“Dad went to war last night” read Vance Boelter's text to his family in the early hours of June 14. This was sent after his shooting rampage aimed at Democratic lawmakers, which left two dead and two critically wounded.
Turns out Boelter is an ordained pastor in a church associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, which sees the world as a spiritual battlefield and whose leaders have preached that political enemies are possessed by demons.
This is not some small fringe movement. Key figures in the Trump administration are adherents. We revisit this apocalyptic evangelical Christian cult and consider its political violence and religious extremism.
Show Notes
Seven Mountain Mandate, Paula White and Trump
Home-goods companies prepare new Trump-linked products
Who Wants a MAGA Instant Pot?
I Tried Pre-Ordering the Trump Phone. The Page Failed and It Charged My Credit Card the Wrong Amount
Doug Ford's Bill 5 is now law in Ontario. Here's what happens next
Chiefs of Ontario issue urgent warning on Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, and will rally on Parliament Hill
CCLA Urges Federal Government to Reverse Course on Bill C-5
Legal experts gear up to challenge Bill 5 as First Nations pledge to ‘close Ontario’s economy
Reckless and chilling: Bill 5 is Doug Ford’s most dangerous legislation yet
Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years
Brief: Stealing Democracy for Jesus
An Audio-Documentary Series on the Christian Leaders and Ideas that Fueled the Capitol Riot
The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows
Meet the powerful evangelicals who believe Trump is an apostle who will reclaim America for Christ
Vance Boelter and the Rise of “Spiritual Warfare”
We Should Not Be Shocked That the Alleged Minnesota Shooter’s Christian School Is Connected to Political Violence
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Conspirituality 263, the Apostle Assassin.
Dad went to war last night, read Vance Belter's text to his family in the early hours of June 14th.
This, after his attempt to murder four Democrat government officials and their families in their homes, left two dead and two critically wounded.
Turns out that the shooter was an ordained pastor in a church associated with the new apostolic reformation, which sees the world as a spiritual battlefield and whose leaders have preached that Kamala Harris and other political enemies are possessed by demons.
But this is not some small fringe movement.
Key figures in America's government are adherents of its teachings and fly its an appeal to heaven flag at home and at work.
Today, we'll revisit this apocalyptic evangelical Christian cult and think out loud about political violence and religious extremism.
Meanwhile, the MAGA cult keeps monetizing, as Derek's story about instant pot illustrates, while Matthew exposes how Trumpian political strategy is infecting Canada.
*music*
This week in spirituality.
Well, we're going to get into a conversation about the spiritual battlefield underlying all of reality right now, but let's start with something more mundane.
Do you guys use an Instant Pot?
You know, if I had had a pressure cooker for the 10 years that I was all yoga and vegetarianism, I think my gut would have done a lot better.
So sorry, listeners for the top of the show image, but I loved it.
I love it.
I still use it.
Like a lot of food prep gadgets from Asia, it's like super smart.
So yeah, I love it.
Are you going to tell us something shitty about the Instant Pot?
I have no idea what it is.
Okay.
What an Instant Pot is?
Yeah, no idea.
Oh, wow.
Oh, it's just a pressure cooker that allows you to make things much, much faster.
And for people who don't cook, they are fantastic.
And if you want to get soups done in like 10 minutes, absolutely fantastic.
But some bad news, if you're not MAGA, InstantPot, the company, is releasing the 4547 collection in what Eater calls a cynical cash grab, you think?
Oh, boy.
The upcoming pots will feature MAGA written on them.
The same month that most corporations have gone radio silent with pride merchandise, Semaphore reports that a number of companies are getting in on the Trump grift.
And yes, the Trump family will profit from it.
This includes Lenox.
They're going to be releasing fine porcelain dinnerware with Trump's face and a White House logo on it.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
And also they'll have some gold-plated flatware and snow globes because, of course, live comfortably and simply interior homes pitched Mar-a-Lago and White House sheets collections.
Though at the time of recording, we don't know if those are going to happen.
I'm not sure about all the details behind these deals, but InstantPot announced that they are donating proceeds to the Trump Presidential Library because everyone knows what a voracious reader he is.
Oh, yeah.
All the companies listed are represented by Nest Point Associates, whose deputy director told Semaphore.
All of these companies, including those not listed, such as LL Flex and Anchor Hawking, are extremely supportive of President Trump and the MAGA agenda, standing with the president with their efforts to onshore and show public support.
Now, the irony here, there's a lot of it, but Instant Pot a few months ago complained that it's going to have to raise the cost of their pots by $40 due to Trump's tariffs.
And now they're turning around.
Meanwhile, we have Trump Mobile, which is going to infect the cell phone waves very soon.
The branded gold T1 phone will retail for $499, which I'll get back to.
404 Media pre-ordered one, and the site, which is filled with typos and grammatical errors, charged the reporter, his name is Joseph Cox, the wrong amount.
He was going to pay $100 for a down payment.
It charged him $64.70.
Cox then received an email saying that he'll receive an email when the phone is shipped.
The problem is the web page failed when he tried to enter his address, so he never actually put it in.
We have to get like the QAnon influencers on that because there's got to be some like numerology with the problems and like the failed website and all of that.
There was a DDS attack, all of that.
Well, I have some more numerology.
1999.
Okay.
