Clay Clark’s Health and Freedom Conference in Tampa, Florida Writeup
Last week, I virtually attended Clay Clark’s Health & Freedom Conference in Tampa, Florida. This is a part of his Reawaken America Tour —previously called the Reopen America Tour, but during the conference Clark revealed that the name change resulted from General Michael Flynn’s recommendation. With only one event previously in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the Health & Freedom Conference boasted high profile speakers such as Mike Lindell, General Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone. While the event was not explicitly QAnon themed — like the For God & Country Patriot Roundup in Dallas — many of the speakers expressed conspiratorial beliefs in their speeches and some of the speakers, like Ann Vandersteel, have previously expressed support for QAnon or spoke at the QAnon event in Dallas.
The event was held at The River at Tampa Bay Church in an outdoor pavilion. According to Clark, this pavilion was created specifically for the conference. The River at Tampa Bay Church was in the news recently when it’s founding pastor Rodney Howard-Browne was arrested and charged with “unlawful assembly and violation of a public health emergency order” for holding services at The River at Tampa Bay Church in March of 2020 in violation of the “safer-at-home order” effective in Hillsborough County at the time.
Much of the event felt a lot like a church service, which is not out of the ordinary for right-wing or conspiracy theory events. The Patriot Roundup in Dallas’s second day started with a service by Sean Golliday, but in my opinion the church service aspects of this conference were much more ingrained with this event. Many of the speakers, such as Rodney Howard-Browne, Mark & Martha Cabrera, Allen Hawes, Jayson Williams, and Shannon Gilbert, are pastors at The River at Tampa Bay Church and Revival Ministries International, which is yet another Rodney Howard-Browne founded organization. Each day of the conference ended with what was essentially a church service by Rodney Howard-Browne.
While many of the speakers at the Patriot Roundup in Dallas were clearly attempting to sell something or boost their brand, these attempts at sales and brand boosting seemed much more blatant at the Health & Freedom Conference. Rodney Howard-Browne’s books, specifically “Socialism Under the Microscope” and “The Killing of Uncle Sam: The Demise of the United States of America”, were brought up by multiple speakers. Many of the speakers brought up River University and it’s River School of Government. This is a The River at Tampa Bay Church affiliated school. At the end of the third day they started handing out physical scholarships for River University. The two most notable instances of money collecting at the conference was on the second day when conference employees got out garbage bags and asked the audience for cash for attorney Thomas Renz and on the third day when they did the same thing to get money for Roger Stone and his wife who he says has stage four cancer.
Having an event like Clay Clark’s Health and Freedom Conference at The River at Tampa Bay Church is not a surprise. As previously mentioned, Howard-Browne was arrested for disobeying county lockdown orders. In addition he had incorporated coronavirus conspiracies into his services. Allowing the Reawaken America Tour into his church is somewhat of a logical extension of The River at Tampa Bay Church’s teachings becoming more conspiratorial.
This isn’t a new pattern. QAnon and related conspiracies have found themselves gaining traction in churches and religious communities. While I would hesitate to call this a direct one-to-one comparison, a lot of how conspiracy theories are gaining inroads with churches now (especially evangelical churches) reminds me of how much of the base of the Tea Party was linked to the religious right by the press. There does seem to be evidence that the Tea Party is more orthodox in it’s religious beliefs than the general population, but I believe equating the religious right and the Tea Party would be reductive of what both movements stand for. I think QAnon and modern far-right conspiracy theories are similar in this regard. There is a large overlap with the modern Christian religious right, but not a perfect overlap. The Health & Freedom Conference in Tampa is just a particularly religious expression of the modern far-right conspiratorial movement.
One of the things that stood out to me at the conference was Pastor Todd Coconato’s story of a coffee shop owner he knew who started having church in his coffee shop. He encouraged the audience to do this and said that church needs to leave the building. This reminded me of what Jordan Sather said at the Patriot Roundup Conference in Dallas about how he tries to mention right-wing ideas to at least one person in real life every day. I’ve been seeing a lot of emphasis on in person interactions in online communities revolving around far-right conspiracy theories.
In addition to the emphasis on real life interactions, this conference had speakers such as Michael Flynn and Kevin Jenkins who reiterated the idea that those attending should get involved in local politics. This line has been getting a lot of traction recently. Post conference, one of the largest neo-Nazi and QAnon telegram channels, GhostEzra, told their followers that they need to start running for local office. QAnon candidates and candidates who promote conspiracy theories are not a thing of the past. On a local level especially I expect to see a lot of candidates who are willing to support far-right conspiracy theories.
As the title suggests, a large feature of the conference was health disinformation. Carrie Madej, Judy Mikovits, Eric Nepute, and Sherri Tenpenny are just a few of the speakers who focused on health misinformation. The speakers promoted anti-vaxx ideas, anti-mask ideas, quantum dye dot conspiracies, conspiracies about transhumanism, and more. Some of the speakers (such as Eric Nepute and Richard Bartlett) have also falsely claimed to have successfully treated or cured Covid. These speakers were given free reign to promote their products on stage at the conference. Clay Clark even joined in with the medical disinformation to talk about how budesonide, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine work as treatments for Covid.
The audience at the conference seemed very receptive to all of these various forms of medical misinformation. On stage Clay Clark brought up that there were various people set up to the sides of the event who would help audience members secure new jobs or file lawsuits against their employers if their current jobs required them to get vaccinated. One of the people who was offering job opportunities was Leila Centner. She runs a school in Florida and has repeated vaccine disinformation. Centner was specifically offering jobs to teachers who no longer wished to work in public schools.
The conference, just like the Patriot Roundup in Dallas, demonstrated that conspiracy theories have a home in the modern political landscape, that there is a certain amount of money and support behind this right-wing conspiracy theory movement, and that the people involved in the movement are attempting to mobilize and encourage others to get involved politically.