Analysis
God’s Army had a plan to save America from Joe Biden.
This ragtag team of MAGA diehards and live streamers banded together to show support for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) decision to erect concertina wire at a riverfront park in the border town of Eagle Pass
The army formed a convoy, consisting primarily of passenger vehicles traipsing across the country to the border, conducting a rally that might … well, the end goal was entirely unclear.
Eagle Pass has become a pawn in Abbott’s border showdown against President Biden’s administration. Under Abbott’s directive, the Texas Military Department (TMD) took over a park in town, blocking off public access and using concertina wire to stop migrants from crossing the Rio Grande.
The wire kept federal agents from accessing the border, so they cut through it.
Texas sued the Supreme Court and lost, but Abbott has not backed down.
Originally, God compelled His army to drive from Norfolk, Virginia on Jan. 29 to Eagle Pass, but it quickly became clear the town couldn’t accommodate them.
Locals feared the convoy’s presence directly on the border could result in violence and the few hotels in town were already filled up.
Thankfully, God accommodates. Their journey pivoted to Cornerstone Children’s Ranch in Quemado, a small town 25 minutes from Eagle Pass, where they would hold a Christian nationalist revival and political rally.
At the ranch, people could pay $20-40 to sleep in their cars and spend the weekend praying for the concertina wire and Abbott, praying the good Lord would save them from Biden’s America, and buying merch.
I met the convoy at their first stop in Texas: a rally in the parking lot of One Shot Distillery & Brewery in Dripping Springs, about 40 minutes outside of Austin and four hours from Quemado.
The convoy stressed they were family-friendly and alcohol-free, but One Shot was an exception
The brewery owner is Phil Waldron, who once circulated a PowerPoint plotting the overthrow of democracy in the months before Jan. 6.
The bar was easy to find; hundreds of Trump supporters had come by to show their support, overflowing the parking and forcing attendees to shelve their cars on the side of the road. Unlike the 2022 trucker convoy that circled Washington, D.C., God’s Army departed Virginia with zero 18-wheelers.
At the entrance, security made me chug my energy drink—no guns, food, or beverages were allowed, a relief considering some of the violent rhetoric that the convoy originally embraced.
A pickup truck with a “Nuremberg 2.0” banner across the front parked out front, calling for people involved in the creation and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine to be prosecuted.
Trucker convoys and anti-Fauci rhetoric brought me back to a simpler time … 2022, perhaps.
A makeshift stage had been erected for the night, decorated with a banner advertising the group’s end goal “Peaceful Assembly, February 3th, 2024.”
Off to the side, a giant wooden cross was set up. Twice my height, the cross appeared to be held up only by a man who was grasping it in a giant hug every time I looked over.
At 5pm, an organizer hopped on stage to tease the evening’s events, which consisted of a forgettable speaker lineup of conspiracy theorists and some of Texas’ fringe aspiring politicians. But he promised two mysterious stars.
They turned out to be conservative A-listers Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent, who arrived on a helicopter to kick things off. Nugent yelled into the mic that Biden was a real piece of shit. The crowd went wild.
“I’m an extremist. I dare to experiment in self-government. I coulda parachuted into America or planet Earth, and I coulda wrote the First Amendment, cuz I have an instinctual right to speak my mind. I have an instinctual, natural, perfect right to assemble against those who might not adhere to their constitutional oath that I hired based on their oath.”
The crowd screamed out cheers.
“Any questions??” Nugent asked.
Yes, many, but there was no answer. Instead, Nugent played a few lines of a Jimi Hendrix song and walked off stage.
As the night went on, speakers regaled the audience with increasingly unhinged claims, coming to a crescendo with Michael Yon, a former war correspondent who now pals around with dedicated conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. Tired from traveling, I was making my way to the exit when I heard the start of his speech. It stopped me in my tracks.
“Hezbollah is coming across … Venezuela is filled with Hezbollah! They speak Spanish fluently. Their soccer team is Venezuelan, their body language is Venezuelan…[a] main funder is HAIS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Jewish, right?” he asked. “They’re actually funding the people that are gonna come to places like Fort Lauderdale synagogues, and they are going to scream ‘Allahu Akbar’ and they’re gonna shoot the shit out of them …. it’s being funded with Jewish money.”
Yon shouted into his microphone, pushing a conspiracy theory that was previously touted by the Tree of Life Synagouge shooter, claiming that Muslim migrants were being paid by Jews to commit acts of terror.
No one in the audience seemed fazed by the escalating rhetoric.
Instead, two men near me looked at each other and smirked. “He’s really going for it,” one said. Others clapped and nodded along.
Shocked, I tweeted a clip of Yon’s speech as I walked back to my car.
By the time I got to my hotel, Yon responded online to my video.
“This account published this carefully edited video clip tonight. Apparently trying to play the anti-jew card for money,” he wrote, adding that another “genocidal demon” had descended on God’s Army.
The drive from Dripping Springs to Quemado should take about four hours, but it seemed God had not given his army an easy journey. A hailstorm hit the troops as they neared Quemado.
Around 7:30pm, ten hours after they left, I headed to the ranch to meet them.
A small gaggle of people sat at the entrance, where live streamers waited impatiently to record the arrival. Finally, vehicles started pulling up to the driveway, stopping along the way to honk or chat with the crowd.
Frustrated live streamers scurried back and forth, looking for a good angle to catch the cars; the original itinerary put the convoy at the ranch before sundown, but now it was pitch black, and headlights were messing up their shots.
Some of the journalists around me tried to conduct interviews with people who had arrived early.
