Another day, another right-wing cabal dedicated to remaking the U.S. as a Christian talibanate. This ProPublica story, which appeared on Saturday morning, is likely to get lost in the post-Trump-shooting coverage.
This time it's a secretive group called Ziklag*, which limits its membership to very-high-net-worth people like the Uline, Hobby Lobby, and Jockey-brand billionaires.
ProPublica got access to a boatload of documents and emails showing the group's intent to use AI to challenge voter enrollments in "blue" states and mobilize Republican voters in swing states through and evangelical churches, particularly by using anti-trans talking points to whip up hysteria about "parental rights."
Which would all be worrisome, though within their First Amendment rights, but the thing that is outrageous is that Ziklag is a registered 501(c)(3) organization: a charitable nonprofit, not one that should be engaged in partisan electoral issues. Its $12 million in annual revenue (2022), which is all dedicated to this work, was tax-deductible to the billionaires and millionaires who donated it — so essentially subsidized by the rest of us whose rights they want to take away.
“They’re planning an election effort,” said Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division. “That’s not a 501(c)(3) activity.”
An important name in the article is Larry Wallnau, a "fiery preacher [who] is one of the most influential figures on the Christian right, experts say, a bridge between Christian nationalism and Trump." Another name: Cleta Mitchell**, whose work they're funding. She's a Trump attorney indicted in the Georgia elections case. Since 2021, Mitchell has been
working "in swing states...advocating for changes to voting rules and how elections are run.... [V]oting-rights experts have criticized [that work] for stoking unfounded fears about voter fraud and seeking to unfairly remove people from voting rolls.... Ziklag documents show that it provided funding to enable Mitchell to set up election integrity infrastructure in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin."
Mitchell's newest goal, using AI:
Secure 10,640 additional unique votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and remove up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
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* I don't care if the name Ziklag comes from the Bible, as the ProPublica story says: it sounds German and on first read it made me think it was a secret Nazi reference.
** I was going to write a post a while ago about Cleta Mitchell, based mostly on her Wikipedia page, but I never got around to it. (She fits within my fascination with people who are converts.) Suffice it to say that it appears as though she was a mainstream white feminist Democractic politician (from Oklahoma) until the late 1980s. At that point, her husband was investigated for bank fraud and later found guilty of five felonies. Mitchell is quoted in a Jane Mayer article as saying that convinced her "overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times." She registered as a Republican in 1996 and she's gone further off the rails ever since.
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