So the Trump organization claims the phone is going to be built and designed in the U.S. But the guys who put the Hard Fork podcast kind of took this to task last Friday.
There's only one phone that is currently actually built and designed in the U.S., and that is the Purism Liberty phone.
Oh my God.
Which cost $1,990 because it's fucking expensive to make phones when you're not relying on Chinese slave labor.
That sounds like it's for Mike Johnson and his son to block porn or something like that.
They actually are able to surveil each other to maintain the accountability buddy system.
Right, right, okay.
That comes pre-built into the phone.
Actually, I'm going to get to that too.
So Hardfolk brought up a terrifying possibility.
One thing Trump could do to lower the costs of the design and building of the phone is to force companies like Google and Meta to pay to preload their apps on the T1 phone.
Given how much money is flowing into Trump's coffers from corporations, this isn't a stretch.
I'm still struck here by the fact that they're selling the phone and then talking about how it will be designed and built in the US.
So they're selling a phone that actually doesn't exist yet.
Right.
They're pre-orders available.
So where they're actually being built is unknown.
They're claiming it's going to be, but all of Trump's products are predominantly made in China.
So either he has like, I don't know, he has deals that are out in the future or everything is like a Kickstarter for him or something like that.
Yeah.
This model exists.
So I'll get geeky for a moment, but major cell phone companies that home their own satellites, they have extra bandwidth every month.
So they sell it to smaller companies.
Like I use Mint Mobile.
Mint Mobile is now bought by T-Mobile, but they honor Mint Mobile's original pricing, which is relatively inexpensive because they are sort of a tertiary brand.
And so that is what this phone is going to do is they're going to buy bandwidth from a different company.
And so that model actually exists.
It's well-founded, but the phone itself is what's really in contention here.
Hard Fork brought up one other point worth considering.
Unlike other wannabe dictators or actual dictators who actually give their supporters something in exchange for their allegiance, Trump might be the first one who just continually leeches off the people who support him without ever giving a damn thing back.
All right, so my story this week is about how Trumpism is or the Trump effect spreads across borders, even paradoxically under the guise of resisting Trumpism.
So I'm going to be flagging two pieces of legislation that are crashing over where I live here in Toronto.
So Bill 5 is now law here in Ontario, brought into law by the Conservative government.
And then Bill C7 is being speedrun by Prime Minister Mark Kearney's liberals.
It's kind of like, you know, Pam in the office with, you know, these are the same picture meme.
Basically, these bills are both trying or pretending to resist fascism by making capitalist extraction more efficient.
When these bills were introduced, were they specific to Trump's agenda?
Like, were the leaders saying we are taking influence by him?
Or are you just saying that it's broader the way the world is going right now?
Well, they wouldn't ever cite him as an influence.
That wouldn't be very nationalistic, right?
But the fact is we do have two Trump-adjacent premiers in like very big economic centers, so Ontario and Alberta.
And now we have this like federal deregulatory response that favors the business class over everyone else.
But they're going to dress it up.
That's part of the story.
They're going to dress it up as something different, as something opposing Trumpism, actually.
So to flesh out my framing, I've been doing a series of briefs and Patreon bonuses called Anti-Fascist Woodshed, where I explore these basic terms that I think are pertinent for people who want to resist rising fascism here and everywhere.
And a core tension is on this definitional level of what is fascism really?
And, you know, there's two big forks.
There's a fork in the road.
There's a division.
On one side, there's the kind of Tim Snyder argument that the concentration is on authoritarianism.
And it can be either right-wing, it can be left-wing.
And it kind of emerges in the form of mass psychosis fueled by really bad actors.
And the antidote is to not obey in advance, to be vigilant about protecting institutions, and to really have faith that proper values can be restored and institutions can be rebuilt.
But on the really leftist side, which doesn't get a lot of play, the explanation is a lot more mundane, is a lot more stark.
It's that fascism is like an intensification of capitalism and a means by which the powerful try to hold on to power when capitalism itself is in crisis from, you know, the environment or AI or unemployment or what have you.
So the slogan on that side really is socialism or barbarism.
Is this specific to these bills or is this more of a wide-ranging slogan that claims that anyone who doesn't fully agree with socialism is therefore contributing to barbarism?
Oh, no, it's very old.
It's a really old slogan.
So I didn't mean to imply that somehow people resisting Canadian laws are sort of chanting that in the streets.
It's really just saying, it goes back like 100 years.
It's saying that if your society doesn't focus primarily on redistributing wealth to reduce or eliminate inequality and cruelty in ways that hopefully empower people and are not authoritarian, you'll probably wind up looking like the U.S. does today.
So yeah, it's just a very old slogan.
And part of I'm bringing it up because the choice, the fork in the road, I think, that Canadians have to look at is, are we going to try to be better capitalists in order to bolster our sort of national prestige and our sort of self-defense?
And that's why I think it's kind of apt because the country has to respond to Trump's may or may not invade you bullshit and also his very real tariffs.
So the question for me is, what does our own nationalism dictate?
And so far, it kind of dictates the attempt to beat Trump at his own grift while pretending to be folksy and local and pro-worker.
So I think Canada is probably going to choose more barbarism before it chooses more socialism.
And Carney is a great representative for this because he's a soft-spoken but direct guy.
He's also a really solid hockey player.
