The Violent Implications of the “Jezebel” Attacks on Kamala Harris

The predictably racist and misogynistic attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, came from equally predictable sources. “She does not speak well, she does not work hard,” said former Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway on Fox News on Sunday. “She should not be the standard-bearer for the party.” Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance went with the same “lazy” trope, adding a not-subtle “welfare queen” allusion to Harris. “What the hell have you done other than to collect a government check for the past 20 years?” Vance demanded at a campaign rally on Monday.

But the most atavistic, horrifying attack on Harris came from a comparatively lesser-known figure who is a prominent voice within a Christian nationalist movement that has been elevating Trump, who has met with the former president, and who mobilized his supporters to “stop the steal” on January 6—Lance Wallnau, a leading prophet in the New Apostolic Reformation. Harris, said Wallnau on Monday, represents “the spirit of Jezebel, and in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.”

To call a Black woman a “Jezebel” hearkens back to America’s racist and misogynistic history of casting Black women as insatiably sexual, which served to justify slaveholding men’s systematic sexual assault of enslaved women. But for right-wing white Christians of the sort Wallnau is addressing, to say a woman has a “Jezebel spirit” is also to say she is a danger to them, a barely human being hell-bent on seducing men to their destruction and assuming their power. In 2021, around the time that Harris was sworn in as vice president, two white Christian pastors denounced her as a Jezebel. Harris, a Baptist, was defended at the time by other Black Baptists, particularly Black women. “To frame a powerful woman as hateful, wily, sexually promiscuous, ambitious and ultimately irresistible is to say more about your powerlessness than her prowess,” wrote Lokelani Wilson, a religion scholar and longtime member of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, where Harris is from.

Jessica Johnson, an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of William & Mary who has researched Christian nationalism, spoke at length to The Washington Post at the time about what it meant to cast Harris as a Jezebel, and the violent connotations of this kind of rhetoric. “The Christian nationalist movement shares many of the same beliefs as the white nationalists, including an attachment to an ‘authoritarian father figure’ running the country, Johnson explained. Calling Harris a Jezebel foments their worst fears: that they will be replaced; that their fate is in the hands of a godless, amoral Black woman,” the paper reported. Johnson said to call Harris a Jezebel is “an incitement to violence.”

The video in which Wallnau recently revived the Harris-Jezebel trope was quickly clipped by the watchdog group Right Wing Watch and widely shared. In it, Wallnau first appears basically like any other white guy on the far side of middle age who goes live on YouTube from his home office or car to indulge in a political rant: Wallnau is seated at his desk, the camera flipped toward his computer monitor, an X feed up on the screen, as he scrolls through video posts of news clips of Harris, hits play on a few, and gives his commentary. Around the monitor viewers could see an accumulation of books, cables, and a few prescription drug bottles.

But after leveling the “Jezebel spirit” accusation at Harris, Wallnau got to the heart of his video. He addressed Christians in his audience directly, telling them it’s “important” for them to “start getting involved with the warfare over the imaginations.” He called both Trump and Harris “flawed instruments” of God, now locked in a political and spiritual contest. “Biden’s out, like we prophesied,” Wallnau said. “Kamala is in, like I said in 2018. My guess is that the devil’s plan is to make her president.”

This is not the first time Wallnau has called Harris a “Jezebel” spirit battling Trump. In an August 2020 video, he related a dream about the then candidate. “Kamala was in an elevator with me that was going up, and I knew there was a Jezebel spirit, and this was before she ran for the primaries for President,” Wallnau wrote in an accompanying blog post. “I knew that she was going to be the one the devil is going to try to use to take Trump out.”

