In the wake of Donald Trump’s conviction yesterday, far-right influencers have taken to Twitter to express their dismay—and desire for revenge. While some have simply urged Trump supporters to show their support at the ballot box in November, others have gone full apocalypse, urging retribution through thinly disguised calls for violence. Here are a few of the suggestions they have for standing up for their hero during his time of need.

First up: the more establishment wing of the MAGAverse. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) oozes with disgust over “the left’s smirking, pretentious little faces:”

A disgraceful moment for our country, when activism and emotion trampled longstanding judicial principles and standards. This case is ripe to be overturned on appeal, as it should be, and Donald Trump will be reelected in November. Ultimately this will blow up in the left’s…

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) May 30, 2024

Then, there’s Charlie Kirk, head of the conservative student movement group TurningPoint USA. On Thursday following the verdict, he tweeted this to his 2.9 million followers on X:

They rigged the trial to rig the election.

Make them pay.

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 30, 2024

Relentless Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who in 2022 was ordered to pay $1.5 billion dollars in damages to the families of the children slain during the 2012 massacre, plays his version of three-dimensional-conspiracist chess by claiming to his 2.3 million followers that calls for violence from Trump supporters are actually a “false flag” operation by Democrats.

Anonymous people on message boards are calling for violence. An investigation of the IP addresses would discover that leftist posing as Trump supporters are making the comments. False flag attacks emanating from the deep state are imminent. https://t.co/GGUyryITWm

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) May 31, 2024

From Jackson Hinkle, an extremist antisemite and white nationalist with 2.6 million followers on X, comes this suggestion:

Donald Trump must IMPRISON these three WAR CRIMINALS FOR LIFE when he is reelected.

Expose their financial crimes, sex crimes, murders & war crimes @realDonaldTrump! pic.twitter.com/CSJgRSkML6

— Jackson Hinkle (@jacksonhinklle) May 30, 2024

Looking at some actors with fewer followers but equal passions, we can start with Stew Peters, a former bounty hunter-turned-extremist-livestreamer. He took a break from spewing his usual antisemitic horrors by tweeting on Friday to his 596,000 followers on X a video he dug up of a guy ranting about the sheer injustice of Trump’s conviction. “We’re going to put Donald Trump in office, and we want him to lock you motherfuckers up and put a lot of you motherfuckers to death,” he fumes.  

The 937,000 followers of the far-right account The Vigilant Fox were gifted with the tweet of an admiring description of a video it produced of conservative pundit Megyn Kelley. “She compares the Democrats to a wolf that just ‘tasted blood’ and suggests the only way to stop a wolf from ‘coming back for more’ is ‘if he loses a limb of his own.’

NEW: Megyn Kelly suggests a reckoning is coming for Biden, Obama, and Clinton after Trump verdict.

“You just wait, and it won’t be Hunter Biden the next time. It’s going to be Joe Biden. It could potentially still be Barack Obama. It could still potentially be Hillary… pic.twitter.com/VCl9DxBKwL

— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) May 31, 2024

The religious right also had strong feelings they needed to express. Smash Baals is an account, with 47,000 followers associated with a group of far-right Christian Nationalist pastors. It urged followers—maybe one notable follower in particular?—to fly a flag bearing the slogan “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”

It’s time to hoist your colors. pic.twitter.com/d09nAeNiQe

— Smash Baals (@smashbaals) May 31, 2024

Lastly, let’s review a few reactions from a pair of brothers associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a growing, controversial evangelical movement whose adherents believe they are called to fight for the supremacy of Christianity in all aspects of life—and that includes the US government. One distinguishing feature of the New Apostolic Reformation is the belief that God speaks through modern-day prophets. Guess who Tim Sheets, who says he is an apostle and pastor in Middletown, Ohio, considers that modern-day prophet to be?

Friday
May 31, 2024

We decree an angelic whirlwind over the Ekklesia and ministry. And these angels and this anointing will be sent and released over this country and the nations to call things back to divine order. So be it. pic.twitter.com/SenVQfmdqz

— Tim Sheets (@TimDSheets) May 31, 2024

Tim is less well known than his brother, Dutch, another NAR apostle who gained notoriety recently when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag over his house. Dutch Sheets has frequently used the “Appeal to Heaven” phrase and symbols as a rallying cry for the ascendant Christian nationalist movement.

In a YouTube address to 340,000 followers on Friday titled “Stay Focused: God Will Have the Last Word,” Dutch Sheets said he had been “revisiting what I’ve been hearing from the Holy Spirit in the last several months.” He shared the dreams of several other prophets, which he said foretold the Trump verdict. “The fire and glory of God is coming to America—it will cleanse and it will empower,” he assured viewers. “It will tear down that which is evil, not us.”

On a recent Monday morning, 15 bleary-eyed high school seniors in Phoenix, Arizona, shuffled into English class, sat at tables that were arranged in a circle, put away their enormous water bottles, and settled down for the day’s lesson. Their teacher, a young man in a brown corduroy blazer, dispensed with housekeeping—the readings to do, the papers to write—and then he closed the tome in front of him, a paperback edition of the Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “Who is more honest,” he asked the class, “Miusov or Fyodor?”

There was silence while the students leafed through their books. One girl ventured that it was probably the wealthy patriarch Fyodor. Reading aloud a few lines, she said they showed that his cousin, another wealthy landowner named Miusov, who loathes Fyodor, withheld his own opinions about the monastery they were visiting— which wasn’t very honest in her opinion. A boy on the other side of the room didn’t agree. At the end of Chapter 1, Miusov says he’s only keeping his mouth shut because he knows that if he loses his temper he’ll say things he doesn’t mean. “So I think that he’s more honest,” he said, “because he’s aware of the fact that what he’s saying is not actually what he believes—he’s just not very good at controlling it when he’s angry.” Fyodor, on the other hand, was just more direct.

For the next half hour, the students eagerly debated, using evidence from the text to support their points. I was struck by how genuinely interested they seemed to be in wringing some broader lessons from the 19^th century masterpiece. No one covertly texted or slouched in the time-honored hoping-to-disappear adolescent posture. But maybe even more remarkably, no one was earnestly copying notes from a blackboard or asking how much the next paper would affect their final grade.

The senior year capstone class that I was observing was called Humane Letters—a two-hour-long seminar offered to high school students at Great Hearts North Phoenix, a K-12 public charter school whose mission is: “To cultivate the minds and hearts of students through the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.” To accomplish this goal, the school feeds students a steady diet of classic literature even before they are able to read. Kindergartners start off listening to Mr. Popper’s Penguins and The Velveteen Rabbit; by third grade, they’re reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on their own; by sixth grade, they’ve read most of the Narnia series and moved on to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Hobbit. From fourth grade on, all students study Latin, which comes in handy both for acquiring English vocabulary and delving deeper into philosophical texts in high school.

North Phoenix is one of 42 Great Hearts classical charter academies spread across several states, mostly in Arizona and Texas. Though individual lesson plans vary, all of them follow the same humanities-rich curriculum, emphasizing European and American history, Latin, and great books of the Western canon. There’s a certain nostalgic, almost anachronistic, formality to the schools: Uniforms (red tartan jumpers or kilts for girls, polos and khakis for boys at North Phoenix); desks in rows; children addressing adults as “ma’am” and “sir.” In music class, the students sing standards like “The Water is Wide;” in the early grades; students, in unison, recite phonics and math facts after their teacher. 

This style of schooling, with roots in ancient Greece, flourished for 2,500 years, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. Most Baby Boomers experienced some version of a classical education. Only after the political turmoil of the 1960s— and the postmodernist movement that rocked colleges in the 1970s and challenged the Enlightenment approach to knowledge and learning—did public schools begin to branch out. By the 1980s, American schoolchildren were learning in new ways—desks in rows gave way to group projects, memorization was out, and questioning authority was in. Classical education became rare in the United States, except in a handful of small colleges with erudite and eccentric reputations, such as St. John’s, with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe.

But, over the past several years, this ancient style of education has had a revival. The group largely responsible for its resurrection? Conservatives fed up with what they see as the excesses of educational progressivism: the prioritizing of anti-racist and LGBTQ-inclusive curricula over the rigors of academic learning in public schools. Those same culture warriors offer their version of K-12 classical education as a back-to-basics alternative. And it’s thriving: According to the school market research firm Arcadia Education, since 2019, enrollment in classical schools has grown at a yearly rate of nearly 5 percent. In the 2022-2023 school year, more than 677,000 students were enrolled in about 1,550 classical schools nationwide. Of those, 219 were public charter schools; the rest were private or religious schools.

Arcadia predicts that over the next decade, new classical charter schools will grow at a yearly rate of 5-7 percent, and by 2035, 1.4 million students—2.4 percent of school-aged children—will be enrolled in public and private classical schools. The classical education movement now has its own SAT alternative, as well as a peer-reviewed academic journal, called Principia; recent article titles include “How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education” and “Teaching Students to Feel Pleasure and Pain at the Wrong Thing: The History of Grades and Grading.” Since 2006, classical schools have received $75 million in federal charter school grants, according to a 2023 report by the public schools advocacy group Network for Public Education.  