And his slogan to rally the country under attack from the Trump tariffs is this old phrase that Gordy Howe used to say, which is elbows up, which it means you play dirty on the ice in a way that the ref can't see when you're battling over the puck in the corners.
There were big ad campaigns around this.
They even got Maggie Atwood to cut a PSA with a captain of the women's national hockey team.
Is that still used?
Because there are cameras everywhere now.
We can kind of see the hockey players playing dirty.
I don't know if they know that.
Yeah, I think when Gordy was playing, the refs were like at center ice or whatever, or they, yeah, yeah, you can see everything from every angle and yeah, no elbow is left unseen.
But what does elbows up mean now in policy terms?
Basically, it seems to echo something like the general brand of the abundance agenda.
Now, not necessarily as detailed by Klein and Thompson, but by the libertarians who are taking this up as a kind of meme.
So elbows up means going back for them to playing deregulation against unions, climate activists, First Nations.
So in Ontario, our former drug dealer, Premier Ford, used his majority to cram through something called the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act.
And it even sounds Trumpian.
It's like this long, you know, executive order type thing.
It creates rules-free special economic zones, allowing companies to be exempt from provincial statutes, regulations, or municipal bylaws, or full consultation with First Nations people.
It repeals the Endangered Species Act.
It narrows habitat protections.
It gives the government more power to override scientific assessments of species at risk.
It exempts some projects from public notification requirements.
So we did this episode on the Ontario Place redevelopment a while back.
It also preempts lawsuits related to all of this stuff.
So all of this is sounding a lot to me like Project 2025.
Yeah, but it's Canadian.
It's dressed up, right?
It's nice.
Bill C5 federally is basically the same thing.
It's called the One Canadian Economy Act.
It grants the cabinet authority to designate infrastructure projects as being in the national interest.
And this allows like a single federal minister to just approve projects and override regulatory protections.
So, you know, the kind of sweeping power that we see, you know, exercised by a number of cabinet members in the states, you know, including RFK Jr., this enables the government to bypass environmental and social and public health safeguards and also to just run over constitutional obligations to First Nations.
So elbows up actually means, I think, at this point, if you can't beat them, join them, especially if they give you good reason to finally force through the deregulatory regimes that you've always wanted.
So, you know, not becoming the 51st state involves having to let everything that makes Canada fall by the wayside, unfortunately.
You know, and to me, the other way would be like an actual nationalist reaction to Trump might be built on nationalizing industries and resources and actually bolstering the commons of the country in a way that distinguishes the society from American society.
And maybe if things get bad enough, that's the direction they'll have to go in.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself, now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Vance Bolter sent out several texts while he was the subject Of an extended manhunt in Minnesota on June 14th and 15th.
Words are not going to explain how sorry I am for this situation, he said to his wife.
There's going to be some people coming to the house armed and trigger happy, and I don't want you guys around.
Dad went to war last night.
He said in a group text to the family, I don't want to say more because I don't want to implicate anybody.
Now, as we've all heard, this was after he had shot and killed Minnesota Democratic House Leader Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
He had shot Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, who survived, each multiple times, and then attempted to do the same at two other Democrat officials' houses.
A massive manhunt ensued in Sibley County until Bolter was finally taken into custody at 9.30 on Sunday evening.
Who is he?
He's this 57-year-old married father of five who traveled for work and spent a few nights a week living in a rooming house.
His fortunes seemed to have been in decline given his work history.
Bolter had gone from working in the food industry and then managing a 7-Eleven and a gas station before working delivering dead bodies to funeral homes and then being on call to extract eyeballs from corpses slated for organ donation.
That seems pretty specialized.
It does.
He must have had some training for that.
He appears to also have had a brief stint working for a security firm, and he had tried and sort of maybe had a full start trying to have a security firm of his own.
Perhaps more significantly, Vance Bolter is a 1990 graduate of the Christ for the Nations Bible College in Dallas, Texas.
It was founded in 1970, and Christ for the Nations is one of the early proponents of a theology now associated with something called the New Apostolic Reformation, which has gained considerable influence over the last three decades in American non-denominational Christianity and extremist politics.
The original co-founder of the Bible College that he attended, James Gordon Lindsay, was part of the New Order of the Latter Reign, which preached that a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit was underway to raise up new apostles and prophets and amass an end times army to do battle with satanic forces and establish God's kingdom on earth.
Really have to give good marks for the names, which have like an Elden Ring or D ⁇ D kind of like ring to them, the new order of the latter rain.
So was there a prior rain that wasn't wet enough or something?
Yeah, I don't know if it's so much about the prior rain, maybe about the current rain not being wet enough.
I mean, we need a real outpouring.
Yeah, that there's an immediacy of lived religion that is missing.
Bolter has been deeply critical of churches where the gifts are not flowing, right?
The gifts of the Spirit.
Rather than accepting a kind of secular present that pales in spiritual comparison to the biblical past, they want all of the signs and wonders, the apostles and prophets, to be really serving the Holy Spirit right now.
Right.
A flood.
They want a flood.
The name of Christ for the Nations before that was actually voice of healing.
And so that also implies that there was something that they need to be healed from.
So it seems like he has a constant refrain of looking into the past.
We should also note regarding to Lindsay's theology that it was derived from a movement known as British Israelism, which taught that white people were the true Israel of the Bible.
