‘Reactionary nihilism’: how a rightwing movement strives to end US democracy

There is a “real and very, very present” threat to the US from a shadowy collection of rightwing leaders,
a new book on the movement behind Donald Trump warns,
with the aim being
“an end to pluralistic democracy”.

#Katherine #Stewart, a journalist who specializes in the religious right, spent years researching the money and influence that has aided and encouraged tens of millions of Americans in their worship at the throne of Trump.

The result is
"Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy",
which sees Stewart explore the “antidemocratic movement”
– an unholy mix of Christian nationalists, billionaire oligarchs and conservative ideologues who have seized control of the Republican party,
and aim to fundamentally change the US.

“#Money is a huge part of the story,
meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system.

Second, #lies, or conscious disinformation, is a huge feature of this movement.

And third #God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism,” Stewart said.

In the book, Stewart details how Republicans have been held hostage by the antidemocratic movement,
something that “came together long before Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president”.

Stewart – whose previous two books,
"The Good News Club" and
"The Power Worshippers",
focused on the impact of the Christian right and religious nationalism in the US
– spent years traveling to an array of rightwing conferences,
from Christian nationalist events to
”Make America great again” fests and sober thinktank talks,
and found many similarities.

The eclectic groups may not seem to have much in common, but their aim is the same:
bringing an end to democracy in the US as we know it.

Their method of achieving that is the same too.
“The overwhelming message, from speaker after speaker, was that ‘Trump needs to be allowed to enact his agenda, and you need to get behind him,’” Stewart said.

Though there is an intriguing collection of individuals and organizations in the movement,
Stewart categorizes its members as #Christian #nationalists
– who believe, wrongly, that America was founded as a Christian nation and must be governed as such
– and the #super-#rich, who are seeking to secure their own wealth at the expense of others.

“Much of the energy of the movement, too, comes from below,
from the anger and resentment that characterizes life among those who perceive, more or less accurately, that they are falling behind,” Stewart writes.

“The best label I can find for the phenomenon
– and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label
– is ‘#reactionary #nihilism’.
It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order;
it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value,
impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will.

It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind
– a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/19/katherine-stewart-money-lies-god-book-christian-nationlism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

This isn’t about J.D. #Vance hanging out with pro-Russian fascist podcasters who gleefully platform Holocaust deniers,
-- although that’s definitely a thing.

And it’s not specifically about the libertarian/authoritarian #Peter #Thiel techbro creepers who basically created J.D. in a lab, without whom he’d literally be nothing.
-- But both of those things are related to these things.

This is about the #Christian #nationalists who find themselves in J.D. Vance’s orbit, and he in theirs
— people who are literally prayer-gasming themselves right now at the idea of having one of their own freaks a heartbeat away from the presidency.

To start off with, did y’all hear about the town hall Vance just did with #Lance #Wallnau, one of the most #dangerous “Seven Mountains” Christian Nationalist #Dominionists in the country?

Lance Wallnau is perhaps the foremost figure in what’s called the #New #Apostolic #Reformation movement, which teaches that Christians have a mandate from Heaven to exert dominion over what they call the seven “mountains” of American life
— family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.

There is no room for democracy in this movement,
it’s authoritarian,
and it craves a dictator.

Wallnau is fucking bonkers.
His movement is fucking bonkers.

Wallnau believes people on the left are literal #demons,
that Kamala Harris has a “Jezebel Spirit,” and so much more.

Oh, and of course, Wallnau and the New Apostolic Reformation believe Donald Trump is a modern-day King Cyrus,
a pagan emperor being used by God to bring forth his kingdom on earth.

Ayup. So it’s not surprising that Wallnau and his movement are deeply entwined with the “Stop the Steal” movement,
which did what it did on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.

Wallnau has been doing something called the #Courage #Tour.

And sweet, kind, caring, moderate J.D. Vance was a special guest on that Courage Tour last weekend in Pennsylvania,
though he was careful not to appear with Wallnau, and did his best to make the event seem as innocuous as possible.

As it happens, Stephanie McCrummen published an article in The Atlantic this week called
“The Christian Radicals Are Coming,”
which is all about the tour’s stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Half Pentecostal tent revival, half voter registration and mobilization event, the thousands who attended were treated to several days of the kind of radicalizing, violent rhetoric you usually hear in documentaries about, well, radicalized movements that turn violent.

Wallnau told congregants about a scene from Gladiator featuring its main character Maximus, and asked the crowd if they were ready to be “activated in your Maximus anointing.”

He told attendees he suspected they were “nobodies on earth who are somebodies in the spirit.” That’ll make ‘em feel special.

Another speaker, a weirdo author named #Bill #Federer, who seems to think he’s a historian, told them they were “important people,” and that “God has chosen you” for this moment in history.

He cited a quote from Peter Thiel
— hi, gay libertarian techbro Peter Thiel!
— which said that “The political slogan of the antichrist is ‘peace and safety.’ ”

(Which is funny because isn’t that what all Trump’s Nazi scaremongering about being women’s protector is?)