Jon Valant, an education policy scholar and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, has observed the momentum behind the classical schools’ movement over the past few years. While there is nothing inherently conservative about classical education, he said, the political right has appeared to latch on to it as a way to “operationalize those views in a particular school model.” Today, the energy behind classical education comes from “conservatives who have a vision partly of what they want schools to look like, but really of what they don’t want schools to look like.”

With more than 25,000 students from diverse communities enrolled, Great Hearts is the largest of several classical charter chains. Perhaps the most controversial is the Barney Charter School Initiative with dozens of schools nationwide run by the ultra-conservative, Christian Hillsdale College. Other classical charter chains include Founders, with 23 schools in Texas and Arkansas, Classical Academies, with seven schools in California, and Valor, with five schools in Texas.

Part of the appeal of classical academies is how their academic rigor leads to high-achieving graduates. Great Hearts is no exception: In 2022, the school network reports, its average student scored 129 points above the national average on the SAT, and 78 percent of the 729 graduates earned college scholarships. The fact that 96 percent of the graduates go to college is, to the administrators, a nice perk, but not the ultimate goal, explained Brandon Crowe, a former Great Hearts history teacher who is now the superintendent for the network’s Arizona schools. “We want people to be full human beings,” he told me. The point of a class discussion like the one about the Brothers Karamazov is not to acquire vocabulary that might show up on the SAT, but to develop critical thinking skills so students will be able to unlock broader lessons about morality and an individual’s purpose in the world. “You go back to Shakespeare, and you see the heroes and the villains,” Maria Baier, Great Hearts’ vice president of external affairs and the parent of two of the school’s graduates, told me. “You learn that you’re really going to become a stronger better person if you do what is right.” Given that human beings will always have questions about their purpose in the world, timeless classics can offer timeless answers.

Yet in the midst of this vast curriculum of Western civilization, there are gaps. Here’s what students at classical academies don’t typically learn: much of anything about the experiences of people in other parts of the world. Though 40 percent of Great Hearts students are non-white, the schools’ reading lists do not include a single text from places that are not the United States and Europe. The only Black authors included are on the high school list: Martin Luther King, Jr., W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. Hillsdale’s classical charter schools’ reading lists also include almost exclusively white authors.

The most generous critics of classical schools accuse them of cultural myopia. The most strident see in them something more sinister: a covert goal of using the ever-more-permissive laws around charter schools to advance an agenda of conservative politics and Christian nationalism. The Network for Public Education report found that nearly half of the existing classical charter schools opened during the Trump administration. “The burgeoning crop of classical charter schools is often fueled by efforts to shape students to the school founders’ Christian nationalist worldview,” the authors wrote. This is not a completely paranoid construct—many classical schools do give off a certain whiff of churchiness. (Is that lion in the school crest of Tulsa Classical Academy supposed to be Aslan, C.S. Lewis’ Christ figure in The Chronicles of Narnia?) Some of the chains, including Great Hearts and Hillsdale, have strong connections to religious institutions, though spokespeople at both networks emphasized to me that their schools are strictly secular.

Educational policy has long been freighted by competing political agendas, but the classical education movement has become unusually charged. Some of the marketing materials seem designed to set themselves apart from the public schools they see as chaotic hotbeds of liberal indoctrination. Colorado’s Ascent classical schools promise “instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue in an orderly and disciplined environment.” Every day after the Pledge of Allegiance, North Carolina’s Roger Bacon Classical Academies’ students recite an oath to avoid “the stains of falsehood from the fascination with experts” and “over-reliance on rational argument.” Hillsdale’s president Larry P. Arnn said at a 2022 event that public school teachers come from the “dumbest parts of dumbest colleges.” In 2021, Kathleen O’Toole, Hillsdale’s assistant provost for K-12 education boasted that its history curriculum “was created by teachers and professors—not activists, not journalists, not bureaucrats.” In an email to Mother Jones, Hillsdale spokesperson Emily Davis clarified, “Dr. Arnn’s criticism was directed at many of the undergraduate and graduate programs that train teachers—not at the excellent teachers who are being done a disservice by these programs.”

Administrators at Great Hearts emphatically denies political bias. For example, the chief academic officer Jake Tawney said that the schools do not teach current events. “It’s something we have chosen not to do so that we can leave that divisiveness out of the classroom,” he told me, “and focus on that common experience that we’re trying to give them.” But that very avoidance of “divisiveness” in itself becomes a political statement. Great Hearts administrators once fired a teacher who wore a “Black Lives Matter” mask. Great Hearts’ Baier explained that the mask violated the dress code, which forbids teachers from wearing clothing with slogans. The schools do not allow student-led clubs, a policy many felt was an attempt to exclude clubs that would affirm LGBTQ identity. Until 2018, students were required to use the pronouns and bathroom associated with the gender to which they were assigned at birth.

About halfway through the discussion of the Brothers Karamazov that I observed, the class at Great Hearts still seemed divided on the question of the day. “Perhaps we should come up with a working definition of honesty,” the teacher said, pointing to a display on the wall that listed the Great Hearts virtues, of which honesty was number four. “It could be honest to withhold things that are unsavory,” he said. “But if you are thinking one thing and acting differently, then that would be dishonest.”

One of the first things that I noticed on my visit to Great Hearts was that for a public school, it seemed to have an awful lot of paintings of Jesus on the walls. Here, outside of a classroom, is Jesus with two cherubs; there he is in the hallway on his mother Mary’s lap; near a stairwell, he appears again, with St. John the Baptist and St. Peter. When I asked Crowe about this, he explained that these works were on display not because of their religious messages, but because they were great works of art by Raphael, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Albrecht Altdorfer. Indeed, the school also hung secular works—for example, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, and Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Those paintings are an example of one of classical education’s core values: It’s not enough to teach students how to learn, you also must teach them what to learn. This idea comes largely from the work of nonagenarian literary critic E.D. Hirsch. In his profoundly influential 1987 book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Hirsch argued that the achievement gap in education is actually a knowledge gap—low-income kids fall behind because they are missing key cultural references. If we teach children from poor families, say, who Sophocles was or how to rattle off a Robert Frost poem from memory, they’ll be on a more level playing field with children from wealthier families who, presumably, absorb this material through a kind of cultural osmosis.

Today, at 98, Hirsch still serves on the board of the nonprofit he founded in 1986, the Core Knowledge Foundation. The group produces a curriculum designed to equip children with that common reservoir of content that Hirsch believes is essential for success. Some 2.7 million students in 38,000 classrooms—including the students of Great Hearts—engage with parts of its curriculum (although that’s likely an undercount because one version is available as a free download). The group doesn’t track its users by style of schooling, Linda Bevilacqua, the group’s president, told me, but classical schools particularly appreciate the program “because there are poems by Keats, and Shakespeare—things that classical people that are focused on.”

Some of the group’s most popular materials are adaptations of literary classics—Shakespeare, Homer, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels—aimed at elementary and middle school children. Through early familiarity with the characters, themes, and famous scenes from the books that they consider foundational for literate citizens, Bevilacqua explained, the children will be equipped to understand the allusions to these works when they encounter them in the broader world. The goal, she told me, is “making sure all individuals are able to communicate with others—not just other people in your neighborhood. If you travel to New York or Florida, you should be able to talk to all people.” For Great Hearts, Christianity is part of that lingua franca: Even if students are not part of that faith community, given its dominance in American culture, fluency in its stories and symbols is necessary for basic, in the words of Hirsch, cultural literacy.

Yet Great Hearts’ connections to Christianity appear to go beyond simply promoting a passing familiarity with religious texts or showcasing masterpieces with religious iconography. Many current faculty members have graduated from Christian colleges; some current and past teachers and administrators have held positions in the local Catholic church and affiliated organizations. Last year, Great Hearts opened two new private Christian schools that promise to prepare students for “a lifetime of service to the Lord, the Church, our neighbors, and society.” While the Great Hearts charter schools say they are committed “to Socrates’ assertion that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’” the Great Hearts private schools, called Christos, hold that “Our knowledge of who we are is ultimately revealed in Christ.” While Christos schools charge about $10,000 in annual tuition, the schools encourage prospective families to use state vouchers to pay for most of the cost. “Through Arizona Empowerment Scholarships and/or tuition-tax credits, attendance at Great Hearts Christos will be within the reach of all families,” the website says.

In fact, when Great Hearts was created it was not supposed to be a public-school network at all. A 2012 video honoring one of the founders, John “Jack” Evans, describes how in the mid-1990s, Evans and his wife “began to dream of establishing a private, Catholic school in the classical liberal arts tradition.” Evans met the other men who would become the schools’ founders through their involvement with the Catholic student organization at Arizona State University.  Several members of the group, including Evans, were involved in a charismatic Catholic community called City of the Lord, the western offshoot of the Midwestern People of Praise movement that gained notoriety when one of its adherents, Amy Coney Barrett, was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Donald Trump. People of Praise had founded a network of Catholic schools that focused on Western civilization, and the Arizona group aimed to open a school based on that model.

