, access to health care, and access to education” among their key issues. The St. Louis–based Daughters of Charity work in health care, prisons, and social services. Pope Francis is reportedly friendly to nuns, but in 2012, the Vatican under arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI accused the largest umbrella organization for nuns of promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” Their crimes? Voicing support for the Affordable Care Act and, allegedly, mentioning “patriarchy.”

Perhaps nuns terrorize the big screen because their social role is so complex. In a society where the value of exclusively female spaces remains confusing, nuns are reduced to objects of fear (or derision). In nun horror, elderly nuns are always the most monstrous. The nubile protagonists in Immaculate and Convent of Sinners are preyed upon for their fertile wombs and pert physiques, and that the predators are their mothers superior speaks volumes.

In a society where churchgoing is on the decline, horror movies may serve a unique purpose. Duns, the Jesuit priest and academic, said he’s witnessed rampant religious alienation among his undergraduate students, but the horror genre offers a novel outlet for existential angst. “Interpersonal communication and shared ritual has been displaced, and I think relocated into horror,” he told me, where “you confront mortality, evil, the meaning of life.” Monsters—psychopathic serial killers, vampires, malicious ghosts—serve this purpose, but assigning that baggage to an actual class of women suggests a deeper problem. Few other professions feature so heavily in horror films, but why? Because these women used to dress strangely? Because they have faith? Because they’ve opted out of the usual marriage-and-children script?

With habit reform nearly 60 years in the rearview mirror and many nun horror films painting Catholics as godless hypocrites, it’s hard not to feel as though that last reason is the one with the most sticking power. After all, if Cecilia had just stayed in the Midwest and done the “normal” thing, there wouldn’t be a movie, would there?

On Monday morning, I drove to Powder Springs, Georgia, a working-class suburb 20 miles northwest of Atlanta, to see former President Donald Trump speak at a palatial Pentecostal church called Worship With Wonders. As I pulled into the 30-acre campus, a gentleman wearing a safety vest and directing traffic motioned for me to roll down my window and handed me a stack of voting guides “for you to hand out to your congregation.” Before I could tell him I didn’t have a congregation, he waved me toward the yawning parking lot, which was filling up fast with a crowd of several thousand attendees.

The organization behind both the day’s event and the voting guide (which assured readers that Trump would say “NO” to “boys competing in girls’ sports” and “YES” to allowing “only US citizens to vote”) was the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a national Christian group that aims to “mobilize and train people of faith to vote and flex their political muscles.” Their flex today turned out to be a four-hour marathon of praise music, speakers, and a lengthy intermission before Trump arrived. The extensive speaker lineup included several superstars of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) a growing charismatic movement led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who believe Christians are called to take over the government. In recent years, Trump has emerged as a key figure in this quest: In 2020, Paula White-Cain, the NAR-affiliated Florida pastor who served as Trump’s lead spiritual adviser during his presidency, warned her followers that Christians who didn’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” 

The day’s main attraction was a meandering conversation between White-Cain, and Trump, who described him as a “champion of people of faith.” Trump reciprocated by calling White-Cain “a great person, a great woman,” and then the conversation began. Sometimes Trump answered White-Cain’s questions, but he mainly treated them prompts for what has become his trademark, meandering, stream-of-consciousness responses.

When White-Cain asked about his religious upbringing, Trump described attending his family’s Presbyterian church in Queens. “It made me feel good,” he replied, “but sometimes you couldn’t get out of there fast enough, I have to be honest.” The audience roared with appreciation for his candor. His father, Fred Trump, used to take him to see Billy Graham preach, he recalled. Which made him think of the hymn “How Great Thou Art.” Which made him think of Elvis.

“It made me feel good, but sometimes you couldn’t get out of there fast enough, I have to be honest.”

When White-Cain asked him about his recent work with Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, on relief efforts in hurricane-stricken North Carolina, Trump marveled at how tornadoes destroy some things but leave others untouched. Then he told a story about how Graham-the-younger had once asked him not to swear so much. The response to a question about Trump’s plans for US-Israel relations was the oft-repeated story of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in 2018. This time he finished with a flourish, with an anecdote about telling the contractors to build the new embassy out of a material called “Jerusalem stone” because “a very rich guy, a very big Wall Street guy” he knew had always told him he was very proud that his building contained the material. And—score!—it also turned out to the “cheap as hell.” Trump’s most significant line of the event may have been his cryptic promise that his “faith council” would be “directly in the Oval Office.”

While Trump rambled and riffed, the speakers who preceded him, each of whom was allotted only a few minutes, cut right to the chase. Faith and Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed announced his group had knocked on more than 8 million doors so far this election season, and then described a moment when Harris allegedly told a heckler who yelled “Christ is king” at a Wisconsin event that he was “at the wrong rally.” Reed crowed, “Today you’re at the right rally!” The crowd went wild. Lance Wallnau, a NAR apostle and key player in the “Stop the Steal” campaign promised, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!” Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, got a standing ovation when he said the “Lemon Test” for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

The crowd was fairly diverse, and the speaker lineup, while mostly white, did include some pastors of color. Florida’s Bishop Kelvin Cobaris, the former president of the African American Council of Christian Clergy, said, “I want to tell every African American in here ‘Don’t be a afraid to lose your Black card…vote to defend religious freedom, vote to defend Israel!’” Pastor Sam Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said the enemy is “trying to kill our children in the classroom.” For a split second, I naively thought he was talking about guns, but then he clarified that the killer was “ideologies and social constructs that are out of alignment with the word of the Lord God.” The group ended the event by gathering around Trump to pray over him.

The attendees I spoke with afterward were jubilant—likely in part because after a program full of shaking their fists against “men in women’s sports” and “transgender surgeries for illegal aliens,” the crowd rocked out to the queer anthem “YMCA” as Trump was leaving the stage. Betsy Jorgensen, a volunteer with the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition, told me that she was “very confident we are going to win, barring any other tragedy.” She was from nearby Lumpkin County, which, she said, “is so red we call it Trumpkin County.” There, she had been knocking on doors and registering voters because she believed this election was crucial to right the country. “We are the last bit of a republic, of the free world,” she said. Alayna Martin, also from nearby, said she thought Trump would win “in a landslide” and that she liked him because “he cares about our faith and wants us to be a part of everything.

Sophie McLean, a regular congregant at the church where the event was held, also thought Trump would win, but her friend and fellow congregant, Jennifer Smith, wasn’t so sure. In fact, she still hadn’t yet made up her mind whom she was going to vote for. What would help her choose? I asked. “More time—I’m running out of it, but more time,” she said. “I probably need a little bit more prayer.”

On a blisteringly sunny October day in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of Christians gathered on the National Mall for a day of intense prayer. A self-proclaimed prophet from Colorado named Lou Engle had summoned them for an event he called the “Esther Call on the Mall” because, he said, he had a dream in which the nation’s capital was filled with “a million Esthers,” a reference to the Old Testament queen who stood up for her people against the wicked king Haman. “You’ll say to your children and your grandchildren that you were there when God gathered the Esthers to save a nation,” Engle promised in a trailer video for the event.

Esther’s people, of course, were the imperiled Jews, and not by accident, Engle’s prayer rally took place on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The speakers, a racially diverse group, praised Jesus, but, on a stage festooned with Israeli flags they also often prayed in Hebrew. Some in the crowd wore Jewish prayer shawls and stars of David and blew shofars, the rams’ horn that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle. Others told me they were fasting, just as observant Jews do on Yom Kippur. Engle and some of the other speakers bowed back and forth as they spoke looking as if they were engaged in the Jewish prayer practice of davening.

Fundamentalist Christians have long supported Israel because of their belief that the Jews are God’s “chosen people.” The modern Christian Zionist movement goes back to the Messianic Jewish movement of the 1970s, widely known as Jews for Jesus, who aimed to convert Jews to Christianity. Their approach, says Rabbi Jack Moline, the emeritus president of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, was, “‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’” Modern Christian Zionists, on the other hand, mostly aren’t looking to immediately bring any Jews to Jesus. Instead, says Moline, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.” But there’s a catch: In this scenario, most of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel will perish, and the remainder will finally accept Jesus—bringing about both “Armageddon and the elimination of the ‘Jewish problem,’” says Moline.

“‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’”

In the past few years, at the forefront of Christian Zionism has been a rapidly growing global charismatic movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose leaders, including Engle and many others who attended the march, believe God has commanded Christians to take over the government, in part because doing so will hasten this particular end-times scenario.

This movement has gained even greater propulsion since the Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza. Prominent NAR pastors have claimed that this conflict is the latest chapter in an existential spiritual war. Damon Berry, a religious studies professor at St. Lawrence University in New York, says NAR leaders believe “that what we’re doing politically on the ground [in Gaza] despite the incredible loss of life, is necessarily a battle raging between the forces of good and evil.” In this battle, NAR leaders see Trump as anointed by God to command the fight for the United States and Israel. Berry adds that they are convinced that “if we don’t support Trump, this is something that America would be judged for.” Some of the most influential Christian Zionist Trump supporters have served as spiritual advisers to the former president and their influence can be seen in some of his foreign policy decisions.

In this election, Christian Zionists’ pleas for their followers to support Israel at any cost are only growing louder. Leaders in this movement, including many of those present at the Esther Call, are working from the top down, leveraging relationships with key GOP leaders, including vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

They are also working from the bottom up, warning their followers that God’s favor for the United States depends on Christians’ support for Israel. The Christian Zionist voting bloc is considerable: Nearly a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical. In a 2020 poll, half of evangelicals said that supporting Israel was “important for fulfilling biblical prophecy.” By back-of-the-napkin math, that’s about 41.5 million people—certainly enough to sway an election. The share of Republicans who support Israel has grown from half in the late ’90s to 80 percent in 2018, a Pew survey found. What’s more, some voters, especially younger ones, have said they plan to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel by not voting in the election, or even, as NPR reported earlier this month, casting a ballot for Trump—in fact, the former president is now the favored candidate among Arab American voters, an October poll found.

At the Esther Call event, Lou Engle stood before a row of Israeli flags and admonished the crowd. “You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God!” he cried. “If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”

“You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God! If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”

For decades, Christian Zionists have been working behind the scenes in Washington to strengthen US support for Israel, mainly through the powerhouse evangelical group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which was founded in 2006 by Texas minister John Hagee to bring together the patchwork of pro-Israel Christian groups. Another aligned group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the massive lobbying organization that advocates for pro-Israel policies (and spent aggressively in 2024 to sink progressive candidates who spoke out against the war in Gaza). A major breakthrough for Christian Zionists came in 2017 when the Trump administration answered their calls to officially recognize Jerusalem, a holy city for Christians, as the capital of Israel, and announced plans to relocate the US embassy there the following year. The United Nations criticized the move because Jerusalem is in the occupied territory of the West Bank. But Christian Zionists saw the move as a victory—and a further validation that Trump had been chosen by God to lead the United States in the world.

One prominent NAR leader, a South Carolina–­based pastor named Dutch Sheets, said in a broadcast that the embassy move “did something in the spirit realm. It aligned us in a significant way with Israel. I believe God was saying He is going to rain Holy Spirit oil down all over America.” In a 2018 interview on a Christian news show, Paula White-Cain, one of Trump’s major spiritual advisers, recalled telling him shortly after he made the decision, “Sir, you’ve done the right thing.” Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based former business strategist and a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, said the embassy move fulfilled “a prophecy” in the Bible that the Jews would be able to return to their land, and that Trump had been “stirred by the spirit of God.”

In reality, Trump had likely also been stirred by the spirit of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a fervently pro-Israel Orthodox Jew, as well as the many pro-Israel groups that had been lobbying hard on the issue (and stocking his campaign war chest). One of the main cheerleaders of the move was CUFI’s John Hagee. In 2017, before the embassy was officially moved, Hagee told a group of his supporters, “When I spoke to [Trump] in the White House about this several weeks ago, he said this very emphatically. He said, ‘Other presidents have failed you, but I will not disappoint the Christian community in this issue. I will stand with Israel, and we will at some point in time, move the embassy.’”

