Bernie Sanders' Good Government vs. Steve Bannon's and Donald Trump's Dizzying "Muzzle Velocity"

Been meaning to post this. It should be read in tandem with this opinion by Ezra Klein titled, "Don't Believe Him," that you can read or listen to here. In particular, Klein underscores the power of Steve Bannon's strategy of "muzzle velocity." The idea is to "overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently."

They want us all to get the sense that "this is Trump’s country now....It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over."

What gets obscured through this reckless bravado of muzzle velocity on steroids in his first few weeks in office is the reality of Trump's weakness.

Klein makes the excellent point that while he may be impacting the coherence of any opposition, what must also get recognized is that he's flooding his own pond. Lots of good nuggets here. What the opposition must do, Klein wisely says, is to not believe him that he is king. If we treat him that way by surrendering their power, it's as if he were king. 

But good isn't gold.

Muzzle velocity and sowing chaos. 

Geez, how devious.

Bernie is gold. If only he could have been our president.

One last point: the animus he and our Governor hold toward immigrants is very real. The president's, too (never mind that his wife is an immigrant). Hence, the impact of his executive orders is atrocious, and we simply do not know at the moment the limits of his anti-immigrant agenda. Eyes wide open.

-Angela Valenzuela

What Trump didn’t say in his inauguration speech

by Bernie Sanders

The simple truth is that Trump ignored almost every major issue facing this country’s working families in his first speech

Thu 23 Jan 2025 06.08 EST | The Guardian



‘Our healthcare system is broken, is dysfunctional and is wildly expensive.’ Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

I was at the Trump inauguration on Monday, and needless to say, I disagree with almost everything he had to say.

What really struck me, however, is not what he said, which was not surprising given his general rhetoric – but what he didn’t say. The simple truth is that Donald Trump gave a major speech, the first speech of his second presidency, and ignored almost every significant issue facing the working families of this country.

How crazy is that?

Our healthcare system is broken, is dysfunctional and is wildly expensive. We remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee healthcare for all. Not one word from Trump about how he is going to address the healthcare crisis.

We pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs – sometimes 10 times more than the people in other countries – and one out of four Americans is unable to afford the prescriptions that their doctors prescribe. Not one word from Donald Trump on the high cost of prescription drugs.


Factchecking Trump’s inauguration speech, from inflation to healthcare


We have 800,000 Americans who are homeless and millions of our people spend 50% or 60% of their limited income on housing. We have a major housing crisis in America – everyone knows it. And Trump, in his inaugural address, did not devote one word to it.

Today in America, we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had. The wealthiest three people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society. But Trump had nothing to say about the growing gap between the very rich and everybody else. And maybe that’s because he had those three people – the three wealthiest people in America – sitting right behind him at his inauguration. And, I should add, those three people – if you can believe it – saw their wealth increase by more than $233bn since the November elections. No wonder they were sitting right behind Trump. They couldn’t be happier.

During his inaugural speech, Trump did not have one word to say about how we are going to address the planetary crisis of climate change. The last 10 years have been the warmest ever recorded, and extreme weather disturbances and natural disasters are taking place all over the world – from California to India, across Europe to North Carolina. Not one word about climate change – except, of course, to make it clear that he intends to make this horrific situation even worse with “drill, baby, drill”. Brilliant.

We pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs – sometimes 10 times more than the people in other countries – and one out of four Americans is unable to afford the prescriptions that their doctors prescribe. Not one word from Donald Trump on the high cost of prescription drugs.

We have 800,000 Americans who are homeless and millions of our people spend 50% or 60% of their limited income on housing. We have a major housing crisis in America – everyone knows it. And Trump, in his inaugural address, did not devote one word to it.

Today in America, we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had. The wealthiest three people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society. But Trump had nothing to say about the growing gap between the very rich and everybody else. And maybe that’s because he had those three people – the three wealthiest people in America – sitting right behind him at his inauguration. And, I should add, those three people – if you can believe it – saw their wealth increase by more than $233bn since the November elections. No wonder they were sitting right behind Trump. They couldn’t be happier.

During his inaugural speech, Trump did not have one word to say about how we are going to address the planetary crisis of climate change. The last 10 years have been the warmest ever recorded, and extreme weather disturbances and natural disasters are taking place all over the world – from California to India, across Europe to North Carolina. Not one word about climate change – except, of course, to make it clear that he intends to make this horrific situation even worse with “drill, baby, drill”. Brilliant.