But as the discussions evolved, Evans and his cofounders abandoned the idea of a private religious school. Instead, they decided to take advantage of the new charter school laws in the state that would allow them to run their school with public funding. To do that, says Robert Jackson, a former chief academic officer at Great Hearts, they had to “strip it of any kind of catechesis or any kind of Christian dimension and just focus on the core liberal arts offering.” In 1996, they founded Tempe Prep. Although no longer affiliated with Great Hearts, it was the model for the rest of the schools. Veritas Preparatory Academy, the first Great Hearts school, opened in a Phoenix church in 2003.

As the school grew, it forged strong ties with some prominent Arizona Republicans. Great Hearts co-founder and current board chair Jay Heiler was chief of staff to former Arizona governor Fife Symington; he went on to serve on the Arizona Board of Regents from 2012 to 2020 and as chairman of the Arizona Charter Schools Association around the same time. Erik Twist, who served as Great Hearts’ president from 2016-2022, is the brother of J.P. Twist, who was a policy adviser to Arizona’s Republican former governor, Doug Doucey. Steve Twist, Erik’s father, sits on the executive committee of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. Tucker Quayle, son of former US Vice President Dan Quayle, serves on Great Hearts’ board. Alan Sears, the CEO of the Arizona-based Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom—whose lawyers drafted the Mississippi abortion law that led to the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade—donates to Great Hearts.

No mention of the schools’ origin story and their overwhelmingly conservative Republican infrastructure appears on the Great Hearts website or marketing materials—so many prospective parents are unaware of it. Robert Chevaleau, a former Great Hearts parent who now lives in Northern California, liked what he saw when he toured Great Hearts North Phoenix in 2012, the year before his daughter was to enter kindergarten. Compared to the local public school Great Hearts struck Chevaleau as appealingly serious. “It had a really nice and nerdy quality to me,” he recalled. “Aristotle and Socrates and all that sort of thing.” The kids looked happy and orderly. His family applied for one of the slots and got onto the waitlist; when a spot opened up midway through their daughter’s kindergarten year, they pulled her from the local public school and enrolled her at Great Hearts.

Chevaleau’s daughter thrived for the next two years, and the family was looking forward to signing up their younger daughter. But then, in 2016, the school passed a policy that required trans students to identify with the gender they had been assigned at birth. This was a problem for the Chevaleaus: Their younger daughter, assigned male at birth, had come out to them as trans when she was three-and-a-half years old. The family had embraced her as a daughter ever since. Chevaleau couldn’t imagine her attending a school that required concealing her identity, so he asked the administrators if they might consider changing the policy. He recalls a school official telling him that Great Hearts wouldn’t do that until forced to by the US Supreme Court. Baier said Great Hearts “is unaware of who is said to have made such a statement.”

That level of rigidity didn’t comport with the values that Chevaleau thought Great Hearts espoused. How could a school committed to “the pursuit of truth” ask his daughter to lie about who she was? “I had bought into the marketing,” he told me. “If they were unwilling to change, even uninterested to listen, then I said, ‘Well, why is that?’” Chevaleau pulled his older daughter out of the school and enrolled both girls at the local public school, where the teachers and faculty affirmed his younger daughter’s identity. Great Hearts repealed its transgender policy in 2018 after significant public backlash; today, says Baier, the schools provide gender-neutral bathrooms and “work with families regarding how to address and care for their students.”

Aderet Parrino, a 2022 graduate from Great Hearts Arete Prep in Gilbert, Arizona, also experienced the school as unaccepting of LGBTQ students. Parrino recalls that although the uniform policy was strict, “everyone knew” who the queer students were. Now a second-year student at the University of San Francisco, Parrino is transmasculine and uses they/them pronouns, but in high school identified as a bisexual girl. “‘You look so gay’—that was just constantly what I heard in the halls,” they recalled, “so people would avoid me.”

When Parrino broached the idea of forming a club for LGBTQ students halfway through sophomore year, in early 2020, an administrator said the idea was “too controversial.” With the help of a former Great Hearts assistant principal named Melanie Young, who had quit in 2016 over the school’s transgender policy, Parrino worked on a presentation to bring to the school’s board of directors. In it, they argued that it was their right to form the club under the 1984 federal Equal Access Act, which protects public school students’ right to form extracurricular clubs. “The really ironic thing is that they taught me so well how to use rhetoric—that’s what ended up winning them over,” Parrino recalls. The board of directors approved the club. (Baier said current Great Hearts administrators were not aware of this incident.)

But before the first meeting, the school closed for the pandemic. The summer before junior year, Parrino received word from the school that all nonacademic clubs had been canceled. Instead, the school offered queer students sessions with the school therapist. Parrino held meetings anyway—over Zoom, and not during school hours. Now, Parrino advocates for queer students as a member of the University of San Francisco’s Senate Executive Board. The fight over the club at Great Hearts, they told me, “prepared me to do this work in a really meaningful way. And also, simultaneously, it was super shitty that I had to go through all of that to get to this place.” 

Not everyone agrees with Hirsch that filling brains with a reservoir of classics is the key to lifting children out of poverty. In his 1999 book The Disciplined Mind, Howard Gardner, a Harvard developmental psychologist who studies learning, called Hirsch’s educational philosophy “at best superficial and at worst anti-intellectual.” In 2015, Henry A. Giroux, a Canadian professor of English, told the New York Times he considered Hirsch’s educational philosophy “very deadly for what it means for students to learn and think creatively and critically.” What’s more, Hirsch’s list of essential knowledge all but ignores the fact that ours is a nation of immigrants who shape culture. 

Responding to these criticisms, over the years, Core Knowledge Foundation has integrated into its curriculum books that represent diverse voices—students read Native American folktales and history, for example; fourth graders read Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir Brown Girl Dreaming. Core Knowledge president Bevilacqua told me that initially, Hirsch expressed skepticism about some of the more contemporary additions. “When I talked to Dr. Hirsch, I said, ‘You need to think about the books that we’re picking now. These are going to be the classics, 20 years from now I’m convinced of it.’ And that seemed to be good logic as far as he was concerned.” The group doesn’t track which of these additions schools actually use. “Maybe they’re shaking their heads and saying, ‘What’s this Brown Girl Dreaming stuff?’ We can’t control for that.”

In February, I attended a virtual information session for Northwest Classical Academy, a Hillsdale school outside Atlanta. I popped a question into the chat: How does the school incorporate literature and history from non-Western cultures into the curriculum? The moderator informed me that the school prioritizes diversity—more than 40 percent of its students are non-white. “We do read books about Frederick Douglass or—I’m forgetting all the others,” she said. “That’s terrible. I’m spacing out. Well, even To Kill a Mockingbird and stuff.”

At Great Hearts, the bar is high for a new book to be added to the curriculum. A committee of faculty and administrators must determine that it not only has strong literary merit but also adds something to the reading list that no existing book does. Recently, administrators debated adding Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude to the 12^th grade curriculum. “I adore this book—I think it should be held in esteem among the best that’s been written,” Tawney, the chief academic officer, told me. But he didn’t consider it to be ag- appropriate. “And that was the thing we just had a hard time getting over.” Two young adult books that recently passed muster were Esperanza Rising, a historical fiction story written in 2000 and set in Depression-era Mexico and California, and Watership Down, a British 1972 adventure fantasy about a society of rabbits. Great Hearts spokesperson Maria Baier noted that in addition to the texts on the reading lists, students also read “works of Mexican origin, African folk tales, and significant works from Russian literature, which is neither European nor American in origin.”

Melanie Young, a former assistant principal at Great Hearts North Phoenix, told me the story of how in 2017, her daughter, then a Great Hearts seventh grader, tried to form an extracurricular book club focusing on works that weren’t in the curriculum—especially those by women and people of color. Young recalled school administrators telling her that if they allowed this club, what was to stop a student from forming a white supremacist club? Eventually, Young’s daughter prevailed, but only after she invoked the same piece of legislation, the Equal Access Act, that Parrino had when proposing a club for LGBTQ students before the pandemic.

Like Great Hearts, Hillsdale strongly denies its reading lists or curriculum contain any political agenda, but one of its recent initiatives suggests otherwise. In 2021, Hillsdale College launched a series of K-12 American history lessons called the 1776 Curriculum. The Hillsdale administrators who designed the program formally deny that it is a conservative alternative to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which explores the legacy of slavery through American history. However, the curriculum directs students to read President Trump’s 1776 Commission Report, which calls the 1619 Project “distorted history.” Hillsdale’s Arnn was the chair of the 1776 Commission.

Hillsdale’s charter schools use the curriculum, and so can anyone else—the lessons are available as free downloads. Kathleen O’Toole, assistant provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, said in a press conference about the curriculum. “It comes from years of studying America, its history, and its founding principles, not some slap-dash journalistic scheme to achieve a partisan political end through students.”

The 1776 Curriculum warns teachers that “a focus on questions of contemporary partisanship and political activism is not appropriate for a K-12 classroom.” Yet its 2,400 pages do seem to suggest some conservative bias. The stars are the Founding Fathers, whose vision is described with a reverence that borders on the religious. Even on the topic of slavery, we are reminded of their righteousness: “Many leading Founders, including those who held slaves, believed that the profitability of slavery was gradually but decisively waning, and that slavery would die out on its own in a relatively short period of time.”

