“Folks, don’t let them tell you there aren’t tunnels, oh, there are tunnels! I’ve seen the tunnels! I’ve been in the tunnels.”
With big country hair and a feisty attitude, Tania Joy Gibson is commanding the main stage. Microphone in hand, old school, she’s polemicising, preaching, proselytising about the deep deep state to a crowd loving every minute. Cowboy hats, stars-and-stripes shirts, biker jackets and diamante TRUMP caps perched intently on hundreds of white folding chairs, they shout “Yes!”, stand, cheer and raise their right hands, Christian witness-style at just about everything.
Gibson gabbles on a million miles a minute: “Yes, I’ve been in the tunnels. I was a teen Disney star like Brittany, like Christina, and I know you know it’s Disney we grew up with, right, but it’s not just the new stuff. Walt Disney was a paedophile and a subversive –”
“Right on!” the crowd yells! “Yes!” “Preach!”
Gibson charges on.
“You go back and you look at The Little Mermaid and you ask, ‘What’s that symbol –’ “
PAAAAAAAAAAAAARP. A huge sound comes from somewhere. What the fuck is that? Just behind me, almost in my ear, a woman in a crop cut and Daniel Boone leathers is blowing a ram’s horn. An actual ram’s horn. Holding the coiled vessel to her lips, pointing it roofward, letting it go.
“What do you think The Owl House is about …”
PAAAAAAAAAAAAARP.
“Shut up,” a veteran biker type yells. “Can’t hear a goddam thing.”
“Well, ahhhm gonna wrap it up now …” Gibson says as someone starts ringing a bell, a big, old-fashioned, bang-the-sides number.
“Preach preach …”
“YES!”
PAAAAAAAAAAAAARP.
The whole noise of it, the glorious chaos, all bouncing off the corrugated metal walls of the space, as the MC, a thin dude who looks like a ’90s art-school rocker, comes back on.
“Tania Joy Gibson! Wasn’t she great?”
Welcome to ReAwaken America.
“Twenty cities! Five hundred speakers! We are rolling!” Clay Clark, said ’90s rocker, actually a right-wing talk DJ, is revving up the crowd.
There must be about 2000 people here in this vast complex, a cavernous conference space with a grey-on-a-grey auditorium, really a huge garage and a hall of booths and hucksters all in a sports complex called Spooky Nook, with halls like this, and soccer courts, and squash, a games arcade, and a sad closed food court, Halloween fake cobweb over its shuttered metal grille.
In the hall, on the main stage, a mess of flags and banners, and the drum kit and guitars of the band, ready for later, the speakers don’t stop. Miss Illinois warning about the tunnels. 5G experts. The “Loose Change” guy, arguing that the transgender movement is a transhuman one. They come on, they come off, Clay keeps ’em moving, prancing around in his black, tight, narrow-pants suit, vibing off the huge energy.
Folks wander in and out like it was the Grand Ole Opry. To one side in the main space, a big concession stand sells flags of various designs, Trump bling, and other such trash. At the back, the concession stand is doing a roaring trade, mainly in hot dogs and steaks, liquid cheese gooped all over, gleaming bright yellow under the lights, people coming away from it, three, four of them in hand, the queue snaking all the way back to the entrance where unsmiling black men in uniform run metal detector wands over new arrivals.
ReAwaken America? It’s a slow-burn “tour” by the sinister-whacko US right of the US, headed by Clark, star of the Thrivetime Show podcast. Starting in the West six months ago, it has crossed the US, aimed at the midterms, with this the penultimate stop, before it ends on November 5 in Branson, Missouri, the Ozark Vegas, home of Dollywood and much more.
“Tour” is a fiction, of course. The 60 or so speakers across two days (“Event starts 8am! Doors open 6am!”) aren’t on some enormous bus. They fly in from NY/LA/DC every few weeks to whatever hole in the flyover states they’re converging on, do their 15 minutes, maybe sign some merch, then a black car pulls up and takes them to the airport again to get the hell out of there.
