In April 2021, business consultant and right-wing podcast host Clay Clark organized a conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was aimed at defying national and local restrictions put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clark, a radical right-wing conspiracy theorist, filled the event with a variety of like-minded COVID-19, election, and QAnon conspiracy theorists, such as Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, Greg Locke, and Ann Vandersteel.
The event was such a success that Clark decided to launch a nationwide “ReAwaken America” tour that would bring his carnival of misinformation to churches all across the country. Every month since April 2021, Clark and his gaggle of falsehood-spreading far-right propagandists have gathered with thousands of activists from Florida to Washington state, spreading wild conspiracy theories at every stop.
Right-wing anti-vaccine “expert” Stella Immanuel claims that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Bill Gates and others are dead and have had their brains downloaded to the internet while their bodies have been replaced by demonic clones. pic.twitter.com/WcC5TWbp2j
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 23, 2022
Eric Trump spoke at the ReAwaken America Conference in Dallas last weekend. Just before he took the stage, Leigh Dundas was up there ranting that COVID vaccines are genocide. pic.twitter.com/9FGZljcWBV
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) December 13, 2021
Sherri Tenpenny, one of the right’s leading anti-vaccine “experts,” claims that COVID vaccines are creating “quantum entanglement” between those who take them and “the Google credit scores and the dematrix and all of those things.” pic.twitter.com/1Hft5GXZMu
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) January 27, 2022
During the last ReAwaken America event, anti-vax activist Jim Meehan uncorked an unhinged rant urging right-wingers to seize power & punish their enemies: “I’ve got a message to the Luciferian cabal, to the overlords: We’re coming for you … We’re gonna knock you into the dirt.” pic.twitter.com/gNdQOvJ6JA
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 7, 2022
MAGA pastor and GOP congressional candidate Mark Burns riled up a crowd gathered for a right-wing conspiracy theory conference at John Hagee’s church, encouraging them as they chanted “Let’s Go, Brandon” and demanded that Trump to return to office “now!” https://t.co/zZvGqysoAA pic.twitter.com/aYRWCY3uyi
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 15, 2021
QAnon conspiracy theorist Scott McKay (aka “Patriot Streetfighter”) keeps threatening to kill people and the ReAwaken America tour keeps putting him on stage to do so: “I’m gonna rain this shitstorm down on all these scumbags until they are dead.” https://t.co/yI12BMzd7e pic.twitter.com/n7i4rYIyxR
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 21, 2022
As Clark’s tour gained momentum, he began to secure the support of elected Republican officials, with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appearing at an event in Dallas in December, Eric Trump making multiple appearances, and Donald Trump Jr. being scheduled to participate in the upcoming event in Virginia in July.
But there is still one man who has been missing from the line-up: former President Donald Trump. Clark believes that a vague 2013 prophecy from the late self-declared “prophet” Kim Clement that “a man by the name of Mr. Clark and … another man by the name of Donald” would join together to save America is about himself and the former president. As such, he has been singularly focused on building ties to those who can get him close to former president and has bragged that having members of the Trump family participate in his events is “legitimizing what we are doing in the minds of many people.”
Last Tuesday, right-wing commentator Doug Billings, who has spoken at several of Clark’s “ReAwaken America” events, interviewed Clark on his program. While introducing Clark, Billings reported that the tour is scheduled to continue through the midterms and that Trump himself is going to be participating at the final tour stop before the November elections.
“We now have the attention and the support of the Trump family,” Billings said. “We will go up through at least November, to the election in November, and we will, I’m told, we will have President Trump at the final event. Now that will be record-setting, and it will be incredible.”
