NAR Watch Ep 4: They Are Already Stealing the Election
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In NAR Watch Episode 4, the discussion centers around a strategic plan aimed at mobilizing Christians as election workers to influence outcomes in swing states. Dr. Matthew Taylor shares insights from the Courage Tour and its links to election denial and conspiracy theories, spotlighting figures like Lance Wallnau and the Lion of Judah's Joshua Caleb Standifer. The conversation also touches on controversial funding, the role of notable political organizations, and potential legal breaches, all contributing to the broader agenda leading up to the 2024 elections.
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I promised you guys an action plan on how to do that.
And we spent months calculating and creating, meeting with experts, something that we felt like could take Christians and put them in a place of influence.
Just imagine, it's election night.
Chaos is happening.
The polls are closing.
They go and the volunteers are getting kicked out.
But what if we had Christians across America and swing states like Wisconsin that were actually the ones counting the votes and making sure what's happening?
So I want to introduce you to our program called Fight the Fraud: How to Become an Election Worker in Four Easy Steps.
Welcome back everybody to NARWATCH, my monthly sit down with none other than Dr. Matthew Taylor.
So Matt, how are you doing?
I am doing all right, Brad.
My book is coming out in a couple months, and as I'm sure you know, that is a busy season, but I'm hanging in there.
Good.
I mean, yeah, busy for every author, but even more busy for you, who's just in demand, because people need to know about the New Apostolic Reformation and charismatic Christianity and Christian Trumpism.
As always, here to talk about things happening in those worlds.
And I'm going to start here with something that some folks are going to be familiar with, but some out there will only have heard about.
And that's the Courage Tour, and specifically some really scary kind of election denial and election stealing efforts that are happening within the Courage Tour ecosystem.
So, let's start with this.
I know you attended the Courage Tour, or at least one stop.
Would you tell us what it is so everyone has a kind of image of what the tour is set to accomplish and who's involved and then what was it like to actually attend?
So, The Courage Tour is led by Lance Wallnau, who we talked about quite a bit in Charismatic Revival Fury, one of the major NAR apostles.
In fact, I would argue that Wallnau is the most effective spiritual propagandist for Donald Trump.
I mean, he's the one who has been driving a lot of these messages that evangelicals have picked up on and have become very mainstream.
And he's partnered up with an evangelist named Mario Morillo, if anybody's ever seen the lamentably terrible show Flashpoint.
Morillo used to be a panelist on there with Wallnail.
And so the whole thing presents itself as a revival tour.
So I went to the stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and there's a big megachurch, and they've got a giant white tent set up on the lawn of the megachurch, and it's presented as a revival, and come and hear preaching, and come and be renewed in your spirituality.
But it's a whole day event, and what's fascinating is that the first 45 minutes or so really lived up to the advertising.
And so it starts off with charismatic worship and people dancing with flags, and Lance Wall now gets up and invites people if they've never been filled with the Spirit, which is kind of Pentecostal charismatic speak for speaking in tongues.
If you've never been filled with the spirit, you need to come forward and we're going to pray over you.
And so they have a time of like ministering to people and people are getting slain in the spirit and falling over backwards.
And if you've ever been to a charismatic revival, that's what it feels like for the first 45 minutes.
And then the rest of the day, they pivot straight into electioneering, messaging about Donald Trump, conspiracy theories.
And so it's very patently clear that the veneer of the whole thing is this revival, but the reality of it is a voter mobilization election oriented scheme.
And when I say scheme, I really mean scheme.
This is very clearly coordinated with the America First Policy Institute, which is a think tank that was created after the Trump administration that many Trump administration officials went into and are leading, and is really kind of going to be part of the seedbed for people who will be employed in a second Trump administration.
So this is very in close coordination.
The revival tour is targeted only at the swing states.
They're only doing stops in the seven swing states.
And it's obviously oriented around this political messaging and mobilizing people.
In fact, at one point in the day, Lance Wilno said, if by the end of today, we don't have every person on the Senate, there are about 2000 people there under the tent and another 50,000 people watching online live with this.
But if we don't have every person here signed up and ready and to volunteer to be an election watcher, a poll watcher, the people who show up to observe the counting of the votes, or Or an election worker, the people who are doing the counting of the votes, or people who are mobilizing votes and this is very implicitly for Donald Trump, then we have failed in our goals.
So clearly this is not about saving souls, this is not about renewal and getting people filled with the spirit, this is about the election.