The personnel is the usual mix of Republican dirty tricksters posing as anti-elitists, pastors spruiking Christian nationalism, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and otherwise uncategorisable obsessives. There’s no printed program and no real support act/headliner structure. It’s just one damn thing after another. But that doesn’t matter. The crowd can’t get enough. They whoop and stand, witness and yell “represent”, whether it’s someone announcing the imminent apocalypse or selling vitamin supplements. “5G rays are being sent out by Bill Gates and the Pentagon. Vitamin X protects from …“ “Represent!” “Yeah!” PAAAAAAAAAAAAARP. The ram’s horn blower is behind my ear now.
“That is really loud,” I mutter.
“Oh, where are you from?” asks a lady in an American-flag shirt and a country string bow tie. Her husband beside her, big handlebar moustache, looks ahead intently, not wanting to miss anything.
“Guess,” I say.
“Brooklyn?”
“Australia.”
She looks at me as if I had said Mars. I must have had this sort of exchange half a dozen times over the past few years.
“Isn’t this wonderful?”
“Yes, ma’am. Praise it.”
“Praise it.”
Her eyes widen. “Did you come all the way for this?”
“No, I’m doing some work in Harrisburg.”
“Work?”
“For McKinsey.” (Pause). “I’m not at liberty to say more.”
She understands.
Clay’s back on stage. “Who thinks this election wasn’t stolen?” Bewildered silence. “Ha, I’m kidding! It was stolen, right?”
Huge roar, hundreds standing. This is the nub of it. The noise and motion makes the flags and T-shirts on the concession stand billow a little. “Trump won!” one reads, with the Donald backed by an American eagle. A stars-and-stripes flag made of guns. Jesus and Trump. Those are the mild ones.
Pennsylvania is a battleground, the battleground now, which is why ReAwaken America is here. But you could pretty much do a tour of the state and get anything you like. The Proud Boys will be north of here tomorrow. Ted Cruz is running some sad little bus tour through Ohio and here, making appearances in rural taverns in small towns with whoever will stand beside him.
The Republicans won the state and its 20 electoral college votes in 2016, lost it again in 2020, and now want to take it back. The crucial race is for the Senate seat, held by retiring Republican Pat Toomey, being fought over by aged hoodie-hipster John Fetterman and Trump-backed TV doctor Mehmet Oz. Election-denier Doug Mastriano is running for the governorship, though he has fallen behind, and there are three congressional seats that are genuine competitions. They’re all Democrat-held — taking them all would get the Republicans 60% of the way along to the five seats they need to flip the House, from this one state alone.
These rolling roadshows are here to keep up the temperature and energise the base. Quite possibly, they have overshot the mark. Until recently, midterm elections had such low turnouts that the whole game was just making sure your voters got to the polls in an unglamorous and unfocused election. But since the coming of Trump, that’s all changed. The 2018 midterms had the highest turnout to date, running at more than 60%. These will surpass that, if polling is correct, heading towards 72%. By contrast, turnout previously has hit 38%.
That’s a rock-up so high that it must extend well beyond the parties’ bases (a very variable 30% for the Democrats; a more reliable 20% or so for the Republicans), leading to the paradoxical position that campaigning to your base — stop the steal, abortion with no limits, etc — will actually repel the moderate and swinging voters now coming to the polls. But of course it’s a little more complicated than that. These roadshows are, first of all, an incredible grift, with tickets purchasable only by phone, and only after 15 minutes of upselling and haggling (a press pass? fuggedaboutit!). They’re sold like cruises, VIP packages, all-in packages.
They’re calling me now, even though this one’s over, to see if I might like to attend the Branson event. They’re tied to mail-order vitamin supplements, gold sales and, of course, My Pillow, the highly dubious revolutionary pillow system whose founder Mike Lindell (memoir: What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO) was a stop-the-steal fanatic, a backer of the story about Venezuelan crooked voting machines, and a man who said that up to “100 million” people might need to be arrested for voter fraud.
In the mini-mall of booths outside the auditorium, people are stocking up on supplements, camo T-shirts with slogans (“Black rifles matter” beside an AR-15 silhouette), 5G shields, non-vaxx COVID replacements, bad art and biographies of General Flynn — the whacko, sacked by Trump, who the movement is clearly positioning as a possible 2024 candidate.
Where does the movement start and the grift end? Or is it all grift, I was thinking as half a dozen speakers rotated through. Sherri Tenpenny spruiking some motivational hop-hah, a dude who’s suing everyone for 6 million COVID-vaccine deaths, and then two announcements: “Eric Trump is in the building” and “Please give it up for… Roger Stone!”
