This Christian Nationalist Network Aims to Purge Voters in Battleground States

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made headlines this week after suggesting the 2024 election could be the last U.S. election if he wins in November. We look at a secret organization of wealthy Christians called Ziklag that is backing Trump’s efforts by working to purge more than a million voters from the rolls in battleground states and mobilize Republican voters to back Trump. The news outlets ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of Ziklag’s internal files and found the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations: Steeplechase, which uses churches to get out the vote; Watchtower, which aims to rally voters around opposition to transgender rights; and Checkmate, which is focused on funding so-called election integrity groups, explains ProPublica investigative reporter Andy Kroll.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made headlines this week after suggesting that this year’s election could be the last U.S. election if he wins in November. Trump made the comment Friday in Florida at Turning Point Action’s Believers’ Summit.

DONALD TRUMP: Christians, get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you. Get out. You got to get out and vote. In four years you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on who’s backing Trump’s efforts, we look at a secret organization of wealthy Christians who are working to purge more than a million voters from the rolls in battleground states and mobilize Republican voters to back Trump. It’s called Ziklag. The news outlets ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of Ziklag’s internal files and found the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations: Steeplechase, which uses churches to get out the vote; and Watchtower, which aims to rally voters around opposition to transgender rights; the third operation called Checkmate, focused on funding so-called election integrity groups, as laid out in this Ziklag member strategy video.

ZIKLAG VIDEO: Voter irregularities are rampant across all 50 states, but especially pronounced in the battleground states. Public polling confirms Americans have lost confidence in electoral integrity. With the federal election already in full swing, more must be done to ensure fair elections in the most important republic in the world. That’s the purpose behind Operation Checkmate and its practical approaches to both get out the vote and clean electoral rolls through our coalition partners. Through these efforts, we have the opportunity to play a significant role in the upcoming election.

AMY GOODMAN: ProPublica reports Ziklag’s mission is to take dominion over seven spheres of public life, which it calls “mountains”: business, science and technology, family, arts and media, church, education and government.

For more, we continue with Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica, his recent piece, “Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country.”

Andy, lay it out for us.

ANDY KROLL: Ziklag is a secretive network of ultrawealthy Christians, conservative Christians, who have this two-part goal, two-part vision for this country. One is to get heavily involved in the 2024 elections, in the ways that you just described, mobilizing pastors, knocking people off the voting rolls, demonizing trans people to motivate conservative voters. But then, looking toward the 20- and 30-year horizon, Ziklag’s goal is nothing less than moving the country toward a state of Christian nationalism, having biblical worldviews, quote-unquote, “biblical truth,” shaping, influencing every part of American culture, the seven mountains that you described. So, this really is, as one expert we quoted in the story told us, a vision for Christian supremacy.

AMY GOODMAN: “Ziklag” mean?

ANDY KROLL: Ziklag, the name, refers to a biblical reference about David taking refuge during his struggle with King Saul. The analogy here, of course, is that the Christians in this group apparently feel that they are under siege and that this group is their refuge, but then the place from which they plan their campaign, their assault to take back American culture.

AMY GOODMAN: In a Ziklag member briefing video that you obtained at ProPublica, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers, Lance Wallnau, a Christian evangelist and influencer, laid out a plan to deliver swing states by using an anti-transgender message to motivate conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.

LANCE WALLNAU: If we can get the left to own their position on LGBTQ — the country has already drifted on the homosexual issue, but on transgenderism, there is a problem, and they know it. They’re going to want to talk about Trump, Trump, Trump, he’s indicted, the guy’s a criminal, this and that. They’re going to have riots on the street and all the kabuki theater. Meanwhile, if we talk about it’s not about Trump; it’s about the parents and their children, and the state is a threat. When you get Governor Newsom or Governor Whitmer or Polis, your top three potential candidates for the future presidency of the United States, other than Kamala, you got these — when they’re going to have to stand with their LGBTQ donors, and so, when they solidify that position, that’s where they’ve gone too far.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Lance Wallnau, a Christian evangelist and influencer. Andy Kroll, if you can talk about him, what he’s saying, and who the other leaders of this are?

