a christian cell phone company plans to take over texas school boards

How a far-right, Christian cellphone company ‘took over’ four Texas school boards

Karl Meek went to a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees meeting Monday wearing a T-shirt with the district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD” to protest the political action committee’s influence over the school system.

DALLAS — A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to “save the nation,” he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.

“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”

Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”

“Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.

It was a moment of celebration for an upstart company whose leaders say they are on a mission from God to restore conservative Christian values at all levels of government — especially in public schools. To carry out that calling, the Grapevine-based company this year created a political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, and gave it more than $600,000 to spend on nonpartisan school board races in the Fort Worth suburbs.

This spring, the PAC blanketed the communities of Southlake, Keller, Grapevine and Mansfield with thousands of political mailers warning that sitting school board members were endangering students with critical race theory and other “woke” ideologies. Patriot Mobile presented its candidates as patriots who would “keep political agendas out of the classroom.”

Image: Attendees listen to a member of the public speak during a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas on Aug. 22, 2022.

Their candidates won every race, and nearly four months later, those Patriot Mobile-backed school boards have begun to deliver results.

The Keller Independent School District made national headlines this month after the school board passed a new policy that led the district to abruptly pull more than 40 previously challenged library books off shelves for further review, including a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” as well as several LGBTQ-themed novels.

In the neighboring city of Southlake, Patriot Mobile donated framed posters that read “In God We Trust” to the Carroll Independent School District during a special presentation before the school board. Under a new Texas law, the district is now required to display the posters prominently in each of its school buildings. Afterward, Patriot Mobile celebrated the donation in a blog post titled “Putting God Back Into Our Schools.”

And this week at a tense, eight-hour school board meeting, the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District’s board of trustees voted 4-3 to implement a far-reaching set of policies that restrict how teachers can discuss race and gender. The new policies also limit the rights of transgender and nonbinary students to use bathrooms and pronouns that correspond with their genders. And the board made it easier for parents to ban library books dealing with sexuality.

Nearly 200 people signed up to speak during public comments before the board vote at the school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas.

To protest the changes, some parents came to the meeting wearing T-shirts with the school district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD.”

“They bought four school boards, and now they’re pulling the strings,” said Rachel Wall, the mother of a Grapevine-Colleyville student and vice president of the Texas Bipartisan Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting school board candidates who do not have partisan agendas. “I’m a Christian by faith, but if I wanted my son to be in a religious school, I would pay for him to go to a private school.”

Image: Rachel Wall during the “Public Comment” portion of a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas on Aug. 22, 2022.

Patriot Mobile officials didn’t respond to messages requesting comment. Leigh Wambsganss, executive director of Patriot Mobile Action and vice president of government and media affairs at Patriot Mobile, declined to speak with a reporter at CPAC, saying she did not trust NBC News to accurately report on the company’s political activism. In a social media post days later, she called the journalist’s interview request harassment, adding, “I don’t interview with reporters I don’t trust.”

In recent interviews with conservative media outlets, Wambsganss has said that Patriot Mobile’s goal is to install school board members who will oppose the teaching of “LGBTQ ideologies,” fight to remove “pornographic books,” and stand against school anti-racism initiatives, which she and her supporters have argued indoctrinate children with anti-white and anti-American views.

“You know, the sad thing is there is real racism, and that is really a terrible thing,” Wambsganss said in a June appearance on the Mark Davis Show, a conservative talk radio program that broadcasts in the Dallas region. “But they’re watering down and devaluing that word so bad that it’s become meaningless.”

In that same interview, Wambsganss made clear that Patriot Mobile views its political activism as a religious calling — and that the group’s electoral success this spring was just the beginning.

“We’re not here on this earth to please man — we’re here to please God,” Wambsganss said, adding later in the interview, “Ultimately we want to expand to other counties, other states and be in every state across the nation.”

‘Make America Christian Again’

Founded about a decade ago, Patriot Mobile markets itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider,” which includes a pledge to donate a portion of users’ monthly bills to conservative causes.

Initially, Patriot Mobile’s founders said their goal was to support groups and politicians who promised to oppose abortion, defend religious freedom, protect gun rights and support the military.

After the 2016 presidential election, the company’s branding shifted further to the right and embraced Trump’s style of politics. One of Patriot Mobile’s most famous advertisements includes the slogan “Making Wireless Great Again,” alongside an image of Trump’s face photoshopped onto a tanned, muscled body holding a machine gun.

Image: Patriot Mobile's booth at CPAC in Dallas on Aug. 1, 2022.

That approach has drawn the support of some big names on the right.

“You can give your money to AT&T, the parent company of CNN, and you can pay the salary of Don Lemon, or you can support someone like a Patriot Mobile and give back to causes that they believe in,” Donald Trump Jr. said from the stage at a CPAC gathering in February. “That’s not cancel culture, folks. That’s using your damn brain.”

Patriot Mobile has also aligned itself in recent years with political and religious leaders who promote a once-fringe strand of Christian theology that experts say has grown more popular on the right in recent years. Dominionism, sometimes referred to as the Seven Mountains Mandate, is the belief that Christians are called on to dominate the seven key “mountains” of American life, including business, media, government and education.

John Fea, a professor of American history at the private, Christian Messiah University in Pennsylvania, has spent years studying Seven Mountains theology. Fea said the idea that Christians are called on to assert biblical values across all aspects of American society has been around for decades on the right, but “largely on the fringe.”

Trump’s election changed that.

“It fits very well with the ‘Make America Great Again’ mantra,” Fea said. “‘Make America Great Again’ to them means, ‘Make America Christian Again,’ restore America to its Christian roots.”

Patriot Mobile appears to have embraced that shift, Fea said.

Beginning a year ago, one of the leading proponents of the Seven Mountains worldview, Rafael Cruz, a pastor, began leading weekly Bible studies for employees at Patriot Mobile’s corporate office, which the company films and posts on YouTube.

In a recent Patriot Mobile sermon , Cruz — the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — dismissed the concept of separation of church and state as a myth, arguing that America’s founders meant that ideal as a “one-way wall” preventing the government from interfering with the church, not preventing the church from influencing the government.

He then called on people who “are rooted in the righteousness of the word of God” to run for public office.

“If those people are not running for office, if they are not even voting, then what’s left?” Cruz said. “The wicked electing the wicked.”

Cruz didn’t respond to a message requesting an interview.

Beginning last year, after opposition to “critical race theory” emerged as a political attack on the right, Fea said he began to observe another shift in the Christian Dominionism movement.

Image: Myra Brown holds up a book about Critical Race Theory as she speaks during the “Public Comment” portion of a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas, on Aug. 22, 2022.

Rather than focusing primarily on winning federal elections, these groups started talking about the need to take control of public schools — “the ideal battleground,” Fea said, “if you’re looking to fight this battle.”

“This is a spiritual war, they believe, against demonic forces that undermine a godly nation by teaching kids in school that America is not great, America is not a city on the hill or that America has flaws,” Fea said. “If you can get in and teach the right side of history, and social studies and civics lessons about what America is, you can win the next generation and save America for Christ.”

‘Saving our public schools’

Patriot Mobile’s unconventional business strategy appears to be paying off.

Without providing specific numbers, the company said it doubled its subscriber base in 2021, and as a result, it planned to give more than $1.5 million to conservative causes in 2022, triple the amount from the year prior.

In January, the company filed documents to establish Patriot Mobile Action and brought on Wambsganss to lead it — a strong signal that the company was planning to get involved in school board politics.

Wambsganss, a long-time political activist , had earned national acclaim among conservatives in 2021 for her work as one of the co-founders of Southlake Families PAC, another group that promotes itself as “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” When the Carroll school system in Southlake unveiled a diversity plan to crack down on racism and anti-LGBTQ bullying in the majority white school district, Southlake Families, under Wambsganss’ leadership, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a slate of school board candidates who promised to kill the plan.

After winning every race by a landslide, the PAC’s success was celebrated on Fox News and in The Wall Street Journal , prompting former Texas GOP Chairman Allan West to urge Southlake Families leaders to “export this to every single major suburban area in the United States of America.”

At the helm of the newly established Patriot Mobile Action, Wambsganss got to work achieving that goal this spring, starting first with some suburban school systems close to home.

In interviews with conservative outlets, Wambsganss has said she and her team zeroed in on four North Texas independent school districts — Keller, Grapevine-Colleyville, Mansfield and Carroll — that had implemented or considered policies dealing with race, sexuality and gender that she and other Christian conservatives found objectionable.

Leigh Wambsganss interviews pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec at the Patriot Mobile booth at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Aug. 4.

After interviewing candidates in each district, Patriot Mobile Action settled on a slate of 11 who pledged to support conservative causes. Following the playbook from Southlake, the PAC hired a pair of heavy-hitter GOP consulting firms that had worked on campaigns for Ted Cruz and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — bringing sophisticated national-level political strategies to local school board races.

