The Right-Wing Conspiracy-Fest Is More Openly Bloodthirsty Than Before

The
first thing I noticed at the latest stop on the ReAwaken America Tour in Las
Vegas in mid-August was that the T-shirts are getting nastier. “Size Matters” blared
one man’s shirt over enlarged images of bullets of various calibers. “It’s RINO
Season,” read another, with an image of Trump carrying a long gun. Another
man’s T-shirt featured dozens of white male soldiers and the words “Diversity
is Destruction” across the bottom. There was the old standby, “God, Guns, and
Trump.” And then there was “BLITZKRIEG.”

Launched
in 2021, the ReAwaken America Tour is where truth and irony go to die in the
face of megachurch-size portions of paranoia. It’s the kind of place where
people tell you with a straight face, “Don’t let them microchip you.”

Clay
Clark, a conspiracist who has made his name pushing horse-drug cures for Covid,
got the roving series of conferences going during the pandemic, and they have
taken on a life of their own. Partners in the project include Mike Flynn, the disgraced
former national security adviser, and election fraud funder Mike Lindell. Eric
Trump is a frequent guest speaker, and Robert Kennedy Jr. delivered
presentations at several ReAwaken America events before launching his run for
president. Among the guest speakers in Las Vegas were Alex Jones, the infamous
purveyor of the most heinous conspiracies; Shari Tenpenny, identified by the
Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the top 12 most influential Covid
deniers; the actor and election-lie promoter Roseanne Barr, and a slew of
demon-haunted “spirit warriors” from the Christian nationalist movement.

The
Las Vegas conference was the third such event I attended in person, and it was
by a significant measure the most bloodthirsty. The
rhetoric coming from the podium was even more violent than the slogans on the
T-shirts.

“When
[Anthony Fauci] is convicted after a short and fast but thorough trial, he will
hang from a length of thick rope,” said the far-right personality Stew Peters. “When
[Hunter Biden] is convicted … he will get … Death!” The audience of several thousand
roared their approval.

“We all have one common enemy, his name is Satan, and right now
his minions are trying to run the country,” Peters said. “Liberals, Democrats, Communists, lizard things, we got a lot of words for these creatures.”

Arguing for the “restoration of the rightful president of
America,” he said, “what we want [is] Nuremburg trials 2.0.” “All we need is a body
of water, a length of rope, and a heavy millstone.… We are going to see extreme accountability.
Natural accountability. Permanent accountability with extreme prejudice.”

Even
the preachers invited to speak at the event seemed exceptionally focused on
making their enemies feel the pain. “This is a God nation, this is a Jesus
nation, and you will never take my God and my gun out of this nation,” said pastor
Mark Burns, a stalwart warm-up act at Trump rallies. “I have come ready to
declare war on Satan and every race-baiting Democrat that tries to destroy our
way of life here in the United States of America.”

The racism too was more transparent than usual. “Big Fani. Big
fat Fani. Big fat Black Fani Willis,” shouted Stew Peters as
he launched into an attack on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and on the Georgia
judge who is presiding over Trump’s criminal charges in that state.

The Jews, or at least their cosmopolitan alter egos, inevitably
came in for abuse too. Mike Flynn, Clay Clark, Peters, and conspiracy
podcaster Mel K, a fortyish woman who spent two decades in Hollywood before
“moving back to NYC to focus full time on exposing truth,” all identified the
archvillains as “globalist billionaires.” The masterminds are “the IMF,
the World Bank, and financial elites,” she said. In case there was any doubt
about what these villains look like, she and the others repeatedly named George
Soros and the Rothschilds. Flynn hawked his latest book, The Citizen’s Guide
to Fifth Generation Warfare (CG5GW), “to prepare Americans and freedom-loving people everywhere for our current global wartime reality.”

But there is hope for persecuted real Americans, Clay enthused—or at least for those who plan to fleece them. He introduced the audience to the
head of a company called Beverly Hills Precious Metals, who offered the promise
of a financial bolt hole for the coming apocalypse. “Typically people are
saying, I’m going to turn my 401K or my IRA into one of the—gold or precious
metals, and not have it be a taxable asset,” he said. “You can do that now for
minimal fees.”

Mainly
Las Vegas was about fear. The overriding message is that nowhere is safe.
“They” will come after you in the churches, they’ll come after your kids in the
schoolhouses, they’re out to destroy your health, and they won’t stop until
they have robbed you of every penny and changed your gender against your will.

A
booklet that was broadly distributed throughout the event was titled
“Battlefield United States” and featured images of tanks and military aircraft
attacking the Statue of Liberty on the cover. The subhed read, “PREPARE FOR EMP
‘GRID DOWN’ NUCLEAR ATTACK WHEN SUMMER IS NEAR. TIME IS SHORT. STOCKPILE
SUPPLIES A.S.A.P.” A line at the bottom helpfully reminded readers that
“coronavirus was planned ‘event 201’ global pandemic exercise.” The back cover
added, “All human population to be RFID chipped *All firearms to be confiscated
*All resistance to be eliminated.… TOTAL ENSLAVEMENT OF MANKIND.”

The
thirst for blood, I realized, is just an index of this ever-growing,
ever-morphing fear.

What
turned up the dial on violent fantasies among this sorry group? The short
answer is obvious after the first round of speeches and conversations: It is
the indictments of Donald Trump. For this crowd, Trump’s multiple arrests and
indictments are not a setback; they are proof positive of their fondest fears.
They show, in effect, as other T-shirts pronounced, that “Alex Jones Was Right,”
and “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong.” More than that, the Trump indictments have
lent the group a political focus and meaning that far transcends their marginal
status.

In
another time, ReAwaken America could have been laughed off as just another
festival of snake-oil hucksterism in the long American tradition of separating
suckers from their money through entrepreneurial grifting. But this group sees
itself as the heart and soul of the modern Republican Party. And to some
degree, they are right about that.

The
undisputed champion of the Las Vegas crowd is Donald Trump. You were less
likely to hear a bad word about Trump than about Jesus. And Trump happens to be
the front-runner—by far—in the race for the Republican nomination. The
runners-up in the Republican contest are notable mainly for promising to pardon
Trump and/or fill his mighty shoes. Majorities of Republican voters continue to
believe in the Big Lie that the 2020 was stolen and that Trump’s indictments
are just political persecution from a “weaponized” system of justice.

And
the representatives of supposed “establishment”—the “responsible” candidates,
the very serious commentators who frame the analysis of the Republican
campaign, and the plutocratic donors who bankroll the operation—have by and
large signaled that all of this is just fine. They have let us know that it is
OK to regard a man who put himself above the Constitution (in his own vice
president’s words) and has collected 91 felony indictments to date as just
another horse in the race; although at the same time, of course, he’s not just
another horse—he’s Seattle Slew and Secretariat rolled into one.

Fascism often happens this way. At the start, it may seem like a joke at the
nutty fringe. But when the supposedly serious people in the center throw up
their hands and begin to make deals with extremists, that’s when you really
have to worry. The serious people think they can bring back the old-time
Republican Party. It’s more likely that the crowd that showed up in Las Vegas
will end up controlling them.