Lindsay himself was connected with white supremacist networks throughout North America.
A partner of his was directly implicated with the KKK.
And this could help explain why there's this contingent of Americans who are so invested in the Bible reflecting their reality as they've literally rewritten the narrative to pretend it's about them.
So you're saying that the true Israel of the Bible, not in terms of a geographical location, but like the tribe of the Israelites, that the true Israelites are just white people generally.
I believe it's the tribe, but they could go full Mormon and think that it actually did occur in the land of America, of American land.
Right.
Yeah.
And in fact, Derek, after being saved at 17 and going door to door, distributing a pamphlet about that experience, Bolter also traveled to proselytize in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
And we've covered various aspects of this movement in previous episodes about white Christian nationalism, political religion, and even some cultish organizations.
Derek, you and I talked about them for our brief on leaked internal media from something called Ziklag in August of last year.
Yeah, listeners, if you want to get a deep dive into that, it's linked to in the show notes.
But that cult founder, Ken Eldridge, who is the current and the current prophet of Ziklag, who's a man named Lance Walnew, who we should add has hosted events in which J.D. Vance has spoken at.
They are the forces behind this.
Walnew is an evangelical preacher and a business consultant based in Dallas.
He is widely considered the person most responsible for mainstreaming NAR.
And this came about in the late 20th century as a distinct movement within American Christianity and which Bolter is a longtime member of.
It's rooted in earlier Pentecostal and charismatic traditions.
And you can find its influence dating back to the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 to 1909.
This revival catalyzed the global Pentecostal movement, and it emphasized speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing.
And since that time, it has gained momentum through various waves in American culture, and it's definitely cresting right now.
Yeah.
And one of those would be the Second Great Awakening with, you know, William Miller and this whole idea that he knew exactly when Christ was coming back.
And that then gave birth to Seventh-day Adventism.
And it's right around the time you see Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses springing up.
So it's one of those big waves.
Yeah.
And I'm assuming that the glossolalia would have been just part of their ritual gatherings.
And I mean, it's still going strong.
Like just the other day, there was this gathering of MAGA women outside of the White House perimeter.
They were doing their Jesus scat.
It fascinates me too with the crossover.
Mallory always sends me videos and she sent me one.
And now on my Instagram algorithm, I get all of these ayahuasca shamanesses who are doing their own version of glossolalia for the ayahuasca deities.
So it definitely seems pervasive in the atmosphere.
Yeah, Matthew, I saw that Instagram video too.
And they're really following Paula White's lead, as well as the capital insurrectionist type of consecration prayer while on the property, right?
Bradley Onishi talks about this, that at each stage of broaching the perimeter of the capital, they're reconsecrating the land because they believe that geographical locations can literally be ruled over by demonic forces.
Do they have to go step by step because you can't, like, you can only sort of, what, like 10 feet of diameter or whatever at a time is enough for the particular prayer.
You have to stage it.
Is that the idea?
Yeah, maybe something like that, but I also think it's sort of symbolic at each new sort of threshold that you're crossing deeper into the inner sanctum of the Capitol building, right?
Right.
It might be like the Seven Mountains or something like that.
Talking about this movement cresting in waves, C. Peter Wagner is a former professor at the California-based evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary.
He coined the term New Apostolic Reformation in the 1990s, and he called it the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation and focused on its decentralized leadership, so a little bit of cryptocurrency here, by self-identified prophets who claim direct revelation from God.
And this part is important because it speaks to the general diversity within the movement, because anyone can say they're a prophet or an apostle and they can spin up a chapter, basically.
A rejection of denominational structures is written into its DNA, as is the focus on charismatic leaders.
So do they use prophet and apostle like interchangeably?
Because apostle, like it carries historically a more administrative meaning, whereas like prophets are always the madmen in the wilderness.
It's not interchangeable, but both prophets and apostles are the two highest leadership roles in NAR.
From my understanding, you can basically just call yourself one.
The difference being is the prophet's the one who's bringing the messages back for people, where the apostle, as you flag there, it is more administrative.
But I guess at that point, you would need the business chops to be able to create the LLC and the organization, et cetera.
Right.
And the coin.
Yeah, it really is.
It's populist religion, right?
It's this notion that we can build our own.
We don't need to listen to the experts and we can have a decentralized power system that essentially is based on revelation, which is actually the ultimate way of establishing authoritarian top-down control.
That's my understanding, too, regarding the prophets and the apostles.
The apostles serve to support the prophets in their unfolding mission based on the messages they receive directly from God.
To me, it's a bit like having the Supreme Court on your side as a wannabe dictator instead of them serving as a check on your power institutionally, right?
I just have to say, as like a cradle Catholic, the notion of the prophet being centralized like that is very far from like my DNA, my experience, because the version of apostolic in the Catholic context is about delegation and obedience.
And like relevant to this particular sort of period, you can see that in action on this same political battlefield when Pope Leo makes Michael Pham, who's like a Vietnamese refugee, the bishop of San Diego, and then encourages him to go to LA and stand with the protesters.
And he shows up at an immigration hearing and reportedly the ICE agents like scatter.
Like, I don't know why they're afraid of him, but maybe that version of the apostle as the representative of the big kahuna carries more gravitas than somebody who's self-appointed.
I don't know.
Well, and this is interesting too, right?
