(Image source and credit: Jess Sutter for Reveal)

My introduction to the American televangelist and prosperity gospel preacher Kenneth Copeland, a member of former President Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, was not through his sermons but through his laugh. The original video clip of Copeland mocking news outlets days after Joe Biden was declared President-elect went viral before the Big Lie that the election was stolen. After Trump supporters—including members of the far-right, all-male, loosely-knit organization the Proud Boys—stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the wealthiest pastor in the United States became a hit on the social media platform Telegram, through the channel “Proud Boys Uncensored” (later renamed “The Western Chauvinist”).

In a masterfully edited ten-second mashup, Copeland manically laughs from a pulpit in a suit and tie to a doom metal soundtrack, until a close-up of his face seamlessly morphs into a shot of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker feverishly laughing. A splotchy white face with greasy green hair and MAGA red lips sloppily painted into a funhouse grin quickly flashes onscreen then back to Copeland. This feedback loop of frenzied laughter returns to the Joker just before the entire sequence ends and the GIF replays from the beginning.

Leading up to his outburst, Copeland sermonized: “A misunderstanding of joy equates joy with happiness…at Johns Hopkins they scientifically proved that your natural being does not know the difference between a belly laugh and a put-on laugh. The devil said what? Ha ha ha. The media said what? Ha ha ha. The media said, ‘Joe Biden’s president,’ Haw haw haw haw.” Copeland’s guttural denial of Biden’s win is in keeping with the charismatic Word of Faith movement of which he is a part, wherein it is believed that Christians can access the power of faith through speech. Copeland exalts his audience through contagious laughter to enact what they desire—a Trump re-election. If believers can pray and speak into being what they want, then they can laugh in the face of political defeat and make it victory.

The Copeland GIF is an homage to and call for homegrown white terrorism in affectively arresting sound, voice, and imagery. The Joker’s uncontrollable laugh in the hysterical pitch of delusional male superiority and unchecked white supremacy visually synchs with Copeland’s joy and menacing drone music. On The Western Chauvinist, battle cries on behalf of white Christian nationalism are used to recruit men into fighting for a global fascist movement. The advantages to Telegram channels for public broadcasting purposes are multiple, with features that include the capacity for an unlimited number of subscribers, the ability to stream and archive large media files, and anonymous posting under the channel’s name. Administrators can also set messages to auto-delete in chats, groups, and channels. Telegram attracts users by advertising that they can delete messages without a trace.

Telegram was used by insurrectionists, including the Proud Boys, to mobilize for January 6^th. After the attempted coup, a social media clampdown on mis/disinformation and threats of violence led to the deplatforming of Trump, QAnon, and white nationalist accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Parler. A surge in Telegram downloads ensued. On January 12^th, the platform surpassed 500 million active users and announced that more than 25 million people from around the world had joined within 72 hours. In the aftermath of the insurrection, Founder and CEO Pavel Durov assured users that Telegram’s “freedom and privacy” promise would remain intact, meaning all client apps would be open source and every chat on the platform was encrypted.

In February 2021, The Western Chauvinist openly capitalized on the deplatforming of Trump and his followers. On February 25^th, a screenshot of the Anti-Fascist and Far Right Twitter account @FFRAFAction was posted on The Western Chauvinist: “Just to be clear, having hundreds of thousands of confused & emotionally distraught QAnon supporters on Telegram channels is a major worry rather than something for sneering hot takes. They are being targeted for blackpilling by Nazi accelerationists & other white supremacists.” Underneath is a taunt posted by The Western Chauvinist moderator: “Anti fascists are worried that MAGA normies are being radicalized on Telegram. Damn, who would’ve thought that physically attacking conservatives, getting them fired, and de-platforming them on social media would push them to the far right?” The next post to The Western Chauvinist was a meme of a man in a ballcap overlaid with the text, “people bitchin about gas prices,” sitting next to the Joker on a subway musing: “me realizing that America has already been destroyed and we’re all just going through the motions til the shooting starts.”

(Image source: Chandan Khanna for Getty Images)

The Western Chauvinist is not the only Proud Boys channel on Telegram, but to date it is the most successful, with over 50,000 subscribers and up to 40,000 views per post. By contrast, the self-named Proud Boys Telegram channel has fewer subscribers at 30,000, fewer daily posts, allows for public comments, and serves as a networking site for local chapters across the United States. On The Western Chauvinist, amateur video footage, news reports, tweets, TikTok videos, films, GIFs, and memes, are not open to subscribers’ comments. Instead of eliciting chatter, the channel engages viewers through fascist propaganda. The Western Chauvinist provides a public platform for fascists to network transnationally, to promote fascism as an ideology, and to advocate for revolutionary violence in plain sight. Posts are curated to incite conspiratorial thinking about existential enemies and to legitimize violent responses to fabricated threats.