Trump’s goodwill with NAR leaders was tested a few years later when his administration tried to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine. Christian Zionists have long opposed the idea of a “two-state solution,” which would recognize the existence of both Israel and Palestine. During the Middle East peace talks of 2013, for example, televangelist Pat Robertson warned that if the United States recognized Palestine, God would punish Americans with a “natural disaster.” In 2019, a group of pastors, including Hagee, White, and Wallnau were invited to the White House for a briefing on a possible two-state solution. Afterward, Right Wing Watch reported, in a YouTube broadcast, Wallnau lambasted the plan. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”  

Negotiations for the two-state solution, of course, collapsed—and Christian Zionists seemed eager to forgive the administration’s blunder. During then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2019 trip to Jerusalem, a Christian Broadcasting Network journalist asked Pompeo, a devout evangelical Christian, “Could it be that President Trump is being raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace?” Pompeo responded, grinning, “As a Christian, I certainly believe that that’s possible.”

When Trump lost the 2020 election, some of the same NAR pastors who had praised Trump for moving the embassy—including Lance Wallnau, Dutch Sheets, and Paula White-Cain—emerged as leaders in the “Stop the Steal” campaign claiming that the election was stolen. In a 2022 broadcast, Sheets said that Trump had told him in a dream, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

Fast forward to October 7, 2023, when NAR pastors’ commitment to Israel became an all-out obsession. In a forthcoming paper for the religion studies journal Nova Religio, Berry, the St. Lawrence University religion scholar, chronicles how NAR pastors characterized the war in Gaza as part of “a cosmic battle between God and satanic forces.” Berry references a broadcast on Rumble titled “Is This WWIII?” that Wallnau published on October 8, 2023. In it, Wallnau claimed that Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel was the result of God punishing the United States for electing Biden, abandoning Trump, and allowing trans people to serve in the military. Because of these transgressions, Wallnau says, the United States has become “spiritually vulnerable.” In another podcast a few weeks later, Wallnau returned to those themes, warning his 21,000 viewers that the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses aimed “to deconstruct the legitimacy of the United States and Israel.”

Berry also quotes Jonathan Cahn, a rabbi and NAR-aligned charismatic Christian. Cahn, who also spoke at the Esther Call event, has said in the past that even to utter the word “Palestine” was “to take part in a war against the promise of God and the will of God.”

To some NAR adherents, paradoxically, the October 7 attack and all the bloodshed that followed was actually good news. NAR pastor Cindy Jacobs, another leader in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, told the crowd on the Mall that God had warned her about Hamas’ attack—but he also told her that “after the dark time, Israel would come into a great revival”—presumably, the prelude to Christ’s return.

What exactly that “great revival” might look like in the near term is a matter of some debate. While many of the NAR leaders make no secret of their disdain for a two-state solution, a new guard of Christian Zionist groups seems to have realized that loudly calling for Palestine’s obliteration doesn’t play well with younger Christians. Take the Philos Project, a decade-old nonprofit with an annual budget of $8 million whose mission is to “promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.” The group, which in 2020 received a $9.4 million grant from the public charity National Philanthropic Trust, says on its website that it supports “some variant of the two-state solution—ideally a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.”

Yet elsewhere, Philos leaders express a different set of beliefs. As the New Republic recently reported, its founder Robert Nicholson appeared last year on a podcast hosted by the pro-life activist Lila Rose during which he warned that Islamist terrorists aligned with Hamas were likely flowing into the United States over the southern border, thanks to lax US immigration policies. On Facebook in January, the organization’s executive director, Luke Moon, posted a photo of himself in Israel proudly signing a bomb that was “bound for Hezbollah.” That summer on Facebook, he posted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus giving the thumbs-up sign, accompanied by the slogan “Jesus Was a Zionist.” Philos Project leaders devoted a recent podcast episode to debunking what they called a “conspiracy theory” that AIPAC wields political power.

“Jesus was a Zionist.”

Philos Project is platformed by powerful groups and people. In January, Moon spoke at the inaugural event of the National Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism, a post-October 7 initiative of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. In addition to the Philos Project, other groups involved in the effort included the MAGA group America First Policy Institute, the conservative Christian organizations the Concerned Women of America, the old guard Christian right Family Research Council, and the Independent Women’s Forum.

On October 7, 2024, the Philos Project hosted an event in Washington, DC. The stated purpose was to recognize the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel, but it also served as a quasi-campaign stop: The event was headlined by vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

By positioning itself as a thought leader, Philos Project exerts its influence far beyond politicians. One prominent example involves Mike Cosper, an opinion writer for the leading Christian magazine Christianity Today. In 2022, Cosper earned a following among progressive Christians with a wildly popular investigative podcast about a scandal-plagued Seattle megachurch. The following year, Cosper decided to turn his attention to the war in the Middle East. In a podcast series called “It’s Complicated,” Cosper promised to travel to the Middle East to unpack the nuances of the war, to “meet the people whose lives have been shaped by this conflict, this war, and this hope.”

As it turned out, Cosper’s reporting included the voices of only a few Palestinians. Ultimately, in a March 2024 Christianity Today cover story, he compared Hamas to campus protesters, writing, “Hamas uses an Islamist and nationalist ideology to demonize Jews, and the academic Left uses anticolonial ideology to do the same.” What Christianity Today did not disclose to its 4.5 million online readers was that Cosper’s fact-finding missions to the Middle East was actually a junket organized by the Christian Zionist Philos Project.

After the Esther Call event in DC, Engle’s group sent out an email urging attendees to donate to a consortium of Christian Zionist groups run by an Alabama-based Christian Zionist named Heather Johnston, who also spoke at the Esther Call. On her groups’ websites, Johnston says that her journey progressed from the life of an ordinary Christian mom “to passionately seeking God and the world of international politics.” The flagship program Johnston runs, the US Israel Education Association, has conducted tours to Israel for congressional representatives since 2011. Their promotional materials give off the veneer of neutrality; the website promises, for example, that congresspeople will learn about “efforts to build an integrated economy between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank as a grassroots peace movement.”

In contrast, on social media, Johnston writes about her “risk-taking relationship with Jesus” and waxes hawkish about Israel. Earlier this month in a post about Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the globetrotting chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she called on Biden to “speed up weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs,” noting that there had been “delays due to human rights concerns, but McCaul emphasizes their necessity for Israel’s defense as tensions rise in the Middle East.”

 In her posts, Johnston regularly mixes her own Christianity with a little folksy Judaism—one mini-essay, for example, explains how New Testament characters showed “chutzpah.” Her connections to power brokers are also fodder, as she regularly posts photos of herself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she calls “a dear friend of mine,” “King Bibi,” and a “strategic genius.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, she wrote in a post last November, “is a brilliant leader and God’s favor is resting on Him.”

At the Esther Call event, Johnston read a text message she said she had received from him. “He told me, ‘I genuinely wish I could be there with you today because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.’”

But her work is not restricted to the US. She also runs an Israel-based group called the National Leadership Center, which trains Israeli youth in leadership skills in partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Education. The group’s headquarters are in the West Bank, which is referred to as “Samaria” on the website. “In the last 13 years there has been a noticeable change in the spiritual climate of the nation,” the group’s promotional materials say. “We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”

“We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”

Another prominent Christian Zionist leader is Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Iowa and 2012 presidential hopeful. Bachmann is a board member of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and earlier this year, she helped found a new institute for studies about Israel at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The institute, Bachmann said at its opening, would “help expand national and global understanding of the Jewish state.” Around the same time, Bachmann partnered with Philos Project’s Moon and several other Christian leaders to create the Conference of Presidents of Christian Organizations in Support of Israel. “We’re in a magic moment right now, a very special moment, when I’ve seen more flowering than I’ve ever seen in my life between the Christian community and the Jewish community,” she told the Jewish News Syndicate.

Part of this commitment appears to be a hardline rejection of the rights of Palestinians. Last year, in remarks at a conference hosted by the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, Bachmann said of Palestinians, “They need to be removed from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park.” In an October 2023 appearance in Los Angeles, Bachmann theorized that “wokeness” in Israel prevented the military from anticipating the attack. “It’s entirely possible that perhaps the intel service in Israel also had wokeness and decided not to pass the information along,” she said. She blamed “a spiritual, demonic presence” for the Hamas attack.

Christian Zionism isn’t just happening at the national level. This summer, while I was reporting a story about the New Apostolic Reformation in Pennsylvania, I attended a service at the Lord’s House of Prayer, a NAR-adjacent church in the city of Lancaster. That morning, a young Christian couple from Jerusalem, Yair and Anna Pinto, stood at the pulpit. (They didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article, nor did the Philos Project, Johnson, and Bachmann.) Yair, a fighter with the Israeli Defense Forces who documents his experiences for the Christian media outlet Trinity Broadcasting Network, told us how God had protected him as he rode in a tank through Gaza. Anna talked about misinformation circulating about Hamas’ October 7 massacre.

“They’re just on social media, TikTok University, saying, ‘Oh, here, this is what happened. My poor Palestinian friends, massacred by this great army, the most inhumane army in the world.’” But that was a distortion of reality, she said. The real enemy was Hamas—the opposite of what young people hear on social media. “My heart goes out to the teens because ours is a world where we have people who define themselves as ‘they’ or ‘it’ or a cat or a dog or a unicorn—I think we’ve got a glimpse of this evil, and it’s just spreading, like a root in a tree.”

Some Jewish people welcome the support of Christian Zionists, and it’s not hard to see one compelling reason why: Pastors are fundraising powerhouses, whose contributions are helping to rebuild areas of Israel that are ravaged by the war. According to the Associated Press, in the weeks immediately following Hamas’ attack, John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel raised $3 million to support Israeli first responders. Sean Feucht, a pastor who has organized a series of prayer rallies on the steps of state capitols, led a pro-Israel rally at New York’s Columbia University. (The Philos Project’s Luke Moon was a fellow organizer.)  Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia-based NAR-aligned pastor who served as a spiritual adviser to Trump, recently pledged to donate $15 million to Israel; he has received awards and accolades from Jewish leaders for his efforts to help Israel rebuild after the attacks.

Other Jews bristle at the appropriation of their culture—which, says Moline, of Interfaith Alliance, can feel transactional. For many Christian Zionists, he says “there’s something important in Jewish practice and Jewish belief, and they want to absorb it. They want it to become part of who they are. It increases a sense of legitimacy.” The appropriation can also seem like a bit of a grift: Get your special edition Israeli army shofar here for only $555! Grab a “solidarity mezuzah” to protect your home for just $18! As Moline put it, “It’s like saying to a Catholic, ‘Where can we get some of those communion wafers? They’re so delicious!’”

It can also appear that there is something transactional about Christian Zionists’ support—they need the Jews to hasten the second coming of Christ. Michele Bachmann said in 2015 that she wanted to “convert as many Jews as we can” (though she later apologized). Southern California pastor Jack Hibbs, who presides over the influential Calvary Chapel network of NAR-affiliated churches and was a leader in the Stop the Steal campaign, said on Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk’s TV show last year that Christians must “look past the sins of Israel and the sins of the Jew and give them the hope of Jesus.” As Mother Jones has reported, Hagee of Christians United for Israel said in 1999, “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.” (He also later apologized.) 

Religion historian Daniel Hummel, who leads the Lumen Center religious studies research institute in Madison, Wisconsin, points out that Christian Zionists’ support does not extend to all Jewish people. Christian Zionists, says Hummel, often express scorn for non-religious and cultural Jews. Indeed, even amid all the fetishization of Israel and Judaism at the Esther Call event, some speakers blamed America’s problems on George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has become a target of antisemitic conspiracy theories all over the world. “American Jews are really dividing over whether they should even support Israel,” says Hummel. “And Christian Zionists see this as endemic of a deeper problem within secular liberal Judaism.”

Trump himself has expressed that same disdain for liberal Jews. In 2019, he called Jewish people who vote for Democrats “very disloyal to Israel.” Earlier this year, he said, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

Despite Trump’s seeming ambivalence about American Jews, as the election approaches, NAR pastors seem more convinced than ever that the former president has been divinely to lead the defense of Israel and God’s “chosen people.” Last year, a few weeks after October 7, Engle, the prophet, announced his intention to make Israel “the Goliath” of his crusade (abortion was his “bear,” he said, and the LGBTQ movement was his “lion,” the NAR research X account @SometimesPDX reported.)

This past July, Jentezen Franklin spoke at the prayer breakfast at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, telling the attendees that he believed that God had providentially saved Trump from being assassinated. A month later, at a sermon at the Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, Franklin gave a sermon about godly voting. “Whether we like it or not, [the Jews] are still his chosen people,” he said, holding a Bible up and waving it around emphatically. “God has blessed America because we have blessed and stood with the nation of Israel. And when you vote for anyone who is anti-Israel, you literally are voting against every part of this book, from Genesis to Revelation.”   

