NAR WATCH Episode 2: Charlie Kirk Joins Forces With NAR Leaders, A History of the NAR and Presidents, and Weird Reactions to the Appeal to Heaven Flag
Brad and Matt Taylor discuss recent flag controversies and the dishonest ways leaders have dismissed the Appeal to Heaven symbol as innocuous. They explore the historical and political influence of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) in U.S. presidential elections since 2000, detailing their involvement in George W. Bush's and Donald Trump's campaigns. The conversation shifts to the current strategies of the NAR and its coordination with Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk in swing states for the 2024 election, particularly targeting Latino and African American communities. The episode emphasizes the growing political impact of the NAR and the urgency for broader awareness and media coverage.
Buy Matthew Taylor's book, The Violent Take It By Force: https://icjs.org/the-violent-take-it-by-force/
Spiritual Warriors NAR Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ev0P92-fqs
Charismatic Revival Fury: https://icjs.org/charismatic-revival-fury/
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It's an early morning for you, so thank you for doing it here.
I'm used to it.
It's how it goes right now, but I want to talk about three things today.
Since we've talked last time, there's been a bunch of developments and things, and the Aledo flag gate continues to rage.
Martha Ann has thrown a lot of Feel to the fire for that whole scandal.
But there's other things happening.
We're going to talk about not only reactions to the Appeal to Heaven flag and what it means and the Alitos and so on, but also the history of NAR interactions with presidential elections and what those have looked like over the years.
And I think that'll provide a lot of context for what's happening now.
And then at the end here, we'll talk about Che'On.
And Che'On is a mega force in the NAR world.
If you listen to Charismatic Revival Theory, Matt talks about how he's connected to 25,000 churches worldwide, approximately.
Well, he's on the move, and he's consolidating and building with people who are scary.
We'll just leave it there for now.
Let's start here, Matt.
I want to get to some reactions to the Appeal to Heaven flag and Alito and so on.
You were kind of at the center of that story, at least in some way, because you were the one that Jody Kantor and others from The Times consulted to learn about the flag.
You want to give us a little bit of that backstory and how that unfolded?
I'm sure you woke up and saw the story and were like, oh, this is going to be a big deal.
I'm going to get a lot of emails today.
So the story came out on a Wednesday.
I got a call that Monday morning before that.
I was in the middle of a work meeting and saw Jodi Kantor popped up on my caller ID.
I was like, I think I better take this call.
She was cautious about revealing details about the story, but from the questions she was asking, it was clear that there was something involving an appeal to heaven flag and a Supreme Court justice, which I guess in my mind, I was kind of thinking like, This would happen at some point.
Given the nature of the Supreme Court right now, given the way the NAR has played itself, insinuated itself into these networks of influence, this sort of thing was probably almost inevitable.
So I helped kind of give them a lot of background on the Appeal to Heaven flag.
Some of it made it into the piece, a lot of it didn't.
I think that the New York Times was very cautious.
They've never really written about the NAR before.
And you and I know, Rad, because we have tried to write about the New Apostolic Reformation for the Times.
So it's a big deal to have the mainstream media paying a lot more attention to this.
This is something that I have been Pressing for for a very long time.
I have talked to dozens of reporters and It's been hard to get the New York Times the Washington Post Politico Network News to pay attention to this stuff It really kind of is outside of their normal reporting orbit But this this was the story that popped that bubble and if for nothing else I'm grateful for it doing that that more and more people are paying attention to to the NAR and are aware of it.
I will say, I mean, maybe entirely predictable and inevitable, but some of these reactions that I see in right-wing media and commentary and I've got Google News Alerts, people tag me into things.
I think I see most of the public reaction to this stuff and It is striking to me how many of the arguments, many of the people who seem to be saying, oh, no, no, that flag doesn't mean Christian nationalism.
It couldn't possibly mean Christian nationalism.
Their argument is constructed as, I was not aware that this flag had connotations of Christian extremism.
In fact, I don't know anything about this flag and I've never encountered it before.
So therefore, it cannot possibly have the connotations that you're describing it having.
There's something about how people just put that out there as an argument, as though that is a rational construction, like, I don't know anything about this, but let me react to it and say that you're wrong, because you have this understanding of this as a far-right symbol, and I don't know anything about that.
So, I understand most people aren't immersed in far-right Christian social media.