Patriot Mobile paid Vanguard Field Strategies nearly $150,000 to run get-out-the-vote canvassing operations across the four school districts, according to financial disclosures. The PAC paid another $240,000 to Axiom Strategies to produce and send tens of thousands of political mailers to homes across North Texas.

Patriot Mobile Action sent thousands of political mailers warning residents in Southlake, Keller, Grapevine and Mansfield that critical race theory was endangering their children.

One flyer sent to Mansfield residents baselessly blamed a recent classroom shooting at a local high school on critical race theory-inspired disciplinary policies and accused the district of putting “woke” politics ahead of the safety of children.

A Patriot Mobile mailer sent in Grapevine and Colleyville endorsed two board candidates who the PAC said would oppose critical race theory, an academic study of systemic racism that, according to the flyer, “violates everything patriots believe in.”

And Patriot Mobile sent flyers endorsing three candidates in Keller under the slogan, “Saving America starts with saving our public schools.”

After all of Patriot Mobile’s candidates won, the company celebrated the victories in a blog post that also included a justification for its decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on nonpartisan local elections.

“While the media today wishes to demonize conservative activism in local races, the truth is that liberal activists have been pouring countless dollars into local politics for many years,” the post said, citing past school board candidate donations from a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for equity in education, as well as one $35,000 donation to a candidate in the Dallas suburbs from a Democratic political action committee in 2021. “Conservative activism at the local level is long overdue.”

At CPAC in August, Bannon asked Wambsganss and Story on his “War Room” TV show whether they had started to see changes in the four school districts.

“Oh, tremendous,” Wambsganss said. “Those 11 seats in four ISDs means that now North Texas has over 100,000 students who, before May, had leftist leadership. Now they have conservative leadership.”

Bannon replied, “Amen.”

Image: Natasha Owens with a banner that reads, "Mobilizing Freedom" during a performance at CPAC in Dallas on Aug. 4, 2022.

‘This is not love’

On Monday night, North Texas residents got a front-row seat for what it looks like when Patriot Mobile takes over a school board.

Just 72-hours before the meeting, the Grapevine-Colleyville school district had unveiled a sweeping 36-page policy touching on virtually every aspect of the culture wars over race, gender and sexuality that have dominated school politics since last year.

Under the policy, teachers are prohibited from discussing any concepts related to or inspired by critical race theory or what the policy refers to as “systemic discrimination ideologies.” The policy gives school employees the right to refer to trans and nonbinary students by pronouns and names matching the ones they were assigned at birth — a practice known as misgendering or deadnaming — even if the student’s parents support their child’s gender expression. And the policy prohibits any reading materials and classroom discussions dealing with “gender fluidity,” which the document defines as any belief that “espouses the view that biological sex is merely a social construct.”

Tammy Nakamura, one of the board members backed by Patriot Mobile, said the board’s 4-3 vote to adopt the policy fulfilled her campaign promise “to put an end to adults pushing their worldviews, whims and fantasies onto unsuspecting children.”

Image: Board member Tammy Nakamura during a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas on Aug. 22, 2022.

Although some members of the board majority and their supporters argued that the policy merely brought the district in line with state and federal laws, Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the plan goes well beyond the state’s anti-CRT law and appears to be in violation of federal civil rights statutes that protect students from discrimination on the basis of their gender and sexuality.

“This is the most extreme board policy that we have seen related to classroom censorship,” Huddleston said.

Debate over the policy turned Monday’s school board meeting into a political circus.

The Patriot Mobile-aligned True Texas Project, which has been labeled as an anti-government extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, called on its supporters to pack the meeting and turn it into a party celebrating the new policy. The group set up tents hours beforehand and tailgated in the parking lot, along with an anti-trans activist group whose leader was suspended from Twitter this year after she wrote, “Let’s start rounding up people who participate in pride events,” referring to LGBTQ rights celebrations.

Nearly 200 people signed up to speak during public comments prior to the board vote.

One man who spoke in support of the new policy urged the board majority to “fight like hell” and “hold the ground against the LGBT mafia and their dang pedo fans” — echoing false claims by some Christian conservatives in recent months that queer educators have been trying to sexually groom children.

“And guess what,” the man shouted into the microphone, “teachers shouldn’t be forced to use your freakin’ made up fantasy pronouns!”

Image: Scott Western during the “Public Comment” portion of a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas on Aug. 22, 2022.

Another resident who spoke in support of the policy said one of the things that made America great was “schools that taught kids to read and know the Bible, and recite the Constitution.” She commended the school board for working to restore those ideals.

“Our kids have to be taught our foundation,” she said. “Our foundation of God-given inalienable rights, religious freedoms, individualism, democracy and a free market.”

Later, a mom told the board she supported banning classroom discussions of “gender fluidity” because, she said, when her child started identifying as a girl, Grapevine-Colleyville teachers provided the student with information affirming that gender expression. As a result, the mother said, choking up as a beeper signaled that her time had expired, “I lost my son.”

Nobody from Patriot Mobile spoke at the meeting. In a recent talk radio interview, Wambsganss said she and her team were busy mapping out their plans for replicating what they achieved in districts like Grapevine-Colleyville in communities across Texas.

A majority of those who did comment during Monday’s meeting said they opposed the policy changes, including one father who accused Grapevine-Colleyville board members of being beholden to Patriot Mobile. “The result,” he said, “is our kids are being forced to act as pawns in their political game.”

A high school student who identified as LGBTQ told the board she feared that the new policy would make queer students — who are four times as likely to contemplate suicide — feel even more alienated. “Help my friends,” she said. “Don’t tell them that they should be erased.”

Image: Caroline Critz during the “Public Comment” portion of a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas on Aug. 22, 2022.

One mother, a former teacher, turned to scripture to explain her opposition to the school district’s new direction under Patriot Mobile’s influence. She said she was worried about LGBTQ students and children from other marginalized groups.

Paraphrasing Jesus, she said, “They will know us by our love.”

“When I read about the policies and I watch and attend school board meetings,” the woman said, “I keep thinking, ‘This is not love.’”

Mike Hixenbaugh is a senior investigative reporter for NBC News, based in Maryland, and author of "They Came for the Schools."

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How a Christian Cellphone Company Became a Rising Force in Texas Politics

Patriot Mobile, based in a battleground suburb, is spending money to promote conservative views on race and gender in schools. It has its sights on bigger political targets.

a christian cell phone company plans to take over texas school boards

By J. David Goodman

Oct. 5, 2022

GRAPEVINE, Texas — Ahead of what would usually be a sleepy spring school board election, a mass of fliers appeared on doorsteps in the Fort Worth suburbs, warning of rampant “wokeness” and “sexually explicit books” in schools, and urging changes in leadership.

The fliers were part of a broad effort to shift the ideological direction of school boards in a politically crucial corner of Texas, made possible by a campaign infusion of more than $420,000 from an unlikely source: a local cellphone provider whose mission, it says, is communicating conservative Christian values.

All 11 candidates backed by the company, Patriot Mobile, won their races across four school districts, including the one in Grapevine, Texas, a conservative town where the company is based and where highly rated schools are the main draw for families. In August, the board approved new policies limiting support for transgender students, clamping down on books deemed inappropriate and putting in place new rules that made it possible to be elected to the school board even without a majority of votes.

The entry of a Texas cellphone company into the national tug of war over schools is part of a far more sweeping battle over the future of Texas being waged in the suburbs north of Dallas and Fort Worth.

The company’s efforts have been seen as a model by Republican candidates and conservative activists, who have sought to harness parental anger over public schools as a means of holding onto suburban areas, a fight that could determine the future of the country’s largest red state.

“If we lose Tarrant County, we lose Texas,” Jenny Story, Patriot Mobile’s chief operating officer, said. “If we lose Texas, we lose the country.”

Glen Whitley, the top executive in Tarrant County, said the company has become an important player in politics in this part of the state. “They’ve been successful in taking over the school board in Grapevine-Colleyville, in Keller and Southlake,” Mr. Whitley, a Republican, said. He said the company appeared to be setting its sights next on city council races next year.

“They’re coming after Fort Worth,” Mr. Whitley said.

Patriot Mobile representatives are a frequent presence on the conservative political circuit across the country, taking praise from Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, buying tables at nonprofit fund-raisers and meeting with candidates from inside and outside of Texas.

Modeled after a progressive, California-based cellphone provider founded in the 1980s, the company unabashedly embraces its partisan agenda, donating money to anti-abortion and other conservative causes. Lately, it has begun spending money on behalf of Republican political candidates.

Peter Barnes, who helped start Credo Mobile, the California cellphone company that funded progressive causes, said he long expected that other firms would follow a similar path.