At the Esther Call, the dozen or so attendees I talked to all told me that supporting Israel was a top issue for them in the presidential election. Toward the end of the day, I met Donna Neiman, a middle-aged woman who had traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the rally. She was carrying a shofar, and wearing lion earrings, which she said represented Jesus as the “lion of Judah.” Jesus, she said, “was born in Israel. He’s coming back in Israel. And if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you’ve got to watch Israel, because Israel is precious to him. It’s the apple of his eye.” Because of this, she said, Israel was a top concern for her in the election, which was why she had decided to cast her vote for Trump. “It’s Trump—he’s the only one, and he literally got on his knees the day when that that attack came on him, when they tried to shoot his ear,” she said, her voice raspy with emotion. “Yes, that is what it is! He will pray for Israel!”

Last Saturday, tens of thousands of Christians gathered under the blazing October sun on the National Mall in Washington, DC, for an all-day prayer rally that organizers called the “Esther Call on the Mall.” While the crowd raised their hands in testimony, waved flags, and sang along with megachurch standards, the speakers paced the stage urgently, speaking, sometimes screaming, about a spiritual war for the soul of the United States. “I pray the fate of America will be given an extension of mercy,” thundered Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist turned Christian influencer. “Give us 48 months more mercy and grace that the church may arise.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out who this crowd imagined presiding over those 48 months. Most of the attendees I spoke with, some of them sporting MAGA gear, told me they believed that Trump had been anointed by God to lead the country. “Many people may not agree with his character, but if you look at [the Old Testament king] David, he was a murderer and an adulterer,” Linda Ilias, who had traveled from Florida, told me. “But God saw his potential. God saw that he was true king, and he he called his potential out of him, and he became the king of Israel. And so Donald Trump, I believe the Lord chose him.”

The particular mix of faith and politics on display at the rally is a hallmark of the New Apostolic Reformation, a quickly growing charismatic religious movement led by apostles and prophets who believe Christians are called to take over the government. Many of them say God speaks to them in dreams.

The day’s speaker lineup was a who’s who of NAR leaders. The master of ceremonies was Lou Engle, the president of Lou Engle Ministries, who has been saying for months that God had put in his mind an image of a million women gathering on the National Mall. He referred to these women as “Esthers,” a reference to the Old Testament character who stood up against the wicked king Haman, who intended to persecute the Jews.

Wallnau, who recently hosted JD Vance at an event in Pennsylvania, called the event “our governmental moment to shift something in the spirit” and bragged about his success in recruiting influential people—Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, British podcaster Russell Brand—to support his movement. “I’m making a new list,” he said. “Red Rover, Red Rover, we called Elon Musk over. We’re calling Joe Rogan over. And I like this guy [Robert F.] Kennedy, [Jr.] I want to see him be a Pentecostal Catholic.”

Also on the stage were NAR leader Dutch Sheets and California pastor Ché Ahn, both of whom were instrumental in promoting the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Not all of the speakers mentioned Trump by name, but Ahn did.

The prayer rally was deliberately held on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the year for Jews, and the rally was thick with symbols and rituals borrowed from Judaism. Some attendees wore Jewish prayer shawls and blew shofars, the rams’ horns ancient Israelites used to call armies to battle. Engle, who rocks back and forth as he speaks in a style that resembles the Jewish practice of davening, had called for the crowd to fast, just as observant Jews were doing on Yom Kippur. From a stage draped with Israeli flags, the speakers referred to the Jews as God’s “chosen people.” One speaker said she had dreamed she was “on a 35-day fast, and I’m in the Middle East in the desert alone, and all of a sudden this man comes in full rage and anger, with a turban, and he says ‘Stop praying!’ But he can’t touch me. He wants to choke me out.”

Michele Bachmann, the staunchly conservative former representative from Minnesota, echoed the support for Israel and read a text message she had received from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “He told me, ‘I genuinely wish I could be there with you today because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.’” The crowd cheered.

“I genuinely wish I could be there with you today, because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.”

The day’s attendance fell far short of the goal of a million people. Each of the four reserved areas could hold 15,000–18,000 people, but only the front section was full. Large contingents from Latino and Asian churches participated, and each lawn section had two Jumbotrons, one with captions in English and the other in Spanish. I spoke with a group that had traveled from Hawaii to attend the rally, and a family of seven who had saved up to make the trip from Northern Ireland. The diversity of the crowd underscored the global nature of the New Apostolic Reformation; as religious extremism researcher Fred Clarkson told me recently, the racial and ethnic diversity of the movement often “doesn’t fit with the narrative and the stereotype of who the Christian right is.”

And then there were the flags, a central feature of the spectacle. Some attendees carried blue and pink banners with the slogan “Don’t mess with our kids,” the name of an ant-trans movement started by a Portland apostle and former multi-level-marketing magnate Jenny Donnelly, who helped organize the rally. Others carried “Appeal to Heaven” flags, which date back to the American Revolution but have recently become associated with Christian nationalism—Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made headlines when his wife, Martha-Ann, flew one at their vacation home. Many attendees waved Trump and MAGA flags.

For many of the attendees I spoke with, Trump was an almost mystical figure. Amy Nile traveled from Texas to attend the rally and was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Spiritual sniper.” I asked her about it. “It just means that whenever we pray as daughters of the King, we do not miss,” she explained. “We hit the target with precision and accuracy under the prompting of the Holy Spirit.” She was praying about “the glory of God coming back to Washington, and back to our nation,” and believed this election would mark the beginning of “a new time” for America. Trump, she said, had been anointed by God to “be back in our capitol, to lead the charge of turning our nation back to God.”

Vicki Kraft, who traveled from Washington state to attend the rally, wore all white and a bridal veil that, she told me, symbolized the “bride of Christ.” Kraft, who served in the Washington State House of Representatives for the 17th legislative district from 2017 to 2023, said she was “certain” the last election had been stolen from Trump. She worried about “the integrity of our elections—if that degrades and the Lord doesn’t bring that back by his grace and cause people to fear and have integrity again.”

Stephanie Liu had traveled from New York to attend the rally, but it wasn’t her first time in DC. She goes every month with a group from her Chinese American church to visit the January 6 insurrectionists in prison. “We came from a communist country,” she said. “We know Americans should not have political prisoners. But sadly, now they have more than 1,000 political prisoners.” Liu wore a T-shirt that bore the slogan “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president.” She explained, “Jesus is my Savior because Jesus is our Lord. He’s the greatest. He’s our strength. He is the master. But President Trump is chosen by God, and he works for we the people.” She added, “I just pray that God will protect America again, and anybody who has common sense, if they truly know the Christian value, they will support Trump.”

There’s a quickly growing religious movement whose followers believe Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. The New Apostolic Reformation, as it’s known, seeks an explicitly Christian command of the highest levels of the government, including the presidency and the Supreme Court—but its leaders are working on the hyper-local level, too.

In the latest episode of Reveal, my colleagues traveled to a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see how these Christian nationalists have inserted their ideology into the very fabric of local civic life rather than merely be the “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians.”

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To Pastor Don Lamb, this is not a Christian takeover. Yet his congregation is influenced by the elusive, hard-to-pin-down New Apostolic Reformation movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God.

There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. “Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler in her feature story on the movement in our latest magazine issue. As Butler noted, “Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR ‘the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.'”

This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s.

The day after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in July, Pastor Diane Mullins took the microphone in front of the southwest Ohio church she and her husband, Jim, preside over and began to pace in front of a large LED screen with the graphic of a billowing American flag.

“I’m tired of holding back because I’m running for a stupid office, and I don’t care if they hear that,” she said, her voice slowly rising. “The only reason I’m running, it’s about the kingdom of God and his righteousness that should rule and reign in the government of the United States of America.” Her cadence quickened, the electric organ and audience’s applause swelling to meet her fever pitch as her words turned into commands. “It is time for the godly, it is time for the anointed of God to arise! Awake! Arise! Advance! Be the church. Stop being afraid!”

From the city of Hamilton, population 63,000, the urban center of a mostly rural county, Mullins is running a statehouse campaign in which she presents herself as a mainstream Ohio Republican, running to defend “conservative values.” But when she appears before her hundreds of congregants, Mullins has been much more explicit about the interdependence of faith and politics. “The principle of separation of church and state is a lie,” she said in a 2021 sermon. “The Constitution of the United States was written by men who were Christian men, who were principled men, because they were concerned that one day, the government would try to take over the church and the Christians.”

A Christian nationalist gospel that might have once been a fringe of the Republican Party now commands a central role, from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to down-ballot races across the country—to school boards and local government. Should they be elected, their mission is to infuse government with the word of God. 

“It’s this belief that while the United States might have different people, different races and ethnicities or religions, it was built by white Anglo-Protestants,” says Andrew Whitehead, co-director of the Association of Religion Data Archives at Indiana University, Indianapolis. “And those folks today who are white Anglo-Protestants really have the clearest heritage to help run this country, to have a say in what it should look like.”

“From three to four years old, if you would say, ‘What do you wanna be when you grow up,’ I would tell you I was gonna work for Jesus.”

The child of devout Christians, Mullins always felt certain of her destiny. “From three to four years old, if you would say, ‘What do you wanna be when you grow up,’ I would tell you I was gonna work for Jesus,” Mullins said on the Christian radio show Shaped by Faith, in 2018. But she figured her vocation was to support a ministering husband, in much the same way her mother did for her father, Pearl Robinson, a Pentecostal pastor in the Cincinnati suburb of Hamilton, where Mullins lives today.

For years, Mullins was Jim’s supportive spouse, when he took over what was then called the Calvary Christian Center in Hamilton from his parents. But over three consecutive nights in 2015, Mullins says, messages from God interrupted her sleep. On day one, he said, “Awake. Arise. Advance.” On the second, he said, “Honeybee.” And on the third, “Deborah.”

A biblical figure who was Israel’s first female judge and prophet, Deborah, or “Honeybee” in Hebrew, appears in the Book of Judges and guided an Israeli warrior to lead 10,000 soldiers to defeat an army of Canaanites (people who lived in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine). In the “Song of Deborah,” she is commanded by God to “awake” and “arise” as a “mother in Israel.” For Mullins, these divine messages and the spectacle of what she described as “the nasty women’s march” after Trump was elected in 2016, convinced her to start a ministry called Deborah’s Voice. Aspiring to be “the voice of Christian women,” the ministry’s priorities include “ending abortion,” “protecting traditional marriage,” and “supporting Christian women in politics.” Starting in 2018, Deborah’s Voice even held rallies across the country. “We just feel that women have a voice in this nation, and we don’t want the wrong voice,” Mullins told the Christian Post ahead of the ministry’s 2018 rally in Washington, which was attended by a few hundred people. 

Devoted Christian nationalists tend to be comfortable with the idea of authoritarian social control, Whitehead tells me. The logic goes that chaotic circumstances require rigid rules, and strong leaders like Trump to enforce them, to restore the order that people crave. Mullins views America’s founding documents as sacred and needing protection from change. Meanwhile, the devil—via the so-called “deep state”—has been working internally to thwart God’s plans. 

“It’s this belief that while the United States might have different people, different races and ethnicities or religions, it was built by white Anglo-Protestants.”

The story of Deborah has often appeared in Mullins’ sermons over the years, especially to underscore the significance of a female prophet who was not only trusted but revered. “She was where I believe the church is today,” Mullins preached in September. “We are a righteous people in between the established church and the world, the culture that we live in, that is so ungodly and unrighteous.” Within this context, Mullins says, around November 2023, God once more directed her, this time to campaign for office and serve him in the Ohio House of Representatives as a representative from the solidly red 47th District. Running for office wasn’t her decision, she says, it was God’s. His timing was propitious: November 2023 was when Ohioans voted to legalize recreational cannabis and constitutionally protect abortion. “Everything is about the kingdom,” Mullins said in a January sermon. “So, what is it about the kingdom that God wants to use me for in that?” Mullins’ campaign did not respond to Mother Jones’ interview requests or questions.

This was not Mullins’ first statehouse campaign. Four years ago, before Ohio enacted new legislative maps, she unsuccessfully challenged a different Republican incumbent, telling southwest Ohio newspaper the Journal-News that she was a pro-gun, anti-abortion candidate who wouldn’t compromise her “conservative core beliefs.” What is new, however, is the amount of dark money that she has received, which helped her—like the biblical David—defeat the political Goliath in the primary against three-term incumbent Rep. Sara Carruthers. Make Liberty Win, a Virginia-based hybrid PAC/super-PAC that seeks to elect “liberty-defending” state lawmakers, poured more than $96,000 into supporting Mullins (and opposing Carruthers), $40,000 more than Mullins’ own campaign spent.