Teachers are instructed to emphasize that the environmental movement is characterized by its “placement of environmental concerns always and absolutely above human concerns and the willingness to use government force to carry out such priorities.” Students are told to commit to memory a quote from Donald Trump’s address at Mt. Rushmore in 2020: “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that [they] were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies—all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”

Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer in American studies at Columbia University, is dismayed by the notion of classical schools advancing a political or religious agenda. He sees the value of liberal arts education not as an “instrument of conversion to any particular place, but as a way of empowering the student to reach their own conclusions and to develop and grow and explore.”

Which, as it happens, is exactly what happened to him. As a teenager growing up in a poor Dominican family in Queens, New York, Montás fished a book of Plato’s dialogues out of a trash can. This discovery changed the trajectory of his life. Intrigued by the ideas in the text, he threw himself into his studies in high school and secured a scholarship to attend Columbia University. There, great books of the Western tradition are part of the required core curriculum. He went on to earn his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, where he teaches today. 

Montás has many things in common with the leaders of Great Hearts and the other classical academies. Like them, he believes deeply in the transformational power of great books. Most importantly, he believes that everyone, regardless of race, class, and political affiliation, can and should have meaningful encounters with these texts, preferably in a classroom with a teacher trained in the Socratic method. To this end, Montás founded a summer program that brings New York City high school students from low-income families to Columbia for an intensive seminar on foundational texts.

The curriculum that Montás’ instructors use for the summer program—Socrates, Aristotle, Hobbes, the Founding Fathers— inevitably overlap with those of Great Hearts and Hillsdale. But in addition to those, there are others. An 1885 letter from a Chinese immigrant on the hypocrisy of the construction of the Statue of Liberty, for example, and civil rights activist Ella Baker’s seminal 1960 text on sit-ins. He wants students to understand, “Aristotle has one view, and Plato has a different one. And Marx has a different one. And Gandhi has a different one. And they are all in some way compelling and in some way illuminating.” In the 15 years since the program’s inception, nearly all of the graduates have gone on to graduate from college, with nearly half majoring in humanities.

A book, no matter how great, Montás says, “doesn’t tell you how to live.” Rather, “One of the big lessons of liberal education is that the character of the human good is fundamentally contestable.” The Brothers Karamazov does not hold the answers on how to live your life, he says, but how to search for meaning in life. This is not, he cautioned, the same as the postmodernist argument that there is no such thing as truth so it’s pointless to look for it. Rather, we can spend a lifetime trying to get closer to truth, and in the process, that very act of pursuit enriches us.

Montás’ approach seemed to me to be meaningfully different from that of Great Hearts. Down the hall from the class that I observed puzzling over honesty, another section wrestled with a different question about The Brothers Karamazov: Was the character Alyosha a realist or merely religious?

At first, the class seemed to be reaching a consensus that Alyosha, the protagonist of the story and the youngest of the brothers, was the latter but not the former. Several students pointed out, that the text said he believed in miracles. He also seemed given to literal interpretations of mystical religious stories, like one about an elder with healing powers, or a coffin that kept flying out of a church. “I feel like a realist wouldn’t necessarily have faith in those types of stories,” one girl said. “When I think realist, I think data—like they believe in what they can see.”

“I feel like you’re confusing the word ‘realist’ with ‘skeptic,’” another girl replied. It was possible, she said, to be both a realist and religious.

Maybe, someone suggested, the class should take a vote.

“Before we do that, I wanted to maybe rephrase something,” the teacher, a recent graduate of St. John’s College, said. If Alyosha sees that a holy man heals someone, and they’re healed, then “Is that not for him an objective fact?”

The students began to nod in agreement. “If you’re wholeheartedly in a religion, and you completely believe all the stories, then how is that different from his definition of realism?” a student asked.

“That’s the thing,” another student said. “I don’t think it is. I think it’s a both/and—together.”

The answer that the students were now arriving at seemed to be that for someone like Alyosha, for whom faith is the pillar around which the rest of life is constructed, religion informs absolutely everything. It is impossible to separate it from reality—and maybe even transgressive to try.

Despite Great Hearts’ leaders’ warnings against bringing current events into the discussion of great books, I found that I could not help but apply this discussion of The Brothers Karamazov to Great Hearts itself, and the new guard of classical charter schools more broadly. For many in the movement, Christian faith and conservative politics are not privately held beliefs or matters of opinion. Rather, they are objective truths. And failing to state these truths? Well, that would be like Miusov at the monastery: dishonest because of what he didn’t say.

“We believe that truth exists, and we must seek it relentlessly by disciplined study and good-willed conversation,” Great Hearts says in its mission statement. What it doesn’t specify is that many of its leaders have a very clear idea of what the truth is—and that their version leaves little room for those who may not share it.

Those efforts—of playing politics in public schools in the name of excising politics—has proved great preparation for its leaders’ current project: Railing against what they see as an antisemitic agenda in certain public schools, even as Moms for Liberty itself reels from allegations of antisemitism in its own ranks.

Earlier this week, leaders of several public school systems testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in the latest hearing on antisemitism in America’s educational institutions. High-up officials from New York City, Berkeley, CA, and Montgomery County, Maryland defended their schools against the allegations of Republican lawmakers. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) said they had “been accused of doing nothing and turning a blind eye” while students and teachers were “spewing Nazi propaganda” in the months since Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent siege in Gaza.

After the hearing, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice connected current concerns about antisemitic activism to one of the group’s most successful battle cries: That schools focus on left-wing politics at the expense of academics.

“Parents thought they were sending their kids to school to get an education, ‘ABCs. One, two, threes,'” Justice told the conservative news site Just the News. “And at some point, the schools started becoming factories for little activist social justice warriors.”

On X this week, the Moms for Liberty’s account reposted several tweets about antisemitism in schools. Among them: a Heritage Foundation leader’s post that accused school “DEI staff” of “promoting antisemitism”; a New Hampshire parent’s complaint about the inclusion of the slogan “From the River to the Sea” in a spring concert, and this post by right-wing gadfly Christopher Rufo:

This is Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver with Palestinian Liberation Organization militants in Algiers, 1969. They were holding a conference to strategize "decolonizing" the Third World, which could then serve as a model for "decolonizing" America.

Sound familiar? pic.twitter.com/3YSOdYv1rq

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) May 8, 2024

Yet Moms for Liberty itself has been accused of antisemitism. Last year, a chapter leader quoted Hitler in a newsletter to members. A Florida leader of the group advocated for banning from schools the holocaust memoir The Diary of Anne Frank. And the group has appeared at events with the Proud Boys, an extremist group that promotes antisemitic ideology.

During the hearing, some of the school administrators pointed out that same irony as it pertained to the Republicans who had convened the hearing. “If my colleagues cared about antisemitism,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), “they would condemn and denounce these comments from the leader of their party.”

The tour’s lead organizer is a Kennedy campaign staffer named Angela Stanton King, who brings her own experience to this fight for change. As her bio explains, “With a personal narrative of overcoming incarceration and championing prison reform, she has become a pivotal figure in advocating for justice.”

Here’s what her bio doesn’t say: Stanton King, who is 47, vociferously supported Donald Trump—until she was hired by RFK Jr.’s campaign as its Black outreach director, where she now works. On culture war issues, she has little in common with Kennedy: Stanton King has several times been the subject of media attention for her anti-gay and anti-trans activism, issues Kennedy doesn’t touch. A staunch opponent of abortion, she is the founder of Auntie Angie’s House, an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center and home for pregnant women and new mothers, while Kennedy has been generally pro-choice. But despite all that, Stanton King may be promising Kennedy something he desperately needs: an inroad with Black conservatives who are increasingly supporting Donald Trump—about 17 percent, according to a January poll.  

The idea that a member of America’s most famous Democratic family could lure Trump voters in this tight race may appear counterintuitive: Until recently, it was a foregone conclusion that Kennedy’s candidacy could only help Trump. Yet Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusading has curried favor with some on the right—and with Black conservatives, Kennedy may see an opportunity.  

And if he can appeal to those voters, Kennedy could potentially peel off Black conservatives from both parties, Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie told me. Gillespie, who studies politics in the Black community, noted that unlike white conservatives, Black conservatives sometimes still vote Democrat. Stanton King, said Gillespie, “could possibly attempt to make the claim that her conservative cachet could possibly pick off Republicans, and could possibly pick off some Democratic voters,” some of whom might have soured on Biden because of his support for Israel. Whether Stanton King will be able to deliver, though, is another question. “I think she’s completely full of it,” Gillespie said, “and [Kennedy] should be able to see right through it.”

After a childhood spent bouncing back and forth between Buffalo, New York, and the South, when she was a young adult, Angela Stanton settled in Atlanta—where she became involved in a car-theft racketeering scheme. She was convicted in 2004 and went on to serve two years in state prison. About a decade later, Stanton self-published a memoir called Lies of a Real Housewife: Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil, and alleged that Phaedra Parks, star of the reality TV series Real Housewives of Atlanta, had been part of the same criminal scheme for which Stanton had been convicted. (Parks later sued Stanton for defamation, though she eventually agreed to drop the lawsuit with prejudice.)