Most people are not watching far-right Christian protests and understanding the dimensions of how charismatic spirituality has become infused into American Christian nationalism.
Most people, sure, I get that you don't live But if you dip your toes into the background of the Appeal to Heaven flag, you will see what I see, right?
If you actually listen, if you actually watch, if you actually click on any of the links in my article and actually read about this, you'll see what's going on.
And all the researchers who are in this space with us, Brad, all the people, that we interact with who work on this stuff, they see it.
They know exactly what that flag means.
And so I think there's this aspect of our media culture right now that says, this is a new data point that doesn't conform to my narrative.
And so therefore it must be false that I have to dismiss it out of hand instead of look into it and actually investigate it.
And I think that gut reaction of right-wing media and right-wing commentators to say, No, this is one flag from American history.
As if that wasn't what I've been saying all along, right?
Or, no, this has been used by previous people in these episodic ways.
I understand that.
Something changed in the meaning of this flag starting in 2015.
And I can pinpoint where it starts.
I can pinpoint who is behind it.
I can show you the pathways it went through, how it was popularized.
I can show you the lawmakers who started adopting it, who have deep connections to that movement.
It is not, it's not speculative.
About this flag.
It has these very real ties into Christian extremism.
Just because you're not aware of it?
Well, get educated about it.
This brings up two things in my mind, and I want to see how this resonates for you.
One is, I think of someone like Adam Carolla, who folks out there may or may not be familiar with, but was kind of a name in the 90s and went on to kind of be a right center, but mainly right wing kind of person who really advocated for who needs welfare, who needs a social state that helps to kind of catch people, a social safety net and so on.
And it was all because he grew up with a parent who received government assistance and did not seek work and therefore was the example of in his mind, Every person on welfare who was not pursuing employment and was lazy and was this and what he had done is built a whole Governance worldview a whole understanding of the social contract based on an experience with one person now Don't get me wrong.
I know that we all have formative experiences, but whenever I've listened to him testified before Congress I've thought I know you had this experience.
It might help if you investigated what happens in like the vast majority of cases of people who are in these situations and how they got there and how they react and their attitudes of being in that situation so on and so forth.
The second Is the OK sign, the sign that the Proud Boys give, like the white nationalist, white supremacist sign with the pointer finger and the thumb touching and the other three up in the air.
Like when I was growing up, Matt, that was the sign for OK.
Like, hey, you know, does this sound good to you?
And somebody gives you that sign and they're saying yes.
OK, perfect.
Good.
Thank you.
Understood.
Let's do that part of the plan.
If I wrote a whole op-ed that was like, of course the OK sign does not mean white nationalism.
I grew up and it meant this.
I've never even heard of anyone using it for that.
This is idiotic.
Going back 30 years and 40 years in American history, that sign has meant nothing except for a an affable affirmation of a question that's being asked.
That's all.
What an idiotic approach.
Why would you devalue our American history this way?
Like when you think about it that way, it starts to click like, oh, It's really quite moronic to talk about a symbol like the Appeal to Heaven flag as not having a malleable set of meanings to a certain community.
And then when you investigate those meanings being like, oh, probably shouldn't use that because it's now poisoned and I'm not going to go there.
Anyway, those two things came to mind as you were speaking.
In reaction to the Adam McCurl thing.
Inevitably, it is a giant world that we live in with so many different media ecosystems and one of the hardest things in life is to get outside of your own little bubble, your own provincialism.
Literally, wherever you grow up, you can grow up in New York City and still have a provincial upward bringing because you experience the world through you and your knowledge, your field of vision is limited to what you can see.
And so part of coming to maturity, part of being a mature news consumer is recognizing like my first impressions are often wrong and I need to dig into things more.
I need to hear from other people's perspectives, from people who inhabit.
Different experiences and different fields of vision than I have and then I'll learn something more from that and I think they're the idea though that like I can I become the arbiter of reality Because it was in my field of vision and what I've experienced is the only reality like I'm sorry, but that's just foolishness And as far as like symbols go what?
I don't want to overplay the analogy, but you could go back to the 1920s and talk about the swastika as a symbol emerging out of spirituality in the Dharmic religions and has these roots in Buddhist and Hindu ideas.
True, that's true.
And then that symbol gets appropriated for other purposes, and that flag takes on different connotations.
