JD
Vance will speak at an event on Saturday hosted by the self-styled
prophet and political extremist Lance Wallnau, who has claimed Kamala
Harris practices witchcraft and has written that the US is headed toward
bloody internal conflict.
The campaign announced earlier this week that the
Republican vice-presidential candidate will participate in a “town
hall” as part of the Courage tour, a traveling pro-Trump tent revival,
during a stop in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.
Wallnau,
who hosts the tour and broadcasts its speakers on his online show –
drawing hundreds in-person and sometimes tens of thousands virtually –
is a proponent of the “seven mountains” mandate, which commands
Christians to seek leadership in seven key areas of society – the
church, the education system, the family, the media, the arts, business
and government.
He is also a leader in the New
Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement that features modern-day
apostles and has taken hold in particular in non-denominational
charismatic churches that embrace faith healing and believe that the
Holy Spirit can speak directly through believers in the form of speaking
in tongues and prophesy. These religious spaces often also practice
“deliverance ministry” and “spiritual warfare” to cleanse people of
demonic entities.
Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a
scholar whose research focuses on such groups, noted that NAR-aligned
practitioners engage in a unique form of “spiritual warfare” – fighting
malign forces in not only individuals who are believed to be inhabited
by a malign entity, but also entire geographic areas.
“Spiritual
warfare is the belief that a demon has taken up residence and is
controlling anything from a large geographic space to a culture, to the
White House or the supreme court,” said Gaspard-Hogewood.
Extremism
researchers worry that spiritual warfare, which is by definition waged
in the supernatural realm, could become dangerous if interpreted
excessively literally. On January 6, spiritual warriors affiliated with
the Jericho March rallied at the Capitol to protest against the election
results, engaging in a form of spiritual warfare on the National Mall.
Wallnau, who himself prophesied that Trump would win the 2016 election
and rejected the outcome when he didn’t win again in 2020, doubled down
on his position at a stop of the Courage tour in Wisconsin.
“January 6 was not an insurrection – it was an election fraud intervention!” Wallnau exclaimed to the roaring crowd.
Wallnau
has also written in his book, God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J Trump and
the American Unraveling, that he believes the United States is headed
toward a potentially bloody clash – a “fiery trial” that will come “both
to believers and nations”. In his book, in which he also claims to have
met with Trump on multiple occasions, Wallnau writes that the US is
entering a “crucible”, which will involve “a ‘conflict’ of ideologies,
often arms, to determine a victor in the power clash”.
[...] The
inclusion of Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, in the tour
highlights the Trump campaign’s increasing alignment with a movement on
the religious right that seeks to subordinate US government and society
to Christian doctrine.
[...] With its 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania could be a make-or-break state for Harris and Trump.
Followup, Vance did not go off the deep end speaking in tongues or such in whoring to this unwholesome group and venue. Yet, according to reporting:
“I got baptized
in 2019,” Vance said to scattered cheers, recounting the story of how he
rediscovered his Catholic faith late in life.
Vance’s
town hall was a mostly routine recapitulation of his campaign talking
points: He blamed the fentanyl crisis on lax border laws; made baseless
assertions that schoolchildren aren’t learning math but “know there are
87 different genders”; and encouraged people to vote this November.
What
was significant about Vance’s decision to participate at Wallnau’s town
hall is that it shows the Trump campaign yet again associating itself
with a strain of extremism steeped in anti-LGTBQ bigotry that’s determined to transform the government into a Christian theocracy.
Wallnau was a
prominent part of the “stop the steal” movement that sought to overturn
the results of the 2020 election and hand Trump a second term. He was
even set to speak at the Jan. 6, 2021 rally that turned into the violent
attack on the Capitol. Wallnau, who has repeatedly compared Trump to
the biblical figure of King Cyrus, recently said that the events of that
day were “not an insurrection” but “an election fraud intervention.”
He has used strident, misogynistic language when talking about Harris, saying she has the “spirit of Jezebel.” Wallnau also claimed that Harris used “witchcraft” during the televised debate with Trump.
“When
I say ‘witchcraft,’ I am talking about what happened tonight.
Occult-empowered deception, manipulation, and domination,” he wrote.