These visions of Jezebel coming “to take Trump out” are simultaneously fearsome and ecstatic, celebrating the violent end coming, in turn, for whoever is accused of embodying this spirit. About a month ago, a Jezebel video with an actual editing budget appeared on Wallnau’s social media accounts. “Evidently there’s a great day coming,” promised a more polished-looking Wallnau on a more professional set. “There’s a dreadful day coming. It’s a time when God is going to be reckoning history and wrapping it up.” God was coming to defeat Jezebel, to stand up for “fathers” against “this emasculating move of lesbian, gay, bi, trans, go down the alphabet … it’s all about emasculating men like Jezebel did, hunting the fathers, embarrassing them, muting them.” That’s how Jezebel works, he continued.

“Do you know what eventually killed Jezebel?” Wallnau asked. It was a prophet—in this case, Elijah—who “shifted the mentality of the nations. It shifted something in the minds of the people and they came out of the fog of the seduction of Jezebel’s weird antics.” Here, the video cuts to two pieces of art: one showing Elijah gripping Jezebel by the wrist, another showing people throwing Jezebel from a window into a pike-carrying crowd below. But that’s not the end of the story: After that, the people saw the rise of “a political figure,” said Wallnau, “like Victor Orbán or like Milei in Argentina, or like Bukele in El Salvador.” He adopted a mocking tone, imitating his critics, made air-quotes, and said, “These dangerous right-wing extremists.”

When Wallnau calls Harris a Jezebel, then, viewers should understand that he is nodding toward his own dreams and prophecies, his claims to have foretold her coming. Such claims are the currency of the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a Christian religious and political movement “driven by theocratic notions of total societal dominion, including the end of democracy as we’ve known it,” as leading NAR experts Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné have described it. As within the wider Christian nationalism movement, NAR prophets encourage followers to “think of themselves as soldiers in a cosmic conflict,” as religion scholar and former Christian evangelical pastor Bradley Onishi has said. The stakes here are higher than mere elections; it’s about who prevails in an apocalyptic battle. “When you explain it that way to folks,” Onishi recently told NBC News, “you’re able to prime them, not only for action, but I think for extreme measures.”

Wallnau has used the influence he’s accrued through the New Apostolic Reformation, taking such prophetic visions and translating them into access to political power. A prophecy revealed to Wallnau that Trump was “God’s Chaos Candidate”—which became the title of Wallnau’s pro-Trump book—someone who despite being “flawed” would do God’s work and/or the work of Christians. This gave evangelicals a path or rationale for supporting Trump, and it earned Wallnau his invitation to Trump Tower early in the campaign, where Wallnau said God gave him “a calling related to this guy.”

It’s against this backdrop, of political influence-building off the back of purported prophecies and encounters with God, that Wallnau’s subsequent “Jezebel” calls should be understood. “Jezebel” was turning Americans away from Trump, Wallnau said in 2019; but if they wanted to pray for Trump and his 2020 reelection, Wallnau offered them a gold coin stamped with Trump’s profile for $45. The NAR are “really Trump’s folks,” said Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism and chair of the University of Pennsylvania Religious Studies Department, to The Nation recently. “All the talk you hear about demonic stuff, about violent stuff—people should take that very seriously.”

Since Wallnau began proclaiming that a Jezebel spirit was threatening Trump in 2019 and that Harris was a Jezebel spirit in 2020, his rhetoric has turned more overtly violent. He has claimed to have heard “prophecies lately about sudden deaths,” as Religion Dispatches reported in 2023. “In May,” said Wallnau, “you’re going to see some of the disciplinary hand of God come down upon those people that have been standing in the path of what he wants to do.” And right now, Wallnau is on the road, recruiting Trump voters from churches in what he’s called the Courage Tour. He’s accompanied by Charlie Kirk, of the far-right youth group Turning Point USA, targeting churches. They say if they can get Trump more than 81 percent of the evangelical vote, “there is almost no way Donald Trump loses.”

“We’re unashamed about the role of the body of Christ in the affairs of planet Earth,” Wallnau said recently on the tour. “We don’t realize that the ultimate role of Jesus is to come back to Earth to rule it. And when he comes back, he’s going to be administrating his affairs over nations with people that get it.”