Stone, the Penguin himself! Nixon’s dirty-tricks guy, then Trump’s, the alleged link to WikiLeaks — which both deny — here he was, white hair, pinstripe suit, slight hump, smirking his way to the microphone.
“He’s recently let Jesus into his life,” the announcer added and a roar goes up.
“We’re in a war,” Roger begins, and the crowd loves that. They’re less enamoured with the rest of his speech, in which the clash of civilisations is largely expressed through the legal travails of Roger Stone.
“Didn’t come to listen to some lawyer,” some handlebar said a few seats away. But Stone gave ’em a bit of red meat, with dark portents about losing America forever, and then the grift again: “Roger, how much are you paying in legal fees?” “About 30 grand a month.” “Let’s help this man if we can!” “I want to thank the Lord for finding me.” Oh Roger. The Nixon tattoo on your back must be laughing blood tears.
But man oh man, Eric Trump, at the end of the afternoon, I thanked my lucky stars. The headliners had come early, I wouldn’t need to come back tomorrow. Slender, bearded, grinning, unfavoured, of course, it’s Eric sent out to Podunk, PA, to gee up the halt and lame.
“My dad wants you all to know he loves you very much!” he begins. From there it’s a man so desperate for approval that he’s willing to ask for it live on stage.
“Let’s face it, if my dad were in charge, none of this Ukraine stuff would be happening.”
He has a surprise for us, holding his phone to the camera broadcasting to the big screens up and down the hall. “DAD” says the caller ID. Yes, it’s the Donald.
“I want you to take good care of my boy,” the familiar voice says, all lethal purr.
“Love you, Dad!”
You’d think a patriot crowd wouldn’t have much time for princelings. You’d be wrong. These are Christian nationalists, and the Trumps are the holy family. Faces are shining with tears as they gaze up at this failson, live on stage, rotating like donor meat, sweaty, soft, eager to please.
Eric’s followed by Dr Joyce, a fundamentalist Christian PhD chemist and anti-vaxxer, who starts in on a slew of academic papers, flashed up, losing the audience in seconds. Joyce plugs everything together, white cells, lung membrane, the reptile — mammal division.
“God made us with all we need to resist disease.”
The jailing of Dr Fauci is discussed, a crowd favourite. The explicitly satanic nature of vaccination is explored. Later, not here, your correspondent will elaborate on how most of what this grifter-loony coalition has a grain of truth to it, but for the moment, as Dr Joyce went into her 30th minute, MC unable to stop her, it suffices to say that this is the first of these things I’ve been to, where some of the speakers were not merely conspiratorial but in the grip of psychosis.
The tunnels they obsess over, under Disney, the World Trade Center, Denver airport, are service tunnels. Quite possibly some underhanded stuff has gone on in them, but these folks think they were built by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum to transport abducted children to Jeffrey Epstein’s secret island. The spirit is ecstatic, joyful, voluptuous. The vast conspiracy has grown — the spirit of Q is everywhere but nowhere mentioned; some sort of ban has been applied no doubt — like a mad art project.
It is, at its root, something to do, that gives sense to lives passed by, in a country whose world status is in decline. Long hippie hair on the women, Creedence beards on the men. Thirty different ways of wearing the flag, but Easy Rider did it first. Some of these folks want Jesus to return in thunder, and some of them voted for McGovern. Hell, some of them campaigned for him. This is one place where the ’60s ends, the boomers’ last tailgate. A long, long trip in the Jefferson Airplane. Talking about the Trilateral Commission in the ’70s, and we still are. Just now it’s run by shapeshifting lizards. OK, the psychosis might be catching.
Many stream out with me, as Dr Joyce goes into injury time. I buy a guns flag from the concession guy, and we chat; he makes the mad gesture, finger twirling round the ear, as Dr Joyce talks of frogs and immortalist. I sense a carny type, just running a stand.
“Yeah, lot of crazy stuff today. Stolen election …”
“Oh man, the election was stolen.” The fake cobweb connection between us breaks. “You”d have to be crazy not to believe that!”
Tunnels within tunnels, chasing the white rabbit down the hole. Come blow the horn…