So to pretend that symbols are stable, to pretend that We are not constantly reconstructing language, constantly adding new connotations to symbols.
That is how memes work.
That is my basic argument, is that the Appeal to Heaven flag is a meme.
And it is also a part of American history, yes.
And people who are aficionados of the Revolutionary War have done things with that flag in the past and know what it means originally, where it comes from.
I understand all of that.
Symbols can attach new meanings to themselves or people will attach new meanings to those symbols and different groups will appropriate those symbols and and I think it's useful and in fact it comes from the the Bible itself this language of it's a shibboleth And there's a story in the Bible where there's the Israelites and these people are at war and they're worried about spies.
And how do they figure out who is an Israelite and who is one of the enemy?
Well, there's a slight difference in pronunciation in how people speak.
And so they ask people to pronounce one word.
And if they say Sibyleth, they know that they are not an insider.
And if they say Shibboleth, they know they are an insider.
Right?
And so we use this term now of Shibboleth as like a A signal.
It's like a it's like a symptom of like a dog whistle.
It's a way of of signaling insiders but also keeping out outsiders.
That is how the appeal to heaven flag functions today.
It is a shibboleth created by Dutch sheets propagandized by the NAR and spread throughout right-wing media circles to signal a hyperactive aggressive form of Christian nationalism that is is threatening violence.
And they would probably say, oh, it's spiritual violence, but it's threatening violence and was deeply involved in January 6th.
And so I don't know what Sam and Martha Ann Alito, what their attachment to the flag is.
I don't know where they got the flag.
I don't know where they got the idea, but it is not an accident that they flew that flag for multiple months last summer.
It was not a coincidence that they happened to be grabbing hold of this flag that also flies outside Mike Johnson's office that he got from the NAR.
Now we discover also flies outside Leonard Leo's house.
Leonard Leo, the conservative, the arch conservative Catholic architect of the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, who is close to Samuel Leto, also happens to fly this flag at his house in Maine.
And when he gets, when the photos get posted of it, he says, oh, Just a fan of maritime New England history.
It's like, it's so coy.
You have to just say, I'm willing to grant some good faith that this flag can mean different things to different people, but at some point, You have to acknowledge that there is an attachment to this flag that keeps popping up in these political contexts that signals extremism, and everyone who flies it comes back and says, oh, I didn't mean that.
They weren't aware of all previous news coverage of the flag, as if they weren't aware of their friends who are flying this flag, as if they weren't aware of the networks and the ministries of Christian influence that have been targeting these institutions for decades.
To pretend that this is not going on.
There's a coyness and a playfulness to it that I think is a signal of how much far-right rhetoric has spread into these, what we would call, normie conservative circles.
That people want to say, I'm just joking when I say that.
And we know!
We know!
The alt-right has been doing this for years now!
Oh, and the OK sign is just a joke!
Right?
Well, this is how the game is played in propaganda now.
Is you create a meme, with plausible deniability that has an element of jokiness or a double entendre and then you spread it and you encourage people to use it as a signal to other people who are like-minded and then when outsiders call you on it you can you can kind of back away oh no no it has this other meaning right this is how the game gets played now and I really wish that
On, in right-wing media, in media in general, there would be more honesty about that and more awareness of how these things get deployed.
Just going back to the OK symbol with the hand and the proud boys, the white nationalists, and so on, white supremacists.
I guess for me now, the thought is, well, I don't really use that.
I don't make that gesture in public anymore because it's been poisoned.
So if I don't want anyone to ask me, As just a guy on the street, as somebody who blah, blah, blah, is a parent, is not a white nationalist or a white supremacist, then I'm just not going to use it.
And, you know, but that's not what happens with Leonard Leo or, you know, or Sam Alito when they're asked.
It's maritime history or American Revolution, right?
It's all these excuses rather than just, you know, I didn't know that that symbol had been poisoned in that way.
Of course, I don't believe that.
I'm going to take it down now.
OK, well, you know what?
Probably wouldn't be talking about it today then.
You and I there probably be a hundred less op-eds being written about the appeal to heaven flag in the Alito house if that had been the response but that was not the response and It shows you that it's an out.
It's it's it's we want the double entendre.
We want to have the insider meaning and And we want to have the outsider exoneration.
And that, yeah.