“The business model is pretty simple and we expected that something similar would emerge on the right,” he said of the plan for channeling profits into politics. “But it didn’t — until now.”

In North Texas, Patriot Mobile’s political spending has supported digital advertising, door hangers and campaign mailers as well as get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of its chosen candidates.

Its political activism has already changed things on the ground in Grapevine, where the nine-year-old company is based. The new policies on books and transgender issues passed 4-to-3, with the two Patriot Mobile-backed candidates making the difference.

An array of high school students in this increasingly diverse area responded with a walkout from class, led by transgender and nonbinary students. Parents opposed to the changes have begun meeting to figure out their own response.

In Grapevine’s harvest-and-wine-themed downtown, where upscale coffee shops and restaurants can be found near displays of “Ultra MAGA” sweatshirts, Patriot Mobile is headquartered in a cluster of offices unmarked from the outside.

The company’s logo adorns a conference room where Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, leads a packed Bible study every Tuesday. Along one cubicle hangs a Texas flag with silhouettes of assault rifles and the words “Come and Take It,” in a nod to a well-known slogan from the Texas revolution.

“We just said, ‘Look, we’re going to put God first,’” said Glenn Story, the founder and chief executive, sitting in his office on a recent afternoon, a guitar signed by Donald Trump Jr. hanging on the wall. “Which is why I haven’t erased that from the board,” he said, pointing to a list of core values written on a whiteboard, beginning with “Missionaries vs. Mercenaries.”

“Our mission is to support our God-given constitutional rights,” said Ms. Story, the chief operating officer and Mr. Story’s wife.

“And to honor God, always,” said Leigh Wambsganss, a vice president at the company who also heads the political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, founded by the company’s executives.

Corporations donate regularly to state and local political campaigns, but a regional company, founded with a partisan mission and willing to spend money in backyard races, is unusual. School boards across the country are increasingly becoming political battlegrounds, attracting larger sums of money and national groups into what had once been largely invisible local contests.

Patriot Mobile’s political activities are focused on suburban Tarrant County, north of Fort Worth, in large part because the county has been trending blue, narrowly carried by President Biden in 2020 and by the former Democratic congressman and current candidate for governor, Beto O’Rourke, during his 2018 Senate run.

Long a bastion of well-regarded schools, conservative churches and largely well-off, white neighborhoods, the area nurtured strong Tea Party groups during the Obama administration and, more recently, those that supported a Republican primary challenger to the right of Gov. Greg Abbott. It has a reputation, among some in the party, as a hotbed for hard-right politics.

The new policies voted on in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District have divided parents and raised concern among some teachers, some of whom said they feared becoming targets of the new school board.

One of the new board members suggested as much during a Republican forum over the summer, saying the board had a “list” of teachers who she believed were activists promoting progressive ideas about race and equity.

“They are just poison and they are taking our schools down,” the board member, Tammy Nakamura, said.

Some teachers have begun removing books from their classrooms rather than abide by new rules that require titles to be posted online so that they can be publicly reviewed. The district canceled its annual Scholastic book fair after previous concerns about books that were “mis-merchandised” and were not age-appropriate, a district spokeswoman said.

“You now have the school board approving library books, and I feel that is completely micromanaging the administration,” said Jorge Rodríguez, a school board member who voted against the new policies, adding that more than a quarter of the district’s 14,000 students were economically disadvantaged. “We’re here to educate kids and this is not helping.”

The top spokesman for the district resigned a few months after being hired , citing the “divisive” atmosphere. The district’s superintendent said recently that he planned to retire at the end of the school year.

“I’ve always been a staunch conservative,” said Christy Horne, a parent whose two children go to elementary school in the district. But the attacks on teachers were too much for her, Ms. Horne said. “It got personal.”

But for Mario Cordova, another parent in the district, the new school board leadership has rightly given more control over curriculum and reading material to parents, many of whom were dismayed by what they saw their children learning in remote schooling during the pandemic.

“Parents across the district voted for a change on the board last May and are happy to see them follow through,” Mr. Cordova wrote in an email. Opponents of the changes are “crying wolf,” he added. “This crowd has convinced themselves they cannot teach children without incessant conversations about sex and gender.”

For many parents and teachers, an early sign that their schools had become a political battleground came last year with complaints over the first Black high school principal at Colleyville Heritage High School.

Some parents contended that the principal, James Whitfield, had been promoting “critical race theory” and were rankled by an email he sent, days after the death of George Floyd, expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters and a desire to create greater equity.

“He’s going to start a diversity advisory committee? At our school? He’s going to say that Black Lives Matter?” said Dr. Whitfield, describing the reaction he encountered. The fight made national headlines and the district eventually reached a settlement with Dr. Whitfield that included his departure as principal.

The district superintendent has said the decision was not about race.

A few months after Dr. Whitfield’s departure, opponents of a diversity plan in neighboring Southlake won control of the local school board , with help from a political action committee, Southlake Families. One of the founders was Ms. Wambsganss, a parent in Southlake schools and a former television news anchor. Another was Tim O’Hare, who is the Republican nominee in November’s election to lead Tarrant County.

Parents both in Southlake and in Grapevine-Colleyville have been offended by the sexual content, including explicit descriptions of sexual activity, in some books offered to students, as well as certain discussions of gender and race, said Ms. Wambsganss, now at Patriot Mobile.

“Parents do not believe that gender issues should be discussed in K through 12,” she said. “Especially Christian parents do not want multiple genders discussed with their children by someone who is not their parents.”

She added: “I always say, it’s not about homosexuality. It’s not about heterosexuality. Stop sexualizing kids in either of those arenas.”

The victories by Patriot Mobile-backed candidates surprised some parents who did not agree with the new direction in the district.

On a recent morning, a dozen of those parents and community members gathered at the local botanical garden. For many, it was the first time they had met after finding one another through one of the many proliferating Facebook pages dedicated to the school district conflicts.

“I ask myself every day, what did I bring my children into,” said Katherine Parks, who moved to the area from France.

“We were Swift Boated by these people,” said Tom Hart, a Republican former city councilman in Colleyville, referring to the political attacks that helped sink John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. “We cannot combat $400,000 in funding from the outside.”

As parents met to strategize, some students at Grapevine High School, where the Gay-Straight Alliance club was shuttered for lack of a faculty sponsor, have already begun to find ways to protest. A student started a book club for reading banned books. A group of friends organized a walkout.

“We can find solidarity, and we can find safety in each other,” said Marceline, who asked that only their first name be used out of concern for possible reprisals. “Because we cannot trust the adults.”

About 100 students joined in the walkout. No similar protest has taken place at nearby Colleyville Heritage High School, and for many students, the beginning of the school year has proceeded, more or less, as it always has.

J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief, covering Texas. He has written about government, criminal justice and the role of money in politics for The Times since 2012. More about J. David Goodman

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Christian mobile phone company helped conservatives take over 4 Texas school boards

Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art. He's the founder of the blog DeadState.org.

Christian mobile phone company helped conservatives take over 4 Texas school boards

The Christian conservative mobile phone company Patriot Mobile donated signs that read “In God We Trust” to schools throughout Texas last week. As The Dallas Morning News points out, the company is tied to Patriot Mobile Action, a political action committee that gave a lot of money to conservatives in North Texas school board races this year.

According to leaders of of the company, its mission is to restore conservative Christian values at all levels of government — especially in public schools, NBC News reports. Patriot Mobile Action gave it more than $600,000 to spend on nonpartisan school board races in the Fort Worth suburbs.

"This spring, the PAC blanketed the communities of Southlake, Keller, Grapevine and Mansfield with thousands of political mailers warning that sitting school board members were endangering students with critical race theory and other 'woke' ideologies. Patriot Mobile presented its candidates as patriots who would 'keep political agendas out of the classroom.' Their candidates won every race, and nearly four months later, those Patriot Mobile-backed school boards have begun to deliver results," NBC News' report stated.

As more changes were implemented in schools, such as Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District’s board of trustees voting to implement policies that restrict how teachers can discuss race and gender. Some parents started to catch on, and during a tense, eight-hour school board meeting this week, they wore T-shirts with the school district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD.”

IN OTHER NEWS: Trump delivered an 'ominous warning' to Merrick Garland as Mar-A-Lago probe heats up: columnist

Patriot Mobile markets itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider,” which includes a pledge to donate a portion of users’ monthly bills to conservative causes.

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Should trump be allowed to run for office, 'he's coming after you, jake tapper': trump aide warns cnn host about ex-president's goals.

Anthony Scaramucci keeps trying to scare CNN about former President Donald Trump .

Trump's former communication director on Friday issued a dire warning to CNN host Jake Tapper that echoed a similar message he gave to Kaitlan Collins .