During that tumultuous time in her life, Stanton met Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an outspoken Trump supporter and prominent figure in Atlanta’s Black conservative community. “She looked at me as a child, a child that needed to be born again,” Stanton wrote in her 2018 memoir, Life of a Real Housewife: The Angela Stanton Story. King, she wrote, brought her in to help at the crisis pregnancy center and home for new mothers that she was running at the time. The work, which included formerly incarcerated women, was particularly meaningful to Stanton because she had been chained to a bed in prison while giving birth to one of her daughters. King became her mentor and godmother, and Angela Stanton went on to change her name to Angela Stanton King.

In 2020, President Trump officially pardoned Stanton King, saying in a statement that she “works tirelessly to improve reentry outcomes for people returning to their communities upon release from prison, focusing on the critical role of families in the process. This pardon is supported by Alveda King.”

Later that year, Stanton King used the momentum from Trump’s pardon to launch a run for the Georgia congressional seat once held by legendary civil rights leader John Lewis who had recently died of pancreatic cancer. Stanton King’s campaign manager was Trevian Kutti, who had once served as the publicist for Kanye West and would later go on to be charged with Donald Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. In an interview about her campaign with the Guardian, Stanton King denied allegations that she was an adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory. When the reporter confronted her with a tweet she had made referencing the debunked QAnon rumor that the furniture company Wayfair was trafficking children, she responded, “You know they are. You saw it. You watched the news just like I did.”

Stanton King lost in a landslide to her Democratic opponent, Nikema Williams. But just a month later, as the Covid vaccines were about to be rolled out, Stanton King discovered a new cause. In December 2020, she made an appearance at an Atlanta conference hosted by America’s Frontline Doctors, the right-wing physicians’ group that promoted conspiracy theories about the pandemic. The presenters—who included the group’s founder, January 6 insurrectionist Simone Gold—warned the crowd that the US government was using the Black community as guinea pigs for the vaccine. This was an especially potent accusation given the long and troubled relationship between the Black community and the mainstream medical establishment.

Stanton King saw an opportunity and in 2022, with her organization, the American King Foundation, she announced a new initiative called Stop Medical Apartheid to oppose “the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans.” In a press release, Stanton King wrote, “Medical Apartheid is Population Control. Population Control comes in different forms; Vaccines, Abortions, Mass Incarceration, and Perverted Sexual Agendas targeting children. Population Control is Racist! From the WOMB to the TOMB, it’s time Y’all!”

That same year, Stanton King spoke at the Defeat the Mandates rally in Los Angeles, an anti-vaccine event sponsored by a group of activists who also organized the anti-vaccine trucker convo. The lineup also included representatives from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s organization, Children’s Health Defense. In a sprawling speech, Stanton King thundered against vaccine mandates—but also touched on abortion (“lynching Black babies in the womb”) and transgender rights. “I’m only 45 years young, and I’ve only naturally birthed and naturally raised five children, and I say ‘naturally’ because I raised my boys to be boys and my girls to be girls,” she told the crowd, to thunderous applause.

Stanton King elaborated on that statement in a 2022 appearance on the TV talk show Dr. Phil, telling the in-studio audience that she would never accept her trans daughter’s gender identity. “I believe that it may be a form of mental illness,” she said “It’s not just that he was born male—he is a male.” Dr. Phil pushed back—and afterward, on Instagram, she posted a video of herself ranting about the show and trans people. “If you were supposed to be a woman, you wouldn’t have to go and have surgeries to get titties put on your breasts, you would already be born with them,” she yelled. “If you were a woman, you wouldn’t be born with a dick, you wouldn’t have to go get your dick cut off.” (Kennedy’s campaign didn’t respond to an emailed question about his response to these comments and his stance on transgender rights, or to any of the other questions I sent. Stanton King didn’t respond to my questions, either.)

Throughout her anti-vaccine and anti-trans crusading, Stanton King continued to support Trump in media appearances. “Trump can’t be President forever and I know that,” she tweeted in 2021. “But he’s the only one bold enough to fight these evil Demonic Satanic forces from the pits of HELL and I’m standing with him.”

But in late 2023, her alliances shifted. In a Twitter spaces event in late April, she said she had soured on the Trump campaign after the former president’s team declined to visit and support Auntie Angie’s House. So she reached out to Kennedy, whom she had met at the Defeat the Mandates rally in 2022, through her “really good friend,” Capitol insurrectionist Simone Gold. “He came by, and he sat down, and he talked to us for about an hour and a half,” she recalled. “And when he left that day, his perspective on abortion had changed.” 

A few months later, when Kennedy asked her to work for his campaign, she was conflicted. “I did not want my relationship with Trump to be ruined,” she said in the Twitter Spaces event. Yet she had repeatedly reached out to the Trump campaign asking for a job, to no avail. “People were telling me to remember where I came from and I was nothing until Trump gave me a party and it was making it seem like because I got a pardon for Trump that you know, I wasn’t valid enough to have a paid position.” So she accepted Kennedy’s offer. By January of this year, Stanton King was knocking on doors with Kennedy in Atlanta’s historically Black West End neighborhood. 

Kennedy, meanwhile, has confirmed that Stanton King’s thinking on abortion has influenced his own. While he has consistently stated that he believes that women should be able to choose abortion at any point in their pregnancies, in a recent appearance on the conservative talk show The Daily Wire, he told the story of his visit to Auntie Angie’s House. “I talked to some mothers in the last couple of weeks in Atlanta, Georgia, in this facility where I’ve been repeatedly back to—Angie’s House, run by Angela Stanton King, who is kind of a relative of Martin Luther King’s family,” he said. “She takes care of women who are being pressured to have abortions because they don’t have the money to take care of the baby, and I don’t think that that should ever be a reason in this country for a woman not carrying her child.”

Stanton King still seems conflicted about the former president. In the Twitter Spaces event, she said she blames her frustrations on “his gatekeepers,” not Trump himself. “I actually still support President Trump,” she said. “I just don’t work for him.” In April, in a since-deleted tweet, she attacked Diante Johnson, a Trump supporter and leader of the Black Conservative Federation, calling him “an open flaming Feminine closet Gay.” In another recent tweet she thundered, “Republicans think I’m helping RFK to help Trump. I have no regrets, but there’s no way on God’s green earth I’d support a party that turned their backs on Black Women & Babies while facing a Black Maternal Health Crisis. Who has their head that far up Trump’s ass cause it AINT me.”

This weekend, Stanton King’s New Dawn for Justice Tour is scheduled to make a stop at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. In an email to Mother Jones, a spokesperson for the King Center, the King family legacy nonprofit that runs the museum at the site, clarified that it “is not in any way affiliated with this event”—it will take place entirely outside in the area that is public space.  

Will Stanton King’s imprimatur on the Kennedy campaign be enough to draw Black voters? Emory’s Gillespie doesn’t think so. She pointed to Stanton King’s failed run for Congress in 2020, when her Democratic opponent, Nikema Williams, won with 85 percent of the vote. “I think there may be a question of how deep her networks are—like, how influential could she possibly be in some of these communities?” Which, she said, made her wonder about Kennedy’s discernment. “What does this say about your judgment to put the administration together?”

Stanton King says she has big plans for the Kennedy administration. In her Twitter Spaces event in April, she spoke of “a vision that God gave me” in which there is “an Auntie Angie’s House in every Black community that has Planned Parenthood.” She said she was working with Kennedy on a policy, called More Choice, More Life, to make this vision a reality. “I’m so thankful that Bobby and his team are shedding light on what we’re doing.”

Yet the growing tension between Owens and Shapiro was more than just a more than just a foreign policy disagreement. Like many on the far right, Owens has ratcheted up her antisemitic rhetoric over the past few months. In a recent episode of her show, she said, “What if what is happening right now in Hollywood is there is just a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism? It’s food for thought, right?” On X, she liked a post that referenced the centuries-old blood-libel antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews drink the blood of Christian children. The author of the post that Owens liked had asked a rabbi, “Are you drunk on Christian blood again?”

Owens is hardly a fringe lunatic—she has 4.8 million followers on X alone. Had a celebrity made these remarks just six months ago, there likely would have been a much louder outcry. But as it was, after she made the incendiary comments on her show, there only was an article in the Jerusalem Post and an opinion piece from the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Other than that, it seemed hardly anyone noticed. 

But why? In part, it’s because of a broader normalization on the far right of vitriol against Jewish people. As I wrote back in January, a main driver of this is the popular live-streamer Stew Peters:

In the past few weeks, though, Peters has dispensed with the euphemisms, instead leveling his accusations against “the Jews.” On a segment on his show last week, for example, he argued in a passionate diatribe that the United States was controlled by Jewish people. “Every institution in this country is led by somebody who claims to be a Jew,” Peters ranted to more than half a million Rumble viewers. “Are they practicing Jews? No, of course they’re not. They hide behind the Jew label so that they can get people like Elon Musk to kick me off of X for saying that they’re a Jew.” (Peters’ account has not been removed from X.)

Since then, Peters’ hate speech has only become more fervent. In addition to antisemitic statements, he has also posted slurs against people from India to his nearly 570,000 followers on X:

If you like brushing your teeth with cow shit and being gang-raped, India is the perfect destination for you.