And you, the two of us, we wrote the piece, we wrote the media article in Rolling Stone back in November that exposed that Mike Johnson was flying this flag outside of his congressional office and where he got it.
And of course, Mike Johnson said, oh, no, no, no, no.
It doesn't have any Christian nationalist connotations to me.
I don't have anything to do with those ideas.
I just appreciate the history of this flag.
That was a statement he gave to Rolling Stone when we wrote that article.
Three weeks after that article came out, Mike Johnson was the keynote speaker at a gala for the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which is led by a man named Jason Rapert, who is a disciple of Dutch Sheets.
And Jason Rayburt and the NACL, their entire campaign, their mission with Christian lawmakers is to get them to fly the Appeal to Heaven flag.
And this is where Mike Johnson gives these remarks about comparing himself to Moses, is at this gala.
Then those make all the headlines, but there's not much attention to it.
He's doing this at an NACL gala.
At some point, let's just kind of drop the pretense and call it what it is.
And the fact that then this recording emerges this week of Samuel and Martha Ann Alito in a casual conversation where they're not on the record or they've got a little alcohol in them, outrightly embracing Christian nationalism.
And then to say, hold on, just because I'm a Christian Nationalist and just because I fly a Christian Nationalist flag, don't read into that.
It's a Christian Nationalism symbolism.
Just because I'm a Christian Nationalist and I fly Christian Nationalist symbols doesn't mean I'm a Christian Nationalist.
Just how dare you?
I can't be the liberal media.
Fuck you all.
I'm being leftists.
Well, I'll just say, just to wrap this up and move on to our next topic here, I think, you know, as recently as this week, you have been continuing to engage people on social media who continue to write things like, this flag has been used in American history and there's no way that it could be blah blah.
I mean, everything you've outlined today.
And so, it continues to resound and it does not matter how much context you provide, how many times you provide the rationale you've provided.
There's always those on the right wing, whether they're pundits, whether they're media, whether they're just folks who are have a following on social media, they're just going to go to the American history, American founding maritime history out and and take it.
And it just it doesn't matter.
The question is, how does the media cover it?
And do they ever drop the pretense?
Right.
I mean, if Mike Johnson says he doesn't think this and yet he shows up talking at the event you just talked about, then can we drop the pretense?
And so Let's shift gears here to the New Apostolic Reformation and the presidential election of 2024, but let's look backwards to the last 25 years.
And, you know, you outlined in Charismatic Revival Theory that the New Apostolic Reformation is really kind of this This oligarchy, this association of prophets and apostles that begins going back to the 90s.
So we know now that NAR leaders are some of the first to jump in on the Trump train nine years ago.
They remain on that train almost a decade later.
They are out doing everything possible to get Trump reelected in 2024.
Where did this start and how did we get the NAR in presidential politics?
Yeah and some of the story we told in Charismatic Revival Fury but a lot of it we didn't because I really wanted in Charismatic Revival Fury to focus on the 2020 election and really kind of the Trump era and really tell that story well and thoroughly but because We just didn't get into some of the backstory here, and I think it's worth narrating some of that backstory, because it really sets the stage for what is going on right at this moment, actually.
So, the NAR, the term New Obstructed Reformation, gets coined in 1996, and Wagner starts building these networks.
And around 1998, C. Peter Wagner and Cindy Jacobs formed the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders.
And we talked about this in Charismatic Revival Theories, this round table of prophets, the most respected charismatic prophets in the country, really, come together and they claim that their collective prophecies have this almost canonical authority because it's the group of prophets.
They would even sometimes use the term a presbytery of prophets.
And so in the 2000 election, George Bush versus Al Gore, George W. Bush versus Al Gore, this Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders believes that they receive a message from God that God wants George W. Bush to be president.
And this is before the Seven Mountains, right?
The Seven Mountains idea gets coined in 2000, takes a number of years to get to spread throughout these networks.
So this is when they're thinking of themselves as more of a church reform movement, as more of a spiritual warfare movement.
But they believe that this election is all about Fulfilling God's will and seeing George W. Bush put in office.
And so they start organizing these mass prayer campaigns before the election to get George W. Bush.
Dutch Sheets goes on TBN and a bunch of other charismatic media channels and says, we have a special call to prayer.
And they never say Bush's name, but they say, we need to pray that God's man becomes the president.