"He wants to go after you, Jake Tapper," Scaramucci said. "He'd like to use the FBI as the Gestapo and the only good thing about that is he doesn't understand history, so he doesn't even know what the word Gestapo means."

ALSO READ: Marjorie Taylor Greene is buying stocks again. Some picks pose a conflict of interest

Scaramucci did not pull the punches when discussing Trump — whom he described as dangerous, ignorant and un-American — nor did he have much to say regarding Steve Bannon, whom he was famously fired for publicly criticizing just 11 days after joining Trump at the White House .

His one-on-one with Tapper arrived just hours after news broke Bannon had lost an appeal to his conviction for refusing to submit to a House subpoena during the Jan. 6 investigation , and he seemed delighted by it.

"I would love to see him go to jail," said Scaramucci. "The comments I made about Steve, which I regret saying only because the idiot that I sent it to recorded it, but I don't really regret saying it because it was from my heart about how I feel about the guy."

"He's a very dishonest very malevolent person," Scaramucci added. "He's such a baby."

Scaramucci — who said he'll be voting in November for President Joe Biden — called on Republicans to listen to the warnings from former Trump staffers who say he represents a danger to the nation and the world.

"Let's say the 40 of us worked for a pharmaceutical company and we told you that the drug was going to kill you, or we work for an automotive company and we say that car is going to crash and kill your family," Scaramucci said.

"You've got 40 people that work directly and in touch with Mr. Trump...we've seen what he is like, the full criminality of him."

Scaramucci then warned Tapper that Trump would seek to strip CNN of its Federal Communications Commission license if re-elected in 2025.

"This is a very dangerous guy," Scaramucci said. "He shouldn't be anywhere near that White House again."

Scaramucci predicted Biden will ultimately defeat Trump with a better organized and better funded campaign machine, but hedged his optimism with a warning.

"Unless [Trump] goes to jail, Jake, he'll probably run in 2028," Scaramucci said. "We'll be dealing with is nonsense again and he'll further weaken the Republican Party, which I used to be very proud to be a part of."

Watch the video below or click the link here.

Ex-Trump lawyer shows Stormy Daniels threw ex-president's legal strategy 'off kilter'

Former President Donald Trump's one-time attorney Jim Trusty thinks that the cross-examination of adult film star Stormy Daniels in the Manhattan hush money trial was handled with essentially the right approach — but, he admitted to CNN's Brianna Keilar, Trump's lawyers fumbled the bag in one key way that made the whole cross go "off kilter."

Daniels revealed a number of salacious details about her alleged affair with Trump . The former president, for his part, was audibly cursing through certain points of the testimony, which prompted Judge Juan Merchan to order defense attorney Todd Blanche to control the client.

"I do want to ask you that if you were still Trump's lawyer, if there was anything different that you would have done on cross-examination of Stormy Daniels," said Keilar. "I asked specifically because there were a lot of questions about whether [attorney] Susan Necheles went overboard on cross the second day with Stormy Daniels because Trump may have wanted her to. What would you have done if you had a client demanding you do something you don't think it's the best strategy?"

ALSO READ: Trump’s Manhattan trial could determine whether rule of law survives: criminologist

"Well, you've got to stick to your guns and get a good apology later rather than permission on the front end," said Trusty. "But look here, here's the bottom line. I think that the overall strategy for the defense has made sense, and she and Stormy became the flash of the strategy. And I'll explain in a second basically, make it all about Michael Cohen through all of your cross-examinations, you want to get and you want to get out. You want concessions. You don't want it to seem like it's a big battle because none of this other stuff is really hurting you. It's not really the primary focus of the case. The more you make this trial a referendum on the credibility of failed cooperator, perjurer, hateful Michael Cohen, the better you have a chance as defense."

That said, Trusty added, "Stormy created a problem because I think they started off that way thinking they're not going to dignify her too much. You're not going to cross too much on that first day ... And so they sat back, they didn't object a whole lot. She got in some gratuitous stuff and that opened the door where they felt they had to start going out with guns blazing, which opened another door on redirect for her to say more scurrilous stuff. So the strategy kinda got off kilter a little bit this week by, again, dignifying her as a witness a little too much."

"But I'll say this," continued Trusty. "I mean, she's a little bit of a target rich environment when you're cross-examining a witness about how they they made money talking to dead people. You got stuff to play with. It might resonate with the New York jury. I just think it was a little long, but not crazy long ... now it's the calm before the storm. When we get to Monday, it's a whole new trial."

Watch the video below or at the link.

Barron Trump 'declines' offer to be a delegate at Republican National Convention: report

Barron Trump is honored but turning down the opportunity to join his siblings as a Florida delegate to the Republican National Convention in June because he has "prior commitments."

"While Barron is honored to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party, he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments," the Office of former First Lady Melania Trump confirmed in a statement to The Daily Mail .

The bowing out comes two days after former President Donald Trump's youngest son Barron, 18, was expected to be cast as one of Florida's at-large delegates when the Republican National Convention takes place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this summer .

“We have a great delegation of grassroots leaders, elected officials and even Trump family members,” Florida GOP chairman Evan Power said after they received a list of the delegates expected to represent the Sunshine State. “Florida is continuing to have a great convention team, but more importantly we are preparing to win Florida and win it big.”

It was thought that Barron would join Power along with Florida delegation’s chairman, brother Eric Trump.

Also expected to be part of the delegation to mint Donald Trump as the GOP nominee includes: Donald Trump Jr. fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, Michale Boulous, the husband of Tiffany Trump; former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, longtime Trump adviser Sergio Gor; prominent Trump donor, and former Marvel Entertainment Chairman Ike Perlmutter, among others.

The high-profile move dovetails off a recent report relying on sources close to the family saying that Barron, who turned 18 in March, is looking to break free from the isolated presence in the shadow of his gatekeeping mother, First Lady Melania Trump, once he graduates high school and then heads to college.

Trump told to pay up before rallying in N.J. town he previously stiffed

How republican plans will make us sicker, marjorie taylor greene delays financial disclosure day after motion-to-vacate debacle.

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With piles of campaign cash, Christian activists make North Texas school board races a state battleground

Texas Tribune

Jason Beeferman And Brian Lopez

KELLER — As Tarrant County continues moving away from its perch as one of America’s reddest urban counties and public schools increasingly serve as battlefields for culture wars, school board races in four North Texas districts have quickly transformed from traditionally low-profile contests into high-stakes political conflicts.

A shifting county

Tarrant County has long been a bastion of American conservatism. When the Tea Party movement swept American politics in the early years of the Obama administration, a northeast Tarrant chapter was formed that included members from suburbs like Collevyille, Grapevine, Keller and Southlake. It quickly became a powerhouse in Texas politics and played an outsized role in shaping the state GOP as it helped elect local conservatives to the Texas Legislature.

In the 2016 presidential election, Texas’ larger counties moved deeper into the Democratic column. But Tarrant emerged as America’s most conservative large urban county . Republican Donald Trump won there with an 8.6-point margin, his largest victory among the country’s 20 largest counties.

But two years later, Democrat Beto O’Rourke narrowly beat Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in Tarrant. In the 2020 presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden narrowly beat Trump by 0.2 percentage points .

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said the conservatives pouring money into local school board races are doing so as a counteroffensive to the inroads progressives have made in areas that were once Republican strongholds. “These are counties that are no longer rock-solid conservative and in the way that we would have characterized them maybe 10 years ago,” Jones said.

Tarrant includes Southlake, an affluent suburb that drew national attention after a 2018 video of white high school students chanting a racist slur prompted dialogues on the treatment of Black students at Carroll ISD, the area’s public school system.

After the video went viral, the district introduced what it called a Cultural Competence Action Plan to address racial discrimination. Then came the backlash.

Through the Southlake Families PAC, Carroll ISD’s conservative parents worked successfully to stop a plan they deemed would “ingrain woke racial politics in the schools.” Last year, with support from the Southlake Families PAC, the two school board candidates running in steadfast opposition to the district’s diversity plan won seats on the board.

Wambsganss, who is now leading Patriot Mobile Action, helped start the Southlake PAC in 2011, a Southlake document obtained by The Texas Tribune shows.

“She runs our PAC and she’s got 30-plus years in political consultant experience and managing money in campaigns,” Coburn said of Wambsganss. “She’s really well versed in all of this. She’s using all of the same tactics that you would see like a political consultant company that would come in and help somebody organize and manage a campaign.”

And while the amount of money Patriot Mobile Action is spending on local school board races is a sharp departure from convention, Rebecca Deen, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, said it’s not unexpected.

“It doesn’t surprise me because they’re right next door to Southlake,” Deen said. “They had a front-row seat.”

State Rep. Dan Huberty , R-Houston, sits on the House Public Education Committee and co-sponsored the GOP’s so-called critical race theory bill last year. Before he was a lawmaker, he served on the Humble ISD school board. Yet even he is in disbelief that the North Texas school board races are pulling in dollar figures usually seen in statewide campaigns.

