Death was in the discourse leading up to Friday night’s boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. Marketing the fight, the two combatants repeatedly threatened to kill each other; a Netflix promo documentary referenced the bitten and bloodied ear Tyson left Evander Holyfield with in a 1997 match; social-media chatter reveled in the possibility that Paul, one of the internet’s favorite villains, would be murdered on air.

But once the match began, streamed from a packed arena to 60 million households, it felt morbid in an unexpected way—in the way of a retirement home, not a slasher movie. Paul, a 27-year-old YouTube star, jabbed and jabbed with the precision of a piston. Tyson, the 58-year-old heavyweight legend who retired nearly two decades ago, hobbled around the ring and gnawed his glove anxiously, only occasionally returning fire. He looked his age, and at times quite a bit older. Six rounds into the eight-round match—which ended in a unanimous decision for Paul—the commentator Rosie Perez, a longtime friend of Tyson’s, dropped any pretense of being entertained. This was, she said, “a hard story to watch.”

As I took that story in, I thought not only about how old Tyson is, but about how old the internet is—how far we are into the process of reality being hollowed-out by digital forces. The ropes advertised tech products: Meta Quest, the VR headset; DraftKings, the gambling network repopularizing one of humankind’s oldest addictions. Paul cut an imposing figure, his neck as thick as a ship’s mast, his tattooed legs swathed in diamond-draped shorts. It was breathtaking to remember that, a little more than decade ago, he became famous as a happy-go-lucky teen goofing around online with his brother, Logan. Now he’s an emblem of a generation of men—and a wider culture—starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle.

To trace the Paul brothers’ career is to trace a few epochs of the internet. They got famous on Vine in 2013 by doing boys-will-be-boys stuff: tasing each other, jumping on strangers’ backs, talking to pineapples in the supermarket. These hijinks were like a last flare of the internet’s OMG-so-random era, when logging on felt like an escape to a fantasy world of cat videos and violent stick-figure cartoons. But soon, the Paul brothers came to represent a new paradigm, in which distinctions between the online world and the offline world became more blurred. They were some of the first influencers, leveraging their lives into clickbait.

Which means that, suddenly, they needed to figure out what to do with the eyeballs they’d attracted. They began to augment their antics with charity efforts and self-help content. Jake joined a Disney Channel show as an actor but left halfway through its second season, then rebranded as a rapper. Logan founded a podcast that now has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. The continual search for the next gimmick also subjected the Pauls to plenty of internet outrage. They earned backlash for offenses as varied as insulting Kazakhstanis, publicizing shady cryptocurrency ventures, and filming a dead body. Their cockiness grew with each attempted cancellation; they tended to apologize and then bounce onward.

Yet to call these guys pure trolls isn’t quite right. Every time I see Jake speak, I discern something searching and sad within his boastfulness. In a video endorsing Donald Trump before the 2024 election, he delivered familiar MAGA talking points in a tone of puppy-eyed desperation. “I don’t come to you to make this video to create more division,” he said. “I believe love is the key to the universe and that we should all love each other more and more and more.” The video made me think less about his politics than about his soul. He seemed like a man looking for a cause, and finding it—as so many others have—in Trump’s promise to transform everything.

At first, boxing appeared to be just another stunt. In 2018, Logan booked a match against another YouTuber, and Jake fought on the undercard. In the years after that, Logan—whose intense, reptilian demeanor belies presidential aspirations—moved into the scripted battling of WWE. Jake, who has more of a crazy-fox kind of personality, stuck with boxing. In both cases, picking up an athletic side hustle was savvy. Combat sports have experienced a renaissance of cultural relevance over the past decade, driven by legalized betting and the popularity of MMA. Trump has deep links to the world of wrestling; just this past weekend he went to a UFC match. If you’re a man making entertainment for other men these days, chances are you have some sort of relationship to combat sports.

[Read: Can a boxer return to the ring after killing?]

Even so, Jake’s boxing career has been more durable and significant than anyone would have predicted in 2018. His fight with Tyson produced his 11th win out of 12 bouts. He says he wants to become a bona fide champion, and followers have been treated to footage of him sparring, ice-bathing, and scarfing hamburgers to bulk up. He started his own promotion company; he even tried (unsuccessfully so far) to get fighters to unionize. Why is he doing all of this? Aren’t there easier ways to make money? In a 2023 Netflix documentary about Jake, Logan explained, “He definitely found something with boxing that I think gave him worth”—worth that he didn’t get from “making stupid little insignificant vlogs on YouTube.”

Those stupid vlogs were, in some ways, quite significant, helping rewire the aspirations of an entire culture. A Morning Consult survey last year found that a majority of Gen Z—and 41 percent of all American adults—want to be influencers. Trump waged his presidential campaign by enlisting online entertainers in the Paul brothers’ model, such as the prank-pulling Nelk Boys. (He also joined Logan on his podcast.) Yet for all the growth of the influencer economy, the career path can be hellish, involving constant hustle, relentless criticism, and existential meaninglessness. Mugging to the camera for views certainly doesn’t fit neatly with old ideals of masculinity. In that 2023 documentary, Logan remarked, proudly and disgustedly, “We’re fucking media whores.” Jake explained his turn to boxing like this: “I was sick of not being respected.”

In this context, the popularity of combat sports is more than just a fad. Today’s American dream tends to involve virtual pursuits—influencing, making a killer app, getting lucky with crypto—but the gladiatorial ring is a macho, meat-space proving ground. No wonder Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. In the case of the Paul brothers, winning substantiates their right to do what they’ve always done: peacock. As Norman Mailer wrote of Muhammad Ali, reflecting on his tendency for trash talk, “The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little bit insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God.”

The problem for Jake Paul is that he really doesn’t have anywhere near a claim to “toughest man in the world.” He’s widely seen as an interloper, a clown, disrupting and degrading a sport that’s supposed to be meritocratic. His fights have almost all been novelty bouts against influencers and stars from other sports (his only loss was to the most qualified professional boxer he’s previously fought). The respect he’s seeking still hasn’t been found. In publicity leading up to Friday’s fight, he played up the idea that defeating the legendary Mike Tyson would shut up his doubters forever. “I want him to be that old savage Mike,” Jake said at a press conference. “I want the hardest match possible Friday night, and I want there to be no excuses from everyone at home when I knock him out.”

But as probably could have been predicted, Tyson turned out to be a 58-year-old man whose body has taken a lifetime of abuse, facing a wealthy 27-year-old who’s devoted his past few years to training. Jake set out to prove he was something realer than a media whore, but he showed only that he had the clout to overhype a terribly unfair fight. Coming so soon after an election partly decided by highly online men who feel their status to be under threat, this outcome seems like an omen: Old systems may soon be torn down, with little to replace them but bluster spun as redemption.

“There’s a shift in the world, and good is rising,” Jake said, sweating and panting, in the after-match interview. “The truth is rising. I’m just honored to be a part of America. It feels like we’re back, baby.”

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When the presidential-election results begin rolling in on Tuesday night, a sizable audience of pro-Trump Christians will not turn to Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, or Right Side Broadcasting. Instead, they will stream their news directly from God, on a show called FlashPoint, where an affable host named Gene Bailey sits behind a desk with a large red phone.

“This is God saying ‘This is my program!’” Bailey says in a promotional video for the show, which airs three times a week and, at peak moments, draws hundreds of thousands of viewers on YouTube alone.

“We have a responsibility to report what we hear from heaven,” a prophet from Omaha named Hank Kunneman has said on the show.

One of the many signs that FlashPoint is a departure from the usual televangelism is that the o in its logo looks like the view through a rifle scope. Another is that the audience is referred to as the “FlashPoint Army.” A third is that the red phone is a hotline to Donald Trump. A fourth is that, sometimes, heaven sends not just news of the End Times, but earthly instructions. This was the case during the run-up to January 6, when FlashPoint was getting millions of views, and the prophets told the FlashPoint Army to claim the U.S. Capitol for God’s kingdom.

In an episode last month, there were no such instructions, not yet. Just breaking news that a hurricane was heading for Florida, and the question of how that fit into demonic plans to thwart victory for Trump. “What do you think, supernatural impact here?” Bailey said to Kunneman.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

“There are a lot of conspiracy theories about whether man can manipulate weather,” the prophet said at a moment when such disinformation was leading to death threats against FEMA workers. “I do know this: Evil spirits work with man. And there are some very evil men who cooperate with evil spirits. And God did say in the prophecies that these storms would be sent to interrupt the flow of our election process.”

It was a relatively typical night for FlashPoint, which I can say because I have watched hours and hours of episodes going back to its launch in September 2020. That was when the show first entered the sprawling media ecosystem that has risen alongside a growing movement of apostles and prophets known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose theology includes the idea that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. The movement has become the vanguard of America’s Christian right, and its media wing is not the realm of prosperity-gospel preachers or Sunday services on basic cable. It is part of another propaganda universe—an unruly world of YouTube prophets broadcasting from basements about a dream God gave them about World War III, or a TikTok prophecy about what the war in Gaza means for the End Times, or a viral video about what the Almighty told a pink-haired prophet named Kat Kerr, who claims to have spoken with Trump 20 minutes before the first attempt to assassinate him. Such prophecies can rack up millions of views on social media.

Within that world, FlashPoint has emerged as the premier outlet for the most trusted prophets with the largest followings, and a venue for politicians eager to reach that audience. By now, Bailey has interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Trump himself. Most important, the show has become a kind of command center for the people Trump refers to as “my Christians.” In a sense, FlashPoint is where God’s memo goes out, which makes it all the more noteworthy that, in recent weeks, the prophecies have become more apocalyptic.

From the beginning, the show has framed politics as a great “spiritual war.” It launched on the Victory Channel, a streaming platform and satellite-television network that is part of the well-funded empire of Kenneth Copeland, an old-guard televangelist in the multifaceted world of charismatic Christianity. Copeland himself never exactly belonged to the apostle-and-prophet crowd. But he was part of the broader mobilization of charismatic Christians behind Trump, and provided the most prominent prophets with the platform they needed to build a movement they likened to a new Great Awakening. Among these was Lance Wallnau, the chief marketer of the idea that God anointed Trump. Wallnau quickly became a FlashPoint regular.

The Victory Channel had virtually no presence on YouTube before FlashPoint debuted, according to Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies who has documented the involvement of NAR figures in the January 6 insurrection. As FlashPoint began amplifying election-fraud conspiracy theories, viewer data show, the Victory Channel’s overall YouTube views grew from 152,000 in October 2020 to 32.4 million in January 2021. On the evening of January 6, 2021, FlashPoint covered the insurrection that its guests had helped foment, broadcasting live from Copeland’s Texas church, blessing what has become a lasting narrative of the day for millions of Americans.

Bailey brought on a pastor who cast himself as a reporter, who said that he had “confirmed that the FBI had a busload of antifa people come in and infiltrate the rally.” The host tossed to a prophet named Mario Murillo, who said, “I know that there is a spirit in the land that wants to take away our Christian rights and our freedoms and that today we demonstrated to them we are not going to let this happen—and anyone who thinks this ends tonight is totally mistaken.” Wallnau Zoomed in from Trump International Hotel in Washington. He described the march to the Capitol as a “giant Disney parade,” and said the violence had been carried out not by “our people” but by antifa and Black Lives Matter, calling them “the devil’s people.” Bailey turned to Kunneman: “What’s God showing you?” Kunneman videoed in from Omaha, calling the violence “a smokescreen from the Devil.” “Remember,” he continued. “Big God, little devil. Big God, little corrupt Democrat rat. Big God, little Republican pathetic person that cannot stand for their democracy.” People clapped.

“Here are your orders from heaven: Be strong, fear not … Your God will come with a vengeance,” Kunneman said, declaring FlashPoint to be “part of the new spirit of truth in media that’s going to rise in the land.”

In the four years since then, the hour-long show has offered regular sustenance for Americans who believe that a great spiritual battle against demonic forces is under way, one that could culminate any moment. Production values improved. The red phone was added. Each show opens with urgent, triumphant music and a red, white, and blue montage of apocalyptic images—dire headlines, hands praying, a tattered American flag flying, and the slogans “We are believing patriots!” and “It’s time to stand up!”

Bailey and the prophets have often hit the road for live broadcasts, part of a circuit of pro-Trump events meant to keep followers energized. In Georgia last year, they led a crowd of thousands in a pledge called the “Watchman Decree,” in which the audience promised allegiance “first and foremost to the kingdom of God,” declared the Church to be “God’s governing body on the earth,” and committed to be “God’s ambassadors” with “legal power from heaven.”

Most of the time, Bailey has been behind the desk, with the prophets Zooming in from offices and basements as they did on a Tuesday last January, kicking off the election season with news from the Iowa caucuses, where Trump was winning. “It’s election season!” Bailey said, showing a clip of the freezing weather in Iowa, and another meant to suggest that Democrats were trying to tell people to stay home. “Hank,” he said. “What do you see as we get into this?”

Kunneman said the freeze meant that God was “freezing the efforts” of Democrats to “manipulate things to alter our election integrity and our freedom.” He said Trump was winning Iowa because voters “recognize the voice God has raised up that is going to bring a deliverance to this country.”

“I want to go to Dutch,” Bailey said, turning to a popular South Carolina prophet named Dutch Sheets, who claims that God speaks through dreams, including one Sheets talked about on January 1, 2021—a few days after he visited the White House—in which he described charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol. As he usually does, Sheets joined from a studio lit with blue lights. His blue eyes glowed.

“I feel like God is exposing evil and opening the eyes of a nation,” he said in a soothing voice, and then he described a cryptic dream God had given him that could be taken as prediction or instruction or some sort of coded plan.

“Watchmen are supposed to be watching for the enemy,” he began. “In this particular dream, 50 people found themselves in a military strategy room. They had been summoned there, one from each state. And Gene in the dream was one of them. I was one of them. We were all gathered. Then a general and an admiral came into the room, and said, ‘We have asked you to come because we need your help.’ There was a map of all 50 states on all the walls. And the dams and waterways were highlighted.” Sheets said that this was God’s “advance warning” of a terrorist attack on the nation’s water supply, a sign of how far the enemy was willing to go, and told people to pray for the safety of supply lines.

“Amen,” Bailey said, turning to Wallnau. “Tie it all together for us.”

Wallnau said the show was God’s way of bringing the disparate prophets together ahead of the election. He said the movement was “apostolically maturing” and would not make the same mistakes it had made on the day of the Capitol riot. “When I was up at January 6, I was upset when it happened, because I could see that Trump did not have the voices that he needed to be there speaking in proximity to him,” he said. “That will not happen this time.”

He did not clarify what he meant by “this time,” and Bailey did not ask. “Amen to that,” the anchorman said.

That is how FlashPoint has been going all year long, each episode rolling current events into an ever-escalating End Times narrative building toward the election. After a helicopter crash killed the president of Iran in May, the usual panel of prophets convened. “What does this mean?” Bailey asked.

Kunneman shuffled through some papers and pulled out a prophecy about Iran that he’d delivered five years earlier, in which he stated that “God is literally going to tear their leadership from them and there would be a regime change.”

“The Lord said 2024 would be his justice,” Kunneman said.

When Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a scheme to silence a porn star before the 2016 election, Bailey Zoomed in from his beach vacation. “Rick?” he said to Rick Green, a regular on the show who runs something called the Patriot Academy in Texas, and who began trashing the judicial system.

“Joseph Stalin would be so proud of Joe Biden right now,” Green said. “He’s looking up from hell right now saying, ‘Great job, Joe. You’re doing this even better than I did with my show trials during Communism.”

“Talk to the people,” Bailey said, turning to Kunneman.

“God said there are two he’s put his hand on: Netanyahu, and Donald Trump,” Kunneman said, explaining that Netanyahu was reelected prime minister despite corruption charges, and that Trump would also triumph. “Same scenario.”

When Trump survived the assassination attempt in July, the panel invoked prophecies and Bible stories about ears. Wallnau spoke of God being “in control of every fraction of what’s happening with this man.” He said angels had turned Trump’s head. As he always did, he spoke of Trump as a King Cyrus, the ancient Persian ruler whom God uses in the Bible to liberate the Babylonians and return Jewish people to their homeland.

“As history teaches, in the final battle, King Cyrus had a wound to his head,” Bailey said as the program ended. “There you go.” The episode got more than 300,000 views on YouTube, which was not unusual.

On a Tuesday in August, FlashPoint promoted a new prophet from Colorado Springs, a fit-looking, bald-headed young man who calls himself “Joseph Z,” who said God had told him that the anti-Christ is working through the “deep state” to assassinate Trump, and scapegoat Iran. “The spirit of the Lord forewarns, to forearm, to prepare us for these moments,” said Joseph Z, who publishes a newsletter for his followers, one of which recently began, “There is a war coming against the will of the antichrist.”

One day in September, the subject was the upcoming debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. “The thing we are dealing with, I believe, is witchcraft at a very high level,” Wallnau said. “You’re dealing with a whole lot of mind control.”

“I think we are going to see the colliding of two kingdoms,” Kunneman said. “The kingdom of God. And the kingdom of the enemy.”

“I am decreeing that the angels of the Lord are on that stage,” Sheets said.

For days, the show had been posting a short promo video of the red phone ringing, signaling that the anointed himself was coming, and now Bailey played the videotaped interview.

“We want to bring religion back into our country, and let it get stronger, bigger, better,” Trump told Bailey just before the debate, pledging to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofits such as churches from endorsing political candidates. “You will be in great shape,” Trump added. Bailey then prayed over the former president, who bowed his head but kept his eyes open.

“It was a great moment,” Bailey said on the show.

“I could feel the spirit of the Lord on his words, on you,” Kunneman said.

“He saw the genuineness of your faith,” Wallnau said, and Bailey cried.

On a Wednesday in October: “We keep turning on the lights and showing where the cockroaches are running,” Wallnau said, referring to the mainstream press, and the work that FlashPoint was doing to unearth satanic plots against Trump.

In recent weeks, the show has shifted into mobilization mode, promoting pro-Trump events such as A Million Women, a recent march on the National Mall organized by some of the NAR movement’s most prominent apostles and prophets. A conservative estimate is that tens of thousands of people showed up. Many in the crowd wore camouflage FlashPoint Army T-shirts and hats. The event was rich with symbolism invoking violent moments in the history of Christianity. Organizers described the march as “an Esther call,” invoking the biblical story of Esther, the Jewish queen of the Persian king, who persuades her husband to save her people from persecution, after which the king grants them permission to kill their enemies.

“What they are wanting is to give the nation back to God,” Bailey said of the crowd gathered in the sunshine on the Mall, where people were praying, crying, laying prostrate, blowing shofars, and waving the Appeal to Heaven flag, white with a green pine tree, that has become a symbol of the movement to advance God’s kingdom.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The Christian radicals are coming]

FlashPoint aired many of these scenes during its recap of the event. But the episode did not show the culmination of the march, when apostles and prophets surrounded a cement altar on a stage in view of the U.S. Capitol. The altar was meant to symbolize demonic strongholds in America, and as music swelled, Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jewish pastor, prayed to cast out these demons. Then he began smashing the altar with a sledgehammer. Others, men and women both, took turns smashing until the altar was in pieces. Later, a California apostle named Ché Ahn, one of the most powerful figures in the movement, declared that Trump would win the election and that Harris was a “type of Jezebel,” an evil biblical figure who was thrown from a tower to her death and eaten by dogs. Ahn decreed that Harris would be “cast out”—a moment that Matthew Taylor, the religion scholar, interpreted as a veiled way of blessing violence against her. (Ahn did not respond to a request for comment but told The Guardian after the event that his message was “all spiritual.”)

“It was a great thing,” Bailey said, describing the march.

During that show and others in recent weeks, Bailey reminded viewers to subscribe to FlashPoint on Rumble, a social-media platform favored by Trump supporters, in case YouTube removes the show. He and the prophets have continued likening the election to epic Biblical battles. They’ve spoken about God’s lawyers preparing to fight demonic “shenanigans” in Pennsylvania. They’ve spoken of “taking territory back.” Kunneman has started calling Harris “cackling Hamas.”

At a recent live show in North Carolina, he told Bailey that the nation was in “an Exodus 32 moment,” when thugs were “trying to steal the leadership and take over the nation, just like today, and God called them out, and he opened up the ground and swallowed those evildoers, and I believe we are going to see that.”

Kunneman said that God is saying, “What will my people decide? Are you going to choose life, or are you going to choose death? You gonna choose good, or you gonna choose evil?”

Bailey said that he was having visions of a decisive moment on a battlefield. The question now was whether the FlashPoint Army that the show had been cultivating for the past four years was ready to follow orders from heaven. “We see an opening,” Bailey said, adding that he believed “this is the time that we’re going to have to go harder, faster, and take back what the devil stole.”

The show ended, and the conversation continued offline.