At JD Vance Marketing campaign Cease, The Infrastructure For A New ‘Stop The Steal’ Is Laid Naked

MONROEVILLE, Pa. — JD Vance spoke at a pageant of election denialism in a Pittsburgh suburb Saturday, lending the imprimatur of his place because the Republican nominee for vice chairman to a gathering of people that nonetheless falsely imagine the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and who is likely to be laying the groundwork to make the identical bogus declare subsequent month if Trump and Vance lose in Pennsylvania, an important battleground state.

Vance participated in an hour-long city corridor at one of many ultimate stops of the “Courage” tour, a neo-Charismatic Christian revival roadshow organized by Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based evangelical pastor and self-described “apostle” who claims to have the ability to converse with God, who informed him Trump is prophesied to be the forty seventh president of the U.S. If Wallnau’s title sounds acquainted, it is likely to be as a result of he performed a significant function in fomenting disinformation in regards to the final presidential election and was even set to talk on the Jan. 6, 2021, election denial rally in Washington that turned the violent rebellion.

As Vance spoke from the stage at Wallnau’s occasion Saturday to some hundred principally middle-aged and octogenarian white folks, a well-recognized forged of election-denying organizations operated cubicles on the opposite facet of the conference corridor, encouraging folks to affix their mailing listing or providing them sweet. Their presence right here demonstrated the methods Wallnau’s model of maximum Christian nationalism dovetails with election denial. In any case, of what import are literally truthful elections right here on Earth if a candidate is predestined or prophesied from above to take workplace?

Manning one of many cubicles was Toni Shuppe, who stated she would solely converse to HuffPost on the situation that she acquired to jot down and edit this text with the reporter, permitting it to publish together with her go-ahead. (HuffPost didn’t conform to these situations, which Shuppe stated she developed after a wave of destructive media protection over the previous few years led her to obtain threats.)

That destructive media protection detailed how Shuppe led a petition drive to nullify the outcomes of the 2020 presidential election and the way the group she leads, Audit the Vote PA, shared knowledge it collected with Pennsylvania information outlet LancasterOnline, claiming it confirmed widespread fraud and irregularities in Pennsylvania vote-counting procedures, just for the outlet to discover that the group’s work was “rife with errors and speculation and that its methodology was deeply flawed” with “mistakes that undermine its conclusion and make its findings unreliable.”

These information tales additionally famous that Shuppe as soon as falsely claimed that voting machines in Pennsylvania had been hacked by China; that she had pushed unhinged QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories; that she as soon as posted on Gab, the social media platform fashionable on the far proper, that “every state needs to secede from the Federal government”; and that she as soon as pushed the false, racist and Islamophobic declare that former President Barack Obama was a “Muslim” who was “born in Kenya.”

Nonetheless, Shuppe was welcomed this weekend on the “Courage” tour cease in Monroeville, standing amongst a bevy of different MAGA organizations dedicated to “election integrity.” This included Turning Factors USA, the far-right youth group based over a decade in the past now by 30-year-old Charlie Kirk, which has become a fundraising juggernaut within the MAGA universe and put a ton of cash in Kirk’s pockets too, permitting him to purchase a $5 million mansion in an Arizona nation membership, whilst he’s grown more and more racist and antisemitic on his eponymous podcast, one of the listened to in America.

Kirk used his large platform in 2020 to develop into one of many largest propagandists for the false declare that mail-in voting throughout the nation was awash in fraud. And on Jan. 6, 2021, Kirk organized buses to take Trump supporters to the rally in Washington, writing on X, previously referred to as Twitter, that the occasion “would likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history.” (Kirk deleted the put up after Trump supporters on the rally stormed the Capitol.)

Earlier this 12 months, the lawyer basic in Arizona indicted two Turning Factors USA officers, Chief Working Officer Tyler Bowyer and state Sen. Jake Hoffman (a contractor for the group), for being among the many 11 “fake electors” within the state — a part of a nationwide effort by the Trump marketing campaign to ship “alternate” electors to Congress who would declare Trump the winner in states he’d misplaced, handing him one other time period.

Within the 2024 election, Turning Factors USA has invested over $100 million to get out the vote, assist far-right candidates with a historical past of election denial, and, as famous by The Guardian, seemingly oust “some key Arizona election officials who disputed claims of election fraud in 2020.”

The group despatched its offshoot, Turning Factors USA Religion, on the “Courage” tour. Its sales space Saturday included free sweet for attendees and buckets of pins with slogans like “PRAY FOR THOSE WHO PERSECUTE YOU,” “COMMUNISM IS SATAN’S RELIGION,” “EVEN HEAVEN HAS SECURE BORDERS. REVELATION 21:19,” and “DISCIPLESHIP STARTS AT HOME,” which featured an illustration of a Fifties white household studying a Bible of their lounge.

A sales space over was the America First Coverage Institute, a MAGA suppose tank whose attorneys are presently representing a Republican Georgia election official — with a protracted historical past of election denialism — in her lawsuit that’s asking for the discretion to refuse to certify election outcomes.

AFPI has additionally filed one of many eight lawsuits this 12 months coming from Trumpland, which baselessly alleges that subsequent month’s election may very well be skewed by widespread voting by undocumented immigrants. The chair of AFPI’s Heart for Election Integrity, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, posted on social media final month that the Biden marketing campaign was plotting “to weaponize federal agencies into a leftwing election operation that opens the doors to non-citizen voting.”

There is no such thing as a foundation for this declare, just as there’s no foundation for the declare that undocumented immigrants vote wherever close to the degrees to sway the election. (A research of the 2016 election, throughout which Trump had additionally warned of noncitizens voting, discovered that out of 23.5 million ballots forged, there have been solely 30 incidents of undocumented folks voting.) A current investigation by Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism challenge, detailed how conspiracy theories “about noncitizens casting ballots in U.S. elections have become a centerpiece of MAGA messaging in advance of the 2024 election.”

“Yet it is a manufactured threat, pushed and platformed by a well-funded network of far-right groups, as part of an intentional and highly coordinated effort to misinform the public, advance longstanding right-wing policy goals, and cast doubt on the election results in November,” Documented wrote.

And at last among the many cubicles on the “Courage” tour cease was Joshua Standifer, founding father of a bunch referred to as Lion of Judah, which is dedicated to signing up Christian Trump supporters (and by default election skeptics) as ballot employees throughout the nation earlier than subsequent month’s election. The group’s web site describes this mission as a “Trojan horse” technique to get Christians in “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers, which will help them spot incidents of fraud, and taking “the first step on the path to victory this Fall,” based on The Guardian.

Simply after Vance’s look on stage at Saturday’s “Courage” tour, Standifer recounted the story of how he determined to begin Lion of Judah.

“I heard the Lord tell me something just absolutely crazy, and he said, ‘Start a group called Lion of Judah and bring the Holy Spirit to the place you were told to stay out of — the political square,’” Standifer stated.