At JD Vance Campaign Stop, The Infrastructure For A New ‘Stop The Steal’ Is Laid Bare

MONROEVILLE, Pa. — JD Vance spoke at a festival of election denialism in a Pittsburgh suburb Saturday, lending the imprimatur of his position as the Republican nominee for vice president to a gathering of people who still falsely believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and who might be laying the groundwork to make the same bogus claim next month if Trump and Vance lose in Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state.

Vance participated in an hour-long town hall at one of the final stops of the “Courage” tour, a neo-Charismatic Christian revival roadshow organized by Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based evangelical pastor and self-described “apostle” who claims to be able to speak with God, who told him Trump is prophesied to be the 47th president of the U.S. If Wallnau’s name sounds familiar, it might be because he played a major role in fomenting disinformation about the last presidential election and was even set to speak at the Jan. 6, 2021, election denial rally in Washington that became the violent insurrection.

As Vance spoke from the stage at Wallnau’s event Saturday to a few hundred mostly middle-aged and octogenarian white people, a familiar cast of election-denying organizations operated booths on the other side of the convention hall, encouraging people to join their mailing list or offering them candy. Their presence here demonstrated the ways Wallnau’s brand of extreme Christian nationalism dovetails with election denial. After all, of what import are actually fair elections here on Earth if a candidate is predestined or prophesied from above to take office?

Manning one of the booths was Toni Shuppe, who said she would only speak to HuffPost on the condition that she got to write and edit this article with the reporter, allowing it to publish with her go-ahead. (HuffPost did not agree to those conditions, which Shuppe said she developed after a wave of negative media coverage over the last few years led her to receive threats.)

That negative media coverage detailed how Shuppe led a petition drive to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election and how the organization she leads, Audit the Vote PA, shared data it collected with Pennsylvania news outlet LancasterOnline, claiming it showed widespread fraud and irregularities in Pennsylvania vote-counting procedures, only for the outlet to find that the group’s work was “rife with errors and speculation and that its methodology was deeply flawed” with “mistakes that undermine its conclusion and make its findings unreliable.”

Those news stories also noted that Shuppe once falsely claimed that voting machines in Pennsylvania had been hacked by China; that she had pushed unhinged QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories; that she once posted on Gab, the social media platform popular on the far right, that “every state needs to secede from the Federal government”; and that she once pushed the false, racist and Islamophobic claim that former President Barack Obama was a “Muslim” who was “born in Kenya.”

Still, Shuppe was welcomed this weekend at the “Courage” tour stop in Monroeville, standing among a bevy of other MAGA organizations devoted to “election integrity.” This included Turning Points USA, the far-right youth group founded over a decade ago now by 30-year-old Charlie Kirk, which has turned into a fundraising juggernaut in the MAGA universe and put a ton of money in Kirk’s pockets too, allowing him to buy a $5 million mansion in an Arizona country club, even as he’s grown increasingly racist and antisemitic on his eponymous podcast, one of the most listened to in America.

Kirk used his massive platform in 2020 to become one of the biggest propagandists for the false claim that mail-in voting across the country was awash in fraud. And on Jan. 6, 2021, Kirk organized buses to take Trump supporters to the rally in Washington, writing on X, formerly called Twitter, that the event “would likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history.” (Kirk deleted the post after Trump supporters at the rally stormed the Capitol.)

Earlier this year, the attorney general in Arizona indicted two Turning Points USA officials, Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bowyer and state Sen. Jake Hoffman (a contractor for the group), for being among the 11 “fake electors” in the state — part of a nationwide effort by the Trump campaign to send “alternate” electors to Congress who would declare Trump the winner in states he’d lost, handing him another term.

In the 2024 election, Turning Points USA has invested over $100 million to get out the vote, support far-right candidates with a history of election denial, and, as noted by The Guardian, likely oust “some key Arizona election officials who disputed claims of election fraud in 2020.”

The organization sent its offshoot, Turning Points USA Faith, on the “Courage” tour. Its booth Saturday included free candy for attendees and buckets of pins with slogans like “PRAY FOR THOSE WHO PERSECUTE YOU,” “COMMUNISM IS SATAN’S RELIGION,” “EVEN HEAVEN HAS SECURE BORDERS. REVELATION 21:19,” and “DISCIPLESHIP STARTS AT HOME,” which featured an illustration of a 1950s white family reading a Bible in their living room.

A booth over was the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA think tank whose lawyers are currently representing a Republican Georgia election official — with a long history of election denialism — in her lawsuit that’s asking for the discretion to refuse to certify election results.

AFPI has also filed one of the eight lawsuits this year coming from Trumpland, which baselessly alleges that next month’s election could be skewed by widespread voting by undocumented immigrants. The chair of AFPI’s Center for Election Integrity, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, posted on social media last month that the Biden campaign was plotting “to weaponize federal agencies into a leftwing election operation that opens the doors to non-citizen voting.”

There is no basis for this claim, just as there’s no basis for the claim that undocumented immigrants vote anywhere near the levels to sway the election. (A study of the 2016 election, during which Trump had also warned of noncitizens voting, found that out of 23.5 million ballots cast, there were only 30 incidents of undocumented people voting.) A recent investigation by Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project, detailed how conspiracy theories “about noncitizens casting ballots in U.S. elections have become a centerpiece of MAGA messaging in advance of the 2024 election.”

“Yet it is a manufactured threat, pushed and platformed by a well-funded network of far-right groups, as part of an intentional and highly coordinated effort to misinform the public, advance longstanding right-wing policy goals, and cast doubt on the election results in November,” Documented wrote.

And finally among the booths at the “Courage” tour stop was Joshua Standifer, founder of a group called Lion of Judah, which is devoted to signing up Christian Trump supporters (and by default election skeptics) as poll workers across the country before next month’s election. The group’s website describes this mission as a “Trojan horse” strategy to get Christians in “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers, which will help them spot incidents of fraud, and taking “the first step on the path to victory this Fall,” according to The Guardian.

Just after Vance’s appearance on stage at Saturday’s “Courage” tour, Standifer recounted the story of how he decided to start Lion of Judah.

“I heard the Lord tell me something just absolutely crazy, and he said, ‘Start a group called Lion of Judah and bring the Holy Spirit to the place you were told to stay out of — the political square,’” Standifer said.