“It’s perplexing to some degree that there is a lot of outside interest coming,” Huberty said. “I ran for school board because my kids were going to public school, and I wanted to try to make a difference [in] their potential education. It wasn’t because I had a political philosophy.”

A patriot’s phone plan

Grapevine-based Patriot Mobile bills itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless service provider.” The money it donates to conservative causes and organizations comes from customers’ phone bills. Patriot Mobile has over 60,000 subscribers nationwide, a number that is expected to almost double by the end of the year, said Coburn, its chief marketing officer whose son is a Carroll student in Southlake.

Ahead of Saturday’s election, Patriot Mobile Action PAC has raised over half a million dollars, coming almost entirely from its phone company, and had about $125,000 cash on hand as of the end of April.

Since the end of March, the PAC has spent about $390,000 on the four Tarrant County school districts’ 11 conservative candidates. That includes nearly $200,000 on direct mailers, about $145,000 on canvassing costs and $30,000 on digital ads, according to campaign filings.

Patriot Mobile Action has spent $38,500 in advertising and canvassing for each candidate from Mansfield ISD, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD and Keller ISD. In Mansfield, the PAC has backed candidates Craig Tipping, Bianca Benavides Anderson, Keziah Valdes Farrar and Courtney Lackey Wilson. In Grapevine-Collevyille, it is supporting Tammy Nakamura and Kathy Florence-Spradley. In the Keller races, Patriot Mobile Action is backing Micah Young, Joni Shaw Smith and Sandi Walker.

The PAC has spent $20,875 on the two Carroll school district candidates it’s backing: Andrew Yeager and Alex Sexton.

The 11 candidates Patriot Mobile Action is backing either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

The company’s political arm was devised after Patriot Mobile founders Chris Wilson and Glenn Story noticed a San Francisco-based phone carrier called Credo Mobile. It promised customers that 1% of their phone bills would go to liberal causes and candidates. In 2012, Credo Mobile created its own political action committee and raised almost $2.5 million to oppose Tea Party Republicans in Congress . According to media reports , one of the targeted conservatives was Allen West, who at the time was a Florida congressperson. He recently led the Republican Party of Texas and unsuccessfully challenged Abbott in the March Republican primary .

“Our founders saw that the Credo on the left was having a major influence on political movements and getting candidates elected just by getting people to sign up for their cellphone service,” Coburn said. “And they said, well, we don’t have anybody on our side that’s doing that.”

According to Coburn, Patriot Mobile allows its customers to receive phone service without directly supporting “Big Mobile,” which he says donates to left-leaning organizations through corporate responsibility programs. But Patriot Mobile pays T-Mobile a wholesale rate to use its phone towers and infrastructure and then repackages the service by handling subscribers’ customer service and billing needs.

Patriot Mobile has supported organizations like the National Rifle Association and conservative youth movement Turning Point USA. The phone carrier will donate $1.5 million to conservative causes in 2022 and expects that number to double next year, Coburn said.

Coburn said the launch of the Patriot Mobile Action PAC allows the phone company to “get involved in local elections” with the goal of eventually expanding into statewide races.

“We are inserting ourselves into the issues because that’s what our customers want,” Coburn said.

In the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of door hangers and direct mailers in the North Texas races, Patriot Mobile Action warns parents of the presence of “critical race theory” in their school districts and endorses the candidates who are “saving America.”

“Keller ISD exposed our kids to explicit, ‘Woke’ Books,” one mailer reads. “The far-left agenda has infected KISD and it’s hurting our kids. It’s time for a new school board.”

Visitors applaud after a public comment concludes at a Keller ISD school board meeting in Keller on April 25, 2022.

A PAC-less fight

As more and more conservative money is poured into these races, some Tarrant parents are working to oppose the PAC-backed candidates — even if that means receiving online attacks and lies.

Hawes, whose four children attend Keller ISD, has been called the “expert in Libtardville” on Facebook by parents who support the three conservative candidates. She’s also been labeled as an extremist in private Facebook groups where she’s accused of working with a liberal organization in Austin to influence the Keller elections.

Hawes has gathered the support of 500 other Keller parents and started a grassroots effort to combat the conservative money.

The aim of the group, Hawes said, is to reach those who usually don’t vote in school board elections. But she said she knows that a group of parents who go door-to-door delivering at-home printed flyers will have a hard time competing against a much more sophisticated political apparatus.

“The challenge here is we’re not well funded,” Hawes said. “They’re just a bunch of parents busy with a bunch of kids, paying for soccer teams and dance classes.”

Craig Allen is a Keller school board member seeking another term. He is running against Micah Young, whom Patriot Mobile Action is supporting. He said that when he first won a seat in 2008, candidates needed less than $1,000 to mount a successful campaign.

This time around, Allen has raised over $10,000 — a number dwarfed by his opponents’ PAC-stocked war chests. None of his money has come from PACs, and about half has come in over the last few weeks as he makes a final push. Allen said parents have a right to be involved in their children’s education, but political issues should not be relevant to school board elections.

Julie Nors is running for a Keller school board seat against Joni Shaw Smith, who is supported by Patriot Mobile Action. Nors, who has raised less than $2,000, said the amount of time administrators are spending on political issues takes away from helping students recover from pandemic learning loss.

Allen said he “never would’ve dreamed” that he would need to raise so much money for a school board seat.

“This wildly exceeds what I would have guessed even a few weeks ago,” he said.

Dialing in on the money

Patriot Mobile isn’t the only big money player in the Tarrant County school board races. Southlake Families PAC and KISD Family Alliance PAC have also raised tens of thousands of dollars to push anti-CRT candidates in their school board races.

KISD Family Alliance spent almost $25,000 on political consulting and advertising in April. On Monday, prominent Texas GOP donor Monty Bennett gave $10,000 to the PAC, filings show.

“Many of our schools have unfortunately been taken over by ideologues who care more about pushing their outlandish agendas than in providing an excellent education to our kids. That needs to change,” Bennett said in a statement late Thursday.

And filings indicate the Southlake Families PAC, which says it is “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values,” spent almost twice as much — at least $45,000 — on Carroll ISD school board races from March 29 to April 27.

Conservatives believe that if they don’t fight back at what they see as a liberal agenda making its way into schools, then they will have lost, said Jones, the Rice University professor.

“If you really want to win, you need the money to do it,” he said.

Coburn said Patriot Mobile chose four districts it considers to be “at risk” or on the “front lines” of the critical race theory battle. He said the point of the local races is to ensure the “right people” hold power to combat alleged attempts to push “liberal ideologies” like critical race theory.

“We’re going to stand up and fight against that all day long,” he said.

Carla Astudillo and José Luis Martínez contributed to this story.

Disclosure: Facebook, Rice University and the University of Texas at Arlington have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune ’ s journalism. Find a complete list of them here .

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The ‘Remnant Alliance’ Is Coming for a School Board Near You

A new coalition of Christian nationalist groups is mobilizing congregations to take over Texas school boards.

by Steven Monacelli

May 8, 2024, 10:17 AM, CDT

On February 6, pistol-packing pastor Troy Jackson, a former Republican Party of Texas strategist and current candidate for vice chair of the Texas GOP, beamed as he welcomed a dozen conservative activists into a flag-adorned meeting room at the New Beginnings Church in Bedford. The attendees included the founder of Citizens Defending Freedom, a Tarrant County GOP official, the founder of the local John Birch Society , and a representative from the far-right group Turning Point USA. They were gathering as the Remnant Alliance, a coalition of Christian nationalist groups that are working to educate, train, and mobilize conservative Christian congregations to influence the outcomes of local elections—especially school boards.

“Even if I don’t have kids in school, I’m showing up at school board meetings and testifying that you’re not going to teach our children this smut,” Jackson told the group. “You’re not going to sexualize these children. Because, even though I may not have children in the school, it affects the entire community.”

Jackson’s heated rhetoric echoes the talking points deployed by state-level Republican lawmakers, big-dollar political action committees (PACs), and well-connected Republican consulting firms that have descended upon local school board races in recent years —and helped install majorities that have taken books off library shelves and rolled back protections for LGBTQ+ students. The election of those majorities was not coincidental: A recent Texas Observer investigative series revealed the coordinated nature of efforts to back more than 105 hard-right school board candidates across 35 districts since 2021, and how those efforts were funded in large part by billionaire donors who support school privatization.

For decades, various far-right, faith-based organizations have been working to train pastors and turn congregants into school board activists and candidates . But now, the Remnant Alliance has united several powerful conservative Christian groups. The overarching ideology of these groups is Christian nationalism , which is “an ideology that seeks to privilege conservative Christianity in education, law, and public policy,” according to David Brockman, a religious scholar with the Baker Institute at Rice University. While conservative churches and outspoken pastors have long played roles in local politics, the Remnant Alliance represents a deepening and broadening of efforts to elect candidates who promise to infuse right-wing Christian values into policy.