Because it's where Protestantism, especially in America, has this very like wild, dynamic, kind of fascinating history and ongoing legacy in terms of this continuous self-reinvention and being visited by the gifts of the Spirit.
And Derek, you mentioned C. Peter Wagner calling his new development the most radical change in the way we do church since the Protestant Reformation.
Well, Southern Poverty Law Center, I think, has also said that the new Apostolic Reformation is the most dangerous movement in America right now in terms of like threats to democracy.
And C. Peter Wagner, by the way, worked very closely with Lance Wellnau, another guy that you mentioned earlier.
I forget who's the mentor of who, which way that goes, but they're part of the lineage.
Jesus mentored them both.
Yes, just to get that straight.
Well, it sounds like a little elbows up there when the ICE agents see Pope Leo.
They're trying to throw the elbows without him seeing.
And then he comes into picture.
Oh, shit.
Right.
So there are up to 30 million adherents of NAR in the United States.
And the core belief centers on Dominion theology, which brings us back to Ziklag and the Seven Mountains mandate.
We talk about that extensively in that episode.
And it really is the key to understanding the modern incarnation of Christian nationalism in America.
Adherents have a God-mandated duty to take control of the Seven Mountains, government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion.
Anyone who doesn't agree with those is an enemy in the spiritual warfare always percolating under the surface of reality, or when it rises to the lever of Bolter, very much on the surface of society.
That means up to 30 million Americans believe they're in a cosmic battle to reclaim America for their God.
While Trump can come out and condemn violent actions like he kind of did after Bolter, that infamous photograph of Christian leaders praying over our president in 2019 included many, many NAR leaders, including Paula White Cain and Samuel Rodriguez, and NAR leaders such as Becca Greenwood and Dutch Sheets.
What a name.
They met with him, with Trump officials, sorry, in the White House a few days before the January 6th insurrection.
But speaking of Dutch Sheets, Jillian, what's the 101?
I mean, he sounds like he should be a character in a mobster movie from like the 1900s, right?
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, so this all goes back to Bolter's Bible College roots because one of his teachers who was there during his training was a guy named Dutch Sheets.
And he currently has 358,000 YouTube subscribers, many of whom were motivated by him to participate in the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Dutch Sheets has prayed on his podcast that God would arise and scatter his enemies.
And that was in direct reference to judges who he believes disrespect God's holy word because they oppose Donald Trump.
Another advisor and frequent guest lecturer at Christ for the Nations is Cindy Jacobs, who was also at the Capitol that day, praying with insurrectionists on the steps before they stormed the building.
And Fred of the Pod, who I mentioned earlier, Brayad Onishi, has written about these threshold-crossing prayer groups spontaneously gathering at various stages of the insurrection to sacralize the violence that they were doing.
Jacobs and her husband founded Generals International, which they describe as a prayer and spiritual warfare organization.
They founded this in- Also an MLM.
Absolutely, yeah.
And that's actually a through line with all of this stuff is that there's an element of evangelical entrepreneurialism at play here.
Whether you succeed or not is another question.
And so they founded this organization in 1985, and it now runs a TV show, a podcast, and some online courses that you can sign up for.
Jacobs, as it turns out, enjoys referencing numerology in her sermons.
She believes that Donald Trump was elected in 2017 because the number 17, where have I heard this before?
The number 17 somehow represents absolute victory and also correlates with the year 5777 in the Hebrew calendar, which is supposedly the year of the crowned sword in which America needs an anointed leader ready for multiple wars against the enemies of God.
And of course, Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.
That's it.
That's where I heard that before.
Yeah, so it all actually, it tracks.
It all actually does add up in the end if you're willing to stay with it.
These attitudes are consistent with what we know about the new apostolic reformation, which encourages adherents to see the world as a cosmic battleground, to see themselves as spiritual warriors who are fighting demonic forces in this world.
Even though an official statement from Christ for the Nations has tried to distance them from what Bolter did, saying, this is not who we are, this is not what we teach, there's a quote from the founder adorning the entryway of the college that reads, every Christian should pray at least one violent prayer a day.
So an important detail here about the New Apostolic Reformation is that it's not officially its own church.
Rather, it's this religious ideology that we've been detailing so far that is then adopted by preachers in various independent evangelical churches.
Along with that Christian supremacist Seven Mountain Mandate agenda that you mentioned, Derek, they preach spiritual warfare against demonic forces.
This is all in preparation for the end times.
And it's associated with speaking in tongues, faith healing, and prosperity theology, which may be why their original name had to do with healing, right?
So let's talk about the pine tree flag for a moment.
It goes back to the Revolutionary War, but today the flag is often associated with this movement.
It's a white flag with a green pine tree on it, along with the words an appeal to heaven, which I've usually seen written in black.
This indicates that believers see God as a higher authority than governments or political leaders, and therefore that people, believers, have a religious right to revolution.
And we've seen this flying at the Stop the Steel rallies, and then during the Capitol riots that came after that, it's been seen flying outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Mike Johnson has flown the flag outside his office, and it was recently flown by Kelly Loeffler, the former Georgia lawmaker who called for the resignation of Brad Raphson's Berger, who refused to find those 11,000 votes.
She flew it outside the Small Business Administration, which she now runs.
