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

JD Vance appeared at a conference hosted by a Christian "apostle" who's accused Kamala Harris of "witchcraft." The event was also steeped in election denialism.

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.”