A popular three-minute video on The Western Chauvinist exemplifies conspiratorial propaganda by demonizing Jews and decrying the fall of Western civilization. A narrator proclaims that “healthy norms” and “healthy nationalism” have been “replaced with guilt, ethnomasochism, self-hatred, apathy, degeneracy, pathological altruism. Traditionalism is labeled sick and outdated, views on parenting have changed significantly. Thanks to the cultural Marxist brainwashing, Europeans no longer believe their position in society will be improved by having offspring.” This white nationalist script is read over a melodramatic soundtrack. The caption below this propaganda film reads: “Tolerance for everything unholy has led us where we are today. Tolerance for all sin, waged upon us by our ‘allied’ enemies have brought us to the brink of civilizational collapse. This has always been much bigger than the fake two-party politics. It has always been a spiritual and physical war for the destruction of the West and her children. STAND UP IN POWER NOW OR GO EXTINCT FOREVER.”

Physical combat and spiritual warfare become entwined in the name of protecting white Christians of European descent from genocide. While this language may seem extreme, it is not unlike the political rhetoric used during a 2018 “state dinner” at the White House during the Trump administration, when 100 Evangelical leaders were hosted for a prayer-filled night akin to a campaign rally. Kenneth Copeland, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and conservative radio show host Eric Metaxas, hob-knobbed with Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump. “We are here today to celebrate America’s heritage of faith, family and freedom,” Trump told the crowd. “As you know in recent years, the government tried to undermine religious freedom but the attacks on communities of faith are over. We’ve ended it.” The president listed several ways he had protected religious liberty for conservatives against abortion and acted against the global persecution of Christians. His remarks concluded to applause and laughter, “Together we will uplift our nation in prayer, protect the sanctity of life, and forever proudly remain one nation, under God…the support you’ve given me has been incredible, but I really don’t feel guilty because I have given you a lot back, just about everything I’ve promised.” Jack Graham, the senior pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, and once-president of the Southern Baptist Convention responded, “We need to maintain our vigilance in the upcoming days [before the 2018 midterm election]. The concern is that this is a spiritual warfare, this is a battle.” The belief that a Democratic victory would lead to the religious persecution of white evangelicals was couched in terms of spiritual warfare and worldly battle by state and non-state actors who worked in concert for political power.

The Western Chauvinist digitally and viscerally amplifies this sense of persecution while calling for combat against clearly demarked enemies to enact a fascist plan to propagate white Christians and secure white male Christian dominance. In February 2021, one post has a cropped USA Today headline, “Christian nationalism is a threat, and not just from Capitol attackers invoking Jesus.” Underneath, the channel’s anonymous moderator writes, “So now not only are they saying nationalism is a crime but Christianity as well? These people want you and I dead so they can inhabit the corpse of our dying nation. But we are not going to give them the satisfaction. Loving your country and your Christian beliefs is no crime.” Another post announces that it is “time for Native born white Americans to advocate for their own interests and to have a viable political party that represents those interests. It is not a crime to not want to be a minority in your ancestral homeland.” In response, the National Justice Party, an American fascist political organization, recommends an “immigration moratorium.” The post contains a link to the National Justice Party Telegram channel, which boasts nearly 10,000 subscribers to date, a number that has doubled since February 2021. Several National Justice Party posts have as much engagement as any on The Western Chauvinist. Videos promoting the National Justice Party’s platform and activism against “anti-white terrorism” perpetrated by Black Lives Matter, “anti-white hate” in the form of critical race theory, and “white decline” due to a global “refugee crisis” created by Israel and celebrated by Jews, accrue between 20,000 to 80,000 views. The National Justice Party leaders openly and regularly post to The Western Chauvinist, enlisting Telegram’s social affordances to recruit followers and disseminate eye-popping propaganda. Scenes of chaos provide evidence of white genocide and aim to inspire revolutionary desire.