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers is campaigning to have the flag flown over all government buildings alongside their parallel agenda to push for religious education in schools and a biblical worldview in state laws and policies.
Paula White, who is the preacher who went viral during the 2020 election count for speaking in tongues from her podium and praying for angels from Africa and South America to strike and strike and strike to ensure a Trump victory, as you've mentioned, Derek, is a prominent apostolic leader.
She's the current senior advisor to the White House Faith Office.
She didn't go anywhere.
And then former Secretary of State from the first Trump administration, Mike Pompeo, and Trump, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also have ties to the movement.
In fact, J.D. Vance appeared a couple months before the 2024 election at a new Apostolic Reformation town hall hosted by Lance Walnow, who had said recently that Kamala Harris was possessed by demons.
I want to also flag a great article on religion dispatches about the violent prayer that you mentioned there, Julian.
They point out that one endorsement of this movement comes from Dottie Osteen.
That last name sounds familiar.
She is the mother of mega-millionaire prosperity theologian Joel Osteen.
Say it isn't so.
Not Joel Osteen.
He's so nice.
You could see his very white teeth on many book covers.
Turns out his mom worked directly with Gordon Lindsay, among other revivalists.
Now, the writer, Carrie Lander, points out that, quote, any revival that spawns a New York Times best-selling author cannot be considered fringe.
And in fact, the school that Joel Osteen's mother endorses is quietly far more influential than many people outside of the NAR want to believe.
Okay, so you guys have both referenced this prayer of violence, and I'm wondering what it actually Is and I did a quick search and it looks like it's taken from Matthew 11, 12 quote from the days please please lead us.
Well, I think they're getting it wrong.
From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force.
Isn't that a bad thing?
That sounds like a bad thing to me.
There's something about NAR and the violent prayer specifically is that they do this thing that we kind of see often on the right, I would argue a lot of places where there's a call for violence, but it's spiritual violence.
So when actual physical violence occurs, they can wipe their hand cleans of it and say that I wasn't talking about that.
And that has been common throughout NAR leadership.
Yeah, it's metaphorical.
Yeah, absolutely.
So put a pin in that, Matthew, the last thing that you said there from the prayer, which is that the violent take it by force, right?
That's Matthew Taylor's book title, right?
Where he does this whole study of NAR.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So back to Vance Bolter.
He seems to have gone through fits and starts in founding his own ministry after graduating from this lineage that we've been talking about through his Bible college.
And he actually traveled regularly to Africa.
Listeners have probably seen this video.
It's been kind of viral online of him preaching on a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo in around 2023.
This is actually from a series of sermons he gave at this particular church over a three-year period.
So we'll play the clip here.
You'll hear his passionate voice preaching with a translator speaking his words in French in between.
French people, especially in America, yeah, they don't know what sex they are.
They don't know how their sexual orientation they're confused.
And it's not by thinking so that the money is on video.
The enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.
But this word makes it deeper because it's living.
God goes down there and pulls that out.
And then I'll play it.
I'm not looking at it.
I'm living just kidding about it.
And he sets every person free.
I'm pretty sure that the translator left out the sexuality and gender stuff.
I did not hear that in the translation.
My French is not that great, but I did not hear her translate that.
I think she skipped over it.
It sounds like she just said they're confused, right?
They're confused, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And she left it at that.
And who knows, right?
Maybe she knows what sells, what doesn't in her neck of the woods, right?
So there he is, Vance Bolter, talking about how the enemy can be overcome.
It seems that the next step in his Christian holy war turned out to be disguising himself as a cop to enact this well-planned killing spree.
Police found what they describe as voluminous writings at his home, along with a list of at least 70 potential targets, including other politicians, civic leaders, and planned parenthood offices.
The SUV he made to look like a police vehicle contained three AK-47s and a 9mm handgun, in addition to another disassembled 9mm he had tossed nearby, presumably the one he did the shooting with, along with the tactical vest and silicon mask that he had used.
Now, I'll finish here by saying that during his recent appearance on the Excellent podcast that we've referred to several times in the past, Straight White American Jesus, Matthew D. Taylor, who you just called out, Matthew, is the author of a definitive recent book about the new apostolic reformation titled The Violent Take It By Force.
And he said this, there are probably thousands of guys like this.
Radicalization can happen very fast.
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Within minutes of the shooter's identity hitting social media, major right-wing voices condemned Bolter's actions, taking full responsibility for helping foment online anger at the left with their divisive rhetoric.
Obviously, I'm being facetious because the conspiracy theories were immediate.
None addressed gun violence.
They didn't even mention Christianity.
Twitter and right-wing media were convinced that Bolter is a Democrat.
He's a leftist loony.
He is a Marxist.
I was planning on doing an overview of people like Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk getting into all this bullshit.
Then I realized the Uber conspiracist churning out all possible theories is Benny Johnson.
I want to step back into our conspiracy theory lane for this last section and discuss the implications of their spread and continued misinformation because the machine, even today, a couple weeks later, is still pumping out content about him.
So a little background.
We haven't covered Benny Johnson, I don't believe, before.
He's someone who's been in the periphery of my own research, but he started working at Breitbart News in 2010.
He bounced around to the Daily Caller and National Review.
He landed at BuzzFeed, where he was fired in 2014 for multiple instances of plagiarism.
Put a pin in that.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
So too many listicles that he stole from other people.
