ReAwaken America Tour Fuses Trumpism and Christian Nationalism

If you’ve heard of the ReAwaken America Tour, it is probably in the context of two of its most explicitly antisemitic participants, Scott McKay and Charlie Ward, being slated to share the stage with Eric Trump at his father’s Doral Resort in Miami this weekend.

McKay, aka “Patriot Streetfighter,” is “a former competitive bodybuilder turned wellness industry entrepreneur whose life passions led him to the political arena,” according to his bio. Those passions include sharing starkly pro-Hitler views on Rumble, a low-moderation video streaming website used primarily by the far-right. “Hitler was fighting the same people we’re trying to take down,” McKay said in one clip publicized this week by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Jake Tapper. “These people are so elusive and slippery and cunning that we ended up having World War II.” Ward was also flagged by Maddow and Tapper because of a social media post in which he praised Hitler for “warning us” about the ruling class purportedly composed of Freemasons, Jews, etc. Ward denies being a Hitler sympathizer, and says he is merely “pointing out simple facts.”

After Maddow called attention to McKay and Ward’s antisemitism and their scheduled appearance at the Miami ReAwaken America Tour stop, Eric Trump tweeted a threat to sue Maddow for calling him antisemitic and pointed out that his is the most “pro-Israel” family in American political history—“Never mind, that my sister, brother-in-law and niece and nephews happen to be proud Jews.” Eric, the third child of former president and 2024 Republican front runner Donald J. Trump, appears to have changed course, claiming to have asked the tour organizers to disinvite McKay and Ward, despite having met and spoken alongside both of them numerous times already.

But McKay and Ward are just the tip of the iceberg of conspiracy thinking, extremism and antisemitism at ReAwaken America events, where more than a hundred speakers affiliated with Q-Anon, election denial, vaccine denial, Christian nationalism, the January 6 insurrection, and Trump’s presidential administration and businesses take the stage in a blur of 15-minute segments. The tour stops, also called conferences, are equal parts tent-revival, political conference and fever-dream. Since 2021, there have been at least 21 ReAwaken events in more than 15 states. Usually, the events are held at mega-churches to sold out audiences that reach into the thousands. Tickets cost about $250. This weekend is the first time the rally has been held at a Trump property, and another is scheduled for August at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. Friday’s lineup includes the pledge of allegiance led by retired general and disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn, exposés of medical fraud by disgraced doctor and vaccine denier Christiane Northrup, evening baptisms on the patio, and more than fifty other speakers and performances.

“Each ReAwaken America Tour is a toxic extremist, radical and harmful blend of baptisms, praise music, election denial and QAnon misinformation—things that do not belong together—all presented to an audience of thousands in Jesus’s hijacked name,” Rev. Nathan Empsell, executive director of Faithful America, said during a press conference Friday afternoon. “The antisemitism, hatred, election denial, and outright embrace of political violence found at Trump Doral has no place in Miami, no place in Florida, no place in America, and no place in Christianity.”

The Ringmaster

At the heart of the ReAwaken America tour—its founder, spokesman, and master of ceremonies—is Clay Clark. In fact, the tour’s full name is “Clay Clark’s ReAwaken America Tour” in a style reminiscent of Buffalo Bill or Barnum and Bailey, a parallel heightened by his manner of calling speakers on stage as if he’s MCing a monster truck rally.

Clark, a 42-year-old Tulsa-based entrepreneur and business coach who was asked to leave the pentecostal Oral Roberts University after a parody rap song he produced mocking the school’s president went viral. In 2020, when his media production company’s projects declined due to COVID-19, he sued the city of Tulsa over its mask mandates. According to Sam Kestenbaum of Rolling Stone, it was during that time that “a network of pandemic defiers—churches refusing to close, alt-health physicians hawking treatments, politicians grandstanding about the incursions on personal liberties—was coalescing. Depictions of the pandemic as part of a scam to control the population swirled about and Clark seized the idea that the official narrative about the virus was not to be believed.”

A screenshot of Clay Clark (right) promoting the Miami Doral event.