If you don’t like either of these things, too bad, bc these people are legally invading us anyway. pic.twitter.com/IrAB1SVYsG

— Stew Peters (@realstewpeters) March 12, 2024

And Peters isn’t the only one spewing hatred against Jews. Media Matters reported that earlier this month, anti-Muslim pundit Frank Gaffney called Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) a “court Jew” and said he “was sent out to Kosher-ize, if you will, the Biden team’s antipathy towards Israel.” Meanwhile, far-right activist Laura Loomer said last month on her Rumble show, “It’s always the Jews, right?… So many rich Jews have a fixation on trying to destroy America.”

Owens, Peters, and their sympathizers are tricky to call out because they frame their hate speech as a reaction to the genuine horror of Israel’s ongoing siege of Palestine. But pro-Palestine activists have gone to great lengths to distinguish their work from far-right antisemitism. In October, when Peters just was beginning to ramp up his antisemitic extremism, I spoke to Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director for the Jewish Voice for Peace, a group of Jewish activists who oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestine. She described Peters and his ilk as “white nationalists with a racist agenda trying to curry favor by peddling vile forms of antisemitic trash.” She added, “We know that it’s actually not about any real care or concern for Palestinians or Jews or Israelis.”

But some Atlantans who had taken to the streets for the previous year’s demonstrations over the police murder of George Floyd didn’t think Atlanta needed any more cops—no matter how well trained. Protesters quickly mobilized against the project, dubbing it “Cop City” and describing it in very different terms. The facility would “allow police not just from Atlanta, but globally, to learn repressive tactics, so that protests and rebellions can be easily crushed,” warned the American Friends Service Committee. Other critics worry about the environmental impact of the facility—the woods for its proposed location are one of four forests called the “lungs of Atlanta.” Nonetheless, the construction began, with the first phase set to open two years later.

Then, in 2023, Georgia state troopers killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an activist known as Tortuguita, who had taken up residence at the planned facility’s wooded site hoping to block construction. Outraged by Tortuguita’s death, organizers supercharged efforts to put the project up for a voter referendum in the fall. More radical protesters allegedly have damaged construction equipment and thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at police cars; 42 are currently facing state domestic terrorism charges. In August, 61 opponents of the project were indicted under Georgia’s RICO law—the same broad anti-racketeering measure behind Trump’s Fulton county election interference case.

The protesters, meanwhile, have doubled down, sending teams out to collect signatures for the ballot measure, chartering buses to pack events, and hiring lawyers to defend those facing charges. This kind of activism doesn’t come cheap—but luckily for the protesters, they have a deep-pocketed ally: Fergie Chambers, a 39-year-old self-proclaimed communist with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Chambers’ wealth comes from his father’s family’s company, Cox Enterprises, a global conglomerate with automotive and media holdings, including AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cox TV, the political site Axios, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With a fortune of some $26.8 billion, the Cox family, a powerful force in Atlanta philanthropy, made the second-largest contribution in 2022 toward the training facility, with their foundation providing $10 million of a planned $60 million in private funding. (Georgia taxpayers are putting up $31 million.)  

In contrast, Chambers estimates he’s donated “a couple million dollars” in the last year to groups opposing the very facility that high-profile members of his family want to be built. Not only has he financially supported signature gathering for the referendum, he’s sponsored buses to shuttle protesters to the site, and contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to funds that paid for bail and lawyers for those who had been arrested.

While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’ October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me.

Because of these extremist views, Chambers’ generous funding of Cop City protests has repercussions beyond the training facility itself. Some Atlanta Democrats worry that his views, along with what they see as increasingly belligerent tactics by the protesters he funds, could alienate the suburban voters who helped Georgia flip the Senate blue in 2020. A poll last year showed that a majority of the state’s voters—and 43 percent of Democrats—support the facility.

Last fall, former Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, a Democrat who represented a metro Atlanta district from 2021 to 2023, wrote an op-ed in the Journal-Constitution: “Certainly, from my suburban vantage point, it looks like downtown progressive activists, supported and funded by national activists and donors, are going crazy over a well-intentioned effort,” she wrote. When I spoke with her, she said she worried that property-destroying protesters were a bad look. “No one should be subjected to police brutality—hard stop,” she wrote to me in an email. But “most moderate Democratic voters of my acquaintance don’t even understand why on earth this facility would generate such ferocious protest…better training would seem to be a solution to problem of police brutality.”

Bill Torpy, a veteran columnist for the Journal-Constitution, put a finer point on it: The “kind of rhetoric” from the most strident protesters, he said, “is something that might get Trump reelected.”

But opponents of the facility I spoke with dismissed those concerns. “I think it’s a good thing that Cop City is causing increased polarization and fracturing amongst Democrats and so-called progressive politicians” who are “more concerned with their bank accounts than they are with doing what is actually right,” argued Sam Beard, an organizer of a group called Block Cop City. Similarly, veteran Atlanta organizer Kamau Franklin told me he thinks the facility “should be a wedge issue because establishment Democrats have not sided with the people when it comes to issues of cops and capitalism. Establishment Democrats are on the same side as right-wing Republicans.”

If Chambers’ rhetoric and politics are brash and unapologetic, when he speaks about his early years, he’s different—tortured, bashful, almost self-loathing. “It was very typical—sort of nepo-baby or, like, rich kid journey to find oneself,” he told me during our first phone call.

While the Coxes have shaped Atlanta for generations, Chambers was raised in Brooklyn, where his father felt more at home with the Patagonia-clad upper crust of the Northeast than his family’s Southern opulence. So Chambers’ exposure to Georgia as a child was limited to yearly visits to his grandmother’s house in the tony neighborhood of Buckhead. Her “crazy fancy” home was a showier version of wealth, he recalls, than the brownstones-and-progressive-private-school version in Brooklyn. He recalls thinking of Atlanta as a “weird oasis of ultra-elite people.” Chambers grew to feel uncomfortable around them, in part, he says, because of his troubled life at home. As a teenager, he got into drugs, which led to run-ins with police.  

It wasn’t until Chambers was in his 20s—recently married, a Bard College dropout, and “going through a Christian phase”—that he relocated to Atlanta to attempt a conventional life. He moved to the middle-class suburb of Smyrna and took a job training managers at his family’s vehicle auction company, Manheim. By the time he was 25, he had three children. Though his role at the company was decidedly white collar, “I was friends with a lot of regular, truly working-class guys,” he said. “I related to that and wanted to fit into that.” As he told me about this chapter of his life, Chambers seemed eager to head off any accusations of slumming it. “I’m not trying to claim some class identity that I don’t have,” he said. “I’m just talking about the social environments that I’ve been in.”  

Working at the plant rubbed him the wrong way—he was unsettled by the power dynamic between the white managers and the mostly Black workers and appalled by the low wages and the “incredibly poor conditions the lowest ranks of workers had.” Then, the 2008 recession hit, and the company laid off thousands of workers, yet “there was still revenue in the billions,” he recalled. “I hated it—I hated the whole thing.”

Disillusioned, Chambers left Georgia later that year. For a few months, he made a half-hearted attempt to finish his degree at Bard but then decided to move his family to Russia, where his wife was born and still had family. Surrounded by a new culture, Chambers became enthralled and dove into learning everything he could about the country and its politics. He decided to try to finish his degree at Bard, returned with his wife to upstate New York, and threw himself into working out and learning more about radical leftist movements.

In 2012, Chambers was summoned to Atlanta for his grandmother’s 90th birthday, and during the trip, he met a guy selling two gyms, one in the city, and one in the Northern suburb of Alpharetta. Impulsively, Chambers bought them and relocated to Atlanta again, commuting between the two gyms. At the Alpharetta location, he remembered that one of his trainers was a “bored, wealthy housewife” who aspired to open a gym. Her name was Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a Republican member of Congress representing Georgia. At that time, Chambers recalled, Greene wanted to become “an important person in the world of CrossFit.” When I asked Rep. Greene’s office about Chambers’ account, a spokesperson responded, “We aren’t participating in any article written by Mother Jones, but for clarity, I can not confirm because it’s not true whatsoever and you should refrain from printing any nonsense about Congresswoman Greene from this avowed Communist.”

Chambers’ first few months back in Atlanta were tumultuous: He got divorced, began using drugs again, became involved with another woman, got sober, married the other woman, and opened a coffee shop in the upscale enclave of Virginia Highland with his new wife. Nearby, in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of East Atlanta Village, he opened a new gym, which he advertised as “a radically aligned, left-friendly gym and community.” A posted sign offered something of an ethos: “Do whatever the fuck you want, correctly, except CrossFit cultism. No fucking cops.”

But he was making inroads with the city’s radicals—especially the police abolitionists. In 2014, he traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the police shooting of Michael Brown. The trip was another turning point—and it coincided with a family transaction that, he said, took his own fortunes from “theoretically wealthy” to “immediately wealthy,” in the “single digit millions of dollars.” But Atlanta, Chambers told me, was “a difficult place to organize, because there was a really strong Democratic Party mechanism there,” he told me. “It just felt like dancing around with these NGOs.” He discovered that several of the racial justice groups he had been working with had ties to the Democrats, so he abandoned the mainstream groups and began to offer direct support to activists.

