Katherine Stewart writes:

The first thing I noticed at the latest stop on the ReAwaken America Tour in Las Vegas in mid-August was that the T-shirts are getting nastier. “Size Matters” blared one man’s shirt over enlarged images of bullets of various calibers. “It’s RINO Season,” read another, with an image of Trump carrying a long gun. Another man’s T-shirt featured dozens of white male soldiers and the words “Diversity is Destruction” across the bottom. There was the old standby, “God, Guns, and Trump.” And then there was “BLITZKRIEG.”

Launched in 2021, the ReAwaken America Tour is where truth and irony go to die in the face of megachurch-size portions of paranoia. It’s the kind of place where people tell you with a straight face, “Don’t let them microchip you.”

Clay Clark, a conspiracist who has made his name pushing horse-drug cures for Covid, got the roving series of conferences going during the pandemic, and they have taken on a life of their own. Partners in the project include Mike Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, and election fraud funder Mike Lindell. Eric Trump is a frequent guest speaker, and Robert Kennedy Jr. delivered presentations at several ReAwaken America events before launching his run for president. Among the guest speakers in Las Vegas were Alex Jones, the infamous purveyor of the most heinous conspiracies; Shari Tenpenny, identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the top 12 most influential Covid deniers; the actor and election-lie promoter Roseanne Barr, and a slew of demon-haunted “spirit warriors” from the Christian nationalist movement.

The Las Vegas conference was the third such event I attended in person, and it was by a significant measure the most bloodthirsty. The rhetoric coming from the podium was even more violent than the slogans on the T-shirts. [Continue reading…]