By February, the race got ugly, culminating in Carruthers filing a complaint against Make Liberty Win with the Ohio Elections Commission for mailing attack ads without disclosing it was the source. The ads claimed Carruthers “threw a single mother out of her house,” referring to a complicated story in which the surrogate of Carruthers’ two children filed a breach of contract suit against the candidate. Carruthers settled the lawsuit out of court in 2022 and the case is now sealed. (Mullins told the Journal-News in February that “I would never OK a mailer like that.”)

Make Liberty Win spent more than $1.8 million in about a dozen GOP primaries in Ohio, mostly to oppose Republican incumbents, part of the so-called “Blue 22,” in favor of more MAGA-minded candidates unwilling to compromise with Democrats. Eight of the 12 challenged Blue 22 Republicans held onto their seats. But the challengers who did win, like Mullins, presented themselves as being much more hardline conservatives, each highlighting their devotion to Christian values. Ty Mathews, for example, running to represent Ohio House District 83, has three pillars guiding his campaign: God, country, and family. “There’s a reason why [God] is number one,” Mathews explains in a video on his campaign website.

The inflexibility and radical nature of their respective candidacies seem to ignore the fact that Ohioans, including Republican voters, have rejected the state GOP’s efforts to stifle more progressive policies, says Paul Beck, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. “There’s an old adage in politics that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he tells me. “We’re seeing that with these Republican supermajorities. Many of their members now think they can really do anything.”

“Everything is about the kingdom. So, what is it about the kingdom that God wants to use me for in that?”

Mullins hasn’t publicly campaigned much since securing the Republican nomination, trading stump speeches and meet-and-greets for private fundraising events and occasional appearances at county fairs and holiday parades. She doesn’t have a campaign website or a WinRed fundraising page. And aside from references to supporting the Second Amendment and opposing abortion, her policy platform is scant. On her candidate Facebook page, she blends patriotic posts with praise and prayers for Trump, and images of her hobnobbing with Donald Trump Jr. and the GOP’s US Senate candidate in Ohio, Bernie Moreno.

Despite her proclivity for conspiracy theories, Mullins has been relatively mum on immigration—which is striking given the national spectacle Trump and his vice presidential hopeful Ohio Sen. JD Vance have created with disproven claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets. Springfield is about an hour north of Mullins’ district, and Trump and Vance’s falsehoods have, as Republican Gov. Mike DeWine put it, made the community the “epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy.”

Mullins’ political base of operations appears to be inside Calvary Church, a medium-sized brick building adorned with a large cross and a looming white steeple. Every Sunday, worshippers gather in a large auditorium, led by a live contemporary rock band and a chorus of singers. Pastors encourage the unsaved in the audience to make themselves known and receive God. Calvary Church weaves nondenominational teachings with elements of Mullins’ Pentecostal upbringing; she speaks in tongues, for instance, and congregants line up for some faith healing from her and her husband.

For years, Mullins has warned people in her church of the impending end times, pointing to evidence that seemed to be everywhere: Satan “pervert[ed] what male and female was all about” in society. The culture’s ungodliness ushered in the spread of the “man-made” coronavirus. The Antichrist has infiltrated American institutions through communism. From her pulpit, she emphasizes this church’s unique role in bringing the unsaved into the Lord’s “harvest” before Jesus’ return, casting out the ever-present “enemy,” and aligning the United States with the Holy Word. 

One Sunday morning this past summer, less than 5 miles down the road from Calvary Church, Mullins’ Democratic opponent, Rev. Vanessa Cummings, was preaching at Payne Chapel AME Church. As Cummings finished delivering her sermon to the dozen or so people in the pews, she emphasized the need to pray for unity, world peace, and healing from divisiveness. She’s been a pastor at this 184-year-old Black church for three years and has ministered across the state. A longtime public servant and community activist, she served as vice mayor and city councilmember of nearby Oxford and is the vice president of Oxford’s NAACP chapter. She has long helped with voter registration and education drives. Today, I am the only white person in the room and I am reminded of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous observation that 11 a.m. on Sunday was the “most segregated hour of America.”

Sitting across from me in her office after the service, Cummings acknowledges that in a district that is nearly 62 percent Republican, the odds are stacked against her. But, she notes, “If I didn’t think I could win, I wouldn’t run.” The voters she’s spoken to on the campaign trail are desperately seeking change, Cummings tells me, and they’re tired of politicians making decisions against their constituents’ wishes because of their personal beliefs. 

While her faith guides her in her personal life, she emphatically rejects the tenets of Christian nationalism that Mullins preaches. “She believes there’s no separation of church and state. I believe there is a separation of church and state,” Cummings says. “She believes this is a stupid position. I believe it’s a position we should fight for, to get to serve the people.”

“It’s good I’m not God, I’d kill ‘em, every one.”

A few hours earlier, as I sat in a back pew as hundreds of people filtered into Mullins’ Calvary Church, a countdown timer inched toward zero on the three LED screens on the wall behind the pulpit. With a couple of months before the election, Mullins’ sermon was far less political than many of the ones I’ve watched on the Calvary Church YouTube channel. Her message was simple: God does not care what sins you have committed in your past, as long as you believe that Jesus Christ is your savior and you devote yourself to living in line with God’s word.

As forcefully as she has condemned the “perversion” and “unrighteousness” in society, in this sermon she emphasized this church would welcome, with open arms, a homeless drug addict or “two men who come in holding hands” who hope to hear the Lord’s good news. Similarly, people struggling with sins like “abortion, unforgiveness toward an abuser, fornication, sex before marriage” and “pornography” should not be afraid to accept Jesus into their hearts. It’s Mullins’ twist on the common refrain “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” 

It can be hard to reconcile that message with the image of the devilish “enemy” she regularly evokes. And it is the proliferation of sin, she preaches, that prevents the full realization of God’s visions for the world. “There’s too much darkness, too much deep state, too much sexual sin, too much abuse,” Mullins said in 2020. “And every day, I go: Oh Lord, Jesus. And he says, ‘I’m just letting you see it, I’ve known it all along.’ You know what my next thought is? It’s good I’m not God, I’d kill ‘em, every one…We need God. Thank God we’re not him, because we’d probably all be dead, too.”

In July, former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a 20-year-old man wielding an AR-15-style rifle. That near miss hasn’t stopped the Rod of Iron Ministries from holding a raffle this coming weekend for a special Trump-branded AR-15 at its fifth annual “Freedom Festival.”

Billed as the “largest open carry rally in America,” the festival draws attendees to celebrate the Second Amendment and hear from headliners that will include former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, radio host Sebastian Gorka, former US Rep. Allen West, former Trump ICE Director Tom Homan, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Anyone who registers early for the free tickets can enter the raffle to win the Trump gun.

The Rod of Iron Ministries was founded by Hyung Jin ”Sean” Moon as a militant breakaway from the Unification Church founded by his father, the late Sun Myung Moon. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Sean Moon’s sermons and social media videos espouse a particular End Times theology that predicts a future overthrow of the American government. He believes the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s divine justice—the “rod of iron” invoked in Revelation 2:27.

Moon often wears a crown of bullets, carries a gold-plated assault weapon, and rides a Harley in a helmet with a creepy skeleton facemask. (Moon also seems to have musical aspirations: He raps under the name King Bullethead and will also perform at this weekend’s Freedom Fest.)

With the help of a $5 million loan from their father, Moon’s brother Justin founded the Kahr Firearms Group in 1995. It started off manufacturing mostly small arms designed to tap into the growing market for American-made concealed weapons as states began to relax their gun laws. It has since expanded, and now Kahr is a sponsor of “Freedom Fest,” which will be held at its TommyGun warehouse in Greeley, Pennsylvania.

Both Moons have cultivated significant MAGA ties, including with the Trump brothers, Eric and Don Jr. Kahr Firearms now offers several Trump-themed weapons, and the company’s products are frequently promoted in Don Jr.’s weapons-themed outdoor magazine, Field Ethos. When the firearms company opened its TommyGun warehouse in 2016, Eric Trump gave a speech.

Given Sean Moon’s obsession with the downfall of the current American government, it’s no surprise that he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was at the US Capitol on January 6, and while he didn’t go in, he was close enough to get tear-gassed.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hyungjin Moon (KINGBULLETHEAD) (@kingbulletheadrodofironkingdom)

The Rod of Iron pastor has never seemed especially concerned with appearances or suggestions that his ministry is a cult. “We’re used to that type of persecution,” Moon told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2022, noting that followers of his father’s church are known colloquially as “Moonies.”

Under Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained some renown for conducting mass weddings for its believers. (One at Madison Square Garden in 1982 joined 2,075 couples.) In 2018, the Rod of Iron updated this tradition by holding a mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony in which couples carried (unloaded) assault weapons similar to the one used just days before to mow down dozens of staff and high school students in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.

This year won’t be the first time the Freedom Festival has given away a Trump gun. But considering the Rod of Iron’s reverence for Trump, I wondered whether the Freedom Festival organizers might have had second thoughts about raffling off a weapon favored by the former president’s would-be assassin. “That wouldn’t affect the decision to do this, not at all. I don’t think we’d see the connection,” Tim Elder, the church’s director of world missions, told me. “It’s not the AR’s fault. It’s the guy that was pulling the trigger. It’s his fault. We’re not going to blame the AR for that incident.”

But if the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s justice, what does it mean if it’s used to try to assassinate Trump? “We see that God’s hand is on this man,” Elder said simply.

The festival starts Friday, with an appearance by Flynn and a screening of his eponymous new movie.

The role of religion in American politics has changed profoundly since fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell and conservative direct-mail mogul Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Back then, the failure of Christians to appreciate their power at the ballot box over issues they saw as challenging their faith—abortion topped the list, but also prayer in schools, homosexuality, and women’s rights—was seen as an opportunity to galvanize a voting bloc for conservatives. The Moral Majority’s support of candidates who would represent those interests as elected officials unleashed a powerful resource in the Republican Party. The Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, but by then many offshoots had appeared: the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council. Evangelical and Christian voters had largely made the Republican Party their home.

Donald Trump tapped into and exploited, and was exploited by, this long history of disaffected voters. In him, a radical-right strain found its voice. Some call themselves “Christian nationalists” while others reject that label, but the movement, by any name, has a distinctly different character from your grandmother’s Moral Majority.

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. Its prominent influencers, ties to militias, and pervasiveness across civil society reveal a radical movement hiding in plain sight. Read the whole package here:

In July, former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a 20-year-old man wielding an AR-15-style rifle. That near miss hasn’t stopped the Rod of Iron Ministries from holding a raffle this coming weekend for a special Trump-branded AR-15 at its fifth annual “Freedom Festival.”

Billed as the “largest open carry rally in America,” the festival draws attendees to celebrate the Second Amendment and hear from headliners that will include former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, radio host Sebastian Gorka, former US Rep. Allen West, former Trump ICE Director Tom Homan, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Anyone who registers early for the free tickets can enter the raffle to win the Trump gun.

The Rod of Iron Ministries was founded by Hyung Jin ”Sean” Moon as a militant breakaway from the Unification Church founded by his father, the late Sun Myung Moon. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Sean Moon’s sermons and social media videos espouse a particular End Times theology that predicts a future overthrow of the American government. He believes the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s divine justice—the “rod of iron” invoked in Revelation 2:27.

Moon often wears a crown of bullets, carries a gold-plated assault weapon, and rides a Harley in a helmet with a creepy skeleton facemask. (Moon also seems to have musical aspirations: He raps under the name King Bullethead and will also perform at this weekend’s Freedom Fest.)

With the help of a $5 million loan from their father, Moon’s brother Justin founded the Kahr Firearms Group in 1995. It started off manufacturing mostly small arms designed to tap into the growing market for American-made concealed weapons as states began to relax their gun laws. It has since expanded, and now Kahr is a sponsor of “Freedom Fest,” which will be held at its TommyGun warehouse in Greeley, Pennsylvania.

Both Moons have cultivated significant MAGA ties, including with the Trump brothers, Eric and Don Jr. Kahr Firearms now offers several Trump-themed weapons, and the company’s products are frequently promoted in Don Jr.’s weapons-themed outdoor magazine, Field Ethos. When the firearms company opened its TommyGun warehouse in 2016, Eric Trump gave a speech.

