Fairhope — The night before polls open in the Republican primary runoff, Judge Roy Moore makes his final campaign stop in a pole barn on 300 acres of Alabama countryside just miles from the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. It feels like church camp.
A congregation of about 250 stands on the mulched barnyard floor and listens intently to the sweaty political service on stage. Each of the speakers teach different iterations of the same anti-globalist, anti-establishment gospel, where rebellion against elites — particularly a vote for Moore — is obedience to God.
That’s not poetic license. It’s the energy inside the room. The people on stage want to defeat incumbent Sen. Luther Strange. They want to put Moore in the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And they want Alabama to spark a worldwide awakening.
“I came to this place because of what’s going on here with this vote tomorrow,” says Nigel Farage, the right-wing British politician most responsible for Brexit. “It isn’t just important for Alabama. It isn’t just important to the Republican Party. It isn’t just important to the United States of America,” he says. “It’s important for the whole global movement across the West.”
The crowd is whipped into a fervor, booing the elites and cheering conservatives. Many of the subsequent speakers say prayers. Some, like the bearded Pat Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame, read more from the Bible than from their notes. Several amens are offered throughout the night.
And backstage, Farage explains what’s at stake as he smokes foreign cigarettes purchased on a not so dissimilar trip to support a different politician in the Czech Republic. “I think our movement needs to be re-energized,” he tells me. “We need people who aren’t going to sell out.”
Farage doesn’t judge loyalty by policy though. The British politician can’t point to a specific policy difference between Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court justice, and Strange, the former Alabama attorney general. Instead the British politician’s endorsement is about disposition.
“All I can tell you is that all those people in the Conservative Party, who came from establishment backgrounds, and who after Brexit, said they were converts,” Farage says likening the political situations of the two English speaking countries, they are “the ones now who are trying to pull the rug out from under us.”
In America, the goal is to bring back those Republicans who have fallen away after the 2016 election. Tim James picks up on this theme. The son of beloved former Alabama governor, Fob James, encourages the crowd to “give D.C. an Alabama attitude adjustment like they’ve never seen before — even Trump who we love.”
That presidential prodigal is not present Monday night (still, a lady standing next to me who looks and sounds like your grandmother bets “he’s watching this tonight.”) Though beloved Trump isn’t excused. The crowd takes offense at the president’s endorsement of Strange and his turning away from 1930s populism.
When former White House strategist and current Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon comes on stage, they greet him like an honest-to-God revivalist. An alt-right voice in the Alabama wilderness, Bannon wants to make way for Moore and a populist revival in the White House.
Not everybody will get an invite. Like the screaming Democrat who crashes the rally and is quickly hustled out, Bannon condemns Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove, and the donor class who served as “the instruments to try and destroy Judge Moore.” In one of the most applauded moments of the night, he warns the lot that “your day of reckoning is coming.”
This thinking is commonplace. Sitting in rocking chairs before the event, Rick Miller, a small business consultant, and Phil Law, a pharmaceutical businessman, switch quickly between politics and theology. Moore won over Miller after visiting his Bible study and Moore won over Law with his “Christian constitutionalist principles.” Those values, they say, aren’t that different from the “conservative nationalist” beliefs of Breitbart.
Aaron Seely clarifies. A political science major from the University of Alabama, he’s supporting Moore because the candidate is “a godly man” who shares his values. The freshman rearranged his class schedule to attend the rally because he sees the election as “a big historical thing.” He wanted to see close up “this battle between globalists and Americanism.”
And at least in Alabama, his side is still winning. Multiple polls put Moore ahead of Strange by 8 points. Something of a miracle, that lead has survived Trump’s endorsement of Strange and outlasted $9 million dollars-worth of attack ads paid for by McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund. In those details, Moore sees divine intervention.
“God is in this. Does that mean that I will win? No,” Moore says concluding a speech about repudiating McConnell and the beltway. “I don’t know what God means in anything. I do know his hand is upon us. And whether or not we win or lose, we will keep on the fight to bring this nation back to what it once was.”
Judging by the fervor of Monday night, Moore could soon bring that mission to the Senate.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