As we enter the new Trump presidency, we have got to remain focused. We can’t panicz

In the coming months and years, our job is not just to respond to every absurd statement that Trump makes. That is what the Trump world wants us to do. They want to define the parameters of debate and have us live within their world. That’s a trap we should not fall into.

Our job is to stay focused on the most important issues facing the working families of our country, provide solutions to those crises and demand that Trump responds to us.

Let me mention just some of them:

Yes, healthcare is a human right and we must join every other major country in guaranteeing healthcare to all people through a Medicare for All, single-payer program.

Yes, we must take on the greed of big pharma and substantially lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country.

Yes, we must build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing.

Yes, we must make sure that all of our young people have the ability to get a higher education by making public colleges and universities tuition-free.

Yes, we must work with the global community to combat climate change by cutting carbon emissions and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and into sustainable energy.

Yes, we must pass legislation to raise the absurdly low federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of $17 an hour.

Yes, we must pass the Pro Act, and make it easier for workers to join trade unions and grow the union movement.

Yes, in order to help fund the needs of working families in this country, we must demand that the wealthiest people, including those multibillionaires sitting right behind Donald Trump, start paying their fair share in taxes.

Yes, we must end a corrupt campaign finance system, which allows a handful of billionaires to buy elections and move us rapidly into oligarchy.

Bottom line: as we enter the new Trump presidency, we have got to remain focused. We can’t panic. No matter how many executive orders he signs and statements he issues, our goal remains the same. We have got to educate. We have got to organize. We have got to bring people together around an agenda that works for all, not just the few.

Now more than ever, we have to fight to create an America based on economic, social and environmental justice. Let’s get to work.


Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and chair of the health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress

Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and “the Mirror World”: Let's Go Back to that "Collective Unsettling" and Make the World Anew

Check out this excellent interview of journalist Naomi Klein on her new book, Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. I like how she unpacks what I am sure so many—if not most of us—felt throughout the pandemic that continues into the present. Specifically, this consisted of a "collective unsettling," experienced by the "lockdown class" to not just see, but to be so perceivably impacted by the consequential societal inequities that had been unmasked. I appreciate Klein's analysis herein on how the pandemic resulted in 

"an absolute frontal confrontation with the logic at the heart of capitalism that tells you you’re on your own. You are an island. All of your successes are yours alone, and people who don’t have them, it’s their fault. " 

All of a sudden, a largely racialized workforce of frontline workers, such as those working in meat packing plants and Amazon warehouses, forced all to consider that they breathe the same air as the rest of us, too. Many wondered and grew concerned that they, too, have rights and that these workers' needs, rights, and risks are not only borne unevenly, but affect the whole. 

This was a hard pill to swallow under neoliberal, individualist capitalist thought that nevertheless appreciated in that moment government "largess" of eviction control and flexible working arrangements.

Citing Arundhati Roy's eloquent 2020 Financial Times piece on how the pandemic held promise as a portal to a new and better world, what started out as a fresh kind of hopefulness for societal change for some, myself included, got taken up and distorted by extremists.

After all, with what seemed to be a racial reckoning in 2021, many of us were hopeful that this heralded a new multiethnic, multiracial democracy where greater justice lives.

Klein's research illuminates a core strategy by the likes of Steve Bannon in taking up the rightful anger against big pharma and the elite and artfully flipping these sentiments to manufacture—via social media—xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and the like. She cautions against the online cruelty and de-platforming of her Doppelganger, former feminist, "Naomi Wolf"—with whom Klein is often confused—hence, the title of her book. De-platforming extremists, she cautions, hardly means that they're no longer a threat to democracy when people like her are able to balloon their following, for example, by turning coats and becoming regular spokespersons on the Steve Bannon Show.

I recently listened to this excellent interview of author Naomi Klein Youtube interview on Democracy Now! and encourage you to do the same if you prefer to listen to her talk about her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, and how this led her into the mirror world of the far right.