A whole day was premised on a denial of the reality of the truth of the 2020 election.
In fact, at one point, as he's pivoting away from this worship time into this more political messaging time, Lance Wilno says, January 6th was not an insurrection.
It was an election fraud intervention.
This is a man who was there, a man who I have argued was one of the most influential Christian leaders mobilizing people for January 6th.
And he was outright denying the truth about January 6th, denying the truth about the 2020 election.
And so this whole thing is geared up as this very targeted, very savvy voter mobilization effort in hand-in-glove coordination with the apparatus of the Trump campaign.
So, a couple follow-up questions for you here.
First of all, I saw you tweet out that quote, and that's just a chilling quote.
Just chilling.
And I actually made the mistake of reading it before bed one night.
Couldn't sleep.
A couple things I want to follow up on real quick.
I think people who've paid attention to the Courage Tour may remember that there was talks of Charlie Kirk getting involved with with NAR folks.
Would you update us on that?
Did that ever happen?
Whether it was with Lance or with Dutch Sheets, there were there were kind of rumblings about the Courage Tour involving the TPUSA apparatus.
Whatever happened with that?
TPUSA had a table there.
They had staffers there.
They were recruiting people for their various programs.
There were a number of Christian political organizations that were there very much signing people up, help with different campaign endeavors and trying to get people mobilized.
So yeah, TPUSA was there.
The funding of this tour is opaque and I would be very interested if anyone could dig up exactly how they are getting funding because at one point they do an offering collection and that's it.
They didn't charge anyone.
I signed up for the thing.
They didn't charge me anything.
You just show up.
So I'm guessing they're getting some pretty heavy outside funding, whether that's coming through TPUSA, there's this whole, we can't even get into it, but there's this whole fundraising scheme, major donor scheme, that is targeted towards charismatic donors, that's coordinated through the Council for National Policy called Ziklag, that Lance Wallnau has been very involved in, that Ziklag is all about.
I'm focusing on the 2024 election and even quote unquote election fraud, which is how things are often framed on the far right in terms of election denial.
And so I'm guessing there's could be some Ziklag money flown in here, but it's very clear that there's these.
This is a sponsored event.
This is not just kind of happening out of the organic resources of the church that's hosting it or the people who are attending there.
There are people bankrolling this whole thing.
Ziklag, there's concerns about Ziklag that Ziklag is breaking campaign laws and that if you... Yeah, anyway, as you said, we probably don't have time to go into Zik... Friends, just stop for a minute.
Ziklag's a real thing.
We're not making it up.
So if you think... There's a ProPublica article about it that just came out I think last month or the month before.
Go and read it.
Excellent journalism and deep dive into...
Yeah, this is not like the New Zima or some weird alcoholic beverage.
This is not like what the teenagers are calling vaping.
No.
Ziklag is like a real thing and for some reason it's called Ziklag.
I can tell you why if you want.
Please, please do.
I'll be honest, I cannot remember why.
So it's actually a fascinating backstory.
It's not mentioned in the article about it, but the Ziklag is a city in ancient Israel.
That's right.
It's kind of a city, as I recall, kind of on the border between Philistia and Israel.
And so the Philistines, it kind of goes back and forth between the Philistines and the Israelites in biblical narrative.
And at one point, Many of the David and his men, their wives and families are kidnapped and taken from Ziklag.
And so they come, David and his men come and fight a battle to bring back, to steal back their families.
And so the way, the reason it's called Ziklag is there's a claim they are stealing our families away from us.
They, right?
The left, the liberals are stealing our civilization and our families away from us and we need to go back and fight a battle to bring it back.
It is a militant vision of using major donor funding channeled directly into election denialism and mobilization around Donald Trump.
I should have known.
I should have known.
I've been doing this long enough.
I should have known that this would There's got to be an Old Testament reference in there somewhere.
I'm embarrassed.
I'm embarrassed.
I'm not going to lie.
I'm just imagining that if you're part of Ziklag, you have to drive a Tesla truck for some reason.
All right.
So let me just...
The picture you're painting, I think, is one that's worth noticing, because this happens...
And we don't know if TPUSA is involved with funding, but I think this happens in these kind of spaces a lot on the American right, and especially in Christian nationalist circles, where these events are surprisingly free.
So like the TPUSA Pastors Conference is often like one where if you're a pastor, you get to like go to, you know, wherever they're having the conference, Philadelphia, they often pay for your like hotel room and all the food.
And as a pastor, you're like, I don't have a lot of money.