So it's kind of slightly coy, slightly coded, but it's very clear what they're angling at.
And so they realize they can reach millions of people in this kind of campaign.
And then, of course, the election is too close to call.
There's a recount in Florida.
And in fact, they claim that they had already received prophecies that Tallahassee was going to be the high point in the nation, the capital of Florida, which is then where the recount starts.
And so they start positioning these prayer warriors all around Tallahassee during this kind of recount season to kind of gin up all the spiritual warfare.
Dutch Sheets even believes that he receives a word, he receives prophecies that he is supposed to go to the White House and make certain declarations at the White House.
And Dutch Sheets is obsessed with the number 222.
And there's all these prophecies about the number 222 and Isaiah 2222.
And again, the NAR loves doing their numbers and things.
So he goes to the White House on December 12th, or December 2nd, 2000.
There's a 222 right in the middle of that date.
And he goes with a couple other intercessors and they stand in Lafayette Square and they declare that the doors of the White House are open to George W. Bush and the doors are shut to Al Gore.
And just about a week later, the U.S.
Supreme Court The firm's, George W. Bush, as the winner of this election and Dutch Sheets and the NAR claim that they swung the 2000 election.
They write a whole book about this called The Prophetic Destiny of a Nation.
And so they have this understanding of themselves as affecting presidential elections, changing the trajectory of the nation spiritually.
And just as a coda to that story, like, okay, that is goofy, right?
These fringe, charismatic pastors and apostles who think they can change American elections.
Catherine Harris is the Secretary of State of Florida, right?
She's an ally of George W. Bush.
She's a friend of Jeb Bush.
She's the one who stops the counting of the electoral vote that then gets overturned by the Florida State Supreme Court and then gets affirmed by the U.S.
Supreme Court.
That's how this election ends, right?
This recount ends because Catherine Harris stops the count.
In 2006, Katherine Harris runs for Congress, and in the midst of that campaign, she gives an interview to Charisma Magazine.
In the interview with Charisma Magazine, she says that two of the people who have been most influential in my life are Dutch Sheets and Cindy Jacobs.
And Dutch Sheets, he gave me a key to the state of Florida as a prophetic act.
And I am an Esther, because God has put me in this position for such a time as this, and Dutch is my Mordecai.
Mordecai!
You've already started Esther.
This is important.
The story of Esther is the Jewish people are, there's about to be a pogrom against the Jewish people.
Esther happens to be a Jewish person who's the queen.
Her uncle Mordecai comes to Esther and says, you need to go to the king.
And get them to stop this attack, and then we will attack our attackers.
And so what winds up happening is Esther appeals to the king, the king affirms her view, and they slaughter all the enemies of the Israelites, right?
A very loaded story, a loaded image that is being used.
And Katherine Harris is saying, I'm a prophecy believer.
To be clear, I don't know if Katherine Harris knew Dutch sheets in the year 2000.
If somebody's got that evidence, I would love to see it.
I don't know that they actually had any influence on the counting of the votes in the 2000 election.
But you never know when a charismatic prophecy believer is going to be in that kind of a position.
And be able to make that kind of a call, right?
So from 2000, you already have the NAR believing, and Dutch Sheets believing, that he has a special commission from God to change American elections.
Now fast forward, right?
The 2004 election, they didn't really care that much about.
George W. Bush was already in office.
They were busy building their networks.
The Seven Mountains was kind of getting integrated in in that stage.
It wasn't a big hullabaloo in 2004. 2008?
Sarah Palin gets brought on the ticket as the vice presidential candidate.
Sarah Palin was mentored by an N.A.R.
prophet named Mary Glazer in Alaska.
And the N.A.R.
sees this as their moment.
They're like, one of our people is literally second in line for one of the most important offices in the land.
And this is right as the Seven Mountains of Dominion Theology are getting all integrated in.
Wagner publishes his book Dominion in January of 2008.
Right?
So they view this as God is opening a door in the Republican Party for us to exert our control over American society through Sarah Palin.
She is a profound ally of the NAR and a believer, as far as we can tell, in what they actually say.
Of course.
Just a note here that as somebody who was like reading everything possible about that election, was a graduate student, was deeply like interested in all things Obama versus McCain.