I understand this "mirror world" of which she writes as largely a bait and switch strategy. First, your against big pharma. Next your against immigrants crossing the border. First it's about "ending all wars;" next, it's about starting a war with China. I look forward to reading this text. In the meantime, let's pause and consider Klein's thesis and analysis of the far-right's manufactured, dangerous, and conspiratorial “mirror world.” It should concern us all that Steve Bannon is forging, in Klein's words, an "international nationalist alliance, authoritarian alliance," with Wolf allowing herself to be a tool for that agenda while enriching herself.

A good, immediate first step for all of us is to listen for the authenticity of the specific policies that any pundit, politician, or marketer like Steve Bannon professes since the mirror world is about sowing confusion and capitalizing on issues that used to be important to the left. Geez, they are wide open in their intentions that it's about taking power. The world is so fearful and boy, can they sell you a dream they'll never deliver on. They haven't yet. They're happy to take your money though.

Let me read your policy proposal and strategy on China, Steve Bannon. How will you accomplish your expressed ends? 

In short, there is a vacuum that right-wing media is exploiting primarily to take power in the service of this unholy, "international nationalist alliance." For the record, China is a market-capitalist country, sometimes described as "socialism with Chinese" characteristics. My husband and I have been to China. They are beautiful people. Very kind and respectful. Incredible history and very ancient. Impressive and magisterial in so many ways. It saddens me that there are not better relations between our countries.

I think we should all go back to that space of a "collective unsettling," that hopeful portal, and make the world anew. THAT's the conversation we should be having and that gets structured out with these intentionally diversionary politics. Weapons of mass distraction, I call them. 

Let's unite and do this by getting involved at the grassroots level. Join or re-commit to a coalition, a civil rights organization, a nonprofit, and any organization doing important work and premised on the humanization of all. It's going to take a lot of work, so the effort itself must rejuvenate. 

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

#JoinTheMovement

References

Klein, N. (2023). Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. MacMillan books.

Klein, N. (2023, Sept. 13).  To Know Yourself, Consider Your Doppelgänger, New YorkTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/naomi-klein-wolf-doppelganger.html

Lewis, H. (2023, Sept. 12). From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist: What Naomi Wolf's Odyssey can teach us about seeing patters where they don't exist, The Atlantic. Retrieved: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/10/naomi-wolf-klein-doppelganger-book/675120/

Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and

 “the Mirror World”

Sep 15, 2023 | 2:00 AM

View on the original site.

Naomi Klein, author, professor, journalist, and contributing editor at The Intercept, has ventured into the far-right “mirror world,” exploring the movements and figures promoting conspiracy theories, misinformation, and its hold on large segments of society. This week on Deconstructed, we bring you a live conversation between Ryan Grim and Klein at the George Washington University Amphitheater, organized by Politics and Prose. Klein and Grim discuss Klein’s newest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” They discuss the labyrinthine world of conspiracy theories and how the right has effectively sowed confusion and capitalized on issues abandoned by the left.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

On Wednesday of this week, I interviewed Naomi Klein about her new book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” which begins with Naomi following her doppelganger, other Naomi — that’s the feminist-turned-Steve-Bannon-ally, Naomi Wolf — down a series of rabbit holes.

Describing her journey to these shadowlands, she also looks into the mirror, and asks all of us to look in the mirror as well, and ask what role we’ve played in ceding turf to the right, or abandoning principles — like skepticism of corporate greed and big pharma, opposition to censorship and mass surveillance, and so on — that have long been the domain of the left. By abandoning that territory, did we play a part in clearing the ground for the mirror world? And how can we reclaim our confidence and our voices in such disorienting times?

We spoke at George Washington University at an event hosted by Politics and Prose. That independent bookstore, by the way, will also be hosting a reading for my own forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” I’ll be in conversation there with my Breaking Points colleague Krystal Ball on November 27th.

Now, here’s Naomi Klein with a brief reading from her new book, followed by our conversation.

[Deconstructed intro theme, continued.]

Presenter: Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a warm and enthusiastic welcome to Naomi Klein and Ryan Grim.

Naomi Klein (Reading from “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World”): In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. I did not have time, no one asked me to, and several people cautioned against it. Not now, not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet, and certainly not about this.

“Other Naomi,” that is how I refer to her now; this person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me, or thank me, or express their pity for me. The very fact that I referred to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation.

For a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations. I report in the aftermath of oil spills and Category 5 hurricanes. I write books of big ideas about serious subjects.

And yet, in the months and years during which this text came into being, a time when cemeteries ran out of space and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space, everything else that I might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption. In June 2021, as this project began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event, dubbed a “heat dome,” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family.