Given Sean Moon’s obsession with the downfall of the current American government, it’s no surprise that he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was at the US Capitol on January 6, and while he didn’t go in, he was close enough to get tear-gassed.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hyungjin Moon (KINGBULLETHEAD) (@kingbulletheadrodofironkingdom)

The Rod of Iron pastor has never seemed especially concerned with appearances or suggestions that his ministry is a cult. “We’re used to that type of persecution,” Moon told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2022, noting that followers of his father’s church are known colloquially as “Moonies.”

Under Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained some renown for conducting mass weddings for its believers. (One at Madison Square Garden in 1982 joined 2,075 couples.) In 2018, the Rod of Iron updated this tradition by holding a mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony in which couples carried (unloaded) assault weapons similar to the one used just days before to mow down dozens of staff and high school students in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.

This year won’t be the first time the Freedom Festival has given away a Trump gun. But considering the Rod of Iron’s reverence for Trump, I wondered whether the Freedom Festival organizers might have had second thoughts about raffling off a weapon favored by the former president’s would-be assassin. “That wouldn’t affect the decision to do this, not at all. I don’t think we’d see the connection,” Tim Elder, the church’s director of world missions, told me. “It’s not the AR’s fault. It’s the guy that was pulling the trigger. It’s his fault. We’re not going to blame the AR for that incident.”

But if the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s justice, what does it mean if it’s used to try to assassinate Trump? “We see that God’s hand is on this man,” Elder said simply.

The festival starts Friday, with an appearance by Flynn and a screening of his eponymous new movie.

The role of religion in American politics has changed profoundly since fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell and conservative direct-mail mogul Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Back then, the failure of Christians to appreciate their power at the ballot box over issues they saw as challenging their faith—abortion topped the list, but also prayer in schools, homosexuality, and women’s rights—was seen as an opportunity to galvanize a voting bloc for conservatives. The Moral Majority’s support of candidates who would represent those interests as elected officials unleashed a powerful resource in the Republican Party. The Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, but by then many offshoots had appeared: the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council. Evangelical and Christian voters had largely made the Republican Party their home.

Donald Trump tapped into and exploited, and was exploited by, this long history of disaffected voters. In him, a radical-right strain found its voice. Some call themselves “Christian nationalists” while others reject that label, but the movement, by any name, has a distinctly different character from your grandmother’s Moral Majority.

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. Its prominent influencers, ties to militias, and pervasiveness across civil society reveal a radical movement hiding in plain sight. Read the whole package here:

Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants. Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos. And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.

These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.

The US Supreme Court oversees 13 judicial circuits, each with an appeals court that hears federal cases arising within its jurisdiction. Every term, the high court agrees to review only a small number of appeals from the circuits, which leaves those appeals courts with final say on most matters. The 5th Circuit has been a right-leaning enclave for decades, filled with judges from the Republican strongholds it oversees. But after Trump placed six new judges on the 17-member court, the relatively staid conservatism of Reagan and Bush jurists gave way to the slash-and-burn tactics of the MAGA movement. On their watch, the court’s decisions, substantive and procedural, have defied judicial precedents and norms while conforming to a familiar far-right agenda of neutering Democratic policies, gutting abortion rights, and undermining the authority of federal agencies.

“There is a new breed of Republican-­appointed judge,” says Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor who has followed the 5th Circuit closely. “Much like the divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans politically, there’s a divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans judicially. And what the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Their goal is to move the law far to the right. In case after case, the 5th Circuit has issued rulings that even this Supreme Court regularly strikes down. “It should be shocking that a very, very conservative appeals court is still losing so often with the most conservative Supreme Court in our lifetimes,” Vladeck says.

But even rulings that are overturned move the Overton Window, dignifying once unimaginable outcomes as acceptable and expanding the public’s notion of what’s possible. “These judges know what they’re doing,” says David Lat, author of the Original Jurisdiction newsletter and a longtime chronicler of the courts. “When they are stepping out on a limb, they know that some of their more extreme positions are not going to stick even with a very conservative Supreme Court. But it’s all part of a larger conservative legal movement.”

“They’re winning the war,” he adds.

“What the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Some 5th Circuit judges have loftier ambitions: At least two of Trump’s appointees are widely seen as auditioning for a spot on the Supreme Court should the former president reenter the White House. In this scenario, being slapped down by SCOTUS is less an embarrassing rebuke than an acknowledgment of a judge willing to take things further. “You could see in the 5th Circuit signs of what a Trump Supreme Court would really look like,” Vladeck says. “That’s terrifying.”

In the final days of the Supreme Court’s latest term, which ended July 1, the Republican-­appointed justices issued two momentous opinions that expose even long-established federal regulations to legal challenges. The first ruling, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturned Chevron deference—a doctrine that had instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies’ expert interpretations of contested statutes—in effect snatching back that power for itself.

Three days later, the court supercharged its attack on federal authority in a case known as Corner Post by eviscerating the six-year statute of limitations for challenging agency regulations. Now, virtually any litigant with a bone to pick can sue to overturn a regulation, even if it has been on the books for decades. “No matter how entrenched, heavily relied upon, or central to the functioning of our society a rule is, the majority has announced open season,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in a scathing dissent.

These two decisions have already teed up a “massive wave of antiregulatory lawsuits,” says Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle, and most “will be filed in the 5th Circuit.”

This wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. The circuit is already a mecca for aggressive judge-shopping, the practice of filing in a jurisdiction where judges are more likely to rule in your favor. Federal district courts select which judge hears a given case randomly, but in certain parts of Texas, litigants are virtually guaranteed to draw hardliners who will rule against Democratic policies. This means anyone bringing a right-wing lawsuit with radical, nationwide ramifications can be assured not only of a friendly trial judge, but also that the inevitable appeal will be heard by sympathetic ears.

“If you have a challenge to an agency action, you really want to look at filing in this circuit, because they’re interested in the issues and there’s an ever-increasing amount of good precedent for you,” says Dallas appellate attorney David Coale, whose legal blog, 600 Camp, focuses on the 5th Circuit.

Indeed, Republicans who dislike a rule or program that President Joe Biden has enacted regularly turn to Texas. “The Biden administration can basically not even take a breath without being sued somewhere in the 5th Circuit,” Vladeck observes. Texas judge-shopping helped Biden’s critics halt a key part of his student loan forgiveness plan. It’s why challengers to Obamacare’s free services, including contraception and HIV drugs, found plaintiffs who could sue in Fort Worth’s far-right district court, and why a policy group founded by former Trump officials relocated there from Virginia. It’s why, in Amarillo, a DC-based libertarian think tank sued to block appliance efficiency rules and a Wisconsin group took on a gun regulation. It’s also why Elon Musk fought tooth and nail to prevent his Texas lawsuit claiming the National Labor Relations Board is the “definition of tyranny” from being transferred to California.

Among the most potentially consequential examples of 5th Circuit judge-shopping is the effort by anti-abortion activists to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions, which account for nearly two-thirds of terminated pregnancies in the United States. A Christian legal group incorporated a plaintiff organization in Amarillo, where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—who worked for a Christian law firm before Trump put him on the bench in 2019—is the sole federal judge. After Kacsmaryk issued a stunning opinion that banned mifepristone nationwide, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than bat his ruling down, upheld it in parts. The drug survived only because the statute of limitations for challenging mifepristone’s approval had expired. The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling in June, holding that the plaintiffs had no right to sue, but the case is likely to return to the 5th Circuit soon. Three states have stepped in as new plaintiffs, and thanks to the Corner Post decision, that statute of limitations no longer applies. For legal groups looking to eliminate abortion in the United States, the clearest path runs through the 5th Circuit.

Lisa Graves, who runs True North Research, a watchdog investigating right-wing legal funding, warns that the circuit’s judges “are enshackling the ability of the president to adopt policies that are widely supported and widely needed. And they are doing so with an almost unprecedented arrogance and aggressiveness.”

The 5th Circuit can accomplish its agenda only by upending settled law, and its precedent-breaking rulings gobble up an outsize share of the Supreme Court’s annual docket. It might seem reassuring that SCOTUS overturned 8 of the 11 5th Circuit rulings it reviewed during the most recent term—more rejections than any other circuit. (Fifth Circuit cases also accounted for nearly half of the Supreme Court’s grants of emergency relief, issued when a party asks the court to quickly halt a lower-court decision.) But this pattern of fringe rulings and rebukes serves a broader purpose for the conservative judiciary. It allows the appellate judges to shape national debate on hot-button topics and lets the Supreme Court, by knocking down the 5th’s wackiest rulings, appear more moderate as it trashes precedent and brazenly rewrites the rules of American democracy.

“The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there.”

Within the crop of Trump judges transforming the 5th Circuit, two—James Ho and Andrew Oldham—stand out, not only for their willingness to implement a far-right agenda, but for their perceived ambition to join the Supreme Court.

Temperamentally, they are opposed. Ho is outgoing and adept at making headlines. His opinions read like partisan op-eds. Oldham is quieter, his writing more like a history term paper. But their goals appear broadly similar: a radical remaking of US law that would end abortion rights, restrict the role of the federal government, and elevate the power of individual states. “Ho might be the poster child, but Oldham is the laboring oar, where it’s really his opinions that are doing the most substantive work to try to move things sharply rightward,” Vladeck says. The two men, he adds, are “very different judges working toward the same goals very differently.”

The two judges, who both declined requests to comment, have another reason to hope for a Supreme Court promotion: Ho clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, Oldham for Justice Samuel Alito, and both have been mentioned as likely replacements for their septuagenarian mentors, who are expected to retire if Trump wins. Both were forged in the fires of Texas’ hard-right partisan combat, a story that began in 1999, when then–state Attorney General John Cornyn created the solicitor general’s office. The federal government has its own solicitor general, a top-tier litigator who represents US interests before the Supreme Court, and Cornyn reasoned that Texas, too, should have such an expert appeals lawyer on staff. Within a few years, the new office was serving an equally important function: grooming the next generation of right-wing judges and politicians.

In 2002, Cornyn was elected to the US Senate and replaced by Greg Abbott, a right-wing brawler who described his job as “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and I go home.” Abbott, in turn, brought on a hungry young lawyer named Ted Cruz as his solicitor general and instructed him to insert Texas into every high-profile conservative legal fight in the country. Cruz complied with gusto.

Abbott subsequently hired Ho, who’d worked under Cornyn in the Senate and had helped draft a memo to justify the use of torture after the 2001 terrorist attacks, despite Geneva Conventions prohibitions. Ho would later join a private firm where he took on pro bono cases, including appellate work for the First Liberty Institute, the Christian law firm that employed Kacsmaryk before he became a district court judge. Trump nominated Ho for the 5th Circuit in 2017.

Abbott hired Oldham in 2012 to work in the solicitor general’s office, where he helped challenge the Voting Rights Act and then-President Barack Obama’s immigration and environmental policies. Trump chose Oldham for a 5th Circuit spot in 2018. Stuart Kyle Duncan, another Trump appointee to the 5th Circuit, also worked for the solicitor general under Cornyn. In all, Trump appointed six lawyers from that office to federal judgeships.

When Ho joined the 5th Circuit, he asked Justice Thomas to administer his oath of office. A photograph of the swearing-in shows the pair standing before an enormous stone fireplace in the Dallas library of Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor who has come under scrutiny for lavishing expensive gifts on Thomas that the justice failed to disclose.

Three months later, in his first 5th Circuit opinion (a dissent), Ho defended the right of individuals, including billionaires like Crow, to spend as much money on campaigns as they like. The case involved a voter-enacted contribution limit for Austin City Council races, and Ho aligned himself with wealthy donors against the specter of regulation, arguing that as “government grows larger,” fighting back with unlimited political spending “becomes a human necessity.” Ho’s dissent—which also claimed that the modern federal government would be “unrecognizable” to the founders and that the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act was wrongly decided—made amply clear what kind of Supreme Court justice he would be.

Ho has sent many such signals. In 2022, he asserted in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should revive its decision in the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, which the court had since overturned. While he framed his argument as pro-labor, the Lochner ruling had struck down a law that protected bakers from being forced to work more than 60 hours a week, ushering in decades of broader worker exploitation. Ho also has made clear that he’s vociferously against abortion, which he has called a “moral tragedy,” and has held that the Constitution guarantees Catholic clergy the right to bury fetal remains against the wishes of the would-be parents.