For example, The Western Chauvinist highlights news reports of white people killed by anyone who is not white to bolster the feeling that white Christians are targets of genocidal violence. The channel also circulates propaganda that depicts white people’s replacement and extinction. One post shows a Black man holding what appears to be a child who is multiracial with the caption, “This is the goal of the global political class. They want a single race that is cross bread [sic] with races proven to be low IQ and subservient to any master who promises them the crumbs from their plate. Is this what you want for your children? What will you do about it?” In other posts, the imperative to “make white babies” to protect “our people” from extinction is framed as tantamount. A picture of a blonde girl in a blue shirt and skirt standing in a city park reads: “The world you were raised to survive in no longer exists.” A photo of nine white girls, all blonde and dressed in white, is overlaid with the text: “A nation that can’t protect its children has no future” and the caption below states, “Fight to secure your children’s future. We are at war for the souls of our people, make sure you’re adequately contributing to the effort.” White Christian men are called to action to protect white families, white homelands, white civilization, white purity, white unity, and white dominance.

In April 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson validated these white nationalists’ fears of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory as fact in prime time. The great replacement, advanced by the French writer Renaud Camus in 2012, argues that white Christian populations are under threat of extinction due to (Muslim, non-white) mass migration and declining birthrates, both promoted by a global elite (often coded as Jewish). The Western Chauvinist posted messages that heralded Carlson as a heroic truth-teller. One screenshot of a New York Times tweet—“The Anti-Defamation League urged Tucker Carlson to resign on Friday, accusing the Fox News host in an open letter of giving ‘an impassioned defense’ of the replacement theory, a racist conspiracy belief popular in far-right circles”—was captioned: “White replacement is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Also, we need to replace whites.” A second post provided further evidence of a Jewish-led conspiracy to replace whites, this time with the screenshot of a New York Times Opinion headline, “We Can Replace Them” and the subheading, “In Georgia, a chance to rebuke white nationalism.” Below, columnist Michelle Goldberg’s last name is circled for emphasis.

Research has demonstrated that the storming of the Capitol on January 6^th was not a product of “the fringe” but rather “the mainstream,” meaning “over half of those who have been arrested are business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects,” whereas “13 percent of those nearly 700 arrested as of early December are members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys.” Political scientist Robert Pape says the thread that connects the “fringe” and “mainstream” is not their worship of Trump, but their belief in the great replacement. Pape states, “52 percent [of those arrested] are coming from counties that Biden won in the 2020 election. That is, more are coming from counties Biden won than Trump won…The No.1 feature of the county sending insurrectionists…is that these are the counties losing the most white population in the United States.” Pape adds:

“There is a right-wing conspiracy theory called the great replacement, which says that white people are being overtaken by minorities and that this is going to cause a loss of rights for white people. It used to be on the fringe…[but now] that that theory is embraced in full-throated fashion by major political leaders and also by major media figures…you see that that is head and shoulders the No. 1 belief that’s driving the difference…Yes, there are other beliefs: Many in the insurrectionist movement believe in the QAnon cult idea, that there is a satanic cult of pedophiles running the U.S. government. Many also fear loss of a job in the next 12 months. Many also believe that the second coming of Christ is happening within their lifetime. Many also think government is an enemy. But those are secondary factors. Head and shoulders, the leading factor is the belief in ‘the great replacement.’ Underneath that, the No. 1 factor that’s predicting whether someone believes in ‘the great replacement’ versus not is racial resentment—that is, specifically resentment of minorities who get what they see as special privileges. These fringe beliefs like ‘the great replacement’ are now no longer confined to the fringe. This is overall a mainstream political movement.”

Pape’s evidence suggests that calling the Proud Boys “extremist” is a misnomer and that white Christian nationalism is not simply about feelings of persecution or the belief that Trump is an agent of God, but the fear that white Christian male supremacy and American exceptionalism are no longer givens, fomenting an urgency to do spiritual and worldly battle against racial, gendered, and religious enemies—the collective conviction in the need for revolutionary violence.

(Image source: John Rudoff for Getty Images)

The Western Chauvinist demonstrates that the ideology of white Christian nationalism is not just a matter of religious symbols, practices, or beliefs. Jesus takes many forms on the channel, but he predominantly appears on the cross, his crucifixion glorified as the ultimate heroic sacrifice. A meme that declares, “Strength Through Christ: Perhaps the biggest mistake the ELITE do is to treat the rest of us like we are cattle. They have no remorse and take pleasure in watching us suffer,” speaks to a sense of collective persecution but also to the desire for populist revenge. An illustrated tribute to a Catholic priest who performed a field service on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1941 reads, “The Cross will not crush you; if its weight makes you stagger, its power will also sustain you.” A meme that plays off the “COEXIST” bumper sticker full of multi-faith symbols has this imagery crossed out and replaced underneath with “CONVERT” written in the same font, but with crosses and stick figures depicting Jesus’s crucifixion entwined in the letters.