The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than 600 people died, most of them elderly. An estimated 10 billion marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores. An entire town went up in flames. It’s rare for this out-of-the-way sparsely populated spot to make international headlines, but the heat dome made us briefly famous.

An editor asked if I, as someone engaged in the climate fight for 15 years, would file a report about what it was like to live through this unprecedented climate event.

“I’m working on something else,” I told him, the stench of death filling my nostrils.

“Can I ask what?”

“You cannot.”

There were plenty of other important things I neglected during this time of feverish subterfuge. That summer, I allowed my nine-year-old to spend so many hours watching a gory nature series called Animal Fight Club that he began to ram me at my desk like a great white shark. I engaged in all of this neglect so that I could, what? Check her serially suspended Twitter account? Study her appearances on Steve Bannon’s live streams for insights into their electric chemistry? Read or listen to yet another of her warnings that basic health measures were actually a covert plot orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum, to sow mass death on such a scale, it could only be the work of the devil himself?

My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back. A master’s degree worth of hours. I told myself it was research. That, if I was going to understand her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows, with names like “Q Anon Anonymous” and “Conspirituality,” that unpack and deconstruct the co-mingling worlds of conspiracy theories. wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with COVID 19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism.

This, on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest. “I feel closer to the hosts of Conspirituality than to you,” I whimpered one night into my best friend’s voicemail.

I told myself I had no choice. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time, or of the compressed writing time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises — and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers of people to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated tyranny — is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that we humans might at some point decide to do together.

Thank you.

[Audience clapping.]

NBC NEWS: HOW A FAR-RIGHT, CHRISTIAN CELLPHONE COMPANY ‘TOOK OVER’ FOUR TEXAS SCHOOL BOARDS

Check out this news story about how Steve Bannon is behind the taking over of four school boards in search of theocracy where Christian values get explicitly taught in public schools. They're pushing back on "critical race theory and other “woke” ideologies" as if these have ever actually been taught in K-12 public schools, especially CRT which is barely and only somewhat taught in higher education. 

This extremist movement that promotes defensive teaching and ultimately, ignorance, is indifferent to actual racism and is thusly a retrenchment of white supremacist politics of whiteness and white people not wanting to be accountable to racial or other forms of systemic inequality in the U.S. Despite this ideological overlay, these are not at all Christian values. 

Jesus himself wan't a white man. Nor was he a monolingual English speaker. And no one can prove that God is white or male.

The ironies...

-Angela Valenzuela

 

NBC NEWS: HOW A FAR-RIGHT, CHRISTIAN CELLPHONE COMPANY ‘TOOK OVER’ FOUR TEXAS SCHOOL BOARDS

 

Patriot Mobile markets itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider.” Now the Trump-aligned company is on a mission to win control of Texas school boards.

 

By Mike Hixenbaugh

 

Please Credit: NBC News – For Story Link, Click Here

Karl Meek went to a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees meeting Monday wearing a T-shirt with the district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD” to protest the political action committee’s influence over the school system.Emil T. Lippe for NBC News

 

DALLAS — A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to “save the nation,” he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.

 

“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”

 

Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”

 

“Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.

 

It was a moment of celebration for an upstart company whose leaders say they are on a mission from God to restore conservative Christian values at all levels of government — especially in public schools. To carry out that calling, the Grapevine-based company this year created a political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, and gave it more than $600,000 to spend on nonpartisan school board races in the Fort Worth suburbs.

 

This spring, the PAC blanketed the communities of Southlake, Keller, Grapevine and Mansfield with thousands of political mailers warning that sitting school board members were endangering students with critical race theory and other “woke” ideologies. Patriot Mobile presented its candidates as patriots who would “keep political agendas out of the classroom.”

 

Their candidates won every race, and nearly four months later, those Patriot Mobile-backed school boards have begun to deliver results.

 

The Keller Independent School District made national headlines this month after the school board passed a new policy that led the district to abruptly pull more than 40 previously challenged library books off shelves for further review, including a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” as well as several LGBTQ-themed novels. 

 

In the neighboring city of Southlake, Patriot Mobile donated framed posters that read “In God We Trust” to the Carroll Independent School District during a special presentation before the school board. Under a new Texas law, the district is now required to display the posters prominently in each of its school buildings. Afterward, Patriot Mobile celebrated the donation in a blog post titled “Putting God Back Into Our Schools.”

