TITLE: The Multilevel Marketer Rallying Women to Put America in Christian ‘Bondage’
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jenny-donnelly-rallying-christian-nationalist-women-1234917988/
EXCERPT: Who says Christian nationalism is a man’s game? Jenny Donnelly — an “apostle” who claims God speaks to her prophetically in her dreams — wants to marshal an “army of women” to this extremist cause.
Donnelly is the founder of the Her Voice Movement, which is committed to activating a million women to stand for Christian dominion over American culture and politics in 2024. Under the guidance of top leaders of the Trump-aligned Christian right, Donnelly is organizing prayer rallies at every state Capitol next April. And she is working to stage a million-woman Christian nationalist march on the National Mall next October, near Election Day.
Donnelly’s movement-building has an appealing gloss of women’s empowerment. She’s an experienced marketer — a former “Hall of Fame” earner for a multi-level-marketing company that got charged for operating as a pyramid scheme. But Donnelly preaches a dark message of Christian supremacy.
“I’m a really black-and-white person,” she said in a video call with the Christian nationalist leader Lance Wallnau this summer. “I just believe what the Bible says,” she added. “We’re supposed to go onto the Earth; we’re supposed to dominate.” In a late November sermon, Donnelly addressed congregants on the divine mandate to “put God’s people in power,” telling followers: “He’s given you a spiritual position to reign and rule.”
The agenda for Donnelly, in particular, is to roll back the LGBTQ rights movement, which she insists is a Satanic slippery slope to pedophilia. “Know that sin does not have a stopping point,” she told a recent religious gathering in Hollywood, warning that if the movement remains unchecked, “all of a sudden it’s going to be OK for a 54-year-old to be married to a 4-year-old.”
Donnelly, 49, positions this anti-LGBTQ sentiment as though it is defensive, with branding that includes the website: “Don’t Mess With Our Kids.” But she also models her movement on one of the bloodiest stories of the Old Testament — which ends with the heroes going on offense against their enemies, one of whom ends up impaled on a spike.
For a preacher obsessed with power, Donnelly shuns media attention. She confided to the followers in LA that she wants her movement to appear bottom-up, insisting: “We want to make it so the press can’t find out who is the leader.” She did not agree to be interviewed by Rolling Stone.
Donnelly preaches near Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her family. Presenting her life story to religious audiences, she describes how she was born to “Jesus movement” hippies, who soon divorced, and was raised in the house of her atheist, doctor stepfather in Idaho. She rediscovered God, she says, during a moment of despair in college.
Donnelly’s first career was a wild ride near the top of an alleged pyramid scheme. She worked with AdvoCare, a Texas-based multilevel marketing firm that ostensibly sold nutritional supplements and energy drinks. Donnelly and her husband were featured as “Hall of Fame” earners for the company. “I never set out to be a millionaire,” she said in one video, bragging of the couple’s seven-figure annual earnings.
Lower-level marketers, however, felt duped by the company, claiming that AdvoCare wasn’t really a nutrition business, rather an expensive trap that duped newcomers into buying inventory they had little prospect of selling for a profit. In 2019, the company reached a massive settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, agreeing to pay nearly $150 million dollars to resolve charges that it operated as an illegal pyramid scheme. (Donnelly was not named or accused of wrongdoing in that FTC action.)
The collapse of AdvoCare occasioned a stark shift by Donnelly into a religious calling — pursued through a ministry she started with her husband called Tetelestai Ministries. The religious nonprofit’s revenue soared, according to IRS records, from $121,000 in 2018 to $1.5 million in 2021, as Donnelly became active in the far-right religious community’s fight against Covid restrictions.
TITLE: In the Wake of a Sex Scandal, a Moms for Liberty Co-Founder’s Career Is Crumbling
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/bridget-ziegler-in-the-wake-of-a-sex-scandal-a-moms-for-liberty-cofounders-career-is-crumbling/
EXCERPT: It’s been just a week since AdvoCare, chair of the Florida GOP, was accused of raping a woman who was involved in a sexual encounter with him and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder and Sarasota school board member Bridget Ziegler. Prominent Florida Republicans wasted no time in calling for Christan Ziegler to resign, which he has so far refused to do. Now, his wife is suffering from the consequences as well.
On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported that the Leadership Institute, the conservative political training group where Bridget Ziegler works as a vice president, had removed her profile from its website; the group later confirmed that she had stepped down. Later that day, Sarasota school board chair Karen Rose, a conservative, said in a statement that she planned to ask Bridget to resign from the board. “I am shocked and deeply saddened by the conduct and deplore the salacious news coverage,” she wrote. “I personally care about Bridget and her family and deeply regret the necessity for this course of action, but given the intense media scrutiny locally and nationally, her continued presence on the Board would cause irreparably harmful distractions to our critical mission.”
Rose said she planned to officially call for Ziegler’s resignation at the school board meeting scheduled for December 12. If she does resign, this will mark the end of Ziegler’s notoriously influential tenure, during which she pushed through an agenda that sought to rid schools of books and curricula that were inclusive of LGBTQ people. In a Facebook post last week, the day before news of the scandal broke, she boasted that she had “terminated gender diverse guidelines,” “eliminated equity committee,” and “eliminated equity policy & position.”
She was able to accomplish these goals by remaking the board to reflect her own political perspective. Last year, Ziegler led a successful campaign to recruit more conservative members, flipping the board’s majority from Democrat to Republican. She capitalized on that victory to secure her job at the Leadership Institute, where she trained prospective conservative school board candidates from across the country.
Ziegler participated in sessions about school board campaigns at both of the Moms for Liberty annual conferences that I attended. As the group rose to prominence, it became clear that school board elections were a powerful entry point for conservative voters. In 2021, when he was Florida’s GOP vice chair, Christian Ziegler praised Moms for Liberty in a Washington Post article. “I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic,” he said. “But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.”
TITLE: School board member sworn in on pile of banned books to troll Moms for Liberty
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/12/07/moms-for-liberty-banned-books/
EXCERPT: Smith was one of five Democrat candidates who beat opponents endorsed by the notoriously anti-LGBTQ+ group Moms for Liberty, who have been waging war on school boards across the US.
Following the vote in November, the Pennsylvania school district switched from a 6-3 Republican majority to a 6-3 Democratic majority.
“I’m not particularly religious,” Smith told local press following the ceremony. “The Bible doesn’t hold significant meaning for me. Given everything that has occurred in the past couple of years, the banned books, they do mean something to me at this point.”
Among the books were The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George Johnson, Mike Curato’s Flamer, Susan Kuklin’s Beyond Magenta, and Night, an autobiography by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
These, and several other titles, have been targeted as “sexually explicit” titles by the right-wing group WokePA. Previous Republican school board members opposed the books last year, as part of its library policy.
Democrats have suspended the former board’s policy.
Smith told the Philadelphia Inquirer that, following her and several other Democratic appointments to the board, the books were “definitely not going to be reviewed at this point.”
While she originally joined the school board in 2015 as a Republican, Smith switched parties in 2021 after noticing a sharp rise in right-wing homophobia from groups such as Moms for Liberty.
“I thought, ‘I can’t be part of these kind of actions’,” she said. “The Republican Party has lost its way.”
Commenting on WokePA’s decision to add Lily and Dunkin to its ‘inappropriate material’ list, Smith said she was shocked to find that there was nothing explicit in Donna Gephart’s book.
“I get to the end, and there’s nothing in there,” she said. “Not even a kiss.”
She described the book as a “sweet story about friendship – one student in the book is transgender. That’s it”.