During the next seven years, Chambers got divorced again and started a commune in the Berkshires, but he stayed in touch with his police abolition friends in Atlanta. In 2021, shortly after Bottoms announced plans for the police facility, Chambers learned of the need for funds to mount a robust protest. He gave generously—first in the tens of thousands, and then in the hundreds. “It was unbelievable to people—in the wake of a pretty strong decade of anti-police sentiment growing especially in Atlanta—that then this would be dropped on the city,” he said. “They were demolishing a forest—that was just totally insane.”

Despite his contributions, it wasn’t easy mobilizing opposition to the facility. Specifically, Chambers saw Atlanta’s Black Democrat centrists—such as former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Sen. Raphael Warnock—as barriers to progress. “I understand how the Black radical community views them,” Chambers told me. “You know, advancing the white corporate agenda of [Atlanta’s wealthy] North Side.” In 2021, Reed told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I support the development of a best-in-class training facility for our police officers, but I have not made a judgment on where it should be located.” Last year, Sen. Warnock criticized the protesters who destroyed property. 

If the protesters were going to win, they needed more people on their side. And if they wanted more people, they needed more money. So, Chambers decided to do something he had been contemplating for a while: Last July, he struck a deal with his family. Instead of inheriting a vast portfolio of investments, he received $250 million and will get more in the coming years—he declined to say how much or exactly when. Some of his money, he said, is in irrevocable trusts, so he can’t personally access it—but it’s designated to go toward the causes he cares about, including protesting the facility in Atlanta. Chambers sees his divestment as an act of protest—against capitalism, yes, but also against his own family’s elitism and greed. “I was ready to let go of whatever illusions I had about doing anything else with myself,” he said, “except trying to be of service to destroying the thing that had created me.”

If Atlanta’s police and political powers have their way, Cop City will be finished by the end of this year. They appear undeterred by the protesters, except for occasional complaints about the inconvenience and expense they’ve caused. In January, city officials said 23 acts of arson had taken place at the site, resulting in a $20 million rise in costs, which they promised would not be passed on to taxpayers.

The leaders of the protests claim that they’ve collected 116,000 signatures, nearly double the number they needed to bring the facility before voters as a ballot initiative. But a December analysis by four Atlanta news outlets found that as many as half of those signatures could be invalid—one signature that they found, for example, was that of “Lord Jesus” with the address of “homeless.” In February, the Atlanta City Council voted to start an official count of the signatures, which will determine the fate of the proposed ballot measure.

On X these days, Chambers is prolific, musing in rapid-fire style about Palestine, the war in Ukraine, his recent conversion to Islam, and, of course, Cop City. On the January anniversary of the killing he posted that because they supported the project, “my family, the Cox family, continues to have Tortuguita’s blood on their hands.”

Recently, he’s also been mocking those who suggest that Democrats must unite behind Biden to defeat Trump. “Why any of you ever put ANY faith in liberals continues to be beyond me,” he posted in January. As he later added, “The Democrat base is about as uncritical as any political bloc, ever…Thank God that base is aging out of relevance.” In Georgia, recent polls predict a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election.

Bipartisan politics, Cop City, Palestine, Russia—one gets the sense that for Chambers and many of those he supports, these are all a single cause. When I spoke to Franklin, the community organizer whose demonstrations against the facility Chambers has funded, he offered similar context, telling me that his fellow protesters “see Cop City in terms of the connection that police here in the United States have with the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli policing agency” and “US imperialism driving towards Russia’s border or using Ukraine as a proxy for that.”

But when we spoke, other, more personal issues demanded his immediate attention. When I asked him in December if I could join him at an Atlanta protest event sometime, he told me that would be unlikely; he had moved to Tunisia. “I just needed to take a break,” he told me. “Elements of people who call themselves the left and the state want to come after me.”

I asked him what was next with the protest movement. He didn’t know, he said. “What if there’s a scandal that we don’t know about?” he wondered aloud, hoping that a political curveball could kill the project. But mostly, he just seemed overwhelmed with the magnitude of his recent inheritance. “Nobody’s used to operating with this scale of resources and, like, how to use it strategically—I need to create different trusts and, like, donor-advised funds.” He sighed anxiously. “I don’t understand this shit.”

In March, when we spoke again, he was still in Tunisia; he had gotten married again the previous month, this time to the mother of his fourth child. He told me that the Cop City organizing had slowed, mostly because he is devoting more time and money to Palestine, as are many of the other activists he works with. There are, he said, “definitely murmurings of the FBI looking at me.” Still, he said he plans to keep supporting the protesters and their legal defense, to the tune of still more millions of dollars if necessary. “They’ll have really significant costs that are going to come up because it’s going to be a fairly drawn-out thing,” he said. “I know we’re going do something considerable.”

First, we travel with Reveal’s Nina Martin to New Mexico’s rural Otero County, where a recent hospital merger has upended the landscape of reproductive care. Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center used to be where people in the county could go to access abortion, birth control, and gender-affirming services. But when the hospital merged with a Catholic health care system out of Texas, CHRISTUS Health, it had to begin following the rules of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. Written by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the doctrine limits or bans a reproductive services, including birth control, sterilization, abortion and gender-affirming care.

The second segment of the episode takes place in the town of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the site of the hospital merger. Martin discovers how the new Catholic rules at the hospital are affecting patients. She interviews experts about how those same rules affect care at other Catholic hospitals nationwide. 

Lastly, Laura C. Morel profiles Kelly Flynn, a physician whose clinics in North Carolina and Florida used to provide abortions to patients from all over the South. That was before the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. Now, the rules are changing: North Carolina prohibits abortions after 12 weeks’ gestation, and Florida is considering a 6-week ban. In light of these tightening restrictions, Flynn has decided to open a new clinic in Virginia so that she can keep offering the reproductive health care that has become increasingly difficult to get. 

The decision spurred a raft of outraged coverage. In an op-ed, the LA Times called it “breathtakingly arrogant, slapdash and pernicious.” The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus began her column, “Welcome to the theocracy.” In a New York Times op-ed, political pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote, “As a result of the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision…the hope and miracles that I was blessed to experience are at risk for families whose clinics have suspended treatments.”

To many, the basic premise underlying the Alabama decision seemed contradictory: Don’t anti-abortion activists want people to have more babies? In theory, yes—yet paradoxically, the ruling was the result of a decades-long crusade against fertility treatments mounted by the same people who oppose access to abortion. 

Much of the current furor over fertility treatments stems from a 1987 Vatican teaching of the Catholic church, which prohibited Catholics from using the then-nascent technique of IVF. “The practice of keeping alive human embryos in vivo or in vitro for experimental or commercial purposes is totally opposed to human dignity,” the Vatican officials wrote. In particular, the guidance objected to the creation of extra embryos that could wind up being discarded—a common practice in IVF, because of the inherent inefficiency of human reproduction: Many embryos aren’t viable, so the more that are available, the greater the chances for a successful pregnancy.

In the years since that declaration, assisted reproduction technology both advanced and became more popular; today about 2 percent of babies are born via IVF. Meanwhile, Catholic doctors began to market what they believed were morally acceptable “alternatives.” One of them was Thomas Hilgers, who developed a practice called NaProTechnology, which promises success rates better than those of IVF to women who track their periods and in some cases take medication and undergo surgery. As I have reported, there is no robust evidence backing Hilgers’ method, yet Catholic hospitals and medical groups continue to promote it.  

Around the same time that Hilgers was building his NaProTechnology practice, anti-abortion activists set their sights on the extra embryos that remain frozen after IVF patients complete their families. In 1997, Ron Stoddart, the head of a Christian adoption agency called Nightlight, founded Snowflakes, a group that matched unused frozen embryos with families wanting children. Beginning in 2002, Snowflakes received funding from President George W. Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services as part of the federal government’s Embryo Adoption Awareness Campaign; though that program was halted in 2013, it was restarted under the Trump Administration and now gives out $1 million in grants every year to several embryo adoption agencies.

Members of mainstream Protestant churches haven’t always agreed with Catholics that assisted reproduction is morally wrong. But, in recent years, evangelical anti-abortion activists have taken up the crusade against IVF. “I’m very connected with a lot of pro-lifers who have had their eyes opened to how IVF violates the rights of children, their right to life,” one activist told Christianity Today a month before the Alabama Court’s ruling. “I think a lot of it is they just didn’t know before, but once you know, you don’t unsee it.” In the same article, a researcher for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation said she had “observed a shift” among Protestant church leaders who are “beginning to reexamine the moral and theological concerns related to IVF.”

As more Christians have come out against IVF, they also have begun to oppose assisted reproductive techniques that can begin even before sperm meets egg, such as egg and sperm donation and surrogacy. Recently, the anti-abortion movement appears to be mobilizing against surrogacy, the practice wherein someone enlists another person to carry and birth their baby, either by transferring an embryo to the surrogate or using intrauterine insemination with a prospective parent’s sperm and the surrogate’s own eggs.  Last month, Pope Francis strongly condemned surrogacy. “I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child,” the Pope said. “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”  

Candace Owens, the Black conservative Christian commentator, also devoted an episode of her podcast to surrogacy and IVF, which aired on YouTube in 2022 to 2.8 million followers. “The bodies of these surrogates are inclined to reject the pregnancies,” she said. (There is no evidence to support this claim.) Allie Beth Stuckey, a Christian conservative influencer with 436,000 YouTube followers, has been outspoken on this subject. On a recent episode of her show, “No Good Surrogacies: A Surrogacy Baby Speaks Out,” Stuckey interviewed a woman born via surrogacy who resented her parents’ choice. “In surrogacy, you’re purposely creating motherless and fatherless children,” said Stuckey, “and egg selling and sperm selling, it’s the same kind of thing.”