I have no recollection of the marquee op-ed that was like, here's the religious background of Sarah Palin in a way that traces her charismatic leanings and even further than that, her NAR involvement.
So I just want to point that out going back to our previous discussion about media and coverage.
Maybe it's out there, but just as somebody who was heavily interested in that election for a lot of reasons, I don't remember that piece, and I don't think that most people listening right now are going to have known before you just said it how involved Sarah Palin was with NAR networks and figures.
So I just wanted to interject that.
You could find it in news coverage, but it was not in the mainstream media.
And people like Bruce Wilson and Fred Clarkson were writing about it, but it was, it was not, it was, it was in the Huffington Post.
It was in kind of more, more kind of obscure media sources, but it was not in the mainstream media, did not get picked up in the mainstream media in 2008.
So then the 2012 election happens and a bunch of the NAR folks get very involved in the 2012 election.
They start supporting Rick Perry, Dutch Sheets as an advisor to Newt Gingrich, but none of their people win the primary.
And they really don't like Mitt Romney that much.
He's Mormon.
He's not their brand of Christian at all.
And so they don't do that much.
But they enter into a moment of real despair during the Obama presidency, especially after the 2012 election.
And Dutch Sheath, particularly, views the Obama administration as virtually demonic to its core.
I mean, he sees this as a travesty and a judgment from God on America.
And he traffics in this idea of Obama being a secret Muslim.
And his rhetoric is just like off the charts, angry and hostile to the Obama administration.
And then in 2013, right after Obama's second inauguration, is when Dutch has given the appeal to Heaven Flag.
And so he He is at this nadir of his own spirituality, and he sees this as a revolution.
We need a new revolution against the liberal tyranny of the Obama administration.
And he retires from his job leading a Bible college.
He was the executive director of Christ for Nations Institute at the time.
He retires from that in order to focus entirely on the 2016 election and on rolling out this appeal to heaven campaign.
He dedicates his life to this.
For the, like, three years leading up to the 2016 election.
And then, of course, in 2016, Lance Wallnau becomes one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Donald Trump.
The NAR gets in at the ground level.
They recognize almost from the start, or at least some of them do, almost from the start, that Donald Trump is the most promising political vehicle they've ever had.
That he surpasses Sarah Palin in his potentiality, in his openness to them, in the access they have with him.
And so in the 2016 election, they actually stand up a prayer campaign to accompany that election.
It's called the As One Campaign, led by Lance Wallnau and Dutch Sheets and Cindy Jacobs.
And it becomes a real... I mean, Dutch goes to dozens of cities promoting the Appeal to Heaven flag and encouraging people to vote for the Republican.
Right, and saying we need to vote pro-life.
It's a whole rollout, but it's still kind of outside the orbit of the Trump campaign.
It's kind of on the side of the Trump campaign.
By 2020, they are more integrated into the Trump campaign.
And so, Paula White launches the One Voice Prayer Movement in the fall of 2019, instigated By the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders.
In fact, the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders are the ones, they come to Paula White in the summer of 2019, and James Gall, who's a member of that group, gives a prophecy to Paula White that she is supposed to start a national prayer movement to accompany the 2020 campaign.
And who does she bring in?
To help lead this one voice prayer movement, Dutch Sheets and Cindy Jacobs and James Gall, all these NAR leaders who become a functional adjunct to the 2020 Trump campaign right there.
And then all that infrastructure, all that energy of spiritual warfare, this campaign that they build up over the course of the 2020 campaign, the Appeal to Heaven Forever, becomes the machinery Of the Christian mobilization for the Stop the Steal campaign.
And all of the networks are the things that get activated in the Jericho marches.
And all of those networks are the people who show up on January 6th to do spiritual warfare and to battle the demons at the Capitol.
That is the story of Charismatic Revival Theory.
That is the story of January 6th.
What we are seeing right now Is they are gearing up for this 2024 election.
They are mobilizing all their forces.
They are raising the temperature and raising the temperature and raising the temperature on this rhetoric of spiritual warfare.
They are gearing up massive new gatherings that we can talk about in a minute that are going to happen on the National Mall right before this election.
Right?
All of their history, all the patterns are now, they've reached their climax.
And here's the other thing.
They are doing it in extremely close coordination with the Trump campaign and with the second Trump administration in waiting.