The Western Chauvinist’s religious messages do not stop at victimhood and suffering; they conjure strength and aspirations to fight. On Easter Day in 2021, one post portrayed a buff Jesus with bulging veins and biceps in a white tank top at a table with a chalice of 100% Gain. Underneath, the joyful greeting reads, “Happy Easter, He is Risen!” A TikTok video of Christian crusaders outfitted in armor bearing shields etched with crosses reinforces the need to prepare for physical and spiritual war. These visuals depict hyperbolic masculinity in the face of religious sacrifice and combat-readiness for religious battle. They appeared between fundraising efforts on behalf of Proud Boys imprisoned for their participation in the January 6^th insurrection.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center has demonstrated, the Proud Boys played a pivotal role in the insurrection. On December 29, 2020, the group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio, posted on social media that the Proud Boys planned to “turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th.” Between the 2020 presidential election and 2021 insurrection, Proud Boys encouraged others to attend “stop the steal” rallies. According to U.S. investigators, over 60 Proud Boys participated in encrypted Telegram message groups called “Boots on the Ground” and “New MOSD [Ministry Of Self-Defense],” where they raised funds for equipment and travel to Washington, D.C. and coordinated communication between members who planned to be at the “Save America” rally that immediately preceded the Capitol siege. At least 37 of those arrested in relation to the insurrection have ties to the Proud Boys, and at least nine of them are military veterans. Proud Boy leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Randall Biggs, Charles Donohoe, and Zach Rehl, are charged in an indictment with conspiring to disrupt Congress’s joint session and impede police.

More than 1,500 pages of Telegram chats recovered by the government indicate that Ethan Nordean led members “with specific plans to: split up into groups, attempt to break into the Capitol building from as many different points as possible, and prevent the joint session of Congress from certifying the Electoral College results.” According to court filings, Zach Rehl said on a December 30^th MOSD Telegram video call, “We’re not gonna be doing like a proud boy fuckin’ 8 o’clock at night march and flexing our [arms] and shit. We’re doing a completely different operation.” On January 4th, another MOSD member instructed the group to “drag them out by their fucking hair” if congressional members attempted to “steal” the election.

Prosecutors asked to revoke the pretrial release of Nordean because he endorsed violence in online videos, including a “1776”-style revolt. U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough alleged that Nordean was willing to sacrifice his marriage, family ties, and Seattle roots in the belief that he is a “patriot,” claiming that “Ethan Nordean planned, organized, fundraised and led others onto Capitol grounds on January 6…to obstruct the certification that was taking place that day, and in fact he and his co-conspirators were successful in that effort.”

After January 6^th, the Proud Boys appeared as though they were in jeopardy of decline and an irreparable split. Chairman Enrique Tarrio was arrested for burning a Black Lives Matter banner at a Washington D.C. church and was renounced by multiple chapters. Meanwhile, several individual members faced criminal charges for their participation in the insurrection.

However, the Proud Boys have proved resilient. Through their presence at local demonstrations and expansion on social media platforms like Telegram, the Proud Boys have recruited new members while showing their support for what the philosopher Jason Stanley calls America’s “fascism’s legal phase,” where Republican state legislators have introduced bills to criminalize protests like those led by Black Lives Matter activists, overturn electoral results, restrict anti-racist curriculum, and decimate abortion rights. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, green-lighted corporate spending in elections, opened the door to partisan gerrymandering, and undermined the bodily autonomy of anyone with a uterus. In turn, the Proud Boys have provided “security” for “the Church at Planned Parenthood,” who describe their actions near sexual health clinics as “a worship service outside the gates of Hell.” Local chapters of the Proud Boys have shown up at public gatherings in support of anti-critical race theory policies as well as anti-mask and anti-vaccination demonstrators, at times praying outside of school buildings and intimidatingly standing in the back of school board meetings.

After Trump did not pardon those charged with crimes in the wake of the insurrection, the Proud Boys felt betrayed and abandoned. Today, Proud Boys openly denounce Trump, calling him “a total failure,” “a shill,” and “extraordinarily weak.” This evidence suggests that devotion to Trump was not the primary motivation for the white terrorism of January 6^th, but rather the excuse. Instead of worshipping Trump like Jesus, the Proud Boys are set on revolutionary violence. This fascist holy war has less to do with Trump’s authority than the ascent and preservation of white Christian power. While Trump and others should be held accountable for planning a coup organized and led in his name, it carries on without him, as fascists within and outside the halls of government plot for permanent rule.

Jessica Johnson is a Visiting Scholar of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. Her ethnographic study of the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle,  Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire, was published by Duke University Press in 2018.

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.