Rather, what Clark purportedly does believe is that the COVID-19 vaccine is a bioweapon containing “luciferase,” which he says Bill Gates created by combining cryptocurrency technology with Jeffrey Epstein’s DNA to create a new species of human. (Luciferase is actually a naturally occurring enzyme involved in bioluminescence.) All of this, Clark and his ilk contend, is in service to “the Great Reset,” a real initiative by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to reshape global fiscal policy in the wake of the pandemic but seen by conspiracy theorists as a nefarious plot to take over the world through 5G, artificial intelligence, weather modification, Black Lives Matter, and virtually every other right-wing boogeyman.

In Clark’s view, the bad guys include WEF head Klaus Schwab and his “high priest,” Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Clark’s website points out (in capital letters) that Harari is “Openly Gay” and “Does Not Eat Meat,” and that the biblical Yuval was a descendent of Cain—all indications that Harari is, or may be, the antichrist. Billionaire George Soros, who has been active at the WEF, also features prominently on team “Great Reset” on the website along with Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and many others.

Clark quotes scripture to assert that the COVID vaccine is actually the mark of the beast, giving this entire narrative apocalyptic—as well as medical, political, and cultural—implications. Speaking to an interviewer on Rumble, Clark offered this narrative summary: “The technology was cooked up by a spirit cooker [Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović] who prays to Satan, and the world’s most prolific pedophile [Epstein], teaming up with Bill Gates, who right now stands at the threshold of the Gates of Hell.” The interviewer, Stew Peters, responded, “I believe everything you just said to be true. 100 percent,” before pivoting to the corruption of the mainstream media.

After Clay Clark began to embrace COVID-19 conspiracies, he was invited to address the January 5, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC; appeared on podcasts with Q-Anon boosters; and connected with Michael Flynn who, as President Trump’s national security advisor, was involved in controversy related to his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign and his subsequent guilty plea for lying to the FBI. In April 2021, Clark and Flynn produced their first “Health and Freedom Conference” at a Bible college in Oklahoma. Eventually, these events were rebranded as the ReAwaken America tour.

One Country, One Religion

Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee and lead organizer of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, says that the ideology of “Christian nationalism” is the glue that ties all of these conspiracies and rhetoric together. She first became aware of the ReAwaken America Tour in November 2022, after Flynn stated at a San Antonio “conference” that America should have “one religion” under God.

“I knew then that Christian nationalism was deep into the language and the ideology of these tour events,” says Tyler, who has traveled to Miami with a group of other Christian leaders to show America that the speakers at this weekend’s conference do not speak for all Christians. “It really isn’t a particular denominational or theological view, but rather this ethno-national ideology that uses the language and symbols of Christianity to cloak this political cause in religious terms.”

Their political cause includes vindicating the continuing claims by Donald Trump and his supporters of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, which have resulted in violence, such as the January 6 Capitol insurrection and many other incidents. “This idea that God is directing some of these antidemocratic actions is a very dangerous direction,” says Tyler. “Christian nationalism is all about acquiring and holding onto political power at all costs, including at the cost of the marginalization and oppression of our neighbors. And it creates second-class citizen status for anyone who doesn’t fall into this narrow definition of ‘Christian.’”

Measures of the spread of Christian nationalism vary. Last year, Pew released a study that found that 45 percent of Americans think the United States “should be a Christian nation,” although far fewer agreed with more radical statements such as “the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation” or “the federal government should stop enforcing the separation of church and state.” However, another survey from earlier this year found that more than half of Republicans either adhere to or sympathize with these views. According to the Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings survey, “half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers said they support the idea of an authoritarian leader in order to keep these Christian values in society.”

One strong proponent of Christian nationalism and a prominent face of the ReAwaken America tour is Greg Locke, pastor of the Global Vision Bible Church in Tennessee, which hosted the tour in January. Clarke has held book burnings for “demonic” materials such as Harry Potter and Twilight, accused six of his own congregants of being witches, and called President Joe Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”

In one of Locke’s most recent sermons, posted on May 7, he exhorts his congregants not to follow the “hippified, sissified, cultural Jesus” that the “Bible doesn’t know one thing about.” He then asks, “If the Jewish people are really God’s people, then how come all these centuries they’ve had so many problems, and there’s a curse upon them, and Hitler killed six million of them? And how come it took till 1948 to get back into their homeland, and is there right now the threat of civil war in this month in Israel? Why are they having so much trouble if they really are the people of God?” Locke goes on to explain that it was because “the religious people [at the time of Jesus] declared a curse on themselves generationally. They said HIS BLOOD BE ON US and on our children’s children. And God said, okay! If that’s what you want, bucko, there ya go.”