In 2019, he became chief creative officer at Turning Point USA, which is Charlie Kirk's MAGA nonprofit that invades high schools and college campuses.
And if you follow us on Instagram, you might have seen a recent video I posted of Kirk telling a group of 14-year-old girls that the only reason they should go to college is to find a husband, as that's the age they will peek at.
This is the quality of the people we're discussing today.
Back to Benny Johnson, who is wildly popular.
He has 4.8 million YouTube subscribers, 3.7 million Twitter followers.
His CV includes claiming the drones over Jersey a few months ago were alien invasions orchestrated to steal Trump's swagger.
And yes, he is a 9-11 truther because of course he is.
Johnson spends an inordinate amount of time calling the left hateful while his entire feed is just filled with vitriol and spites.
I can see how he plagiarized at BuzzFeed beyond listicles even, because having watched four of his YouTube videos on Bolter for this episode, that's basically all he does.
Wow.
Calling Johnson news or even media to me is a stretch.
He's a gossip columnist at best.
Here's the vibe of his content.
As a story is breaking, he speaks to the camera and his laptop while scrolling through some of the 30 to 40 tabs that are open in his browser, which are almost all pointing to Twitter.
He reads posts and articles aloud.
Sometimes as he's just learning this information, then he pontificates on it all in real time.
His videos have hundreds of thousands to millions of views.
He has over 4 billion YouTube views alone.
And he's often just reading other people's content and occasionally offering some random thought that he hasn't researched and definitely hasn't been verified.
And he's getting paid probably a lot of money given his view count for that work.
That's what an incredible gig.
So is it just parasocial news sharing and BSing?
Like, what's the vibe?
Like, what is, what value do you think he adds to his viewers?
Is he like the friend or the uncle you're hanging out with at the bar or something like that?
He's the guy you turn to to hear things, but I don't get the friend vibe from him.
He's pretty dorky.
His presentation isn't very charismatic, but it's always up-leveled.
There's a nervous energy behind everything he does.
And he's always just trying to be like, this is happening, this is happening.
And I can see how it appeals to that specific demographic.
Yeah.
And my sense of like watching some of his stuff is that he does try to come across like he's a like he's a fairly serious figure.
He's not just, he's not just some guy like telling you what he's reading on the internet.
He's, he's sort of filtering it through you for you through his intellect in a way.
So he's like a voice AI for Twitter, basically, with commentary.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
And to your point, Julian, he often caveats in the weakest way possible, but he'll go through this whole conspiracy about Bolter and then reference the people who are killed and then say something that's horrible and then move on.
So he does try to seem like an empathetic person at times like that to caveat and possibly avoid lawsuits.
I don't know.
But within hours of this story breaking, Johnson spins a theory that Bolter is wearing a Walter White mask.
He clips a famous scene from Breaking Bad where White tells his wife Skylar that she shouldn't be scared for him, but of him.
It's the moment he reveals to her who he really is.
I don't know if you've guys seen the series.
It's fantastic.
That moment, that episode was huge.
That scene is unbelievable.
That becomes the conspiracy at the heart of Johnson's identity Around Bolter.
He then says, This is Johnson repeating Walter White, I am the danger, I am the one who knocks.
So for the rest of his commentary on this story, Johnson refers to Bolter as the one who knocks.
This is over weeks, it's still going on.
You can literally see the cork board being constructed.
Bolter's wife apparently interned for Governor Tim Walls in 2010, before he was governor, obviously.
So therefore, Bolter must know him and Walls must support him.
Johnson keeps referring to Bolter being appointed to a governor's board by Tim Walls.
He never mentioned specifics, which is this is the Governor's Workforce Development Board.
It's a routine nonpartisan advisory group that focuses on workforce issues.
Bolter served as a volunteer business sector representative along with 59 other people.
And Johnson never mentions that he was appointed to the board in 2016 by the previous governor, Mark Dayton.
Johnson keeps repeating that Bolter worked for Walls and was a left-wing appointee, but there's no evidence of any of that.
Then after all of that speculation, which he never clarifies on or corrects later in later videos, he goes full galaxy brain here.
Vance Bulliter was also working for a nonprofit called the Red Lions Group that received federal funding.
What was their goal?
Their goal was to relocate Africans from Africa into Minnesota.
Now, why would somebody who was part of a shady nonprofit want to commit murder, especially right on the eve of the moderate Democrats deciding to shut off free Medicaid and Medicare for illegal aliens?
Well, you connect the dots.
But if his livelihood is tied to how many Africans can you relocate to Minnesota for free health care, then I have a feeling this guy took a massive hit.
Yeah.
So the red line group is either fictitious or definitely exaggerated.
There's no real operations or staff.
It's a website that promotes Bolter's security work.
Bolter's roommate, who was interviewed shortly after the shooting, he told the news that Bolter never provided security services or had any employees.
He does have a connection to the Congo, which you flagged earlier, Julian.
Somehow, Johnson, himself a staunch Christian, fails to discuss any of this in all of his galaxy brain conspiracy theories.
Instead, he churns out fabricated nonsense about an NGO that doesn't exist while painting Bolter to walls.
Johnson then goes on to say walls should be investigated by the DOJ for the murders, and then he calls leftism a mental illness.
Then he added this on Twitter.
It's not random.