From Keller to Katy, such right-wing religious candidates continue to run for school boards in 2024, increasingly with the vocal support of pastors and congregations in the Remnant Alliance orbit. While some deep red areas like Llano have become flashpoints, most of the action appears clustered in suburban districts around Houston, Austin, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

“We are a team of ministries and faith-based organizations who are committed to providing a clear path for pastors and churches to move into active engagement with culture for the purpose of bringing God’s moral values, once again, as the foundation of America’s success, while also opposing evil in our land,” the Remnant Alliance website reads.

In Keller, two right-wing school board incumbents, Charles Randklev and Heather Washington, were prayed over at Mercy Culture, a church where “Biblical Citizenship” and “End-times Prophecy” ministry is led by Mark Fulmer, the founder of the north Texas chapter of the John Birch Society, who attended the February Remnant Alliance meeting. In Katy, two right-wing school board challengers, Donovan Campbell and David Olson, received endorsements from Katy Christian Magazine , a publication that has run articles on school board politics penned by Rick Scarborough, a Remnant Alliance leader who attended that same meeting and whose organization, Recover America, focuses on school board elections.

The Remnant Alliance is an amalgam of independent organizations that share goals and sometimes personnel. It operates as a sort of clearinghouse for Christian nationalist ideology and is building its coalition with a five-step plan: First, local pastors are trained to have a “Biblical Worldview” through Liberty Pastors; second, pastors begin teaching a “Biblical Worldview” from the pulpit with the help of preprepared notes; third, congregants are trained on “Biblical Citizenship” and “Constitutional Defense” through the so-called Patriot Academy; fourth, pastors form a “Salt and Light” ministry at their church and are paired with a Citizens Defending Freedom liaison; and fifth, entire congregations are mobilized to “extend the Kingdom of God” with the help of advocacy groups—in other words, to vote for “Biblical values” candidates in races that can be decided by a few hundred votes.

Its political activism is framed as spiritual warfare against satanic evil in the pursuit of realizing the kingdom of God on earth.

According to Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, the Charismatic Christian language of spiritual warfare has become a sort of lingua franca for the broader Christian nationalist movement, which is increasingly locally focused. “It’s become a very effective schema for how to get Christians angry, how to get Christians mobilized, and how to get Christians taking action locally,” Taylor told the Observer . “And I think it is going to really redound to their benefit and power in this upcoming national election.”

As Taylor sees it, the strategy has shifted from a hail Mary pass to get Donald Trump elected in 2016 to more localized efforts that feed into national politics.

“They’re working to activate these grassroots networks that can take over these school boards and city councils,” Taylor said. “The juice they get from seeing this local victory will then spur people on towards a national approach. It’s very politically sharp.”

School boards are a top priority for the Remnant Alliance; official meetings of the group encourage activists to attend their meetings. Scarborough, one of its leaders, has vowed to free school boards from “ godless educrats ” and save children from “being groomed by homosexuals and the trans perverts to be recruited into their evil lifestyles.”

It’s difficult to exaggerate the scope of the Remnant Alliance’s collective influence. Between the nine groups that make up the coalition, there are thousands of churches and hundreds of thousands of activists. Among the partners are: Citizens Defending Freedom, a Christian nationalist group with chapters in several states that critics have described as “Moms for Liberty in suits”; Liberty Pastors, a training organization for church leaders founded by politically outspoken Oklahoma pastor Paul Blair; Recover America, a nondenominational ministry led by Scarborough that aims to mobilize pastors and their congregations to “vote biblically” in school board elections; Patriot Academy, an educational organization founded by former Texas state representative Rick Green with seed funding from Christian nationalist David Barton; Turning Point USA, a college-focused group with a track record of associating with extremists that is led by Charlie Kirk; ACT for America, an advocacy organization led by Brigitte Gabriel that has pushed anti-Muslim rhetoric and recently recruited on a QAnon show ; the Salt and Light Council, a parachurch organization led by Dran Reese that works to equip pastors to mobilize their congregants toward political ends; Liberty Counsel, a legal organization led by former pastor Mathew Staver that provides litigation support to the conservative Christian movement; and All Pro Pastors, a networking and education group for pastors that has aligned with election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.

Several Remnant Alliance leaders—such as Blair, Scarborough, Kirk, Gabriel, Reese, and Staver—are also members of the Council on National Policy (CNP), a secretive group founded in 1981 that has worked to link wealthy right-wing donors and political operatives to plan and execute long-term strategies.

Award-winning journalist Anne Nelson, whose book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right provides an in-depth look into the CNP, has described the group as a “pluto-theocracy.”

“The Remnant Alliance is just the latest version of an ongoing effort to politicize evangelical pastors and their congregations by the radical right wing of the Republican Party,” Nelson said. “These efforts are heavily financed and coordinated by the network of mega-donors and organizations involved in the Council for National Policy.”

Since the beginning of 2024, the Remnant Alliance has held over a dozen meetings at local churches across Texas. Some included local Republican party officials, such as a February 6 meeting during which Rosalie Escobedo, the Tarrant County GOP secretary and executive director of the Tarrant County chapter of Citizens Defending Freedom, endorsed training children to “not give up Jesus” through “end times militaristic preparation,” such as “army crawls” that troops use to advance during battle.

“Friends, the response of pastors at these meetings has been overwhelming,” reads a January 21 newsletter from Recover America. “Over 90% of pastors attending decid[ed] to team with the Remnant Alliance to educate, equip, empower and lead their congregations to be ‘Salt and Light’ in their local communities.”

At the New Beginnings meeting, Remnant Alliance members engaged in a wide-ranging discussion that blurred the lines between faith and politics. Jackson, the hosting pastor, boasted that 19 of his congregants ran for office in 2022, mainly school boards and city councils. He touted firearms classes held at the church and explained how he trains Republican precinct chairs to engage in “Kingdom activism”—a concept promoted by self-described Christian nationalist prophet Lance Wallnau, a leader in the controversial “ New Apostolic Reformation ” who lives in the nearby suburb of Keller.

Jackson is a model of the pastors the Remnant Alliance seeks: He’s highly political, teaches “biblical citizenship” at a nondenominational church, employs the rhetoric of “spiritual warfare,” and is a proponent of Christian nationalist ideas such as the Seven Mountains Mandate — a theology popularized by Wallnau that calls for Christians to rule over the seven domains of family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Jackson’s business card includes a link to his Republican party vice chair campaign website, which features a photo of him with Wallnau. In 2020, the oil billionaire-funded Texas Scorecard dubbed Jackson a “happy warrior” for his political activism.

“The law of nature is God’s law, which is the law of the land,” said Steve Maxwell, the founder of Citizens Defending Freedom, during the February meeting. “It comes before the constitution.”

“That’s it,” Jackson responded. “The Constitution comes second to the word of God.”

“Amen,” Maxwell said in agreement.

After establishing mutual understanding during two hours of animated conversation, Jackson closed the Remnant Alliance meeting with a prayer. “God, we thank you for the presidential campaign, we thank you for Donald Trump …We thank you that you’re building a hedge of protection around him and the entire team as they go about all across the nation. We know that the weapons of our warfare are mighty for you. … God I thank you for fortifying us in this moment so that we can go into the enemy’s camp and declare victory.” In an interview with the Observer , Jackson said he linked up with the Remnant Alliance in 2023.

“The purpose of the Remnant Alliance is to provide free resources to churches to do exactly what we’re doing in our church through Biblical Citizenship teaching,” Jackson said . “A lot of pastors are not willing to teach or do certain things in their church, not because of fear, but because they’re not equipped to do it and they don’t know enough about it because they know how to teach and preach the word of God but they don’t know the civic side of the game.”

Scarborough, the self-described Christocrat who has a long political resume and a national profile, is a regular at such Remnant Alliance pastor meetings. In addition to his CNP membership, Scarborough serves on the board of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which, according to Baptist News , embraces “a ‘biblical worldview’ that claims political organizing is spiritual warfare, that spiritual revival can come through political activism, and that Christians should have dominion over nonbelievers.” Mike Johnson, the powerful speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who is also a proponent of the Seven Mountains Mandate, addressed the National Association of Christian Lawmakers convention on December 5, 2023, where he said God had prepared him to be a “ new Moses. ”

Through Recover America, Scarborough claims to have already helped elect two “committed Christians” to the Houston Independent School District board of trustees and three “biblical values candidates” in the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in 2021. Scarborough agreed to an interview with the Observer , but canceled hours before it was scheduled.

