The Gathering Conspiracy Against Freedom

Photo: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty

After a would-be assassin nearly killed Donald Trump on Saturday, the right quickly pointed fingers to the left. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” tweeted Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who was named as Trump’s running mate 48 hours later. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Representative Mike Collins of Georgia claimed Biden had “sent the orders,” and his House colleague, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, tweeted, “For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America. Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”

We know nothing about the shooter’s motivations, but Trump’s allies would not wait for the facts. Instead, they wanted to silence their critics by honing in on liberal rhetoric. Should Democrats give in and tone down what they’re saying, the right will go unchallenged at a crucial moment in politics. Take a careful look at what some conservatives have planned for the future, and it becomes obvious: There is a conspiracy against our democracy. The problem is much larger than Project 2025, for all the attention it receives. The right has money and power and a grandiose vision it wants to manifest.

A recent ProPublica investigation with Documented helped unveil the conspiracy at work. Through a Christian charity called Ziklag, wealthy donors have spent almost $12 million to “mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states.” Ziklag’s 30-year vision speaks of a “terrible conflict with the powers of darkness” and its goal is to turn “American culture toward Christ by bringing back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.” Voters may get in the way, but Ziklag has a plan for that, too: “The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states,” which could amount to a purge.

Ziklag is heavily influenced by Seven Mountains theology, which ProPublica and Documented describe as a “less democratic approach to gaining power.” Should adherents conquer the mountains, including the mountain of government, they’ll be able to enforce their plans for America whether public opinion backs them or not — and purging voters is a way to win. If they succeed, they intend “to take down the education system as we know it today,” as Peter Bohlinger, the chair of Ziklag’s education mountain, said in a 2021 meeting. “For the arts and entertainment mountain, goals include that 80% of the movies produced be rated G or PG ‘with a moral story,’ and that many people who work in the industry ‘operate under a biblical/moral worldview,’” added ProPublica and Documented. The group is strongly opposed to marriage equality and hostile to rights for trans people. “Transgender acceptance = Final sign before imminent collapse,” read one internal document.

Prominent donors to Ziklag include the Uihlein family, the Greens of Hobby Lobby, and the owners of Jockey apparel. And Ziklag is generous with its funds. The group donated $600,000 to the Conservative Partnership Institute in 2022, which funded Cleta Mitchell’s election denialism, among other far-right causes. (Mitchell was the group’s secretary at its founding in 2017.) Like Ziklag, CPI is not particularly well-known to the public. But its work is vital to the future of the right, as a new piece in The New Yorker makes clear. “C.P.I. has gathered the most talented people in the conservative movement by far,” a source close to the organization told the magazine. “They have thought deeply about what’s needed to create the infrastructure and the resources for a more anti-Establishment conservative movement.” The group and its affiliates raised nearly $200 million in 2022 alone. Republican members of the House and Senate meet weekly at CPI’s headquarters. As Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin put it, “You walk into the building and you can talk to Mark Meadows or Jim DeMint if they’re there, or Russ Vought.”

CPI helped Trump staff his first administration and, according to The New Yorker, was involved in the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In 2021, after Biden took office, the organization also helped former Trump staffers like Vought and Stephen Miller form eight new groups, “each with a different yet complementary mission.” Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network “trained volunteers to monitor polling places and investigate state and local election officials,” and another group, American Moment, connects would-be staffers with jobs. The result is a well-funded and growing conservative infrastructure that could shape not only a second Trump administration but the trajectory of the country. Vought, for example, wants to “break the long-standing expectation that the D.O.J. should operate independently of the President,” presumably so it could better carry out Trump’s bidding. Miller is working on plans for mass deportations. There are plans to arrest anti-Trump protesters using the Insurrection Act. Then there’s Project 2025, which enlisted “top figures” from CPI including Vought, Miller, and Saurabh Sharma of American Moment.

The conspiracy is vast, and it is propped up by capital. CPI and Ziklag are flush with cash thanks to major donors on the right, while Elon Musk and his allies pour millions into a pro-Trump super-PAC. Trump’s shooting did not lower the stakes of the election, and Democrats shouldn’t heed the right’s call for quieter rhetoric. Conservatives want placid enemies. Why give them what they seek? The right’s America would be substantially less free than the America we live in now. Sunlight alone can’t kill a conspiracy, but at least it reveals the truth.