That kind of thing Vance could have declined. He went. He whored. Perhaps enthralled by some occult manipulative force acting against his better judgment.
...................................
In Pennsylvania, which does have a bundle of electoral votes. Vance basically traded his credibility in an under reported effort to cement the worse part of MAGA to the Trump campaign. Any vote being worth courting, any way, any circumstances.
Perhaps he thought he could hide. Media would ignore it. Or that anybody on Trump's ticket owed it to Trump. As likely, he enjoyed himself at the event and was likeminded with the crowd and their minds.
____________UPDATE___________
Worth a reminder, Politico reported of another Catholic hardlinder/rabblerouser, widely reported to be in alliance with Vance:
Kevin Roberts said the revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, speaks Feb. 22, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. | George Walker IV/AP
By Associated Press
NEW YORK — The leader of a conservative think tank orchestrating plans for a massive overhaul
of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win
said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution”
that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin
Roberts made the comments Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast,
adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country
back.”
Declaring "A Revolution" on Steve Bannon's "War Room" is attuned to "Wallnau writes that the US is
entering a “crucible”, which will involve “a ‘conflict’ of ideologies,
often arms, to determine a victor in the power clash”.
This kind of provocative talk sparked the Jan 6 riot, and is denounced by most fair minded and peaceful people. Those voicing "warfare" and "Revolution" thoughts are worth watching. Policing. For if/when they try to turn their speech into action. It could get ugly, as well as it might end up all talk, no action.
___________FURTHER UPDATE___________
With the thought that P2025 is weird and overly authorian while as Christian Nationalist as Wallnau, in its own way, things don't stop there.
In
many thousand words’ worth of blog posts over the past 15 years,
computer programmer and tech startup founder Curtis Yarvin has laid out a critique of American democracy:
arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media
outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this
declining country, while the US executive branch has become weak,
incompetent, and captured.
But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the
single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US
government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he
likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin
argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he
says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the
old regime, and build something new in its place.
To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power,” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist” — a term he disputes,
arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism,
and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a
class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his
preferred term is “monarchist.
Blake Masters, currently a Senate candidate in Arizona, and JD Vance are attuned to Yarvin-think, the Vox item continuing:
Besides Vance and Masters (whose campaigns declined to comment for this story), Yarvin has had a decade-long association with
billionaire Peter Thiel, who is similarly disillusioned with democracy
and American government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy
are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009, and earlier this year, he declared
that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment
after the January 6 attacks were “traitorous.” Fox host Tucker Carlson
is another fan, interviewing Yarvin with some fascination for his streaming program last year. He’s even influenced online discourse — Yarvin was the first to popularize the analogy from The Matrix
of being “redpilled” or “-pilled,” suddenly losing your illusions and
seeing the supposed reality of the world more clearly, as applied to
politics.
Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the New Right
— a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional
Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has
captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are
necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting
more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s
advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite — or at least Yarvin-lite —
ideas for the second term, such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of “election deniers” on the ballot this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon — and Yarvin has written a playbook for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.
[...] During our lengthy conversation, Yarvin argued that the eventual fall of
US democracy could be “fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” Yet the
steps President Trump took in that direction after the 2020 election
were not particularly joyous or peaceful, and it was hard for me to see
why further movement down that road would be.
It is a fairly outer-limits meandering outlook, which Walz correctly called "weird."
Stupid too, but enough a threat of wrong people getting again to power, that it can scare you posthaste to the voting booth to go with sane norms instead.
It should scare even the super-lazy to vote. There's a lot of money behind the humbug. Money already makes it shake and rattle as feasible, no matter what. Hanging there, skeletal, in the JD closet.
A way to view things - Trump is old, declining, and an opportunistic grifter while Vance is younger, with a stronger mind, while a twilight zone idealogue. Were Trump to win he'd be lucky to make it a year before croaking, more or less, with Vance weird and ready, and likely studying the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
FURTHER: Yarvin also shows up in this item. What might not have yet gone into mainstream attentiveness, is out there on the Internet and nobody's secret. Look for it to show up more and more.
Not an October suprise, but an October know-it-exists.