One of the candidates he supported was Natalie Kagan Blasingame, a former educator and public school administrator who back in 2015 unsuccessfully campaigned for a Cypress-Fairbanks school board position explicitly on the issue that Christianity should have more of a place in classrooms and evinced belief in the Seven Mountains Mandate in an email seeking financial support. “God is weaving the pieces together, Blasingame wrote. “Making sure he is positioning Christians at the head of all the mountains of culture. … The Lord put in on my heart that my agenda is to tear down the over interpretation of the separation of church and state that has shut God out of schools.” In 2021, Blasingame ran again for school board and won, along with the two other PAC-backed candidates Scarborough supported. She now serves as the board’s vice president. In total, Recover America claims to have helped conservative candidates win 25 of 36 school board races since 2019.

“In May 2023, three conservative candidates were elected to the Katy ISD School Board,” Scarborough wrote in an April 2024 newsletter. “This changed the ‘majority opinion’ of the Katy ISD School Board and thus the direction of the ISD toward faith-based values. It happened in a single election cycle! One of the positions was won by 263 votes…Pastors, be encouraged … your church can make a difference!” Scarborough also noted that the newly elected conservative majority on the Katy ISD school board passed a policy that “requires the use of pronouns based on the student’s biological sex, and prohibits faculty and staff from teaching or using instructional materials relating to gender ideology.” He concluded by encouraging his followers to use the CNP-affiliated iVoter Guide.

Even after such policies have been passed, pastors and activists aligned with the Remnant Alliance continue to show up to school board meetings and demand the removal of books. On February 5, the Remnant Alliance held a meeting at the Community Transformation Church in Houston, led by Pastor Richard Vega. On April 3, Vega endorsed the Remnant Alliance during a WallBuilders podcast with Green, the founder of Patriot Academy. That same month, Vega addressed the Katy ISD school board. “There’s probably 150 books, probably more, in your school district that need to go ahead and come out,” Vega said. “We’re willing to work with you guys and be able to give you that list so you can start filtering through.”

Katy is one of the school boards that has been targeted by members of the Remnant Alliance; another is Keller, 250 miles northwest in Tarrant County, where a newly elected conservative majority also adopted controversial bathroom and pronoun policies aimed at trans and nonbinary individuals in the district.

When the new Patriot Mobile-backed conservative majority on the Keller school board passed the new bathroom and pronoun policies, Citizens Defending Freedom celebrated the victory.

“Thanks for the hard work and dedication of Citizens Defending Freedom members, along with True Texas Project and community members, a school district in Tarrant county has banned transgender bathrooms and the usage of pronouns that [do] not align with biological sex,” reads a July 2023 Citizens Defending Freedom post on X .

A November 29, 2023, rally at the Sandstone Mountain Ranch event center in Llano encapsulates the extent to which the Remnant Alliance overlaps with Republican Party power players on school board-related issues. Dubbed the “Protect Our Children Event,” the gathering featured multiple Remnant Alliance affiliates who spoke alongside Matt Rinaldi, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, Luke Macias, a Republican political consultant linked to Christian nationalist billionaire oilman Tim Dunn, and Kevin Roberts of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. One goal of the event was to raise money for Llano County to fight a lawsuit brought against county officials that stemmed from the removal of 17 books from the public library, including one for teens that calls the Ku Klux Klan a terrorist group and another that describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system. Another was to “educate those who attend to the types of harmful content readily available to children in public and school libraries.”

Some big-name pastors have also lent their support to the Remnant Alliance or embraced its member organizations. In January, the Second Baptist Church, the SBC-affiliated megachurch where Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick recently called for pastors and their congregants to run for office , hosted a Remnant Alliance pastor meeting. In July 2023, Green, the former Texas state representative and founder of Patriot Academy, spoke at the annual summit for the ministry of Kenneth Copeland, the wealthiest pastor in America whose Flashpoint News show airs on a channel that reaches hundreds of millions of people.

Several Remnant Alliance organizations—Liberty Pastors, Patriot Academy, and Turning Point USA—have all directly partnered with Patriot Mobile, which explicitly endorse school board candidates through its PAC, Patriot Mobile Action. In 2022, Citizens Defending Freedom organized voter registration events, including one at Gateway Church in partnership with Glenn Story, the co-founder and president of Patriot Mobile who in December 2023 was recognized with the Salt and Light Award at the same National Association of Christian Lawmakers event attended by Speaker Johnson.

The Remnant Alliance also has managed to establish informal relationships with like-minded groups and pastors, like Fulmer, the north Texas John Birch Society chapter leader. Fulmer also heads up “Biblical Citizenship” and “End-times Prophecy” ministry at Mercy Culture, a church where state Representative Nate Schatzline serves as a pastor. Mercy Culture has thousands of congregants and is a part of the expansive Gateway Church network, which has more than 100,000 attendees some Sundays.

On April 21, Schatzline led the congregation in prayer for “ Friends and Family Candidates ” supported by For Liberty and Justice Tarrant, a nonprofit that Schatzline also leads. The list, which promoted Keller school board candidates Randklev and Washington among others, carried a disclaimer that says it is “not an endorsement” and that “these are candidates that are involved in their local church and share our values.” Patriot Mobile also explicitly endorsed Randklev and Washington. The American Principles Project, which features a CNP member on the board of directors, endorsed Campbell and Olson in Katy. All four candidates have received endorsements from local Republican Party officials.

But the recent primary results show that the growing Remnant Alliance isn’t always able to succeed. In Keller, both Randklev and Washington won reelection, each beating their opponent by around 1300 votes. But down in Katy, both Donovan and Olson were unsuccessful in attempts to unseat incumbents, each losing by 13 percent.

“Hearing that these groups are coordinated and working together is unsurprising,” said Anne Russey, a parent with children in Katy public schools who co-founded the Texas Freedom to Read Project, which aims to counter efforts to restrict access to books in schools. “I think the formalization of those relationships is extremely concerning. And something that all Texans should be paying attention to.”

This story is part of a series that was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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How a far-right, Christian cellphone company ‘took over’ four Texas school boards

A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to “save the nation,” he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.

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How a far-right, Christian cellphone company took over 4 Texas school boards

Discussion in ' BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion ' started by Coach AI , Aug 25, 2022 .

Coach AI Contributing Member

How a far-right, Christian cellphone company ‘took over’ four Texas school boards (nbcnews.com) A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to “save the nation,” he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action. “The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.” Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.” “Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause. It was a moment of celebration for an upstart company whose leaders say they are on a mission from God to restore conservative Christian values at all levels of government — especially in public schools. To carry out that calling, the Grapevine-based company this year created a political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, and gave it more than $600,000 to spend on nonpartisan school board races in the Fort Worth suburbs. Click to expand...

dmoneybangbang Member

Christian extremism is some scary stuff. I’d rather Texas and the US not to resemble Saudi Arabia.

JuanValdez Contributing Member

I'm not pleased. But, I do admire their ability to commit to a ground game and win at local elections. I wish democrats were able to do that.

tinman Contributing Member Supporting Member

VooDooPope Love > Hate Supporting Member

Glad my kids are out of school. I'd happily homeschool them before having the new christian conservative god shoved down their throats.

DatRocketFan Member

VooDooPope said: ↑ Glad my kids are out of school. I'd happily homeschool them before having the new christian conservative god shoved down their throats. Click to expand...

DatRocketFan said: ↑ The folks who btch about critical race theory and r actively banning "inapproiate books" are the same dam hypocrites pushing this religion indoctrination bs onto the young minds. U hate to see it Click to expand...

DFWRocket Member

I'm pissed. This is our district- we watched this live for about 5 hours. It's appalling. Over 80% of the people that spoke in defense of the school board during that and these Orwellian changes did NOT have children attending the district. These outside fanatics literally sent out texts messages all across north Texas to get people to show up to speak in support. These outside sources raised tens of thousands of dollars to completely outfund the sane candidates. We ended up with lunatics like Chip Gaines sister Shannon Braun who has NO KIDS in the district. Or Tammy Nakamura who literally said she had a "hit list" of teachers who they are going after. Many of the people speaking out against the nuts that night were reading statements from teachers who were afraid to speak themselves for fear of reprisal. They are forcing teachers to provide a list of all the books in their classroom so they can review the titles for appropriateness. My wife (2nd grade) has over 300 books in her class. She works from 7am to 4pm with no breaks and comes home and works from about 6pm to 10pm. She works Saturdays and often Sundays. If they want a list of her books, they can come make the list themselves - she doesn't have the time. F them

Rokkit said: ↑ Click to expand...