Demonic Entities

Clarke is just one of the speakers slated to share the stage with Eric Trump at the Trump Doral Resort in Miami. Other highlights of the schedule include:

• An opening prayer by Amanda Grace, a self-described prophet who ministers to both people and animals, who will also offer her take on “God’s plan for America.”
• MyPillow owner Mike Lindell, who claims that foreign hackers from the Chinese Communist party hacked the 2020 elections for Joe Biden, on “Why we must expose election fraud and get America back to God.”
• Julie Green, another self-proclaimed prophet who purportedly channels God on stage. At a previous event, she said, on behalf of God, “Know that my hand is moving now to take this nation back, to give back the power that rightfully belongs to my chosen people in this hour. You can’t stop my son, who is the rightful president, and his name is Donald Trump [from] taking his position back on center stage.”
• Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official involved in Trump’s legal battle over the possession of classified documents in Mar-a-Lago, on exposing the deep state. Patel also serves on the board of the Trump Media & Technology Group, Truth Social’s parent company, and has written two children’s books about Trump.
• Peter Navarro, a senior Trump administration official who has been indicted for two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, on “why Dr. Fauci needs to be fired and in jail.”
• Stella Immanuel, a doctor who gained notoriety for her claims that hydroxychloroquine is a cure for COVID-19 and that demons cause illness, speaking on why “we cannot win a spiritual war with purely political means.”
• Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California who resigned from the House in order to run Trump Media & Technology Group. Nunes was involved in the Trump-Ukraine scandal and has promoted conspiracy theories about the FBI. He will be addressing the audience with Flynn.
• Charlie Kirk, a 29-year-old activist and talk-show host who promotes conspiracy theories about election fraud and COVID-19 vaccines. Although Kirk has been received well in some Jewish spaces, the ADL notes that members of his organization, Turning Point USA, affiliate with extremists.
• “Mel K,” a conspiracy theorist who has promoted claims of election fraud, QAnon and the Great Reset.

A screenshot of Melody Krell, aka “Mel K,” addressing a previous ReAwaken America Tour audience.

Mel K—aka Melody Krell—is an interesting case. Krell is Jewish and studied film at NYU. She hosts the “Mel K Show,” on which she promotes the idea that Nazis were relocated to New York after World War II, where they founded the United Nations with the help of David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and others. Krell makes heavy use of antisemitic tropes. “We, the people of this planet, are all fighting the same war, the same enemy…the bloodlines go back, it’s not a conspiracy theory,” Krell told a previous ReAwaken America gathering. “And, unfortunately, as we’re learning from medicine, science, math but worst of all our history, has been rewritten by these demons. And they have brainwashed multiple generations into believing a story that is a full-on lie.” (If her syntax doesn’t make sense, it’s not you.)

Krell goes on to describe how Rockefeller, who died in 2017, has controlled the world “for at least 50 years, if not centuries and bloodlines [sic],” and how Rockefeller ”teams up with the debt-slave masters, the Rothschilds, and their many many bloodline families that have held our entire planet captive for many many years, financing both sides of every war,” and so on. The thread of Krell’s argument is not coherent, but the upshot is clear: “When Donald Trump comes back, and when we reclaim our country, we have to demand that the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the IMF, the World Health Organization, NATO and all of their demonic entities, are excised from our planet.”

Top image: The ReAwaken America promotional image features “Team Holy Bible” (Greg Clarke, Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, Simone Gold, Stella Immanuel, and Vladimir Zelenko) arrayed against “Team Great Reset” (Klaus Schwab, George Soros, Bill Gates, Yuval Noah Harari, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg). Below are images of Donald Trump’s Miami and Las Vegas hotels. The man opposite the serpent is Kim Clement, a deceased self-acclaimed prophet who supposedly foretold the influence of the tour’s founder, Clay Clark.