In 2023, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed Kacsmaryk’s mifepristone ruling, allowing the drug to remain on shelves, Ho wrote he would have fully blocked access. Perhaps most alarming was his proposed theory for why a handful of anti-abortion doctors could bring the suit in the first place. It is a foundational principle of law that a plaintiff cannot merely be a concerned bystander. They must have skin in the game, or standing: an actual or likely injury that a court could remedy. Both Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit had accepted the doctors’ dubious claim that they might one day encounter a patient suffering adverse effects from mifepristone and be obliged to help that person in violation of their religious beliefs—despite federal conscience laws that ensure they wouldn’t have to.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, ruling 9–0 that the mifepristone plaintiffs lacked standing, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh patiently explaining, as though lecturing a first-year law student, that the doctors were not suitable plaintiffs.

Ho had not only supported the rejected ruling, but in a concurrence had gone further to construct a standing doctrine for physicians in abortion cases. “Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients,” he wrote, “and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted”—a dystopian perversion of the doctor-patient relationship. Graves worked with Ho about 20 years ago on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and remembers him as “ambitious” and “transactional.” But the idea that a woman must remain pregnant for her physician’s viewing pleasure “shows the veneer is off,” she says. “He’s untrammeled by common sense, he’s untrammeled by restraint. He just thinks that he in that role as a federal judge with a lifetime job can do whatever he wants.”

This past July, Ho went where none of his colleagues had dared. In a concurrence in which he approved of the floating barrier that Abbott, now Texas’ governor, had placed in the Rio Grande to thwart migrant crossings, Ho codified the MAGA rhetoric equating immigration with a hostile invasion. Seven judges warned in a dissent that Ho’s theory “would enable Governor Abbott to engage in acts of war in perpetuity.”

At least two of Trump’s 5th Circuit appointees are widely seen as auditioning for the Supreme Court.

Some of Ho’s boldest politicking happens outside the court. At Georgetown Law in 2022, he defended Ilya Shapiro, a professor the school had put on leave for tweeting, in the runup to Justice Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, that Biden would select a “lesser black woman.” (“If Ilya Shapiro is deserving of cancellation, then you should go ahead and cancel me, too,” Ho proclaimed.) Seven months later, he announced he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School after students there disrupted conservative speakers. In 2023, Ho expanded his no-hire list after Stanford law students clashed with Duncan, his 5th Circuit colleague, during a campus lecture. Earlier this year, having popularized a broader clerkship boycott phenomenon, he joined 12 other Trump-appointed judges in announcing they would no longer hire clerks from Columbia Law School in light of pro-Palestinian campus protests.

As for judge-shopping, Ho defends the practice: “This isn’t about forum-shopping. It’s about forum-shaming,” he argued in an April speech to a local bar association in Texas. “It’s about shaming judges.”

Ho’s behavior on and off the bench has raised his profile and made his politics crystal clear. “He’s citing things like Fox News or other kinds of conservative publications that you would not normally cite,” says one attorney, who, because they argue cases before the 5th Circuit, asked not to be named. “No one else writes in that way.”

Ho already was on Trump’s 2020 Supreme Court shortlist. Then, last year, the extremist group American Family Association Action, which seeks to infuse the judiciary with biblical views, placed him on a list of six Supreme Court picks for a second Trump term.

Oldham, the other potential Supreme Court contender, has likewise made his mark with opinions that push the law into uncharted waters. But it may be his pre-judicial government service that’s most revealing. When Abbott invited Oldham to Texas to join the solicitor general’s office, Oldham considered it to be “God opening a door.” Oldham and Abbott would go beyond arguing that specific actions of the Obama administration were illegal to assert that the existence of the very agencies implementing the policies was unconstitutional. When Abbott became governor in 2015, Oldham joined him as a top legal adviser, and, according to the Texas Tribune, played a significant role in crafting Abbott’s so-called Texas Plan. Abbott envisioned a convention of states, the first since the founders gathered in Philadelphia, to adopt nine constitutional amendments. In some respects, the proposed changes would set America back to pre-1787, when the fledgling republic floundered under the Articles of Confederation, depriving the federal government not only of powers created in response to the Civil War, but also some put in place by the original framers.

In a 2016 speech hosted by the University of Chicago chapter of the Federalist Society, Oldham harped on the “illegitimacy” of the “administrative state.” He also made a villain out of James Landis, a largely forgotten Harvard Law School dean who had helped create and went on to run the SEC.

Landis, Oldham said, was the “architect” and “godfather” of modern regulation, who viewed the Constitution as an “inconvenience” to be discarded. To restore its integrity, Oldham described a “Route A” wherein Congress amends the Constitution to roll back regulatory agencies and grant states new powers. Given Congress’ disinclination to do so, Oldham urged the adoption of “Route B,” the Texas Plan’s convention of states. Unmentioned was what might be called Route C: judges taking it upon themselves to remake the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

During his Senate confirmation hearings for the 5th Circuit, Oldham distanced himself from this work, claiming he was simply representing Abbott, his client. “My perspective as an advocate has no bearing on my perspective as a jurist,” he told the Judiciary Committee. But on the bench, Oldham has essentially copied and pasted the grievances that animated the Texas Plan into judicial opinions. In a 2021 case involving constitutional challenges to SEC authority, Oldham returned to Landis, claiming he was heir to a German intellectual lineage, which, Oldham argued, made modern administrative agencies a foreign import fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s separation of powers. As he had done previously in a state publication promoting the Texas Plan, Oldham quoted a 2014 book by Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger titled Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (His opinion failed to mention that Hamburger leads the nonprofit that had brought the case under review.) Nicholas Bagley, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan, describes the “Germanic trope” as a right-wing “fever dream,” and deems Oldham’s citation a “strategy to give academic respectability to fringe legal views.”

Two years later, Oldham heard another challenge to SEC power in which he and his colleagues, squarely at odds with Supreme Court precedent, ordered the agency to enforce some of its actions in federal court rather than before its in-house judges. The judge who wrote the majority opinion quoted Oldham’s earlier SEC opinion, including some of his writing on Landis. In June, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling, casting doubt on the enforcement authority of dozens of agencies. (Remember Route C?)

An attorney who attended Harvard Law School alongside Oldham recognizes his certitude. “He sees himself as an intellectual and he knows he’s very smart,” says the classmate, who asked for anonymity. “And it doesn’t matter if there’s all this precedent that says something else.”

The 5th circuit has been radically transformed by Trump’s appointees, who make up more than a third of the court. But the change wasn’t always smooth. In a recent Texas immigration case, for example, Oldham was at odds with then-Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, who, when first nominated by President George W. Bush in 2001, was viewed as such an extremist that Democrats blocked her appointment. (Her nomination succeeded during Bush’s second term.) While some of the Bush and Reagan appointees regularly join the Trump judges in decisions that push legal boundaries, others have resisted—sometimes publicly. The divide mirrors the broader struggle between old-school Republicans and Trump diehards. And, just as Trump has taken over his party, his judicial appointees are prevailing.

One case in particular lays bare the court’s transformation. At the height of the pandemic, United Airlines announced an employee vaccine mandate. Several workers sued, arguing that getting the shot would violate their religious beliefs. They asked the court for protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That might sound like a normal request, but legally, it’s cuckoo. Title VII relief comes in the form of damages after a religious violation has occurred. Yet Oldham and another judge found that the courts could grant relief and keep the policy from taking effect. “It totally blew my mind,” says the attorney who practices in the 5th Circuit. Not long ago, it “would have been laughed out of court.”

But it was a dissent in the case that really got people’s attention. Judge Jerry Smith, a conservative Reagan appointee to the circuit, had once hired Ho as his clerk. Smith was also there at Crow’s library for Ho’s swearing-in. But now he warned that nothing, “especially not the law, will thwart this majority’s plans,” adding that Oldham had helped unleash an “orgy of jurisprudential violence.”

“By today’s ruling, the Good Ship Fifth Circuit is afire,” Smith continued. “We need all hands on deck.”

His dissent, perhaps unintentionally, struck the same note as the court’s left-leaning critics: The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there. The last few years have seen the court seize on aggressive procedural maneuvers that give its judges more power. Its expansive view of standing is one key area where, as Vladeck sarcastically puts it, the 5th Circuit has “really covered itself in glory,” with judges repeatedly ignoring precedent so they can rule on cases that excite them. In recent years, the Supreme Court has reversed the 5th Circuit’s decisions on standing five times in politically charged cases, twice unanimously. But the lower court “keeps repeating the same errors,” Vladeck says. “The point is not that they’re getting these things wrong. The point is that they are getting them wrong in a way that is making it possible for them to actually interject themselves even deeper into our social and political debates.”

The 5th Circuit wasn’t always reactionary. Until 1981, its jurisdiction also included Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, and under the leadership of Republican-appointed judges, the court spent the 1960s desegregating the South in the face of violent white supremacism. One of the judges was an Eisenhower Republican felicitously named John Minor Wisdom, for whom the court’s majestic building in downtown New Orleans was dedicated in 1994.

“The 5th Circuit and the US Supreme Court were instrumental in this period of American history where rights were finally actually respected by the federal courts,” says Graves, of True North Research. “In reaction to that, there’s been a concerted effort to take over those courts and put people on the courts who have this fundamental hostility to civil rights and the power of government to protect individual freedoms.”

The transition began with increasingly conservative appointments under President Richard Nixon. But it ramped up under Obama’s tenure, as Senate Republicans stymied many of his judicial nominations, leaving him, in eight years, able to make only three 5th Circuit appointments. Texas’ senators, Cornyn and Cruz, blocked all but one appointment to the court from their state, allowing Trump to tap Ho and another Texan as soon as he entered office. Ultimately, Trump made six appointments in four years.

The decisions now coming out of the Wisdom courthouse are increasingly hostile to its namesake’s legacy. During the 1960s, the court embraced Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the constitutionality of school segregation. At his 2018 confirmation hearing, Oldham refused to say whether Brown was rightly decided.

Justice Thomas spoke that same year at a Dallas Federalist Society event, where he recounted something his former clerk and newly appointed 5th Circuit judge, Ho, had said as he was finishing his clerkship. “‘You know, when I came to this job, I thought it was going to be very complicated,’” Thomas recalled Ho saying. “‘But you know, it’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?’”

“I think it is,” Thomas concurred, “if you start at the right place.”

That’s a point that could be made of Ho, Oldham, and many of their 5th Circuit colleagues. It’s no mystery where they are headed once you know where they started from.

More than a week after Hurricane Helene decimated the rural mountain communities of Western North Carolina, residents are still searching for missing loved ones and grappling with the destruction of their homes and businesses. On social media, meanwhile, powerful accounts are turning the disaster into the latest vehicle for politically coded conspiracy theories about the failures of the Biden administration—and the righteousness of the Trump campaign.

One group that has picked up this narrative is composed of Christian influencers, many of whom are part of the quickly growing New Apostolic Reformation, which I wrote about last week. Followers of NAR believe that God is calling Christians to take dominion over the government. They are led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who claim that God speaks directly to them. Many NAR leaders also believe that former President Donald Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. In recent weeks, some have claimed that the political left, including the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, is controlled by witchcraft and demonic forces. As Right Wing Watch reported, on October 1, NAR-affiliated pastor Hank Kunneman turned a request for prayer about the hurricane into a prayer that the storm would show Americans that Trump was the better choice for president.

Lance Wallnau, a powerful NAR apostle and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, recently hosted vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance at a Pennsylvania rally. Wallnau claimed that Vance was supposed to be campaigning in North Carolina, but the gathering storm forced him to divert to Pennsylvania. This demonstrated that an “act of God” had made Vance’s appearance possible.

But now that the devastation from the storm has become apparent, Wallnau seems to have changed his mind about Helene’s divine origins. Wallnau, who is an organizer of the Project 19 election strategy campaign that aims to mobilize Christian voters in 19 key counties in swing states, has been sharing his concerns about the hurricane on X. “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather?” he asked on Sunday. “If they succeeded do you trust them not to use this ability to stop Trump (a threat who says he will expose them and prosecute) from being elected?” The same day he posted, “Does the government have the ability to manipulate hurricanes? Thought it was a crazy conspiracy idea till I read a government report!” (He linked to a report that discussed the government’s failed campaign from 1962 to 1983 to break up hurricanes using silver iodide.)

Sean Feucht, an NAR leader who has been organizing a tour of prayer rallies at Capitol buildings in major US cities, has been posting about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency supposedly bungled its hurricane response. On October 4, he tweeted that FEMA was “inept, corrupt, and broke!” In a video, he assured people in the hardest hit areas, “Help is on the way—not by bureaucrats in DC, but by rednecks, hillbillies, and everyday Americans.”