 

And this week at a tense, eight-hour school board meeting, the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District’s board of trustees voted 4-3 to implement a far-reaching set of policies that restrict how teachers can discuss race and gender. The new policies also limit the rights of transgender and nonbinary students to use bathrooms and pronouns that correspond with their genders. And the board made it easier for parents to ban library books dealing with sexuality.

 

To protest the changes, some parents came to the meeting wearing T-shirts with the school district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD.”

 

“They bought four school boards, and now they’re pulling the strings,” said Rachel Wall, the mother of a Grapevine-Colleyville student and vice president of the Texas Bipartisan Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting school board candidates who do not have partisan agendas. “I’m a Christian by faith, but if I wanted my son to be in a religious school, I would pay for him to go to a private school.”

 

Patriot Mobile officials didn’t respond to messages requesting comment. Leigh Wambsganss, executive director of Patriot Mobile Action and vice president of government and media affairs at Patriot Mobile, declined to speak with a reporter at CPAC, saying she did not trust NBC News to accurately report on the company’s political activism. In a social media post days later, she called the journalist’s interview request harassment, adding, “I don’t interview with reporters I don’t trust.”

 

In recent interviews with conservative media outlets, Wambsganss has said that Patriot Mobile’s goal is to install school board members who will oppose the teaching of “LGBTQ ideologies,” fight to remove “pornographic books,” and stand against school anti-racism initiatives, which she and her supporters have argued indoctrinate children with anti-white and anti-American views.

 

“You know, the sad thing is there is real racism, and that is really a terrible thing,” Wambsganss said in a June appearance on the Mark Davis Show, a conservative talk radio program that broadcasts in the Dallas region. “But they’re watering down and devaluing that word so bad that it’s become meaningless.”

 

In that same interview, Wambsganss made clear that Patriot Mobile views its political activism as a religious calling — and that the group’s electoral success this spring was just the beginning.  

 

“We’re not here on this earth to please man — we’re here to please God,” Wambsganss said, adding later in the interview, “Ultimately we want to expand to other counties, other states and be in every state across the nation.”

 

‘Make America Christian Again’

Founded about a decade ago, Patriot Mobile markets itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider,” which includes a pledge to donate a portion of users’ monthly bills to conservative causes.

 

Initially, Patriot Mobile’s founders said their goal was to support groups and politicians who promised to oppose abortion, defend religious freedom, protect gun rights and support the military.

 

After the 2016 presidential election, the company’s branding shifted further to the right and embraced Trump’s style of politics. One of Patriot Mobile’s most famous advertisements includes the slogan “Making Wireless Great Again,” alongside an image of Trump’s face photoshopped onto a tanned, muscled body holding a machine gun.

 

That approach has drawn the support of some big names on the right.

 

“You can give your money to AT&T, the parent company of CNN, and you can pay the salary of Don Lemon, or you can support someone like a Patriot Mobile and give back to causes that they believe in,” Donald Trump Jr. said from the stage at a CPAC gathering in February. “That’s not cancel culture, folks. That’s using your damn brain.”

 

Patriot Mobile has also aligned itself in recent years with political and religious leaders who promote a once-fringe strand of Christian theology that experts say has grown more popular on the right in recent years. Dominionism, sometimes referred to as the Seven Mountains Mandate, is the belief that Christians are called on to dominate the seven key “mountains” of American life, including business, media, government and education.

 

John Fea, a professor of American history at the private, Christian Messiah University in Pennsylvania, has spent years studying Seven Mountains theology. Fea said the idea that Christians are called on to assert biblical values across all aspects of American society has been around for decades on the right, but “largely on the fringe.”

 

Trump’s election changed that.

 

“It fits very well with the ‘Make America Great Again’ mantra,” Fea said. “‘Make America Great Again’ to them means, ‘Make America Christian Again,’ restore America to its Christian roots.”

 

Patriot Mobile appears to have embraced that shift, Fea said.

 

Beginning a year ago, one of the leading proponents of the Seven Mountains worldview, Rafael Cruz, a pastor, began leading weekly Bible studies for employees at Patriot Mobile’s corporate office, which the company films and posts on YouTube.