And so many of the people who were insiders in the Trump campaign, or in the Trump administration, people like Paula Wyer, Chad Wolf, kind of the B-listers of the Trump administration, they started something called the America First Policy Institute, AFPI.
There is the think tank that is in many ways kind of the Trump administration, the second round in waiting.
They're all kind of holding their time for being in a second Trump administration.
And AFPI identified that there are nine swing states for winning both the presidential election.
In those nine swing states, they identified 19 counties.
All suburban counties with more than 400,000 people in them that are all purple.
And they said, this is a very sophisticated electoral strategy.
If we can swing those 19 counties, we can win this election.
Right?
Very tactical.
The NAR is not tactical like that.
That is not how they think.
They think about global revival.
They think about prophecy, right?
That's how they operate.
This is very tactical.
And guess who is also now targeting those exact same 19 counties?
Lance Wallnau and Turning Point USA.
And they are sending their revival meetings and Wall Now is running a new courage tour that is targeting those 19 counties.
They are trying to mobilize pastor networks in those 19 counties.
And you know what?
I think they might be successful.
I think that like, this is, I'm not a good political expert, but as far as I can tell, this is very sophisticated.
And the Christians, if they can swing those counties, I think that they actually can swing this election.
It's that close.
Let's stay on that, Matt.
So I thank you for that history and a tour de force and only the way you can give and really appreciate that.
I want to stay on what you just ended with, and that's TPUSA working with Lance Wallnau, the Courage Tour, and the ways that all of that has been mobilized.
Because the history you just gave provides a context that to me goes like this.
These folks started as Outsiders, not only to Washington, D.C.
politics, but also to mainstream evangelicalism.
We've talked about this at length, but going back to the 70s or 80s, a lot of times charismatic Christians who spoke in tongues and so on and so forth were looked down on by the Grams, the Falwells, those that you might have seen as the core of the religious right.
Now, there were some of those elements floating in there, but nowhere near as what we see today.
We fast forward through the history you gave us, and not only are NAR folks seen as allies to a second Trump campaign, they're seen as key to it.
They're seen as like, we need to leverage them, their energy, their reach, their networks.
We need to tap into what they've got in terms of people who are listening.
Then we get to Charlie Kirk, and I have maintained, along with Matthew Bode and others who are on the kind of Charlie Kirk beat, that Charlie Kirk's one of the most influential conservatives in the country.
I mean, he leads an organization that has so much reach with pastors, with young people, with that.
I always imagine that suburban dad in those counties you just mentioned, who's 34, driving to work, he's got two kids, and he's on the Charlie Kirk-like podcast, you know, anytime he can get it, because he wants what Charlie Kirk's selling.
This week, Mike Hixenbaugh and colleagues at NBC wrote a piece about Charlie Kirk, outlining how in 2018, he's talking about, of course we have separation of church and state.
I mean, Charlie Kirk did not start as a Christian voice.
He started as a kind of conservative young voice.
He is now a full-throated Christian nationalist.
The reporting that Hixenbaugh and others give is that, you know, he's now, and you have said this on this podcast, he's now a A propagator of the Seven Mountains Mandate.
I mean, he learned it from Jack Hibbs and from McCoy at Godspeak and Other People, and now he's all about it.
Now, I guess what I'm driving at here, Matt, is like, to me, if people want an example of the potency of the NAR, like when you put Charlie Kirk and Lance Wallnau together in those 19 counties, that scares the hell out of me.
It scares the hell out of me.
And again, the addendum to that reporting from Mike Hickson about which it was an excellent, excellent piece.
So then the Charlie Kirk spokesperson gives a statement.
I'm not sure that Charlie could even identify the seven mountain.
It beggars the imagination that these people can like say these things with a straight face.
I'm surprised it wasn't.
Charlie just likes the Seven Mountain Mandate because he's really into New England and their kind of history.
I mean, at some point, like, those are the excuses they keep giving.
The man has restructured Turning Point USA, which began as a Tea Party-oriented, college-oriented organization.
He has restructured it around Christian National Communities.
Also restructured it around the Seven Mountains.
And it's trying to activate and propagate the Seven Mountains to more and more networks of pastors.
And here's the other thing, Brad, that I think does not get media coverage, does not get talked about, but we absolutely need to think about.
Part of this strategy, part of this rollout, is they are targeting Latino, African-American Christian communities and Asian-American Christian communities, but especially Latino communities.