Yelling to be heard over the honking and cheering, nearly every participant proudly proclaimed they had driven in from out of state because they were worried about the “invasion of illegals” at the Texas border. Many mentioned migrants bringing fentanyl into the country as one of their top border concerns, even though the drug is predominately smuggled by Americans.
It seemed like the only requirements to participate in God’s Army were loving Jesus and hating Biden; knowledge of actual border policies was not necessary.
One journalist stepped away from the crowd, presumably on the phone with an editor. “I’m not going to argue with people, so interviewing them is pointless,” he said, before hanging up and walking in the direction of the parked cars.
I wandered onto the property to see the setup for the next day’s Take Our Border Back rally. The giant cross from Dripping Springs had made its way onto the stage in Quemado, though at least it was now held up by a base.
A band began to practice Christian rock as people made their way toward the stage, but every song was quickly interrupted by the singer complaining about his microphone.
After a dozen interruptions, a woman standing near the stage got antsy. “Play a song, honey! Practice is over!” The band ignored her. My head started to pound.
Convoy participants started to trickle into the area, joining the early arrivals. We all awkwardly stood around; the music was too loud to have conversations with one another, but impossible to enjoy with all of the restarts.
Eventually, someone rolled a wall of T-shirts for sale, curtly informing me I was in a space for vendors. A man who went to prison for his involvement in storming the U.S. Capitol walked by, hawking sandwiches for $5.
Listening to the repetitive and increasingly loud music, watching a convicted criminal try to sell repulsive Sloppy Joes, I felt like I was a subject in a trial run of some new form of torture and decided to leave.
The next day was the long-awaited Peaceful Assembly of February 3th. The line of parked cars stretched down the road for half a mile. Christian and Trump flags and QAnon stickers decorated the vehicles; one driver had attached a cardboard cutout of the former president to the side of their car. The plates indicated people had driven in from as far away as Washington state and Canada.
It was almost 80 degrees. The rally started at noon, and the Texas sun was beating down. Apparently, the organizers overlooked the need for shade. It appeared that sunset would be the only relief we would get—though I hoped the rally would not last that long.
Already hot, I eyed the trough that was set up for the revival baptisms they would be doing at the end of the day, which often appeared at Christian nationalist events, although its role in protecting the border seemed dubious.
Despite my thirst, I felt mildly nauseous at the idea of audience members, some of whom had slept in their cars the night before, being dipped into the water.
A handful of vendors set up. One had placed an orange bucket of Christian flags for sale next to a board showcasing their “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go” stickers. In addition to the classic “come and take it” shirts featuring a cannon, some vendors had already made “come and cut it” shirts with concertina wire in place of the cannon.
A few hundred people were in the chairs in front of the stage; a few smart attendees had brought umbrellas for shade. The median age seemed over 55. Despite being the main event, Saturday lacked Thursday’s star power; Nugent and Palin were nowhere in sight.
Instead, Texas Rep. Keith Self (R) railed against the Biden administration, claiming that under their rule, the FBI puts people on their watch list just for being “MAGA Republicans.”
Failed Texas Land Commission candidate Weston Martinez told the audience, “It’s no longer Republicans and Democrats. It’s patriots and traitors, and you’re one or the other. And if you’re [with] Joe Biden’s administration … then you are a traitor..”
The rhetoric that Biden was a criminal who had abandoned Americans, especially Texans, was a common talking point. Once again, speakers brought up the claim that fentanyl is brought in by “illegals.”
Others harped on the idea that Abbott was correct to defy the Biden administration at the border, calling for the arrest of Biden.
It wasn’t long before I was interrupted by a guy shoving a camera in my face.
“Why did you say Michael Yon is an antisemite?” he demanded.
I walked off. He followed me, demanding I answer him. Instead, I started munching on a bag of pistachios, offering some up. Ignoring me, he repeated his questions.
“I don’t know,” I replied, my mouth full of pistachios. “Do you want a nut?”
“No!!” he snapped.
After five minutes, he stormed off, complaining about me to anyone who would listen.
Within minutes, I received a series of Twitter direct messages that seemed to indicate Yon had seen his video.
“You do look a little disturbed, I’ve seen some of the video,” he said. “Why are you so anti-Jew?”
After four hours in the sun, now with minions pursuing me, I decided to head off, certain the convoy was a sham.
It capitalized on the outrage at Eagle Pass, but no one had any real intention of solving the problem. Instead, they worked to exacerbate it, with frightening rhetoric amplified by massive speakers on portable stages and the loud roaring engines of American-made trucks.
A migrant processing center had to evacuate after they received threats attributed to the convoy. Vehicles with out-of-state plates and Trump flags aimlessly drove around downtown Eagle Pass.
The day after the rally, convoy participants would join together on a corner downtown and shout “go back to where you came from!” at indigenous residents of Eagle Pass Some of the main convoy live streamers would “hunt” migrants at the Arizona border, all espousing and harboring the same disturbing rhetoric undergirding the convoy’s journey.
Undergirding it all was a Christianity that seemed to ignore the tenets of the faith, to help and serve their fellow man, preferring a more militaristic religion, where guns were needed to ward off others. Tangents of conspiratorial thinking, from Jews to drugs, flowed easily, ramping up the tenor of the rally to concerning levels.
But days later, the kind of border bill these people might want collapsed, sunk by intransigent GOP members of Congress.
And yet that might be the root of all this. The convoy didn’t come to the border with a plan to solve the crisis. Instead, they just wanted everyone to listen to them yell about it.