 

In a recent Patriot Mobile sermon, Cruz — the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — dismissed the concept of separation of church and state as a myth, arguing that America’s founders meant that ideal as a “one-way wall” preventing the government from interfering with the church, not preventing the church from influencing the government.

 

He then called on people who “are rooted in the righteousness of the word of God” to run for public office.

 

“If those people are not running for office, if they are not even voting, then what’s left?” Cruz said. “The wicked electing the wicked.”

 

Cruz didn’t respond to a message requesting an interview.

 

Beginning last year, after opposition to “critical race theory” emerged as a political attack on the right, Fea said he began to observe another shift in the Christian Dominionism movement.

 

Rather than focusing primarily on winning federal elections, these groups started talking about the need to take control of public schools — “the ideal battleground,” Fea said, “if you’re looking to fight this battle.”

 

“This is a spiritual war, they believe, against demonic forces that undermine a godly nation by teaching kids in school that America is not great, America is not a city on the hill or that America has flaws,” Fea said. “If you can get in and teach the right side of history, and social studies and civics lessons about what America is, you can win the next generation and save America for Christ.”

 

‘Saving our public schools’

 

Patriot Mobile’s unconventional business strategy appears to be paying off. 

 

Without providing specific numbers, the company said it doubled its subscriber base in 2021, and as a result, it planned to give more than $1.5 million to conservative causes in 2022, triple the amount from the year prior. 

 

In January, the company filed documents to establish Patriot Mobile Action and brought on Wambsganss to lead it — a strong signal that the company was planning to get involved in school board politics.

 

Wambsganss, a long-time political activist, had earned national acclaim among conservatives in 2021 for her work as one of the co-founders of Southlake Families PAC, another group that promotes itself as “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” When the Carroll school system in Southlake unveiled a diversity plan to crack down on racism and anti-LGBTQ bullying in the majority white school district, Southlake Families, under Wambsganss’ leadership, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a slate of school board candidates who promised to kill the plan.

 

After winning every race by a landslide, the PAC’s success was celebrated on Fox News and in The Wall Street Journal, prompting former Texas GOP Chairman Allan West to urge Southlake Families leaders to “export this to every single major suburban area in the United States of America.”

 

At the helm of the newly established Patriot Mobile Action, Wambsganss got to work achieving that goal this spring, starting first with some suburban school systems close to home. 

 

In interviews with conservative outlets, Wambsganss has said she and her team zeroed in on four North Texas independent school districts — Keller, Grapevine-Colleyville, Mansfield and Carroll — that had implemented or considered policies dealing with race, sexuality and gender that she and other Christian conservatives found objectionable.

 

After interviewing candidates in each district, Patriot Mobile Action settled on a slate of 11 who pledged to support conservative causes. Following the playbook from Southlake, the PAC hired a pair of heavy-hitter GOP consulting firms that had worked on campaigns for Ted Cruz and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — bringing sophisticated national-level political strategies to local school board races.

 

Patriot Mobile paid Vanguard Field Strategies nearly $150,000 to run get-out-the-vote canvassing operations across the four school districts, according to financial disclosures. The PAC paid another $240,000 to Axiom Strategies to produce and send tens of thousands of political mailers to homes across North Texas.

 

One flyer sent to Mansfield residents baselessly blamed a recent classroom shooting at a local high school on critical race theory-inspired disciplinary policies and accused the district of putting “woke” politics ahead of the safety of children.

 

A Patriot Mobile mailer sent in Grapevine and Colleyville endorsed two board candidates who the PAC said would oppose critical race theory, an academic study of systemic racism that, according to the flyer, “violates everything patriots believe in.”

 

And Patriot Mobile sent flyers endorsing three candidates in Keller under the slogan, “Saving America starts with saving our public schools.”

 

After all of Patriot Mobile’s candidates won, the company celebrated the victories in a blog post that also included a justification for its decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on nonpartisan local elections.

 

“While the media today wishes to demonize conservative activism in local races, the truth is that liberal activists have been pouring countless dollars into local politics for many years,” the post said, citing past school board candidate donations from a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for equity in education, as well as one $35,000 donation to a candidate in the Dallas suburbs from a Democratic political action committee in 2021. “Conservative activism at the local level is long overdue.”

 

At CPAC in August, Bannon asked Wambsganss and Story on his “War Room” TV show whether they had started to see changes in the four school districts.