In recent weeks, Feucht has been urging followers to join the culmination of his tour at a prayer rally at the Capitol in DC. “October 25th we bring the HARP OF DAVID inside the US Capitol,” he tweeted last week, an apparent reference to an Old Testament story in which the warrior David played a harp to soothe a king who was possessed by an evil spirit.

Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader who advanced the stolen election narrative in broadcasts before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, also posted a video to his 349,000 YouTube subscribers criticizing the government’s hurricane response. He quoted an op-ed from the far-right platform Blaze Media alleging that the government couldn’t afford to adequately help hurricane victims because it had spent too much money providing services for undocumented immigrants. (Though that narrative has been debunked, it has gained traction in far-right enclaves of social media.) The silver lining, Sheets said, is that because of Helene, “Millions of Americans have awakened from their stupor. They see the corruption, are aware of the deep state.”

As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, Kat Kerr, a prophet based in Jacksonville, is assuring her 118,000 followers on Facebook that she will “take authority” over the storm to protect people in its path. “We are over the weather, not under the weather,” she said (without evidence). “We also command that no tornadoes be formed.”

She made the same claim before Hurricane Helene.

Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants. Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos. And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.

These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.

The US Supreme Court oversees 13 judicial circuits, each with an appeals court that hears federal cases arising within its jurisdiction. Every term, the high court agrees to review only a small number of appeals from the circuits, which leaves those appeals courts with final say on most matters. The 5th Circuit has been a right-leaning enclave for decades, filled with judges from the Republican strongholds it oversees. But after Trump placed six new judges on the 17-member court, the relatively staid conservatism of Reagan and Bush jurists gave way to the slash-and-burn tactics of the MAGA movement. On their watch, the court’s decisions, substantive and procedural, have defied judicial precedents and norms while conforming to a familiar far-right agenda of neutering Democratic policies, gutting abortion rights, and undermining the authority of federal agencies.

“There is a new breed of Republican-­appointed judge,” says Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor who has followed the 5th Circuit closely. “Much like the divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans politically, there’s a divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans judicially. And what the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Their goal is to move the law far to the right. In case after case, the 5th Circuit has issued rulings that even this Supreme Court regularly strikes down. “It should be shocking that a very, very conservative appeals court is still losing so often with the most conservative Supreme Court in our lifetimes,” Vladeck says.

But even rulings that are overturned move the Overton Window, dignifying once unimaginable outcomes as acceptable and expanding the public’s notion of what’s possible. “These judges know what they’re doing,” says David Lat, author of the Original Jurisdiction newsletter and a longtime chronicler of the courts. “When they are stepping out on a limb, they know that some of their more extreme positions are not going to stick even with a very conservative Supreme Court. But it’s all part of a larger conservative legal movement.”

“They’re winning the war,” he adds.

“What the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Some 5th Circuit judges have loftier ambitions: At least two of Trump’s appointees are widely seen as auditioning for a spot on the Supreme Court should the former president reenter the White House. In this scenario, being slapped down by SCOTUS is less an embarrassing rebuke than an acknowledgment of a judge willing to take things further. “You could see in the 5th Circuit signs of what a Trump Supreme Court would really look like,” Vladeck says. “That’s terrifying.”

In the final days of the Supreme Court’s latest term, which ended July 1, the Republican-­appointed justices issued two momentous opinions that expose even long-established federal regulations to legal challenges. The first ruling, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturned Chevron deference—a doctrine that had instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies’ expert interpretations of contested statutes—in effect snatching back that power for itself.

Three days later, the court supercharged its attack on federal authority in a case known as Corner Post by eviscerating the six-year statute of limitations for challenging agency regulations. Now, virtually any litigant with a bone to pick can sue to overturn a regulation, even if it has been on the books for decades. “No matter how entrenched, heavily relied upon, or central to the functioning of our society a rule is, the majority has announced open season,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in a scathing dissent.

These two decisions have already teed up a “massive wave of antiregulatory lawsuits,” says Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle, and most “will be filed in the 5th Circuit.”

This wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. The circuit is already a mecca for aggressive judge-shopping, the practice of filing in a jurisdiction where judges are more likely to rule in your favor. Federal district courts select which judge hears a given case randomly, but in certain parts of Texas, litigants are virtually guaranteed to draw hardliners who will rule against Democratic policies. This means anyone bringing a right-wing lawsuit with radical, nationwide ramifications can be assured not only of a friendly trial judge, but also that the inevitable appeal will be heard by sympathetic ears.

“If you have a challenge to an agency action, you really want to look at filing in this circuit, because they’re interested in the issues and there’s an ever-increasing amount of good precedent for you,” says Dallas appellate attorney David Coale, whose legal blog, 600 Camp, focuses on the 5th Circuit.

Indeed, Republicans who dislike a rule or program that President Joe Biden has enacted regularly turn to Texas. “The Biden administration can basically not even take a breath without being sued somewhere in the 5th Circuit,” Vladeck observes. Texas judge-shopping helped Biden’s critics halt a key part of his student loan forgiveness plan. It’s why challengers to Obamacare’s free services, including contraception and HIV drugs, found plaintiffs who could sue in Fort Worth’s far-right district court, and why a policy group founded by former Trump officials relocated there from Virginia. It’s why, in Amarillo, a DC-based libertarian think tank sued to block appliance efficiency rules and a Wisconsin group took on a gun regulation. It’s also why Elon Musk fought tooth and nail to prevent his Texas lawsuit claiming the National Labor Relations Board is the “definition of tyranny” from being transferred to California.

Among the most potentially consequential examples of 5th Circuit judge-shopping is the effort by anti-abortion activists to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions, which account for nearly two-thirds of terminated pregnancies in the United States. A Christian legal group incorporated a plaintiff organization in Amarillo, where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—who worked for a Christian law firm before Trump put him on the bench in 2019—is the sole federal judge. After Kacsmaryk issued a stunning opinion that banned mifepristone nationwide, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than bat his ruling down, upheld it in parts. The drug survived only because the statute of limitations for challenging mifepristone’s approval had expired. The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling in June, holding that the plaintiffs had no right to sue, but the case is likely to return to the 5th Circuit soon. Three states have stepped in as new plaintiffs, and thanks to the Corner Post decision, that statute of limitations no longer applies. For legal groups looking to eliminate abortion in the United States, the clearest path runs through the 5th Circuit.

Lisa Graves, who runs True North Research, a watchdog investigating right-wing legal funding, warns that the circuit’s judges “are enshackling the ability of the president to adopt policies that are widely supported and widely needed. And they are doing so with an almost unprecedented arrogance and aggressiveness.”

The 5th Circuit can accomplish its agenda only by upending settled law, and its precedent-breaking rulings gobble up an outsize share of the Supreme Court’s annual docket. It might seem reassuring that SCOTUS overturned 8 of the 11 5th Circuit rulings it reviewed during the most recent term—more rejections than any other circuit. (Fifth Circuit cases also accounted for nearly half of the Supreme Court’s grants of emergency relief, issued when a party asks the court to quickly halt a lower-court decision.) But this pattern of fringe rulings and rebukes serves a broader purpose for the conservative judiciary. It allows the appellate judges to shape national debate on hot-button topics and lets the Supreme Court, by knocking down the 5th’s wackiest rulings, appear more moderate as it trashes precedent and brazenly rewrites the rules of American democracy.

“The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there.”

Within the crop of Trump judges transforming the 5th Circuit, two—James Ho and Andrew Oldham—stand out, not only for their willingness to implement a far-right agenda, but for their perceived ambition to join the Supreme Court.

Temperamentally, they are opposed. Ho is outgoing and adept at making headlines. His opinions read like partisan op-eds. Oldham is quieter, his writing more like a history term paper. But their goals appear broadly similar: a radical remaking of US law that would end abortion rights, restrict the role of the federal government, and elevate the power of individual states. “Ho might be the poster child, but Oldham is the laboring oar, where it’s really his opinions that are doing the most substantive work to try to move things sharply rightward,” Vladeck says. The two men, he adds, are “very different judges working toward the same goals very differently.”

The two judges, who both declined requests to comment, have another reason to hope for a Supreme Court promotion: Ho clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, Oldham for Justice Samuel Alito, and both have been mentioned as likely replacements for their septuagenarian mentors, who are expected to retire if Trump wins. Both were forged in the fires of Texas’ hard-right partisan combat, a story that began in 1999, when then–state Attorney General John Cornyn created the solicitor general’s office. The federal government has its own solicitor general, a top-tier litigator who represents US interests before the Supreme Court, and Cornyn reasoned that Texas, too, should have such an expert appeals lawyer on staff. Within a few years, the new office was serving an equally important function: grooming the next generation of right-wing judges and politicians.

In 2002, Cornyn was elected to the US Senate and replaced by Greg Abbott, a right-wing brawler who described his job as “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and I go home.” Abbott, in turn, brought on a hungry young lawyer named Ted Cruz as his solicitor general and instructed him to insert Texas into every high-profile conservative legal fight in the country. Cruz complied with gusto.

Abbott subsequently hired Ho, who’d worked under Cornyn in the Senate and had helped draft a memo to justify the use of torture after the 2001 terrorist attacks, despite Geneva Conventions prohibitions. Ho would later join a private firm where he took on pro bono cases, including appellate work for the First Liberty Institute, the Christian law firm that employed Kacsmaryk before he became a district court judge. Trump nominated Ho for the 5th Circuit in 2017.

Abbott hired Oldham in 2012 to work in the solicitor general’s office, where he helped challenge the Voting Rights Act and then-President Barack Obama’s immigration and environmental policies. Trump chose Oldham for a 5th Circuit spot in 2018. Stuart Kyle Duncan, another Trump appointee to the 5th Circuit, also worked for the solicitor general under Cornyn. In all, Trump appointed six lawyers from that office to federal judgeships.

When Ho joined the 5th Circuit, he asked Justice Thomas to administer his oath of office. A photograph of the swearing-in shows the pair standing before an enormous stone fireplace in the Dallas library of Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor who has come under scrutiny for lavishing expensive gifts on Thomas that the justice failed to disclose.

Three months later, in his first 5th Circuit opinion (a dissent), Ho defended the right of individuals, including billionaires like Crow, to spend as much money on campaigns as they like. The case involved a voter-enacted contribution limit for Austin City Council races, and Ho aligned himself with wealthy donors against the specter of regulation, arguing that as “government grows larger,” fighting back with unlimited political spending “becomes a human necessity.” Ho’s dissent—which also claimed that the modern federal government would be “unrecognizable” to the founders and that the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act was wrongly decided—made amply clear what kind of Supreme Court justice he would be.

Ho has sent many such signals. In 2022, he asserted in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should revive its decision in the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, which the court had since overturned. While he framed his argument as pro-labor, the Lochner ruling had struck down a law that protected bakers from being forced to work more than 60 hours a week, ushering in decades of broader worker exploitation. Ho also has made clear that he’s vociferously against abortion, which he has called a “moral tragedy,” and has held that the Constitution guarantees Catholic clergy the right to bury fetal remains against the wishes of the would-be parents.

In 2023, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed Kacsmaryk’s mifepristone ruling, allowing the drug to remain on shelves, Ho wrote he would have fully blocked access. Perhaps most alarming was his proposed theory for why a handful of anti-abortion doctors could bring the suit in the first place. It is a foundational principle of law that a plaintiff cannot merely be a concerned bystander. They must have skin in the game, or standing: an actual or likely injury that a court could remedy. Both Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit had accepted the doctors’ dubious claim that they might one day encounter a patient suffering adverse effects from mifepristone and be obliged to help that person in violation of their religious beliefs—despite federal conscience laws that ensure they wouldn’t have to.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, ruling 9–0 that the mifepristone plaintiffs lacked standing, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh patiently explaining, as though lecturing a first-year law student, that the doctors were not suitable plaintiffs.

Ho had not only supported the rejected ruling, but in a concurrence had gone further to construct a standing doctrine for physicians in abortion cases. “Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients,” he wrote, “and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted”—a dystopian perversion of the doctor-patient relationship. Graves worked with Ho about 20 years ago on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and remembers him as “ambitious” and “transactional.” But the idea that a woman must remain pregnant for her physician’s viewing pleasure “shows the veneer is off,” she says. “He’s untrammeled by common sense, he’s untrammeled by restraint. He just thinks that he in that role as a federal judge with a lifetime job can do whatever he wants.”

