The Laundering of Ethno-Nationalism into Conservative Christianity via Twitter
Adam “AD” Robles is a podcaster/YouTuber and former pastor within a subset of Christian Nationalism I have previously described as Christian Authoritarianism. He is friends with Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab and co-author of Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations; Torba is known for provocative, antisemitic behavior, which has landed him in trouble with Twitter in the past.1 In his Twitter bio, Robles describes himself as a “Christian Nationalist” and “Christian Extremist”, the latter being characteristic of his purposeful “trolling” behavior on the platform. Though Robles advertises himself as a Christian, his behavior rarely reflects such. Beyond a generally antagonistic behavior, he regularly belittles people for their physical appearance2, and one of his most common tactics is to post a picture of someone he disagrees with, mocking them and signaling to his followers to “brigade” that person (bombard their tweets with disparaging comments)3. These mostly anonymous followers contain many accounts that are explicitly antisemitic and/or white-nationalist (something I will show below). Despite this, Robles is still a welcome figure among several, very conservative podcaster-pastors; he is one degree of separation from many mainstream, conservative Christian thought-leaders.
As part of the research for my commentary on Stephen Wolfe’s Christian Nationalist book, I have been watching prominent Christian Nationalists on Twitter, including Robles. On Easter Sunday, Robles retweeted a post from Gab’s account (run by Torba), which contained a picture of the Pharisees from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with a caption to the effect of “They are seething today.” I noted the retweet from Robles in my own timeline, and wound up getting into a brief back-and-forth with the Gab/Torba account, where he dodged my attempts to get him to admit the antisemitic intent of the post. The tweet has since been deleted.
Later that same day, Robles retweeted a post from the white-nationalist account, Raw Egg Nationalist (whom I will refer to as REN, from here on out). His book, The Eggs Benedict Option, a tongue-and-cheek mockery of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, is published by the explicitly white-nationalist book publisher, Antelope Hill. Also available from this publisher are such books as In His Own Words: The Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler and the Wehrmacht Fitness Manual.
The post that Robles retweeted contained a double entendre for Heil Hitler, playing off of another post by Hulk Hogan, who signs most of his tweets “HH” or “HH4Life”; HH or 88 (the number of the letter H in the alphabet) is also a common neo-Nazi trope.4 They will often deal in these types of word-plays that leave them a window of plausible deniability when confronted, and they will relentlessly mock anyone who notices as a conspiracy theorist. REN often uses Hogan for this purpose to signal to his followers, who respond with HH, in kind.
It was this “Happy Easter. HH.” post that Robles retweeted. I wrote a Twitter thread that explained what this post meant and proved that REN was a white-nationalist account; in the thread, I gave Robles the benefit of the doubt, and said that I would drop the matter if he apologized and committed to not promoting REN. This thread was picked up by several, fairly prominent Christian Twitter users and became the most viewed tweet I have posted to date with my newly created account, using my real identity. The amount of attention the post received gave me hope that Robles would do the right thing, but I forgot to account for the predicament he was in. When many of his most antagonistic followers, who regularly brigade for him, are openly white-nationalist, he cannot denounce REN without losing their support.
Instead, as Robles most often does, he resorted to mockery and sicking his brigade on me and those who promoted my post. In the four days that we were in a back-and-forth, he did not dispute a single factual claim I made about his behavior - the very first thing someone wrongly accused does is attempt to prove their innocence. He and his allies attempted to claim that HH only ever stood for “Hulk Hogan” and that I was a conspiracy theorist, but once the “Hug Horse” post (above) came into the picture, along with more evidence of the white-nationalist nature of the REN account, it was mostly mockery from then on out.
Those reading this who know me in real life know exactly the type of aggressive, dogged persistence I display when confronted with something I consider evil. Readers who have been subscribed to this Substack since the height of COVID hysteria have perhaps gleaned this as well. I had accounted for the brigade when making the post, and began enacting a preset plan5 to fully engage his followers to draw the most unscrupulous of them out, screencapture racist comments from their timeline if they were not explicitly racist in engaging me, and show exactly who defends Robles online. I knew from the beginning that this persistent posting had the potential to make me look frantic, but that is also exactly what I knew would draw the white-nationalist accounts out; they took the bait. There are many such examples I have stored, but for the sake of space, here are three of the more disgusting ones:
Robles’s behavior was beyond the pale, including a fake repentance video and a mockery of my admission that it saddened me.6 Three days after my original thread, he made a YouTube video in which he claimed that I am doing this for attention (calling me a “sycophant” to Big Eva), lied that I called him a “neo-Nazi” (I only mentioned white-nationalists in his brigade), still claimed that HH only ever meant “Hulk Hogan” even to REN, and also lied that he still didn’t know whether REN was a white-nationalist account (something proven false below).
In response to my persistence, other semi-prominent, Christian Nationalist accounts jumped in on the mockery, including William Wolfe, a former Trump administration Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, now an intern of the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He tweeted other combinations of HH words, and the antisemitic trope of “noticing things”, a phrase that I had been turning back on the white-nationalist accounts brigading me. Because of his former position, a non-Christian account dedicated to military matters, who knows what HH means but was unaware of my situation with Robles, picked up on it, giving Wolfe far more attention than I gave Robles. Wolfe later deleted the tweets. This was not his first time posting bigoted tweets; for example, he previously compared a multicultural worship service to rape gangs.