Federer, jumping the shark completely, told the crowd that
“Someday, you’re going to be dead” and in Heaven
— specifically in Moses’s living room,
some kind of celestial onesie party, I guess
— and Moses will tell stories of all the hot shit he did and David will talk about that one time he fucked up Goliath,

and then everybody will look at the MAGA Christians and ask them what they did.
https://evanhurst.substack.com/p/lets-meet-jd-vances-creepy-christian

The #Courage #Tour, organized by Trump-promoting #dominionists
-- #Lance #Wallnau and #Mario #Murillo,
-- and co-sponsored by the MAGA movement organization
"America First Policy Institute",
rolls into Pennsylvania this week on its tour of 19 swing counties that could decide the outcome of the presidential election.

The event will be held Friday night and all day Saturday in #Monroeville, which is located east of Pittsburgh.

Scholar Matthew Taylor, who attended a Wisconsin stop, called the tour
“the most targeted and tactical voter mobilization effort done by #Christian #nationalists ever,”

adding that
“they’re doing it hand in glove in many ways with the #Trump campaign and with the apparatus of the Trump campaign through an organization like #AFPI.”

Indeed, the Courage Tour exemplifies
the de facto merger between the MAGA movement and dominionist Christian nationalists.

AFPI, a “think tank” organized by and filled with former Trump administration officials,
is an active participant in #Project2025, another example of the shared authoritarian goals of Trumpworld and the Christian nationalists who helped put Trump in power in 2016 as part of their long-term plan to take “dominion” over every sphere of influence in society.

Turning Point USA’s #Charlie #Kirk has also supported the tour.

In 2023, AFPI President #Brooke #Rollins, a former Trump adviser who had been preparing his second-term agenda before he lost the 2020 election,
held an "America First Summit"
where she discussed AFPI’s Vision 2025,
a preview of Project 2025’s plans for the aggressive use of government power to promote the far-right agenda.

Rollins happily admitted that their “ideologically revolutionary” goal is to “seize control of the administrative state” as part of “an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions.”  

That echoed language used by the #Heritage #Foundation when it launched Project 2025 as a plan for the MAGA movement to “take the reins of government.”

The Courage Tour’s combination of tent revival-style religious rallies with political mobilization reflects the beliefs of #New #Apostolic #Reformation figures like Wallnau and Murillo that spiritual revival will lead to political transformation of the country to bring it into alignment with their particular biblical worldview.

Wallnau has said the tour’s purpose is to break “#demonic #strongholds” that have supposedly kept Republicans from winning elections,
and to prepare Christians to rule and reign after Christ’s return by training them to “occupy territory now.”

In other words, the Courage Tour is an example of #NAR “#spiritual #warfare” in pursuit of earthly power
—for Trump and for themselves.

Right Wing Watch reported that when the tour stopped in Wisconsin in July, the leader of a group called "The Lion of Judah" urged people to sign up to serve as election workers so that they could be in effect a
“Trojan Horse” for the Christian nationalist political movement.

At an earlier stop in Michigan, Christian nationalist political operative #David #Barton spread false Christian nationalist history.

Researcher Jenny Cohn has pointed out that #Rob #Pacienza, senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

—a longtime center of Christian-right political organizing

—is a senior fellow in the Center for the American Dream at AFPI.

This Wednesday, Sept. 25, Pacienza will kick off 40 days of prayer leading up to the election
with an online event with Courage Tour speaker Alveda King.

Pacienza’s project comes with a daily prayer guide that includes prayers for policies protecting life “from conception until natural death”
and “restoration” of marriage being limited to one man and one woman.

It includes a prayer that “Christians would use the power we have as citizens to rein in big government so that the State never becomes our Master.”

It also urges people to pray that God would
“remove those from office who oppose Him”
and “cause chaos and confusion among groups who oppose Him and His people so that their plans are thwarted.”

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dominionist-courage-tour-heads-to-pennsylvania-in-bid-to-put-unleashed-trump-in-power/

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas:

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named #Curtis #Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym,
proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed
“not productive”:
“convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time,
clarified that he was “just kidding.”
But then he continued,
“The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass.
However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to #genocide.”

He then concluded that the
“best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people:
Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement”
where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface”
so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers,
chief among them: tech billionaire #Peter #Thiel
and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. #Vance,
whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald #Trump’s vice president.
If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted #techno-#authoritarianism to the White House,
and one can imagine—with horror
—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics,
but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years,
hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas.
Yarvin was one of them.
Way back in 2012, in a speech on
“How to Reboot the US Government,” he said,
“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their #dictator phobia.”
He had also written favorably of #slavery and #white #nationalists in the late 2000s (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).

Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin.
In "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power", reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as
the “house political philosopher” of the “#Thielverse,”
a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit.
In 2013, Thiel invested in #Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin.
In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.
Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised
—and parroted
—Yarvin’s ideas.
That was worrying enough when Vance was only a senator.
Now that he could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his close ties to Yarvin are more alarming than ever.
Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like
taxes and regulations,
but that’s only part of the story.
Tech plutocrats like Thiel and Elon #Musk already have money.
Now they want power—as much as money can buy.