I wasn’t going to write a Friday newsletter. But something came into my hands overnight. After the Midterms, I’ll devote a week to the source.
Today, I want to juxtapose two different slivers of this cache with a State Department video and my work.
First, the relevance of my work
From the beginning, I have warned readers that White Christian Nationalists have public-facing materials crafted in coded language. Everything they share publicly is designed to sound benign, positive, and desirable.
I showed how this worked in my coverage of The Heritage Foundation’s Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education. I struck through their benign language and replaced it with what they would say amongst themselves. Shown side-by-side, it reveals how sinister, authoritarian, and evil the Phoenix Declaration is.
But that was me using my experience to interpret what they meant. Doesn’t make my work less relevant, but millions of people dismiss it as a stretch or hyperbole or fear-mongering or taking things too far.
You can still support this work by upgrading to paid using the Midterm Special. $48/year FOREVER (reg $60.)
Thanks to the 23 of you who have taken advantage of this offer so far. You mitigate the sting of the 75 or so people who have canceled their paid subscriptions over the same time period. While not a sustainable trajectory, you 23 keep me in this chair for the time being. THANK YOU.
So let’s look at this statement
America is in a state of crisis. Decadence and corruption abound, from the streets of West Hollywood to the boardrooms of Wall Street, and in many unnamed and unknown places in between. “Citizenship” has little meaning in the morass of social dysfunction and unaccountability that has become our republic. “Virtue” has become a term of derision rather than an achievable ideal.
Our aim is to provide a framework and the resources for a way forward for ordinary citizens to reclaim a humane vision of society. Community, virtue, wisdom, strength, and solidarity are our watchwords. We seek a vigorous civic renewal that will reflect the past while facing the future.
This is the public-facing mission statement of the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR). On the surface, it doesn’t sound bad, does it? I mean, “corruption” is one of the biggest issues on American minds these days.
Don’t most people want a more functional, accountable society? With a humane focus? Isn’t positive civic renewal a good thing? This doesn’t sound like the mission of a bunch of fascist religious fanatics, does it?
SACR is a radicalized White Christian Nationalist extremist group. The Guardian covered them in 2024 HERE.
Founded in 2020, they are male-only. Membership is by invite-only. They seek to replace US democracy with a White Christian Nationalist male-run authoritarian regime inspired by the forces that gave rise to South African apartheid.
And they say those things amongst themselves.
Here’s SACR’s internal mission statement.
Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society’s decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.
We acknowledge our intellectual, political, and social inheritance, of both America’s founding and of Christendom. We are un-hyphenated Americans and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies. We ambitiously point to an ideal based on that dual inheritance. We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance of that ideal.
To that end, our organization seeks to recruit men of good character whose loyalties are grounded in strong virtue, correct religion, the moral life, and piety toward their forebears. Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm. Our conviction is that a brotherhood of these men will form the backbone of a renewed American regime that will reflect the past while facing and vigorously shaping the future.
Now let’s look at a 35-second video created and distributed by the US Department of State.
When anyone calls it that, they point to their public-facing mission statement - humane vision! virtue! civic renewal! no more corruption! - to gaslight and discredit accusers if they acknowledge the connection at all. That’s WHY they spend so much time on public-facing, coded language: To trick millions of people into thinking these groups are nothing to fear or take seriously.
I’m not hysterically telling you that. THEY ARE TELLING YOU THAT IN THEIR OWN WORDS.
Do you want to live in the country envisioned by the SACR - White, Christian, ruled by men, rigidly authoritarian, governed by their narrow religious laws?
Or do you want to live in a country where only YOU have the right to your own mind, and you are free to build a life accordingly?
VOTE.
But also understand that a Blue Congress and Blue statehouses won’t stop these people. One election won’t stop them. This is a fight that will consume the rest of many of our lives.
We must act accordingly. Be more determined. More strategic. More organized. More ruthless. More cunning. Because I promise you, Americans. Even if they lose the Midterms, there’s never a second where they won’t be working to “secure permanently…the political and social dominance” of White Christian Nationalist male power.
Please share this newsletter with every persuadable voter you know.
