The Christian Nationalists Have a Plan
· The Atlantic
Joel Webbon has a six-year plan to usher in the first Christian-nationalist president, and he’s sticking to it. Although some on the far right were shaken by last week’s rout of Republicans at the polls, seeing it as a setback for their own agenda, Webbon told me last week that he sees it as validation. Conveniently enough, the first phase of Webbon’s plan required that Republicans lose the midterms, getting rejected by voters after starting a wildly unpopular war that exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis.
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That defeat was necessary to clear the way for the rest of his plan, which he is expected to promote at a three-day conference outside Dallas this week. The gathering, hosted by Webbon’s company, NXR Studios, has been dubbed “Christ Is King: America After Trump.”
Webbon is not bashful about his views. He is a Christian nationalist, a pastor, and a podcaster. The difference between the two parties, he told me, is that “you have gay Jews and war Jews.” Republicans are an “openly racist, closeted-gay political party.” Democrats are an “openly gay, closeted-racist political party.” “Either way,” Webbon added, “the winner is always world Jewry.” Despite his embrace of one of the most persistent anti-Jewish tropes, he claimed not be anti-Semitic, and magnanimously offered this concession: So long as Jews don’t get in the way of white Christians, they will, in some future racial dispensation, be permitted to hold positions of power. Although Webbon is preoccupied with Jews, he has also expressed floridly offensive views about other groups. He has argued that women who have lied about sexual-assault allegations should be publicly executed and that “the greatest moment in history for any brown or Black country is the moment that the white man’s ships arrive on your shore.”
Despite, or because of, his views, a roster of prominent Donald Trump–era figures has signed up to speak at the conference, including the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Tucker’s even more race-obsessed brother, Buckley Carlson. The event’s title reflects a shift on the far right in recent months, as it abandons Trump and searches for a new champion. Jones, the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, the conservative streamer Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson have already broken with the president over his decision to go to war in Iran. (Fuentes urged his followers to support Democrats in the midterms.) After the election, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called Trump “yesterday’s news” and said that “we have to move on” and find a new Republican leader.
Others are also thinking about what comes next. Jack Posobiec, a Catholic far-right influencer with close ties to the administration, told me by text that it was “Time to purge the dead wood.” (Posobiec didn’t elaborate, but he has previously criticized supporters of the Iran war.) Andrew Torba, the Christian-nationalist proprietor of the far-right social-media platform Gab, posted that he had “great convos this weekend with our guys and everyone is fired up and ready to get to work.” Fuentes told me over text that he wants to take his online movement into the physical world and “build a volunteer army” focused on campaigning in states that will hold early-2028 presidential primaries. But no one offered a game plan as specific as Webbon’s.
With Phase 1 of his plan—Republicans losing the midterms—successfully completed, Webbon is proceeding to Phase 2: Recruiting James Fishback to run in the 2028 Republican presidential primary. Fishback is a 31-year-old Floridian who ran a racist and anti-Semitic campaign in an unsuccessful GOP primary bid to be Florida’s governor. (During one argument in April, Fishback told a Black man, “You should be lynched.”)
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Fishback would be too young to meet the minimum presidential age of 35, but that does not matter to Webbon, because victory is not the point. “James will likely run in 2028, and we know he won’t win,” Webbon told me. The goal is to get Fishback on the primary debate stage and “prime the pump” for 2032 by forcing Christian-nationalist politics into the mainstream. Fishback himself told me that if he runs in 2028, he plans to win. Fishback also sent me a memo that outlined a plan to have his vice-presidential candidate serve as acting president until he turns 35, in 2030, should he win.
Phase 3 involves yet another losing maneuver: Webbon expects Republicans to be defeated in the 2028 general election, giving Democrats a chance to govern. By 2032, Webbon assumes, Americans will be so fed up with left-wing policy that they’ll finally be ready to embrace far-right Christian nationalism and its leaders—a future President Fuentes, President Fishback, or even a President Webbon. “It’ll be Nick, or Nick may not want to do it. It’ll be James, you know, or it’ll be me, or it’ll be someone else. Maybe I’m a faith adviser, something like that,” Webbon said. “But that’s the plan, and it’s not even like a plan that we wrote. It’s the obvious thing that’s happening.”