They are targeting Latino pastors.
Because they recognize that they have kind of hit that saturation point with white Christians and how much they can activate conservative white Christians.
I mean, they have got the conservative white Christian locked down.
And now they are thinking, how do we get culturally conservative and theologically conservative and charismatic Catholics, or African Americans, and Latino, the Latinas, and Native American, there's a number of Native American leaders within the NAR.
And how do we get Asian American?
And they are instrumentalizing the networks and the inroads they have with those communities.
And they are doing, that's part of what this, this rollout and this Courage Tour and the TPUSA targeting stuff.
And so we talk a lot about white Christian nationalism.
That's a real thing.
There's real racism embedded in all of this.
But you have to be aware...
That this stuff is spreading rapidly into communities of Christians of color who feel like they are locked in a kind of culture war, who are hearing some of these messages, these anti-LGBTQ messages and anti-abortion messages.
And that is causing them to feel real anxiety about their Christianity and about the role of Christianity in American culture.
And this stuff is rapidly spreading.
And so when we see Trump's numbers increasing in Latino, Latina, and African-American communities.
A lot of the story behind that is about religion.
And if we aren't paying attention to these other styles of Christian nationalism that are not just white Christian nationalism, or that are inflected with whiteness but are not only made up of white people, that is a part of how this is rolling out.
And what just drives me crazy is Liberal white people want to assume that only white people can believe this stuff.
Because they can't imagine people of color attaching themselves to this.
But it is happening all the time.
And there's complicated reasons for that.
There's complicated backstories.
Everything with race and religion in America is always complex.
This is a real thing that is happening in the world.
It is not getting reported on, but I talk to reporters who are on the ground, activists who are on the ground, and they're saying, if you want to resist, if you want to mobilize to resist the deployment of the Seven Mountains, the deployment of Christian nationalism, we need resources that are not only in English.
Because this stuff is spreading in California, in Vietnamese, in Korean churches, and in Spanish-speaking churches.
And the campaign, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, all that stuff's in English.
And so it doesn't penetrate into those communities.
And those communities have their own siloed media ecosystems that have also been taken over by a lot of these leaders that are also spreading this propaganda into those communities.
It's just a very, very dangerous mix of what's going on.
And I think many people are going to be surprised The way that Trump has won over so many of these communities in this election, and it's because there's a vast infrastructure of Christians at a local level that are galvanizing and mobilizing this right now.
Thanks for listening to the first half of this episode of NARWATCH, our monthly sit-down with Dr. Matthew Taylor on everything related to the New Apostolic Reformation.
In order to get full access to this episode, as well as everything we're doing here at Straight White American Jesus, make sure to become a premium subscriber.
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It costs less than that latte you bought on the way to work today.
We've we've just learned so much from you today as As always, an indispensable and singular voice on these issues.
People know, but I'll remind them, listen to Charismatic Revival Theory.
If you don't have seven hours to listen to a podcast series, go watch the documentary that Matt made along with his colleagues on this issue.
It's called Spiritual Warriors.
Spiritual Warriors Decoding Christian Nationalism and the Capital Rights.
25 minutes.
Very shareable.
Share it with people.
Give me the digest version.
That's it.
It's open access.
You can watch it.
It's free.
Go get it.
And then you can order his book, pre-order his book, The Violent Take It By Force.
That'll be out in a few months.
So we'll put all that in the show notes for you all.
Other than that, Matt, I imagine the best way to keep up with you is just watching you fight the good fight on X and other social media.
But anything else you want to mention before we go?
Just the, the, the, I know that the book is coming out in September.
Those who pre-order.
My book will get it in mid-August.
And for journalists, I am happy to share advanced copies or with podcasters.
I very much care about getting knowledge out there.
I'm not concerned about book sales.
So please, if you have a reason to see my book and want to reach out to me, I'd be happy to share it.
And especially if you're willing to spread the word about what's going on here, because We are coming to a very perilous season in American history, and I am truly worried that many Americans are not paying attention right now who should be.
Yeah.
Thank you.
All right, friends.
That'll do it for us today on this second episode of Narwatch.
We'll catch you next month.
As always, we're here with interviews on Monday.
It's in the code on Wednesdays and the weekly roundup on Fridays.