While my plan of exposing the white-nationalist accounts and egging Robles and his allies into exposing themselves more than they normally would worked better than I expected, I overestimated my ability to remain emotionally aloof while being publicly mocked by them, and persistently brigaded by white-nationalist accounts, for several days. By the evening of the second day I was run down, my language had become more coarse and accusatory than it should have been, and I began to be filled with indignant anger over the situation. Because of this, I offended several people who did not deserve it, Phil Johnson of Grace to You Ministries, whom I was able to apologize to (and am grateful for his acceptance), and Christian podcaster Josh Daws, who blocked me on Twitter. I have yet to be able to apologize to him and cannot get in touch with him. Assuming that someone who reads this has a line of communication with him, I would greatly appreciate you letting him know that I would like to apologize directly to him. This was a lesson learned and, should I ever get brigaded again - very likely, as I am still being attacked by Robles’s allies as I write this - I will know when it is time to take a break.
I was expecting the situation to slowly die down, at this point; being accused of sharing a white-nationalist meme is no laughing matter for a Christian. Even if they did not want to dignify the accusation, or mocked it as Robles did, any semi-reasonable Christian would lay low for a while. But, on the morning of the third day, Robles did something I was not expecting. With full knowledge that the REN account is white-nationalist, he retweeted another post from him, likely to mock the situation and project “strength” to his followers. After taking a break for a day to detox from the situation, the next morning I posted another thread proving he had no plausible deniability, something that no reasonable person would assume at this point, anyway. Robles had made the blunder of commenting directly on the post in my original thread where it is shown that REN is published by Antelope Hill; his comment acknowledged this fact three days before he went on to make a video claiming he did not know whether REN was white-nationalist. We can say, unequivocally, that a man who is still welcomed in many conservative Christian circles, who likely has a fan in most PCA, OPC, and CREC churches in the country, knowingly shares content from a white-nationalist account. Most church bodies have explicit doctrinal positions against race hatred, and would be unsympathetic to Robles’s likely excuse that he thought it was funny.
As with the first thread, at no point did Robles attempt to dispute the claims, but immediately resorted to mockery. Though I had originally planned to not get much further involved, that afternoon a journalist private messaged me that Robles had tweeted something of note. In the replies was more evidence of the type of people his behavior draws out:
I recognized this as a formulaic, “plausible deniability”, antisemitic post; it was the same format that Torba had used on Easter Sunday with the Pharisees. First, a known account with reach posts something that has clear antisemitic innuendo, but which leaves a tiny door open where the brigade can lambaste and gaslight anyone who takes offense as reading too much into it (the Jews reject Christ, don’t they?). Then smaller accounts come into the conversation and say exactly what the average reader reasons the original poster was implying. If someone takes umbrage with how the original post obviously drew the explicitly antisemitic accounts, the brigade will say that the person taking offense is accusing the original poster of guilt by association (he didn’t write it, did he?). Wash, rinse, repeat.
I decided to tweet my genuine shock at the brazenness of this type of continuous posting, knowing the brigade would likely resume in full force, according to the formula7, and planned to get into it one more time to try to catch Robles and his allies in the act; as I continued to write tweets highlighting the white-nationalist responses and egged Robles on a bit, he committed another blunder I think most will find very much of note. He liked a tweet from an account I had highlighted after he had played the guilt by association angle; the tweet says of a screencapture I had taken from his timeline, “Its funny he keeps posting that as if its wrong.” The content of the post he contended is correct was, “Slavery and genocide are not ontologically evil and racism is not an actual sin but a concept made up by a marxist a century ago.”
By the end of the day, Robles’s mockery had turned to claiming that I was mentally unstable and obsessed with him. Knowing that I had gathered enough information and that, should I persist, I would play into that framing, I officially backed out of the dispute. During this situation, Robles consistently private messaged me on Twitter, sometimes sadistically mocking me and sometimes writing in a way that made me feel there was a genuine human being on the other end. He messaged me the morning after I announced I was backing out, and blocked me from seeing his account after I informed him that I was truly done. I believe he is a troubled man and pray that God would help him. I did not get involved in this out of any personal animosity towards Robles; I am praying for him daily, and the disaffected young men who follow him, and ask my Christian readers to do the same. I did this to shine a light on how truly evil ideologies are being laundered into the conservative Church, through antagonistic “Christian” YouTubers and podcasters, and their Twitter followers. I know there are multiple PCA and OPC members, elders, and pastors who read this Substack, and if this whole ordeal means that one of you knows the potential implications when a church member says they are a fan of Robles, then it has all been worth it.
“Gab’s CEO deactivates Twitter account after wildly antisemitic tirade,” daily dot, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/andrew-torba-deactivates-gab-twitter-antisemitism
I had previously engaged Robles, two weeks prior, over his making fun of the physical appearance of a fellow Christian and sending the brigade after him, and made this plan in the possibility that the brigade would at some point be turned on me.