This past July, Ho went where none of his colleagues had dared. In a concurrence in which he approved of the floating barrier that Abbott, now Texas’ governor, had placed in the Rio Grande to thwart migrant crossings, Ho codified the MAGA rhetoric equating immigration with a hostile invasion. Seven judges warned in a dissent that Ho’s theory “would enable Governor Abbott to engage in acts of war in perpetuity.”

At least two of Trump’s 5th Circuit appointees are widely seen as auditioning for the Supreme Court.

Some of Ho’s boldest politicking happens outside the court. At Georgetown Law in 2022, he defended Ilya Shapiro, a professor the school had put on leave for tweeting, in the runup to Justice Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, that Biden would select a “lesser black woman.” (“If Ilya Shapiro is deserving of cancellation, then you should go ahead and cancel me, too,” Ho proclaimed.) Seven months later, he announced he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School after students there disrupted conservative speakers. In 2023, Ho expanded his no-hire list after Stanford law students clashed with Duncan, his 5th Circuit colleague, during a campus lecture. Earlier this year, having popularized a broader clerkship boycott phenomenon, he joined 12 other Trump-appointed judges in announcing they would no longer hire clerks from Columbia Law School in light of pro-Palestinian campus protests.

As for judge-shopping, Ho defends the practice: “This isn’t about forum-shopping. It’s about forum-shaming,” he argued in an April speech to a local bar association in Texas. “It’s about shaming judges.”

Ho’s behavior on and off the bench has raised his profile and made his politics crystal clear. “He’s citing things like Fox News or other kinds of conservative publications that you would not normally cite,” says one attorney, who, because they argue cases before the 5th Circuit, asked not to be named. “No one else writes in that way.”

Ho already was on Trump’s 2020 Supreme Court shortlist. Then, last year, the extremist group American Family Association Action, which seeks to infuse the judiciary with biblical views, placed him on a list of six Supreme Court picks for a second Trump term.

Oldham, the other potential Supreme Court contender, has likewise made his mark with opinions that push the law into uncharted waters. But it may be his pre-judicial government service that’s most revealing. When Abbott invited Oldham to Texas to join the solicitor general’s office, Oldham considered it to be “God opening a door.” Oldham and Abbott would go beyond arguing that specific actions of the Obama administration were illegal to assert that the existence of the very agencies implementing the policies was unconstitutional. When Abbott became governor in 2015, Oldham joined him as a top legal adviser, and, according to the Texas Tribune, played a significant role in crafting Abbott’s so-called Texas Plan. Abbott envisioned a convention of states, the first since the founders gathered in Philadelphia, to adopt nine constitutional amendments. In some respects, the proposed changes would set America back to pre-1787, when the fledgling republic floundered under the Articles of Confederation, depriving the federal government not only of powers created in response to the Civil War, but also some put in place by the original framers.

In a 2016 speech hosted by the University of Chicago chapter of the Federalist Society, Oldham harped on the “illegitimacy” of the “administrative state.” He also made a villain out of James Landis, a largely forgotten Harvard Law School dean who had helped create and went on to run the SEC.

Landis, Oldham said, was the “architect” and “godfather” of modern regulation, who viewed the Constitution as an “inconvenience” to be discarded. To restore its integrity, Oldham described a “Route A” wherein Congress amends the Constitution to roll back regulatory agencies and grant states new powers. Given Congress’ disinclination to do so, Oldham urged the adoption of “Route B,” the Texas Plan’s convention of states. Unmentioned was what might be called Route C: judges taking it upon themselves to remake the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

During his Senate confirmation hearings for the 5th Circuit, Oldham distanced himself from this work, claiming he was simply representing Abbott, his client. “My perspective as an advocate has no bearing on my perspective as a jurist,” he told the Judiciary Committee. But on the bench, Oldham has essentially copied and pasted the grievances that animated the Texas Plan into judicial opinions. In a 2021 case involving constitutional challenges to SEC authority, Oldham returned to Landis, claiming he was heir to a German intellectual lineage, which, Oldham argued, made modern administrative agencies a foreign import fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s separation of powers. As he had done previously in a state publication promoting the Texas Plan, Oldham quoted a 2014 book by Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger titled Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (His opinion failed to mention that Hamburger leads the nonprofit that had brought the case under review.) Nicholas Bagley, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan, describes the “Germanic trope” as a right-wing “fever dream,” and deems Oldham’s citation a “strategy to give academic respectability to fringe legal views.”

Two years later, Oldham heard another challenge to SEC power in which he and his colleagues, squarely at odds with Supreme Court precedent, ordered the agency to enforce some of its actions in federal court rather than before its in-house judges. The judge who wrote the majority opinion quoted Oldham’s earlier SEC opinion, including some of his writing on Landis. In June, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling, casting doubt on the enforcement authority of dozens of agencies. (Remember Route C?)

An attorney who attended Harvard Law School alongside Oldham recognizes his certitude. “He sees himself as an intellectual and he knows he’s very smart,” says the classmate, who asked for anonymity. “And it doesn’t matter if there’s all this precedent that says something else.”

The 5th circuit has been radically transformed by Trump’s appointees, who make up more than a third of the court. But the change wasn’t always smooth. In a recent Texas immigration case, for example, Oldham was at odds with then-Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, who, when first nominated by President George W. Bush in 2001, was viewed as such an extremist that Democrats blocked her appointment. (Her nomination succeeded during Bush’s second term.) While some of the Bush and Reagan appointees regularly join the Trump judges in decisions that push legal boundaries, others have resisted—sometimes publicly. The divide mirrors the broader struggle between old-school Republicans and Trump diehards. And, just as Trump has taken over his party, his judicial appointees are prevailing.

One case in particular lays bare the court’s transformation. At the height of the pandemic, United Airlines announced an employee vaccine mandate. Several workers sued, arguing that getting the shot would violate their religious beliefs. They asked the court for protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That might sound like a normal request, but legally, it’s cuckoo. Title VII relief comes in the form of damages after a religious violation has occurred. Yet Oldham and another judge found that the courts could grant relief and keep the policy from taking effect. “It totally blew my mind,” says the attorney who practices in the 5th Circuit. Not long ago, it “would have been laughed out of court.”

But it was a dissent in the case that really got people’s attention. Judge Jerry Smith, a conservative Reagan appointee to the circuit, had once hired Ho as his clerk. Smith was also there at Crow’s library for Ho’s swearing-in. But now he warned that nothing, “especially not the law, will thwart this majority’s plans,” adding that Oldham had helped unleash an “orgy of jurisprudential violence.”

“By today’s ruling, the Good Ship Fifth Circuit is afire,” Smith continued. “We need all hands on deck.”

His dissent, perhaps unintentionally, struck the same note as the court’s left-leaning critics: The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there. The last few years have seen the court seize on aggressive procedural maneuvers that give its judges more power. Its expansive view of standing is one key area where, as Vladeck sarcastically puts it, the 5th Circuit has “really covered itself in glory,” with judges repeatedly ignoring precedent so they can rule on cases that excite them. In recent years, the Supreme Court has reversed the 5th Circuit’s decisions on standing five times in politically charged cases, twice unanimously. But the lower court “keeps repeating the same errors,” Vladeck says. “The point is not that they’re getting these things wrong. The point is that they are getting them wrong in a way that is making it possible for them to actually interject themselves even deeper into our social and political debates.”

The 5th Circuit wasn’t always reactionary. Until 1981, its jurisdiction also included Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, and under the leadership of Republican-appointed judges, the court spent the 1960s desegregating the South in the face of violent white supremacism. One of the judges was an Eisenhower Republican felicitously named John Minor Wisdom, for whom the court’s majestic building in downtown New Orleans was dedicated in 1994.

“The 5th Circuit and the US Supreme Court were instrumental in this period of American history where rights were finally actually respected by the federal courts,” says Graves, of True North Research. “In reaction to that, there’s been a concerted effort to take over those courts and put people on the courts who have this fundamental hostility to civil rights and the power of government to protect individual freedoms.”

The transition began with increasingly conservative appointments under President Richard Nixon. But it ramped up under Obama’s tenure, as Senate Republicans stymied many of his judicial nominations, leaving him, in eight years, able to make only three 5th Circuit appointments. Texas’ senators, Cornyn and Cruz, blocked all but one appointment to the court from their state, allowing Trump to tap Ho and another Texan as soon as he entered office. Ultimately, Trump made six appointments in four years.

The decisions now coming out of the Wisdom courthouse are increasingly hostile to its namesake’s legacy. During the 1960s, the court embraced Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the constitutionality of school segregation. At his 2018 confirmation hearing, Oldham refused to say whether Brown was rightly decided.

Justice Thomas spoke that same year at a Dallas Federalist Society event, where he recounted something his former clerk and newly appointed 5th Circuit judge, Ho, had said as he was finishing his clerkship. “‘You know, when I came to this job, I thought it was going to be very complicated,’” Thomas recalled Ho saying. “‘But you know, it’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?’”

“I think it is,” Thomas concurred, “if you start at the right place.”

That’s a point that could be made of Ho, Oldham, and many of their 5th Circuit colleagues. It’s no mystery where they are headed once you know where they started from.

More than a week after Hurricane Helene decimated the rural mountain communities of Western North Carolina, residents are still searching for missing loved ones and grappling with the destruction of their homes and businesses. On social media, meanwhile, powerful accounts are turning the disaster into the latest vehicle for politically coded conspiracy theories about the failures of the Biden administration—and the righteousness of the Trump campaign.

One group that has picked up this narrative is composed of Christian influencers, many of whom are part of the quickly growing New Apostolic Reformation, which I wrote about last week. Followers of NAR believe that God is calling Christians to take dominion over the government. They are led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who claim that God speaks directly to them. Many NAR leaders also believe that former President Donald Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. In recent weeks, some have claimed that the political left, including the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, is controlled by witchcraft and demonic forces. As Right Wing Watch reported, on October 1, NAR-affiliated pastor Hank Kunneman turned a request for prayer about the hurricane into a prayer that the storm would show Americans that Trump was the better choice for president.

Lance Wallnau, a powerful NAR apostle and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, recently hosted vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance at a Pennsylvania rally. Wallnau claimed that Vance was supposed to be campaigning in North Carolina, but the gathering storm forced him to divert to Pennsylvania. This demonstrated that an “act of God” had made Vance’s appearance possible.

But now that the devastation from the storm has become apparent, Wallnau seems to have changed his mind about Helene’s divine origins. Wallnau, who is an organizer of the Project 19 election strategy campaign that aims to mobilize Christian voters in 19 key counties in swing states, has been sharing his concerns about the hurricane on X. “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather?” he asked on Sunday. “If they succeeded do you trust them not to use this ability to stop Trump (a threat who says he will expose them and prosecute) from being elected?” The same day he posted, “Does the government have the ability to manipulate hurricanes? Thought it was a crazy conspiracy idea till I read a government report!” (He linked to a report that discussed the government’s failed campaign from 1962 to 1983 to break up hurricanes using silver iodide.)

Sean Feucht, an NAR leader who has been organizing a tour of prayer rallies at Capitol buildings in major US cities, has been posting about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency supposedly bungled its hurricane response. On October 4, he tweeted that FEMA was “inept, corrupt, and broke!” In a video, he assured people in the hardest hit areas, “Help is on the way—not by bureaucrats in DC, but by rednecks, hillbillies, and everyday Americans.”

In recent weeks, Feucht has been urging followers to join the culmination of his tour at a prayer rally at the Capitol in DC. “October 25th we bring the HARP OF DAVID inside the US Capitol,” he tweeted last week, an apparent reference to an Old Testament story in which the warrior David played a harp to soothe a king who was possessed by an evil spirit.

Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader who advanced the stolen election narrative in broadcasts before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, also posted a video to his 349,000 YouTube subscribers criticizing the government’s hurricane response. He quoted an op-ed from the far-right platform Blaze Media alleging that the government couldn’t afford to adequately help hurricane victims because it had spent too much money providing services for undocumented immigrants. (Though that narrative has been debunked, it has gained traction in far-right enclaves of social media.) The silver lining, Sheets said, is that because of Helene, “Millions of Americans have awakened from their stupor. They see the corruption, are aware of the deep state.”

As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, Kat Kerr, a prophet based in Jacksonville, is assuring her 118,000 followers on Facebook that she will “take authority” over the storm to protect people in its path. “We are over the weather, not under the weather,” she said (without evidence). “We also command that no tornadoes be formed.”

She made the same claim before Hurricane Helene.