In the last few months, GCISD has seen an 18% turnover rate. Twice the average of most districts this year. In the middle of a massive teacher shortage, this is crazy. The school boards response.."there's plenty of teachers waiting to take their place" ignorance at its finest

leroy Contributing Member

The students of Grapevine HS have organized a walkout for today over the policy changes. I'll let you know how it goes, but from what my daughter read to me this morning, it seems very well organized for a bunch of teens.

fchowd0311 Contributing Member

Rokkit said: ↑ How a far-right, Christian cellphone company ‘took over’ four Texas school boards (nbcnews.com) more at the link and a little taste of the kind of bigoted, lunatic extremists that support and are more represented now by these school takeovers: Click to expand...

fchowd0311 said: ↑ Also is that guy doing a parody or something? His smirk leaving the mic seems to kinda suggest that. Click to expand...

thegary Contributing Member

Not sure there exists a group more ignorant, intolerant and hypocritical than evangelicals.

JayGoogle Member

DFWRocket said: ↑ Over 80% of the people that spoke in defense of the school board during that and these Orwellian changes did NOT have children attending the district. Click to expand...

DaDakota If you want to know, just ask!

Evangelicals = Taliban DD

Invisible Fan Contributing Member

JayGoogle said: ↑ Yep, this is a common theme for most of these people. They will be homeschooling kids or whatever the case and will not have children in the districts they are trying to change. I think people miss this is another long game by many conservatives in this country...like the pro-life movement was. I think where conservatives messed up was education reformation should have been their first priority before things like banning abortion and they are going to find that many people will not like the changes they want to implment. But the long term game here is to indoctrinate as many kids into their religion as possible. This sounds like some crazy libtard conspiracy theory, I'm sure, but when you look into it then it becomes pretty clear this is the plan here. Otherwise, why make a law trying to get a 'In God We Trust' poster in schools? Now though conservatives are going to war against the education system because honestly...and lets be honest here, the more people learn about the world, its history, sciences, etc...the more they question their faith. The response? They hope to eliminate public education entirely knowing that most private schools are religious schools. Something like 80% of private school students attend religious schools. What would they do to all the children who can't afford to go at all? Well, they DGAF about those kids, those kids can enlist in the US military machine or do labor/menial tasks for the rest of their lives. They don't care. The funny thing is the whole "Liberal propaganda" theory from the right has always been a massive projection of what they wish to do with other people's children. Click to expand...

CCorn Member

JuanValdez said: ↑ I'm not pleased. But, I do admire their ability to commit to a ground game and win at local elections. I wish democrats were able to do that. Click to expand...

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A Christian cell phone company plans to take over Texas school boards

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thirteen hours in the past - News A Christian cell cellphone business company plans to take over Texas faculty boards

Michael Mooney

Axios on facebook Axios on twitter Axios on linkedin Axios on e-mail A Patriot Mobile income space at CPAC this 12 months. Photo: Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Patriot Mobile, a North Texas-based totally cell telephone service reseller that markets itself as "America's only Christian conservative wi-fi provider" changed into the using economic force within the lower back of the election of eleven new school board members in four suburban North Texas districts.

Driving the news: Patriot Mobile helped opt for the majority of participants in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, which these days passed a controversial new set of conservative guidelines dubbed " Don't Say Trans ."

Why it topics: The guidelines, which encompass prohibitions on instructors discussing whatever related to critical race concept or "gender fluidity," are part of a top notch push from every Patriot Mobile's political arm — Patriot Mobile Action — and the united states GOP.

The massive image: Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has knowledgeable conservatives that to "save the country," they need to aim school boards, over and over spotlighting Patriot Mobile.

Between the lines: School districts are the the front line inside the political battle for Texas. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke has rooted his advertising and marketing campa on faculty investment and safety , whilst Gov. Greg Abbott has made fears of conservative mother and father a cornerstone of his bid for re-election.

What passed off: Earlier this 12 months, Patriot Mobile Action employed national GOP consulting organizations — Vanguard Field Strategies and Axiom Strategies — to help aim college board races inside the suburbs of Tarrant County, the largest conservative county in the america .

What we are looking: Last week the Republican Party of Texas made a fundraising appeal praising GCISD's new policies, pronouncing the birthday celebration is "working to convey this conservative policy" to each school district in the united states of america.

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How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas
Conservative Christian cellphone company wins control over four Texas school boards. Story turned to the camera and said, "We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them ...
A Christian cell phone company plans to take over Texas school boards
Patriot Mobile, a North Texas-based cell phone service reseller that markets itself as "America's only Christian conservative wireless provider" was the driving financial force behind the election of 11 new school board members in four suburban North Texas districts. Driving the news: Patriot Mobile helped elect the majority of members in ...
How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas
How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas school boards. DALLAS — A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to "save the nation," he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas ...
Conservative Christian cellphone company wins control over four Texas
Conservative Christian cellphone company wins control over four Texas school boards. NBC. August 25, 2022. Patriot Mobile, a far-right cellphone company, has worked to gain control over Texas school boards and implement a conservative agenda in the state's education programs. NBC News' Mike Hixenbaugh reports.
How a Christian Cellphone Company Became a Rising Force in Texas
The entry of a Texas cellphone company into the national tug of war over schools is part of a far more sweeping battle over the future of Texas being waged in the suburbs north of Dallas and Fort ...
These are the right-wing ideologues taking over Texas school boards
While Patriot Mobile Action is primarily funded with money from the Christian nationalist cell phone company, some conservative billionaires have forked over big bucks to school board PACs ...
Cellphone company making Texas school board races battleground
The phone carrier will donate $1.5 million to conservative causes in 2022 and expects that number to double next year, Coburn said. Coburn said the launch of the Patriot Mobile Action PAC allows ...
Christian mobile phone company helped conservatives take over 4 Texas
The Christian conservative mobile phone company Patriot Mobile donated signs that read "In God We Trust" to schools throughout Texas last week. As The Dallas Morning News points out, the ...
With piles of campaign cash, Christian activists make North Texas
Texas has more than 1,200 school districts, which are largely independently run by their elected boards. About 47 districts across the state have school board elections Saturday, according to ...
The 'Remnant Alliance' Is Coming for a School Board Near You
Education. The 'Remnant Alliance' Is Coming for a School Board Near You. A new coalition of Christian nationalist groups is mobilizing congregations to take over Texas school boards.
Carroll ISD accepts 'In God We Trust' signs from Christian conservative
Updated:6:22 PM CDT August 16, 2022. SOUTHLAKE, Texas — A self-proclaimed Christian conservative cell phone company donated new 'In God We Trust' signs to be hung in a prominent location at ...
How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas
A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to "save the nation," he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.
NBC News
A Christian cellphone company called Patriot Mobile is on a mission to take over Texas school boards. The company backed 11 candidates in four school districts this year. They won every race.
Conservative Christian Cellphone Company Wins Control Over Four Texas
Patriot Mobile, a far-right cellphone company, has worked to gain control over Texas school boards and implement a conservative agenda in the state's educati...
A Christian cell phone company plans to take over Texas school boards
A christian cell phone company is a real thing? Remember in the movie Dogma where George Carlin plays a priest who is trying to market a line of Jesus merch, and that was a comical exaggeration of how the church has become a capitalist enterprise? That movie is only like 20 years old.
How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas
Now the Trump-aligned company is on a mission to win control of Texas school boards. ... Now the Trump-aligned company is on a mission to win control of Texas school boards. How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas school boards. FIND YOUR COMMUNITY. ENTER YOUR ZIP CODE TO SHOW THE COMMUNITIES NEAR YOU. ENTER All. LOG ...
A Christian cell phone company plans to take over Texas school boards
76 votes, 11 comments. 2.8M subscribers in the atheism community. Welcome to r/atheism, the web's largest atheist forum. All topics related to…
A Christian cell phone company plans to take over Texas school boards
21. Pomp_N_Circumstance • 1 yr. ago. Patriot Mobile, a North Texas-based cell phone service reseller that markets itself as "America's only Christian conservative wireless provider" was the driving financial force behind the election of 11 new school board members in four suburban North Texas districts.
How a far-right, Christian cellphone company took over 4 Texas school
How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas school boards (nbcnews.com) A little more than a year after former Trump adviser... Home; SHOP; Forums. Recent Posts; ... Christian cellphone company took over 4 Texas school boards. Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Rokkit, Aug 25, 2022. Page 1 of ...
How a far-right, Christian cellphone company 'took over' four Texas
DALLAS — A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to "save the nation," he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.
Not even kids cellphones are safe anymore from indoctrination ...
Not even kids cellphones are safe anymore from indoctrination and blacklisted websites: A Christian cell phone company plans to take over Texas school boards
A Christian cell phone company plans to take over Texas school boards
Patriot Mobile helped elect the majority of members in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.

How a far-right, Christian cellphone company ‘took over’ four Texas school boards

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How a Christian Cellphone Company Became a Rising Force in Texas Politics

Christian mobile phone company helped conservatives take over 4 Texas school boards

Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art. He's the founder of the blog DeadState.org.

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