Violence is hard-coded into the Democrat Party.
Kill for power.
Check out what leftists were doing in the 1960s and 1970s.
Democrats have never disavowed the violence.
The Democrat Party needs to be treated like the domestic terrorist organization it truly is.
Okay, just fact-checking that.
If we're talking about domestic murders, never mind the Democratic Party.
Anti-fascist, anti-racist, anarchist activists are nowhere near as violent as right-wing extremists or fascists are.
There's this famous 2020 report that examines political violence-related murders in the U.S. going back 20 years, 25 years rather, and found that right-wing extremists are six times as likely to engage in violent assault than left-wing activists and had killed 329 people while only one murder was committed by a self-described anti-fascist, just for the record there.
Oh, you and your data, your facts, your evidence.
How dare you?
Were those 329 metaphorical people?
No, I think they were real people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, some of whom were reproductive health providers.
Right.
Nearly every day since the shooting, Johnson has released a video about Bolter, and every day he opens up articles, reads them on air, reacts off the cuff.
Every video has hundreds of comments cheering him on.
As you guys know, I'm stepping back into journalism mode here.
I've been working on a very big project with a major media organization since November.
Hopefully it's coming out in a few weeks.
I've been working with one main journalist, but dozens of people have weighed in on this project.
Lawyers have scrutinized every single word.
Just last week, I spent five hours on calls going over line by line, word by word, refining it.
When it is released, it will have been reviewed dozens of times and will account for hundreds of hours of work.
And that's just one investigation.
Derek, you could just bullshit on Facebook Live like all day long and you would make more money.
How do you feel about that?
I would make a shit ton more money.
I feel very screwed by the fact that this is the ecosystem we live in.
Because people like Johnson and the entire right-wing media ecosystem, they just don't have any oversight, not even that level I've just discussed, any oversight.
He can literally read shit online, make shit up that turns out not to be true, never issue a correction.
That's to the COVID contrarians who are hung up on the COVID vaccine stops the spread.
Oh, it was corrected two days later.
They never bring that up.
Then people like Johnson keep repeating those errors, which lead to a bigger point.
You can't possibly stop the spread of conspiracy theories in this environment.
The families and friends of the Hortmans and the Hoffmans are suffering right now.
And people like Johnson are using that and them to radicalize people and make a shit ton of money.
And you just know that if any of Johnson's followers actually commit violence due to his videos, he will not take responsibility.
Their online personas are as weak as their supposed journalism.
They bluster without facts, make shit up, then wipe their hands clean when a mirror is held up to them.
As this all trickles down, as even people not captured by right-wing propaganda default to making statements like both sides are just as bad.
If you spend any amount of time consuming this content, You'll know which side is really calling for the not metaphorical violence right now.
And then they go and they hide in their living room bunkers when the violence comes knocking.
You know, I just want to tie these two broad themes together because I see some kind of continuity between social media conspiracism and speaking in tongues.
Like I think we've alluded to this with regard to, you know, Alex Jones getting into a trance state on air.
I think the conspiracy babbling is on the cognitive slope downwards into glossolalia.
I mean, they would say, you know, glossolalia is at the top, I guess.
So it's a slope up, but to do it, you have to increasingly like unhitch your, you know, your brain from your mouth and just trust what's flowing forth from this raw emotional whirlwind.
And I think that can feel really good.
And I know that I haven't disclosed this, I don't think, but when I was at Endeavor Academy in Wisconsin, glossolalia was actually a common response to the preaching of the guy who was in charge there, Charles Anderson.
Most of the time, it was like big sighs, laughs or moans.
Occasionally, somebody would break out into full-blown tongues or light language, and it was involuntary, you know, except that the person usually prepared for the induction by standing in the space for a time.
When you say a common response, I'm just wondering if part of what you mean is that it was part of the culture.
It was definitely part of the culture, and it was, I would say that it was contagious, emotionally contagious.
And when somebody broke out into things, we looked at that person as the one who had transcended like the rules of normal human cognition, which is how people regard like Alex Jones.
Yeah, so the bolt of truth had penetrated enough for them to now go into this response.
Yeah.
And on your behalf, they were embodying everything that we secretly knew, but somehow were suppressing or we couldn't articulate.
So they were fully imbued with a spirit or God.
They had the pure pleasure of not having to think things through, you know, which is a terrible burden.
They had the ability to discharge rage.
So, you know, like Paula White, for example, is like one of the people who grows up in this environment and to whom it comes easily, but she also realizes that it gives her a kind of social power.
And then that's how the skill grows.
And then we have Johnson on social media.
I think the same logic is in play, but it's slowed down in text form or like live stream form.
Most followers are like shouting out amen in the comments.
Is that right, Derek?
Or like everybody's like responding basically, yeah, yahoo, amen, hallelujah.
And then some rise up to mimic the tongues on their own, right?
But also like this glossolalia doesn't just bend to the right politically.
Like it happens everywhere, like it happens in the Black Baptist church during music and sermons.
And so like it seems that there's just this thing that we do when we get high.
And they've found a really effective way of hacking into it.
Yeah.
And, you know, one of the things I find kind of ironic is that a lot of folks of these particular kind of charismatic religious persuasions, they will often raise the alarm about how unless you are specifically within our particular initiatory stream, be careful because you may be being taken over by demons.