ANDY KROLL: Lance Wallnau is maybe one of the most important Christian evangelist figures that maybe your audience hasn’t heard of. He was one of the earliest Christian right leaders to endorse Donald Trump. We’re talking way back in 2015 here. He popularized this notion that Donald Trump was a modern-day Cyrus, a sort of flawed but virtuous leader who would deliver a victory for Christians. And that Cyrus idea really caught on, was a big reason that evangelicals turned out to such a big degree for Trump in ’16, again in ’20. Wallnau remains this bridge between the Christian right, Christian nationalism and Trump world.

Wallnau is one of a number of really influential and well-known people that are part of Ziklag. Some members that your audience might have heard of, the Green family, they’re the family behind Hobby Lobby. Obviously, they’ve had a pretty big impact in trying to strike down parts of the Obamacare law back in the Obama presidency. The Uihlein family have donated to this effort. They are, of course, the billionaire office supply family out of the Midwest, major, major political donors to Republicans and to Donald Trump. And then, another family is the Waller family, influential in Ziklag. They are the owners of the Jockey apparel company, which probably a lot of people have heard of even if they haven’t heard of this family. So you have a number of really wealthy, really influential conservative Christian families in this group. They have the means to invest not just in political work, but also in this larger cultural transformation plan that Ziklag has really put its — really organized itself around.

AMY GOODMAN: Andy, talk about more in depth these three programs, Checkmate, Steeplechase and Watchtower.

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. You see an almost sort of wraparound, 360-degree approach to influencing the 2024 election in these three groups. So, with Steeplechase, you have mobilizing conservative pastors out in America, out in the field, to mobilize their congregations to get them out to vote. And, you know, there’s some concern that maybe there’s fatigue about Donald Trump in 2024, that maybe conservative Christians won’t turn out in the numbers they did in 2016. That’s what this program is there for, getting the church as involved as possible.

You have this anti-trans operation. As Lance Wallnau says in that video that you just played, they believe that going after trans people, demonizing transgender Americans, transgender healthcare, can, quote-unquote, “deliver” swing states. That’s what Lance Wallnau himself said.

But then, this final one, I think, is, honestly, perhaps the most interesting, this Operation Checkmate, putting money into mobilizing conservative voters in key counties — not just states, but the counties — so Maricopa County in Arizona, Fulton County in Georgia, the other battleground counties in the country, and then trying to put money into knocking more than a million voters off the voting rolls in these states. And you see this in a couple of ways. But what’s so interesting is how the Christian right, Christian nationalism is fusing here with the election integrity or, really, the election denial movement that grew out of the 2020 election. We didn’t have a lot of evidence of that before this reporting on Ziklag. But you see this bridge, again, between the Christian right and the election deniers in a really big way going into this election.

AMY GOODMAN: And how effective can they be in knocking voters off the rolls?

ANDY KROLL: A little bit of money goes a long way when you are trying to get people knocked off the eligibility list for voters. That’s what the experts, the political consultants, the folks that know these worlds, told us in the reporting for this story. You know, Ziklag is putting, say, $800,000 or $1 million into something called EagleAI, an artificial intelligence software that makes it easier to challenge the eligibility of voters en masse. So, you’re not doing it one by one; you’re doing it by the hundreds, by the thousands. You don’t need tens of millions of dollars, the experts told us, to be able to make those challenges and to sort of turbocharge the effort to make voters ineligible. You only need a few hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars. That’s what this group, Ziklag, appears to be doing. So, it could have an effect. And we’re talking about margins again in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, margins that are a few thousand, a few tens of thousands of voters.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Andy, how does the election officials in every state, especially in the battleground states, their cooperation with these efforts, how might that turn out in the coming election?

ANDY KROLL: Well, you have two different camps here. You have the election officials in these states and in these counties who are just trying to run a free and fair election. What we’ve heard from those officials is that these efforts, like EagleAI or the work of the group True the Vote, another, quote-unquote, “election integrity” group — these mass challenges to the voter rolls make an already difficult job, an already stressful job, a time-consuming job, even more difficult. It’s putting just more stress on the work of these local election officials, the ones who are trying to do a good job.

And then you have the officials who have sort of bought into the election integrity claims, who have bought into Donald Trump’s election denial for 2020 or 2022 even. And for them, they are, in some places, encouraging these mass challenges. And so you might see confusion. You might see chaos. You might see voters unaware that they’ve been removed from the rolls in these kinds of places. So, it’s just creating either more stress on good officials, or it’s creating more chaos with officials who buy into these baseless claims about election fraud.