Lance Wallnau used the Oct. 29 episode of his podcast to rail against the “woke industrial complex” and to portray “wokeness” as “a weird new religion.” Wallnau, a Christian nationalist author, speaker, and life coach who promotes Seven Mountains Dominionism, urged Christians to recognize that proponents of “Wokeianity” are their enemies.
“The Wokeianity of the Antichrist system is an extorted confession of faith,” he said, “where you have to use the gender pronoun arbitrarily chosen by a student” even if that student’s reality “isn’t real for you.”
Wallnau reaches a wide audience through his books, podcasts, conference speeches, and appearances on religious-right media. He has more than 735,000 followers on Facebook and more than 60,000 on Twitter. In advance of the 2016 election, Wallnau claimed that former President Donald Trump was God’s anointed “chaos candidate.” He became enough of an insider among Trump’s Pentecostal supporters that he was invited to the White House for a briefing on the administration’s Middle East peace plans. In 2020, Wallnau said that Trump’s reelection would set the stage for the church to take greater authority in the world. When that didn’t happen and Joe Biden was sworn in as president, Wallnau declared Biden to be “an illegal counterfeit.”
On last Friday’s podcast, Wallnau portrayed the political situation in the United States as a “spiritual battle,” something even more powerful and “sinister,” he said, than the political battles as covered by right-wing pundits on Fox News. “It’s a whole invasion of Western civilization with ideas that are grounded in the destruction of America as we’ve known it and freedom as we’ve experienced it,” he claimed.
Wallnau is promoting his next book, and his company’s vice president of operations Mercedes Sparks joined him on the podcast, where she repeatedly flacked the book.
Wallnau denied that systemic racism is a problem in the U.S., accusing Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of “lying” by writing in a letter accompanying a report on the administration’s plans to promote gender equity that America has “never fully lived up to” the idea that “every one of us is equal in dignity and deserves to be treated equally.” Wallnau continued:
I would say they’re lying. I would say that women, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Caucasians, that there is a set of laws. You’re not finding anyone that has been systemically robbed or denied a job or a position. Unless, of course, it’s over, you know, vaccine mandates. But no one’s being unemployed or discriminated against. I’d say the exact opposite is happening. People are beefing up quotas all the time in order to show that they are inclusive. So, when they use the language, “every one of us is equal in dignity and deserve to be treated equally,” they mean, the transgender or queer or lesbian or homosexual activist movement has to be treated equally. And you see, what they’re doing is they’re raising a sexual practice, preference, or identity to the status of a civil rights issue, where they should not be doing so.
Wallnau claimed that “wokeism” has infiltrated corporate America through a scheme by “the homosexual movement” to get gay people hired into human resources departments, where they could “hire their own woke people” and “get rid of the conservatives or evangelicals.” He claimed that the HR director of a major corporation angrily told him that the movement was not seeking acceptance from Christians but instead would force Christians to “bow” to the need to affirm and celebrate homosexuality.
Wallnau repeated dishonest right-wing claims that, by agreeing to investigate threats and harassment directed at school board members, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is “willing to sit there and say that soccer moms are terrorists because they don’t like critical race theory.” Wallnau predicted that school board battles are “political kryptonite” for Democrats and will help Republicans win races in Congressional District battlegrounds, which is clearly the goal of right-wing strategists who are inflaming fears and resentments in hopes that they will result in conservative voter turnout in 2022.
Wallnau also weighed in on vaccine requirements, likening them to the stars of David that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, adding, “this is how communism works”:
The thing that bothers me with the whole vax and no vax situation is I’m watching how science is being used as a justification for categorizing people into groups that are almost, like, hated and despised or accepted. Where it comes down to a question of intelligent discussion and freedom of choice, you are being categorized like the Jews in Germany, you’re being given your own little Star of David to be put on you if you are not toeing the party line. This is how communism works. And this is the history of communism, which is why these things are so deadly.
“Christianity creates kingdom principles that God gave for the maximum and happiness and prosperity of nations,” Wallnau said, calling it God’s “playbook for nations.”
But, he claimed, “our new religion that America is exporting is transgender queer alliances.” He denounced the U.S. State Department, claiming it has been “invaded by Marxists and LGBTQ activists, the progressive Marxists, and the radical woke,” which he said explains why some U.S. embassies have flown the rainbow flag. (That was done, of course, as a sign of U.S. support for the rights of LGBTQ people.)
Like many American right-wing activists, Wallnau admires Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, who has squelched democratic institutions and media in the name of defending “Christian civilization.” On his podcast, Wallnau not only praised Hungary and governments that are following Orbán’s lead, like Poland’s, he even had praise for Russia and China. The Chinese government’s totalitarianism and often brutal repression of religious freedom are generally denounced by religious-right leaders, especially those who believe COVID-19 was engineered as a biowarfare weapon to ruin Trump’s presidency. But Wallnau seemingly found common ground with these U.S. adversaries in their “moving against the woke agenda” and “cracking down on it.”
Wallnau’s podcast seems to tap the same funding sources that fuel many right-wing media: disaster food preppers, sellers of gold and silver, and MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. On this episode, Wallnau gushed about Lindell’s MySlippers, describing the product as a “beautiful leather suede cozy faux fur slipper with a lining that just literally knocks your socks off.”