The hostility of many of these activists is motivated by their perception of assisted reproduction as a threat to traditional family structures—largely because the techniques can help LGBTQ people form families. Last month, Owens posted a Facebook video in which she claimed that IVF is “attracting a lot of wealthy lesbians, a lot of gay people, who are using it and creating designer children.” In a December post on X, far-right live streamer Stew Peters called a gay male couple who had a baby through surrogacy “the latest gay couple to steal a baby through the ‘rent-a-womb’ child trafficking racket.” That same month, Matt Walsh, host of the conservative show The Daily Wire, spoke out against LGBTQ couples using IVF. “The child will be deprived of what he needs, which is both a mother and a father, so that the gay couple can get what they want,” he said.

Should the couple struggling to have a baby be heterosexual, however, activists often recommend dubious treatments. Just as the anti-abortion industry has capitalized on misinformation about hormonal birth control promoted by wellness influencers, it has also leveraged the work of fertility influencers who hawk supplements, diets, detoxes, exercise routines, massage, monitors, and mindfulness. Despite a lack of evidence that these treatments help people get pregnant, anti-abortion groups have endorsed them.

Take the American Pregnancy Association, a website that purports to be a neutral source of information about human reproduction but is actually the project of anti-abortion activists. In its section on IVF, the group promotes its fertility guide, which includes links to purchase supplements, lubricants, and fertility monitors—but never mentions assisted reproduction. Modern Fertility Care, an anti-abortion fertility practice that says its practitioners share a “passion for quality women’s health, marriage, and human dignity,” promotes the work of wellness influencer Jolene Brighten, who sells “adrenal support” supplements for people who have had a miscarriage. Natural Womanhood, a group that calls itself a “health literacy program” but also has ties to anti-abortion groups, promotes practitioners of NaProTechnology to its 14,000 Facebook followers.

Anti-abortion activists have been building this momentum in their campaign against assisted reproduction for years, while the reproductive rights movement has done little to counter it. So focused have pro-choice groups been on the work of preserving access to abortion—especially since the US Supreme Court overturned abortion rights with its Dobbs decision in 2022—there appears to be little energy left to fight for the prospective parents’ rights to treat their infertility. Major reproductive rights groups support assisted reproduction, but few of them have programs specifically dedicated to advocacy around access to the technologies. Assisted reproduction remains loosely regulated, not covered by most insurance, and outrageously expensive: The cost of a single cycle of IVF ranges from $15,000 to $30,000.

The Alabama decision will almost certainly end up in the US Supreme Court, where it is likely to meet some sympathetic justices. If they were to outlaw IVF, a host of weighty questions would have to be answered. Who will pay for the indefinite storage of the hundreds of thousands of embryos in freezers at IVF clinics across the country? Could IVF patients be forced to choose between using all of their frozen embryos themselves or “adopting” them out to strangers? If these embryos are all considered to be babies, what other rights do they enjoy? And if a mistake should result in their destruction, what are the consequences? In Alabama, these questions are no longer hypothetical. Meanwhile, you can bet that anti-abortion activists nationwide—who hope that Alabama has set a precedent—are working on the answers.

At Manatee Bay Elementary School in Broward County, Florida, six children have tested positive for measles, a respiratory virus so contagious that 90 percent of those exposed will contract it. Infection with measles can have serious consequences, according to the Centers for Disease Control: About 20 percent of measles patients will be hospitalized, 1 in 1,000 will have brain swelling that can lead to brain damage, and 3 in 1,000 will die. Invented in 1963, the measles vaccine is considered one of the greatest public health triumphs of the last century. Thanks to it, measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, though sporadic clusters of the disease have occurred since then. 

Because of the extreme contagiousness of measles and its potentially serious health consequences, in the case of a school outbreak, the CDC recommends that “unvaccinated children, including those who have a medical or other exemption to vaccination, must be excluded from school through 21 days after their most recent exposure.”

But maybe not in Florida. Bucking those guidelines, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo issued a statement on Tuesday announcing, the state’s Department of Health, “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance” because of the “burden on families and the educational cost of healthy children missing school” and the “high immunity rate in the community.”  

Data from Florida’s childhood immunization records, however, suggest that the rate of immunity in Broward County might not be high enough to forestall an even greater outbreak. According to the CDC, at least 95 percent of a population must be immune to measles—either through vaccination or prior infection—to meet the “herd immunity” threshold necessary to prevent a disease from spreading broadly. As of 2022, 91.7 percent of Broward County kindergartners were fully vaccinated, according to the Florida Department of Health.

Ladapo’s guidance on the current measles outbreak is only the most recent example of the Florida surgeon general’s flouting of public health guidelines. He has long been a harsh critic of Covid vaccines for children, insisting that their risks outweigh their benefits—though plenty of evidence suggests exactly the opposite. Earlier this year, he called for Florida to stop administering Covid vaccinations entirely, falsely claiming that the shots alter recipients’ DNA. The CDC continues to recommend Covid vaccines for adults and children.

The vaccination rate in Broward County, as well as Florida as a whole, has been declining since 2019. As I reported in November, childhood vaccination rates also appear to be falling nationwide:

The percentage of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated declined from 95 percent in the 2020-2021 school year to 93 percent in 2021-2022—below pre-pandemic levels. Since schools still require routine vaccinations, more families than ever before are asking permission for their school-aged children to skip the shots, as well. Requests for exemptions increased in 41 states, and in 10 states, more than 5 percent of parents made such requests.

This decrease in vaccination rates has happened against a backdrop of a relentless campaign by anti-vaccine activists, emboldened by backlash to public health guidelines put in place during the pandemic. High-profile politicians have supercharged this campaign—Florida governor Ron DeSantis has shaped his state’s policies on Covid vaccines around Ladapo’s baseless claims about the dangers of the shot. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has built an anti-vaccine empire with his organization Children’s Health Defense.

Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with pediatricians in Florida who worked diligently for decades to increase the state’s childhood vaccination rates. They told me that they were dismayed by what they saw as an attempt by the state leadership to undermine those efforts and especially worried about an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, like measles, the kind that used to routinely land kids in the hospital. “It’s just mind-boggling to think that we could go back to that,” one pediatrician told me in 2022. “The diseases are waiting. They’re waiting for stupidity.”

But the Covid pandemic supercharged Mercola’s reputation. In a lengthy 2022 profile, the New York Times called him “the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online.” Mercola topped the internet extremism research firm Center for Countering Digital Hate’s 2021 “Disinformation Dozen” list of the most powerful disseminators of anti-vaccine propaganda.

This week, the supplement industry trade publication Natural Products Insider reported that last week, Mercola suddenly fired four members of his executive team. He also announced that his company would be going in a new direction, reportedly informing his staff in a video that “my new goal is to reach billions, literally billions, around the world with a new paradigm of how to increase joy in their life.”

The details of Mercola’s “new goal” and “new paradigm” are scant, but according to the article, he made the changes in management after extensive consultations with a psychic named Kai Clay, who sometimes goes by the name of Bahlon.

Janet Selvig, Mercola’s sister, was one of the executives who was fired. In an interview with Natural Products Insider, she expressed concern about Bahlon’s influence on her brother:

Selvig said she confronted her brother about the odd behavior on Jan. 31 after seeing hours of videos of his trance channeling sessions with Bahlon. “I just felt immediately that he was being taken advantage of,” Selvig said.

The confrontation did not go well. Selvig said her brother was very dismissive of her concerns and defended his work with Clay. “He thinks the book is going to save the world,” Selvig said. “He believes that he’s [Mercola] a god and he’s been reincarnated. And he even referred to himself as the new Jesus.”

On Feb. 2, Selvig was shown an email sent to a coworker from Mercola’s address announcing the doctor’s intention to fire Selvig, Rye, Boland and a fourth executive. The email offered the CEO spot to a different Mercola team member who later turned down the position. The email went on to explain “reasons for the mutiny,” describing the Catholic church as a “global cabal” that controls “50% of the world’s worth” and “created all the pain that most people experience.”

Mercola’s longtime partner, Erin Elizabeth, an anti-vaccine influencer in her own right, posted a link to the Natural Products Insider piece to her Twitter 165,000 followers Wednesday evening:

This is the hardest post I’ve ever made in 16 years this year, on Twitter or anywhere else. Dr. Mercola’s family is praying for him. I am praying too. We are all praying for Joe and I do not know what the future holds. Happy Valentine’s Day. https://t.co/3MIoSMRWt7

— Erin Elizabeth Health Nut News (@unhealthytruth) February 14, 2024

In a reply, a follower asked Erin Elizabeth if she was still with Mercola. “I’ll update soon,” she wrote. “Things are crazy.”

Neither Mercola nor Natural Products Insider responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones.