Lord Cameron previously opposed assisted dying but says the current bill "is about shortening death".

Lord Prescott spent a decade as Tony Blair's deputy and was seen as a custodian of traditional Labour values.

John Prescott who served under Tony's Blair's Labour government has died aged 86.

The Labour Peer, who is blind is urging Transport for London to do more for visually impaired people.

Writers are great gossips. Get one or three of us alone at a party; add a few gin or whiskey drinks. Ask a question about somebody’s professor from grad school, or about that (married) handsome writer who slept with that other (married) writer at a conference. Lord help the authors whose group texts get subpoenaed and then printed for the world to see.

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two monolithic California writers who died within days of each other in December 2021, were prolific generators and subjects of literary gossip. Didion, the essayist who anatomized and often eviscerated the ’60s, was successful and venerated for most of her career; Babitz, who captured everything sordid and beautiful about Los Angeles, had a more troubled life and career, followed by a late surge of popularity as a misunderstood genius.

Opposites at first glance, they were also connected in many ways. Both were bolstered and weighed down in equal parts by their status as persona, image, idea. The photographer Julian Wasser turned both into literal icons—Didion leaning on her Daytona-yellow 1969 Corvette Stingray, Babitz playing chess in the nude with a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp. Decades later, both women’s books are the sort that people post on Instagram and TikTok to prove something ineffable and particular about themselves.

Lili Anolik’s new book, Didion and Babitz, a dishy gloss on the pair, purports to be interested in pushing past persona and performance to find the truth, the humans underneath. It opens with a quote from Babitz, who wrote that gossip has “always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick,” and yet “how are people like me—women they’re called—supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room?” Anolik, like Babitz, is out to redeem the disreputable practice.

She doesn’t come to the story in a disinterested way. While working on a biography of Babitz, Anolik became close with the writer, and she remains in touch with Babitz’s sister and friends. There’s something endearing about the power of Anolik’s love for the author, but something dispiritingly deflating about this latest homage to her. Babitz’s work, for all its frisson and humor, also feels particular, alive. Anolik, by contrast, gets trapped on the flat surfaces. As much as the book seems earnestly set on redefining both of these women, the truth it captures more than any other is how quickly wit can slip into caricature, fun and fizzy gossip into cruelty.

The catalyst for the book, the reason for its existence, is this: Babitz was infamously messy. Lovers complained of cat hair in their meals; trash, tissues, and rotting food littered her floor. Anolik recalls the smell being so intense that she would have to leave and walk around the block when she visited. After Babitz was moved into an assisted-living facility, her sister, Mirandi, was left to manage the cleanup. On New Year’s Day 2021, Mirandi FaceTimed Anolik to report a surprising discovery in the back of a closet: a box that held more insight into Babitz’s relationships than either of them had known. Anolik was able to dive in after Babitz’s death. The anecdote itself feels like the perfect material for a book: Shouldn’t we all be rummaging around in the messy closets of the mysterious dead, looking for one last remnant that might reveal a hidden truth?

Within the box were letters, including a single one from Babitz to Didion, which Babitz almost certainly never sent. As was already publicly known, Didion had helped Babitz get her first story published in Rolling Stone magazine and worked with her on her first book, Eve’s Hollywood. That is, until, as Babitz told friends, I fired her. In the acknowledgements, Babitz thanked Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, “for having to be everything I’m not.”

[Read: The “L.A. woman” reveals herself]

The letter is a more detailed snapshot of the women’s relationship. It begins: “Dear Joan.” (“That Joan, the Joan,” Anolik comments—one of many interjections.) “Just think Joan,” writes Babitz, “if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work, they’d invent reasons … could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” The letter is deeply charming and also a little bit combative. It’s impossible to read it and not want to know more about how and when and why these women overlapped.

At first, Didion and Babitz suggests loose connections. Like Eve (and most other writers), Joan had a rocky beginning; 12 publishers rejected her first novel. The one who finally said yes did so, in part, because of the help of an older man, Noel Parmentel Jr., with whom Joan was in love—only to be spurned. Also like Eve, Joan had her heart broken. But then Joan got married early. Eve never did. Parmentel told Anolik he’d advised Didion to marry Dunne and thereby “invented Joan Didion.”

Soon enough, Eve and Joan’s timelines converged. Didion and Dunne moved out to Hollywood; Babitz started coming to their house on Franklin Avenue. Yet just as she begins to show how their lives intersected, Anolik starts to lean into all that divides them. For instance, she muses on the rock legend they had in common (one as subject, the other as lover): “The difference between their perceptions of [Jim] Morrison is the difference, I think, between their roles on the scene: Joan an observer of it; Eve a participant in it. Or perhaps it’s the difference between being a starfucker, which Joan and Dunne emphatically were … and one who fucks stars.”

From here, the binaries metastasize: Didion was volatilely thin; Babitz loved to eat (one chapter is titled “Eve Bah-bitz with the Great Big Tits”). Didion cooked and cleaned; had the kid, the house, and the husband. Babitz never did. Didion knew how to play the career game; Babitz mostly either failed at it or had no interest. At the same time, Anolik’s tone, especially with regard to Didion, begins to shift. She asks, “Was the moment Eve realized she’d lost to Joan the same moment she realized that she and Joan had been in a competition all along?”

As Anolik progresses through the thickets of their lives, she treats Babitz to warm stories and close readings (if sometimes dismissively) but begins to take hits at Didion (often parenthetically). She side-eyes a friend of Didion’s giving her a rave in The New York Times: “Confirmation of Joan and Dunne’s sly careerism.” When the couple moved to a cliff-top home in bourgeois-bohemian Malibu, they “abided by mainstream values,” much to the ire of Babitz. Of that shot in front of the Corvette, Anolik says (in parentheses): “How could Joan be sexual?” More often than not, Didion is collateral damage in the war to lionize Babitz, her self-sabotaging, sexy alleged frenemy.

Every time Anolik noses her way toward parallels between Didion and Babitz, she veers away, doubling down instead on the split between them.

One major missed opportunity traces back to that unsent letter. It was a response to Didion’s openly expressed disdain for the women’s movement. Anolik acknowledges Babitz’s own ambivalence—“Feminism offended her sense of style: it had no style.” Both women attempted to gain and keep power in a male-dominated field, and yet neither was quick to ally herself with any ideologically self-defined group. Both used their strengths, performed their public personas—Joan with her steely reserve, Eve with her froth and sex—to attain whatever status they could in a literary world built mostly to slap them down. But Anolik does not linger on these complications, nor on how necessary it might have felt to each woman to be perceived on her own terms.

When it comes to Didion, Anolik’s gossip is tinged with judgment. She writes that “there were people who believed” that Dunne was bisexual; that he spent a year living in Las Vegas without Didion, leaving her alone with their young daughter, Quintana (this is well-trod territory that Dunne wrote a book about); that Dunne once grew so angry that Didion begged a friend not to leave her alone with him. And yet, Anolik writes, “by the eighties, Joan would be telling the New York Times that she and Dunne were ‘terrifically, terribly dependent on one another.’” Anolik calls this “a statement that warms the heart. Or chills the blood.” Or, just maybe, both sentiments, many others, can be true at the same time.

Babitz also dated many complicated men, but those relationships are described in less reductive ways: Some were married, some she took money from. She and the prominent magazine journalist Dan Wakefield dated for a year, but he claimed to have been certain he wouldn’t survive a second. “My God, the decadence!” is how he described the relationship to Anolik years later. Babitz gets to be knotted, yearning, complicated—as well she should. Didion stays a “cool customer”—as she called herself with notable irony in a memoir—and not much else.

One of the dangers of anecdotes, the raw material of gossip, is how easily stories can be weaponized. Almost always in Didion and Babitz, the Babitz tales grow and richen, and Didion tidbits are dropped as damning evidence.

Following Anolik’s lead, I’d like to present one of her passed-along anecdotes as evidence of something else: the all-too-common impulse to pit one woman against another, and, in doing so, to reduce her to her least attractive parts. While writing the book, Anolik received a short email from the writer David Thomson, a friend of the Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta. He told her that Didion had called Mehta the day after she’d sent him the manuscript of The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about her husband’s death and her daughter’s grave illness, and asked, “Will it be a best seller?”

[Read: Joan Didion’s magic trick]

Anolik’s interpretation: “Thomson’s story shows what Didion was willing to do for the sake of her writing (anything) and what it cost her in a human sense (everything). When I said earlier that she’d crawl over corpses to get where she had to go, I was, it turns out, speaking literally. The Year of Magical Thinking is her crawling over the corpse of Dunne, crying all the while, but still crawling, still getting where she had to go.” Later, Anolik writes of the best seller in question: “I reject its fundamental narcissism. (It purports to be about Dunne, is really about Joan.) I reject, too, its fundamental dishonesty. (I believe Joan feels grief at Dunne’s passing, but not only grief. To be alone was for her, I suspect, a kind of fulfillment.”

My turn: No one literally climbed over a corpse. Nor did anyone do it figuratively. To believe that presupposes not only that literary ambition forestalls any other desires, but that Didion’s single question in the course of a professional conversation expresses her complete feelings about her work. This is the fundamentally reductive power of gossip. What if, instead, Anolik had asked other people about this time? What if, instead, she’d considered how and why work might have felt like mercy, a suture in that wound of a year?

I felt squirrely, queasy, writing this essay. I kept thinking: What has the world done to us, and particularly to women, to make us so quick to make such blanket statements, to make us think that only a single type of woman writer might have a right to make it out intact? But then, of course, I knew.

Like most writers, and most women I know, I love gossip. Sometimes, when I’m out with friends, I lose hold of myself. My words flatten. It feels intoxicating—and later it feels sickening. Gossip is narrow-minded, sloppy; it reifies the teller’s already established sense of what the world is; it gives us power and control; it makes us feel safe in a culture that often makes us feel the opposite. Almost all of the best writing follows an antithetical impulse: to let go of that control, to find and put down stakes in spaces of not knowing, to reach inside those hidden boxes and get as close to the chaos as we can bear.

Babitz didn’t just fuck the star; she wrote about him too. Anolik admires her article about Jim Morrison: “What gives that piece its peculiar power is that you can see Eve changing her mind about Morrison on the page. The tenderness she feels for him sneaks up on you as you read it, as I suspect it did on her as she wrote it.” This is the feeling I waited for in this book, but Anolik never lets either woman surprise her. She pulled that letter out of that sealed box only to stuff these brilliant women, especially Didion, back into the places they already occupied.

Didion said all writing is by nature an act of bullying: “It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way.” The job is then to mitigate the bullying, to turn the language in as many different directions—middle, under, over, opposite—as a writer can. There are enough gestures in Didion and Babitz to suggest that its more savage slights weren’t quite intentional. When we start talking and talking, our words can feel accidental, out of our control. But it’s necessary to name the ways that language can harm, distort, debase—and then try and try again toward something more.

New Lord Mayor Alistair King is among thousands to take part in the ancient procession.

Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles a reader’s existential worry. He wants to hear about what’s ailing, torturing, or nagging you. Submit your lifelong or in-the-moment problems to dearjames@theatlantic.com.

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Dear James,

Do you ever feel like you know how you’re going to die? I’m 38 years old, have no health conditions, take no medication, and work a low-risk job with manageable stress. The way I see it, I’m Teflon, except for two Achilles’ heels (both heels!):

1. My driving
2. My diet

I’m not an insane driver. It’s not as if I weave between six lanes of traffic to gain one car length. But I do love to drive fast, and I also hate to waste time. It’s a potent combination. I’ve had enough close calls that I can’t deny the significantly nonzero chance that one day all the high-speed, moving variables align to end me.

If the car doesn’t get me, it’ll be my high-fat, high-calorie diet. Despite my life of fast-food abundance, I am not obese, because I am extremely tall and get regular exercise. My large frame hides a lot of excesses. Though external warning signs are absent, everything I know about nutrition makes me feel like I’m headed for a stealth cardiac event or terrible, late-detected cancer.

Don’t get me wrong: I love living! But I think that’s why I find myself handicapping the cause of my own death. Is this normal, or at least not unprecedented?

Dear Reader,

First: Slow down, dude. I’m not being metaphorical. Go slower in your car! In my mind, I see you zooming around out there, folded over the wheel in your tallness, blazing with your fast-food calories, calculating your odds, making a bit of a menace of yourself. I like being speedy too, but think about who else is on the road with you: the panicking, the wild with anger, the hesitant, the half-asleep, the ones who need their eyes tested. Also: the nice people just driving along on their way to Chuck E. Cheese. Do not conscript them into your game of high-speed moving variables.

Now to your question: Is it normal to envision or predict the cause of one’s own death? I think it most certainly is. The other night I attended a performance by the Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan, a very Beckettian figure in his baggy black suit and tipped-back hat, speaking lyrically about madness and death, twitching around in the spotlight. Tiernan told us that he was all for the death penalty, because it gives the condemned man a how and a when and a why: You’re going to die at 3 p.m. on Thursday, by such-and-such a method, because you killed someone with an ax. (Rather than conking out randomly in a room at the DoubleTree, was his point.) Me, I imagine rather fondly that I’ll get hit by a bus: I picture myself looping through the air post-impact, in slow motion, full of regrets and reconsiderations, perhaps even having a last-minute breakthrough. But the Lord comes like a thief in the night, doesn’t he? So I’m pretty sure that, when the ultimate moment arrives, that’s not how it’ll be. You, too, might get a surprise. In the meantime: I’m glad you love living. Eat fewer McNuggets, and take your foot off the gas.

Droning with mortality,
James

Dear James,

Because I’m an old geezer (I’ll be 80 next June), I often reflect on the wreckage I may have left behind in my long life. In the past couple of years, someone I hurt emotionally has stopped talking to me entirely, and he’s made it clear that I shouldn’t try to get in touch with him, either.

Over the course of about 30 years, I have sincerely apologized to him a couple of times for the damage I did. But now, in my old age, it occurs to me that an apology—no matter how sincere—does not have the emotional and moral weight that asking for forgiveness does. It’s not really getting to the bottom of what happened between us. What do you think?

Dear Reader,

I don’t know how anybody expects to get to the end of their life, especially a long life, without a look over their shoulder at the mile-wide seam of smoldering, Mad Max ruination they’ve left behind them: craters, twisted frames, flattened people. Equally, I’m sure your eight decades have been strewn with uncounted good deeds and good vibes. Why not reckon them up?

I once got dumped by a friend—extremely painful!—and I sought advice from someone with more experience than me. “Ah,” he said, “when it’s over, it’s so over.” And so it has proved. Sounds to me like your friend can’t, won’t, or is disinclined to forgive you. So forgive yourself. Let yourself off the hook. Leave him to his life, and get back to living yours. And when the ruminations arise, those creeping wreckage-thoughts, simply give them a nod and then turn your mind elsewhere. Make yourself a nice cup of coffee and sit and watch the weeds grow.

In rustic peace,
James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

This article was originally published by Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike have compared him to some of history’s most famous rulers: Cyrus the Great, Adolf Hitler, King David, and more.

But on the eve of the election, a celebrity pastor named Jonathan Cahn wants his evangelical followers to think of the Republican candidate as a present-day manifestation of a far more obscure leader: the biblical king Jehu, who vanquished the morally corrupt house of Ahab to become the tenth ruler of the Kingdom of Israel.

“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God. God called you to walk according to the template; he called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king,” Cahn told the hundreds of Christian leaders who gathered last week for the National Faith Summit outside Atlanta. He also shared a clip of his prophecy about Trump on his YouTube channel, which has more than a million followers.

What Cahn means—and why at least one scholar of the Christian right says he is worried—requires some background. Cahn, 65, is the son of a Holocaust refugee and grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. When he was 20, he says he had a personal revelation that led him to Jesus, and he eventually became the head of a Messianic congregation, blending Jewish rituals with Christian worship and a focus on doomsday prophecies.

Cahn helped popularize the interpretation of 9/11 as an apocalyptic biblical allegory. In his telling, the terrorist attacks were akin to God’s rebuke of the biblical nation of Israel, and they happened because God wanted the United States to revert to a time before legalized abortion and gay rights when religion held a more central place in society—or else. His book on the topic, The Harbinger, came out in 2011 and spent months on the New York Times best-seller list.

Cahn continued to release commercially successful books, and combined with his social-media activity, he established a growing and enthusiastic audience for his prophetic warnings.

Then Trump came along. During Trump’s first term, many evangelical-Christian supporters explained his lack of religiosity by comparing him to Cyrus, the pagan ruler of ancient Persia, who served as God’s agent by, according to the Bible, helping the Israelites return home from exile. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amid an effort to build stronger ties with the evangelical movement, praised Trump as a modern-day Cyrus.

But Cahn had spun a different prophetic narrative about the new American president. He released a book called The Paradigm the year after the 2016 election, which cast Trump as Jehu, the biblical king who took control of and restored the Kingdom of Israel, whose territory largely overlapped with parts of present-day Israel and Lebanon. Just as Jehu killed the idol-worshippers who had taken over the kingdom, Trump would “drain the swamp” of Washington and “make America great again.” In this contemporary rendition, Hillary and Bill Clinton play the role of Ahab and Jezebel, the evil rulers who had led the kingdom astray. Jezebel is also seen as wicked in the Jewish tradition, but she is far more prominent as a symbol in evangelical discourse today, representing feminism, sexual promiscuity, and moral decay.

In the 2024 election, Joe Biden’s replacement with Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate challenging Trump allowed the template of Jehu versus Jezebel to get updated and become salient again.

Two weeks before Cahn spoke at the National Faith Summit, an ally of his named Ché Ahn evoked the comparison at another mass religious event. Ahn heads Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, as well as a network of thousands of ministries all over the world. He is a leader of a spiritual movement known as New Apostolic Reformation, which aims for Christians to dominate society and government. Major Republican figures such as Mike Pompeo, Sarah Palin, and Josh Hawley have visited Ahn’s church, reflecting the growing influence of Christian nationalism on the Republican Party.

On October 12, Yom Kippur, Ahn appeared at the “Million Women March” event on the National Mall, speaking before a crowd of tens of thousands, with many wearing prayer shawls or blowing shofars—traditionally Jewish symbols highlighting the movement’s overlap with Messianic Judaism.

“Jehu will cast down Jezebel,” Ahn said, and prophesized a victory by Trump over Harris.

The social-media user who brought the recent Jehu comparisons to wider notice through posts on X is Matthew Taylor, a scholar of the Christian right at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, a Baltimore-based interfaith research and advocacy group, dedicated to “[dismantling] religious bias and bigotry.”

“Since Harris became the candidate this summer, we’ve seen the Jehu image really rise to the surface much more,” Taylor said in an interview. “This is the story [Cahn and Ahn] want running through their followers’ heads, their lens for interpreting the election and its aftermath.”

In the grim biblical story, recounted in the book of 2 Kings, as Jehu ascends the throne, he kills Jezebel by ordering her thrown out of a palace window, after which he stomps on her body, which is then eaten by dogs. The new warrior king then goes on a killing spree, slaying the families of Ahab and Jezebel and other Baal-worshipping pagans who had despoiled the kingdom.

“Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp,” Cahn said in his speech, addressing Trump, who also spoke at the National Faith Summit. “Jehu formed an alliance with the religious conservatives of the land. So, it was your destiny to do the same. Jehu overturned the cult of Baal by which children were sacrificed. So, God chose you to overturn America’s cult of Baal, Roe v. Wade.”

Cahn and Ahn did not respond to my request to their ministries to discuss the theology of their recent statements.

Neither pastor elaborated on the analogy they were drawing, and neither made an explicit call for violence. But Trump has generated widespread concern by speaking of retribution, calling his political opponents “the enemy from within,” and talking about using the military against political enemies if he wins.

Given the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, after Trump challenged the election results, and his ongoing promotion of election-fraud narratives, independent experts and government agencies are warning of increased political violence. Many Jewish leaders are particularly concerned because Trump recently blamed Jews for his potential defeat.

Taylor says the pastors’ followers would be familiar with the biblical story of Jehu, and he believes that they are priming their audience to accept violence during the election or afterward.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, that surfaced the Jehu prophecies, Taylor voiced his alarm.

“If Trump wins in this election, the Jehu ‘template’ tells Trump’s Christian supporters: some real-world violence may be needed to purge America of her demons,” Taylor wrote. “If Trump loses this election, particularly to Kamala Harris their ‘Jezebel,’ the Jehu template prescribes vengeance.”

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.