That sounds really neat.
I get to go to Philadelphia for three nights and the hotel's paid and the conference doesn't cost a thousand bucks.
And we got all this, you know, paraphernalia and tote bags.
And this is fun.
and And so it's all bankrolled by someone else.
I mean, who paid for the tent?
Who paid for the speakers?
Who paid for the this and that, right?
And then these normal folks show up, as you say, 2,000 people in person, 50,000 online.
And you really go from Big Tent Revival, Christian renewal, to election intervention, as Lance Wallnau put it.
Now, This is something Lance Wallnau is pushing, but there's an even more insidious effort, I guess that would be my term, perhaps not yours, within the Courage Tour itself, and I'm wondering if you can take us through a kind of bombshell story that has dropped since you and others have been talking about it, at least for those who are paying attention to these things on a daily basis.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
Oh, I think insidious is a very good term for what's going on here.
So, there's an organization, very new organization, called Line of Judah, led by a man named Joshua Caleb Standifer.
And it's presented, again, right, the appearance versus reality, it's presented as a Christian ministry, a 501c4, that is devoted to Training and equipping and recruiting Christians to be election workers.
Which, on the surface, you're like, okay, that sounds kind of strange, but I mean, it's good that people are volunteering, I guess, right?
What could be wrong with that?
Except the entire organization is premised on denying the 2020 election.
And it got started, he started this organization in January.
I talked to Joshua Caleb Standifer for a bit while I was there at the Courage Tour, kind of off on the sidelines, and he got up and spoke at the event.
And he's very prominently featured at these events.
I mean, Lance Wallnau brings him up, tells all kinds of stories about Joshua Caleb Standifer and what a great guy he is.
Standifer's background is in opposition research for the Republican Party.
That's how he came up, that's how he was trained.
And then he moves to Nashville and starts this ministry, I'm putting that in pretty big air quotes, that is focused on election workers.
If you go and sign up for Lion of Judah, which I have done, and you can go through their training modules, what they tell you is, we are not going to let what happened in 2020 happen again.
We need to insert, they would say, spirit-filled Christians, but they're the people they're recruiting.
I talked to people at the Courage Tour.
I listened to the messaging from the stage.
The entire premise of this thing is that the 2020 election was stolen.
So these are all people who are buying into conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, that it was stolen.
And those, that's the target, that's the recruiting pool that they are trying to draw these people in, train them, equip them, send them to the right, teach them, here's the letter template for you to send to the election worker office, recruitment office in your area, saying, I care about the integrity of elections, right?
I mean, it's all pad, it's all kind of boilerplate.
Training these people, here's how you get inside.
And then when Joshua Caleb Sandifer gets up to speak in the afternoon at the Courage Tour, he says this.
He says, this whole way that we're going about this is our Trojan horse into the election systems.
And he says, you know, if you're just volunteering, if you're just a poll worker, If you're an outsider, then when they go to start counting the votes, they can lock the doors and push you out.
What if you could be inside, inside when they're counting the votes?
And then in the training curriculum that they run you through, it's all an online thing, they say, if you see anything suspicious, If you see anything fishy during the counting of the votes, what you need to do is send us an email with all the evidence of this suspicious activity and then report it to the state.
So why does a Christian ministry Need to collect evidence of voter fraud or of election tampering, right?
What's the role of a Christian ministry in that?
It is patently, it is clearly, it is obviously an effort to put conspiracy theory believing voters into the process.
People who are already not living in reality, people who are already dubious about the entire process, who suspect the entire process, insert them inside and pre-position them to create quote unquote evidence of election fraud that if the election does insert them inside and pre-position them to create quote unquote evidence of Trump's way, well, we know that these people are going to come out of the woodwork saying, well, look what I saw, look what happened.
If the election does go Trump's way, you can be confident that you're not going to hear a peep from these people other than to say the process was perfectly solid and there was nothing to be suspicious about.
Do you know how extensive the efforts have gotten?
Is this in every swing state?
Is this in all the 19 counties that Lance Wallnau is always talking about as the keys to this election?
I asked Stanifer about that, and he said they are operating in all 50 states.
He even said, hey, you live in Maryland.
You could sign up in Maryland.
He didn't really catch on to who I was very quickly.
But then he said, but we're especially focused on the swing states.
Right.
And where they are messaging, where they are organizing is at these Courage Tour events that are in the swing states that are very targeted.
Right.
And so if you think about it, like, let's say there were 2,000 people there, however many thousands watching online.