So what would a world run by Webbon and his friends look like? The Nineteenth Amendment would be one of the first things they would first seek to eliminate. “Women’s suffrage is a picture of a woman punching herself in the face,” Webbon said. Democrats, he predicted, will make things so bad that by 2032, “a lot of women will be like, ‘Yeah, we want to survive, we want to be safe, we want to be secure, we want to prosper, and we’re willing to forfeit control.’”
Deportations would rise, as well. The targets would be those who can’t define themselves as “Heritage Americans.” The nationalist right has different definitions of that term but, according to Webbon, a Heritage American would be anyone who is a third-generation American on both sides of their family or fifth-generation on one side. Others want the definition to apply only to white people, but Webbon told me he’s fine with any minority who meets the requirements.
People, including citizens, who fail that test—and especially those who are nonwhite, non-Christian, or “hate America”—would be at risk of deportation or of being deprived of their voting rights. Indeed, voting would be restricted to “net positive” taxpayers, Webbon said, meaning those who contribute to, rather than benefit from, government funds. “So that would knock out most Black people,” he said. But he clarified that not all tax-negative Americans would be automatically deported: “Jamal’s not going back. Now he may be going to prison if he’s committing a crime, but he’s not going.” I asked if he meant “Jamal” as a catch-all for Black people, and he responded with a laugh. “Yeah. Tyrone—whatever you want to use,” he said. Webbon also denies that he is racist.
Webbon sounded placid and assured when we spoke. He casually presented his most bigoted contentions as matters of objective fact, sometimes in an almost-rhyming couplets: “It’s not every single Stein, but it is every single time,” he told me twice.
How influential is Webbon? He is the senior pastor at Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas, an Austin suburb on the edge of rural Hill Country. He is a part of what Mother Jones’s Kiera Butler has called the “TheoBros,” a loose faction of Christian-right figures across the country who are trying to make America more theocratic. Webbon has a following of more than 133,000 accounts on X, and another 189,000 subscribers on YouTube. Together with Fuentes, he recorded a 10-part series of conversations that cover “race realism,” “Christian nationalism,” and “World Jewry.” He has also appeared on Steve Bannon’s show, War Room. When I asked Bannon how seriously I should take Webbon, he replied, “Very.” Bannon predicts that there will be another nationalist surge on the right and that Webbon is poised to be a part of it.
Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice, told me that he regards Webbon as “part of a faction of anti-Semitic, far-right influencers who are finding purchase right now.” Webbon’s contribution to this faction is his ability to translate its extreme perspectives for mainstream audiences, and his success in organizing gatherings such as the one in Dallas tomorrow.
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Webbon, who is 40, claimed that both he and Fuentes have young supporters who have infiltrated an array of conservative institutions, think tanks, and Republican political offices. Fuentes has said the same. Webbon declined to provide evidence, but his claim is not far-fetched. The New York Times Magazine recently reported on the growth of younger, more extreme staffers at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. These adherents will accrue more power as they age, Webbon told me, and can eventually wield influence in service of Christian nationalism.
Webbon’s vision doesn’t need to be realized to be consequential. By promoting extremism as the Republican Party searches for its post-Trump identity, he may force the party to either forcefully reject the far right (which it has yet to do) or adopt more far-right ideas into its policy agenda. At a minimum, Webbon is attempting to run to the front of a parade of ideas that will define the American right. And the far right, despite the nation’s shift leftward, shows few signs of losing all of its appeal. Fuentes had one of the most watched Election Night livestreams. Young conservatives I’ve spoken with who don’t like Fuentes or agree with his politics at least acknowledge that he has tremendous influence. Nationalists, nativists, and white supremacists retain more political salience than they have had in decades—and many of them are determined to keep it that way, well beyond the age of Trump.