A domestic terrorist plot was disrupted two weeks ago, and virtually nobody in the media or government is describing it for what it was: a work of Christian extremism. The plot is another datapoint indicating the nation’s growing problem with Christian nationalist violence, a phenomenon which has been mostly obscured by the mainstream media’s unwillingness to describe it accurately.
To be clear, plenty of major outlets have covered what is being called the UFC plot, an alleged plan by at least five men (two more suspects were arrested while this article was being written) to attack the recent Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House with drones and snipers. In attempting to describe the plotters and their motives, though, most of those outlets have settled for descriptions like “anti-government extremists” with “numerous grievances against the government and federal officials.” Right-wing outlets have focused on the claim that the alleged ringleader, Abraham Alvarez, is in the country illegally, and that some of the group’s communications contained disparagement of billionaires.
Those descriptions are accurate. Like so many violent extremists, the five men arrested in connection with the UFC plot seem to have held contradictory, nonsensical political beliefs. They praised Hitler and wanted to target politicians supported by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). They embraced far-right figures and ideology but seem to have been radicalized regarding much more mainstream positions, as well, like opposition to data centers.
The affidavits submitted by the Department of Justice in the case contain those descriptions, but they also contain something else; something which both the media and Trump administration talking heads like FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche have been willing to omit from their discussions of the plot. In black and white, the DOJ’s own case against the alleged plotters spells out that they were united by extremist Christian beliefs.
It was Tycen Proper’s mother, Danielle, who foiled the plot. Proper, a 19-year-old from Knox County, Ohio, is the youngest of the alleged plotters, and his involvement with the group behind the planned attack had become so alarming to his mother that she called the police to ask if someone could come have a talk with her son. Her call set into motion an investigation which ultimately uncovered the plot on June 10. The UFC event at the White House was scheduled for June 14.
In an affidavit filed June 12, FBI Task Force officer Christopher Betts details his interview with Proper’s mother. The very first description of the group she gave to Betts, according to his affidavit, was as “Christian-based,” “ultra-religious,” and “anti-government.” Notably, the media has chosen to rely just on the last descriptor.
“Proper’s mother detailed that talking with these individuals online has caused Proper to lean heavily into his religion,” the affidavit reads.
I examined the discoverable social media accounts linked to men arrested in connection with the plot and found indications of mainstream Christian beliefs curdling into a more violent incarnation.
Facebook posts by Daniel Eskridge, a 32-year-old Missouri man arrested for his involvement with the planned attack, show the melding of Christian beliefs and political conservatism which is the hallmark of American Christian nationalism. After the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump was reelected, Eskridge shared a post reading, “Last month she mocked God, and told Christians they were at the wrong rally. This month, God had the final say in America.” The previous week, he posted that he voted so that his daughters “will not be forced to compete against men in women’s sports” and “to protect them from the evils that have strangled Christian values out of this country.”
Posts from Proper’s mother’s Facebook indicate that Christian faith played a prominent role in the young alleged plotter’s life. In September 2025, Danielle Proper shared her son’s senior photos, which show him posing with a Bible and wearing a shirt with a cross and the phrase “it is finished” on the front. “It is finished” are the last words attributed to Jesus Christ in the Bible prior to his death by crucifixion. Proper’s mother told authorities that she felt the other members of the group had manipulated her son by using his faith.
The Christian nationalist and extremist elements of the plot have been covered admirably by journalist Jonathan Larsen on Substack, who also takes a look at how figures like Patel and Blanche have smoothed over the conservative Christian elements of the plot in their public pronouncements on the case. For my part, I’m never surprised by a government’s willingness to lie for its own interests, but I am fascinated and appalled by the mainstream media’s complete unwillingness to do its job when it comes to describing our present Years of Lead – or Lead Poisoning, as might be more accurate.
Between January 6, 2021 and the reelection of Donald Trump in November 2024, there were more than 300 cases of political violence in the United States, according to Reuters, meaning we live in the most politically violent and tumultuous times since at least the late 1960s. If you relied on cable news and other mainstream outlets for all of your newsgathering, though, you’d never know it. Today, we understand the political violence of the 1960s as generational upheaval, the dying of an old world and the birthing of a new. Now, though, the press goes out of its way to avoid the meta-narrative, casting every incident as a random, standalone act of violence – and, in doing so, they rob their audience of the ability to understand, the ability to situate themselves in the course of human events.
The meta-narrative matters. It’s what the historians will eventually write. It’s what our kids and grandkids will eventually understand about the time we are living in right now, but that our current media landscape largely prevents us from recognizing in the present. In the year 2026, the United States of America is being lifted in a rising tide of political violence, driven primarily by right-wing extremism and with no small amount of Christian terrorism.
Last September, a 40-year-old man named Thomas Jacob Sanford drove his truck through the wall of a Mormon meetinghouse in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan before opening fire and killing four people. After the attack, it came out that Sanford was a devout Christian who had come to hate Mormons after a bad breakup, seeing them as “fake Christians” and the “antichrist.” He was seen in social media posts wearing Trump 2020 merchandise and reportedly also had a Trump sign in his front yard. Despite the reality of the Grand Blanc Township attack being a conservative Christian Trump supporter attacking Mormons for religious reasons, Trump himself called the incident “another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America.”
In June of 2025, a man named Vance Luther Boelter assassinated Democratic Speaker Emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, as well as Democratic state Senator John Hoffman. In his car, police found a target list including information for other Democratic lawmakers, as well as abortion rights activists and a Planned Parenthood clinic. After the attack, Boelter’s friends and loved ones told reporters that the killer was “deeply religious,” a “follower” of Donald Trump, and believed that he was on a mission from God. Like with Sanford, Boelter’s case was covered in the mainstream media with almost no emphasis given to the explicitly religious motivation for his crimes.
As I wrote when I covered the Boelter case last year: Vance Boelter was a Christian extremist. He was a terrorist produced by a radical, homegrown Christian movement. And he will not be the last.
That remains the case – in fact, it has already been proven right multiple times – but most in the media can’t bring themselves to say it. Meanwhile, polls and surveys show an increasing acceptance of political violence among Christian nationalists.
If the media were simply trying not to rock the boat in peaceful times, maybe – maybe – I could understand why they so insistently skirt past these attackers’ sectarian identities and religious motives. But these are not peaceful times. Five years ago, right-wing, Christian nationalist extremists attempted to overthrow the government of the United States. Some had plans to execute members of Congress and, if they could get their hands on him, the Vice President. We are only half a decade removed from that event, existing in a reality where right-wing and Christian extremists are committing assassinations, perpetrating mass murders, and plotting terrorist attacks, and the mainstream media can’t be bothered to identify the thread that unites them.
Their coverage is negligent, but the reasons for it are not a mystery: if even a single one of the attackers discussed above had been Muslim, if even a single one of them had possessed a shade more melanin, I think we all know that the conversation around their attacks would have taken on a different tone entirely. But they were white and Christian, so the tide will keep rising, and the pertinent details will be omitted.