 

“Oh, tremendous,” Wambsganss said. “Those 11 seats in four ISDs means that now North Texas has over 100,000 students who, before May, had leftist leadership. Now they have conservative leadership.”

 

Bannon replied, “Amen.”

 

‘This is not love’

 

On Monday night, North Texas residents got a front-row seat for what it looks like when Patriot Mobile takes over a school board. 

 

Just 72-hours before the meeting, the Grapevine-Colleyville school district had unveiled a sweeping 36-page policy touching on virtually every aspect of the culture wars over race, gender and sexuality that have dominated school politics since last year.

 

Under the policy, teachers are prohibited from discussing any concepts related to or inspired by critical race theory or what the policy refers to as “systemic discrimination ideologies.” The policy gives school employees the right to refer to trans and nonbinary students by pronouns and names matching the ones they were assigned at birth — a practice known as misgendering or deadnaming — even if the student’s parents support their child’s gender expression. And the policy prohibits any reading materials and classroom discussions dealing with “gender fluidity,” which the document defines as any belief that “espouses the view that biological sex is merely a social construct.”

 

Tammy Nakamura, one of the board members backed by Patriot Mobile, said the board’s 4-3 vote to adopt the policy fulfilled her campaign promise “to put an end to adults pushing their worldviews, whims and fantasies onto unsuspecting children.”

 

Although some members of the board majority and their supporters argued that the policy merely brought the district in line with state and federal laws, Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the plan goes well beyond the state’s anti-CRT law and appears to be in violation of federal civil rights statutes that protect students from discrimination on the basis of their gender and sexuality.

 

“This is the most extreme board policy that we have seen related to classroom censorship,” Huddleston said.

 

Debate over the policy turned Monday’s school board meeting into a political circus.

 

The Patriot Mobile-aligned True Texas Project, which has been labeled as an anti-government extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, called on its supporters to pack the meeting and turn it into a party celebrating the new policy. The group set up tents hours beforehand and tailgated in the parking lot, along with an anti-trans activist group whose leader was suspended from Twitter this year after she wrote, “Let’s start rounding up people who participate in pride events,” referring to LGBTQ rights celebrations.

 

Nearly 200 people signed up to speak during public comments prior to the board vote. 

 

One man who spoke in support of the new policy urged the board majority to “fight like hell” and “hold the ground against the LGBT mafia and their dang pedo fans” — echoing false claims by some Christian conservatives in recent months that queer educators have been trying to sexually groom children.

 

“And guess what,” the man shouted into the microphone, “teachers shouldn’t be forced to use your freakin’ made up fantasy pronouns!”

 

Another resident who spoke in support of the policy said one of the things that made America great was “schools that taught kids to read and know the Bible, and recite the Constitution.” She commended the school board for working to restore those ideals. 

 

“Our kids have to be taught our foundation,” she said. “Our foundation of God-given inalienable rights, religious freedoms, individualism, democracy and a free market.”

 

Later, a mom told the board she supported banning classroom discussions of “gender fluidity” because, she said, when her child started identifying as a girl, Grapevine-Colleyville teachers provided the student with information affirming that gender expression. As a result, the mother said, choking up as a beeper signaled that her time had expired, “I lost my son.”

 

Nobody from Patriot Mobile spoke at the meeting. In a recent talk radio interview, Wambsganss said she and her team were busy mapping out their plans for replicating what they achieved in districts like Grapevine-Colleyville in communities across Texas.

 

A majority of those who did comment during Monday’s meeting said they opposed the policy changes, including one father who accused Grapevine-Colleyville board members of being beholden to Patriot Mobile. “The result,” he said, “is our kids are being forced to act as pawns in their political game.”

 

A high school student who identified as LGBTQ told the board she feared that the new policy would make queer students — who are four times as likely to contemplate suicide — feel even more alienated. “Help my friends,” she said. “Don’t tell them that they should be erased.”

 

One mother, a former teacher, turned to scripture to explain her opposition to the school district’s new direction under Patriot Mobile’s influence. She said she was worried about LGBTQ students and children from other marginalized groups.

 

Paraphrasing Jesus, she said, “They will know us by our love.”

 

“When I read about the policies and I watch and attend school board meetings,” the woman said, “I keep thinking, ‘This is not love.’”