Let's say they even just got 100 people to sign up in Wisconsin to go and do this thing distributed across a number of different counties.
Right.
Imagine the chaos that can be inserted into our election system.
We don't even have to imagine it.
Just think back to 2020, right?
Think back to that chaotic season after the election gets called for Joe Biden.
And as Donald Trump is denying the results of the election and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are running all over the country trying to stand up these legal challenges to the election systems in the different swing states.
And what was the problem?
They had zero evidence.
They could not prove a single thing because it was all made up.
They were completely fabricating this entire claim and they get thrown out of it and left out of every court that they go to.
But yet, what happens if they have, again, quote-unquote, evidence from people who are on the inside, from people who are throwing up the red flag?
Oh, I saw something really suspicious here.
And now you have these outside groups who have evidence from, quote-unquote, witnesses, right?
And then you can have congressional hearings.
Then you can create this whole firestorm of controversy.
And it all throws all this chaff into the wind and nobody knows what's going on, right?
That's the target of all of this.
That's the goal.
That's the scheme that they're working with is to, if the election goes Trump's way, well, I mean, literally on the flyer for Lion or Judah, they have a picture of Donald Trump and a quote from About the importance of elections, right?
It is absolutely clear what a partisan effort this is.
And again, I think Ziklag, I'm not a lawyer.
I don't get to weigh in on whether something's legal or illegal.
Ziklag sure looks like they're cooking the books and doing some stuff that's pretty illegal.
I've got to imagine somewhere in one of the 50 states, this is breaking a whole bunch of rules, right?
The fact that you have these groups, partisan groups, recruiting people to do this work.
Election workers must have to assign some sort of a commitment to the integrity of the process.
And here these people are saying, we're a Trojan horse.
We are a deceptive tactic intended to disrupt the very system that we're claiming to participate in.
Just wondering if the training videos and the materials or anything that Standifer says instruct people to disrupt the process.
You know, it's one thing, it's one insidious thing to send an email saying, hey, here's some evidence of whatever.
It's another to disrupt.
So, you know, just talking about breaking laws and overstepping legal boundaries.
I'm just wondering what these folks are actually going to do once they're inside that room, counting, helping to count votes, helping to certify votes, and so on.
It's a real question.
They're pretty careful what they say from the stage.
I mean, the fact that he's willing to say that it's a Trojan horse, I mean, it's very revealing, right?
But no, I mean, and this is the way these things are often framed in far-right circles.
This is an election integrity.
This is an election fraud intervention, right?
They are projecting onto the process its corruption and saying, we are the defenders of integrity, right?
But the reality is they are sowing corruption into the system through the doubts that they're creating, through the conspiracy theories they're peddling, and then they are inserting the people who believe those falsehoods into the process.
Just one note is worth thinking about.
In Georgia, within the last couple of weeks, it was reported that there's a five-person election board that oversees the election process in the state of Georgia.
Three out of those five people who've been appointed by the Georgia State Legislature are now 2020 election deniers.
So the majority of them.
And they recently created a new policy that election workers who are doing this vote counting at any point can throw a red flag and stop the counting.
An individual election worker can just gum up the whole system on election night if they, quote unquote, see something suspicious.
And again, this is a delay tactic.
If it doesn't look like it's going Trump's way, well, we can stop this process.
We can create a new reality.
We can change the facts on the ground.
So it's kind of a pincer move, right?
They're monkeying with the rules in advance of this whole thing.
They're creating people who are already inside the process who are changing the rules.
They're inserting people to come forward, come out of the woodwork as witnesses if they do make claims of voter fraud.
And then it's also been reported in Axios and other outlets that Donald Trump's campaign is investing more in legal teams in the swing states to contest the results of the election than they are in get-out-the-vote efforts.
So it's all kind of, they're pre-positioning all these arguments.
And I've said this in other places, in many ways, it's like we're going into this election with a gun to the head of American democracy, with one party saying, "Hey, Heads, we win.
Tails, we lose.
Right?
Heads, we win.
Tails, you lose.
Right?
Heads, we win.
Tails, you lose.
If everything goes our way, then we'll accept the results.
And if it doesn't, we are ready to fight this to the end.
And we're already putting the pieces on the board to make sure if we don't win, we'll at least create enough chaos to cause even more people to distrust and disbelieve in the validity of this election.
I want to stay on this.
Let's take a break and we'll come back and zoom out a little bit because I think there's more to say here.
Be right back.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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