If you check Google, you’ll find that there are lots of Freedom Festivals scheduled in the upcoming weeks. Most Freedom Festivals are devoted to fun, food, art and music. The Rod of Iron Ministries’ Freedom Festival -- organized by the ultra-rich and ultra-conservative Moon family -- is devoted to guns, conspiracy theories, conservative politics, and fundamentalist preaching. This year, Moon’s Freedom Festival is lining up some heavy hitters, and scheduling all sorts of conspiracy-laden seminars. The event is being held in Greeley, a small town of around 1300 people in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. The town was named for Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, considered to be the U.S.’s most influential newspaper during the mid 1800s.
Greeley is near the company headquarters of Kahr Firearms Group, a relatively small manufacturer that makes semi-automatic handguns. What distinguished Kahr is that it “is run by a family commonly derided as “the Moonies’ because of its more famous legacy: a Christianity-based religious movement started in the 1950s by the patriarch, Sun Myung Moon,” The Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery recently reported.
According to Paliery (https://www.thedailybeast.com/doomsday-church-and-gun-company-kahr-team-up-for-ultra-right-festival-steve-bannon-dana-loesch-freedom-fest) “This year’s top speakers include Steve Bannon, once the chief strategist for President Trump, Dana Loesch, the former aggressively vocal National Rifle Association spokeswoman who made millions while achieving celebrity status in the gun industry, and a smattering of alt-right figures known for championing Trump and the Second Amendment.”
In addition to Bannon and Loesch, orgabnizers have scheduled a talk by an anti-vaxxer known as “Mel K,” warning about ‘the great reset’ of the United Nations ‘Agenda 23’ and ‘Agenda 30,’ references to a conspiracy theory about how the UN is working on a secret eco-totalitarian plot to force people to move to cities.”
Charles Sam Faddis a former CIA operations officer, is giving a seminar about “election integrity.”
And Teddy Daniels, a Republican running for Congress in Pennsylvania, is also slated to speak. According to Vice.com, “Daniels, a hard-line pro-Trump Republican, former cop and Afghanistan War veteran running in a Democratic-held district, was in Washington [on January 6], and posted a video from the east steps of the Capitol of the crowd of rioters about 90 minutes after they first breached the building. The video was shot well within where the original police lines had stood that day.”
Do not sleep on the Moon family
On the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Donald Trump gave a virtual speech at the “Rally of Hope” event held by the Unification Church. This past May, Mike Pence, Michael Pompeo, and Mark Esper were featured at a virtual rally by the Unification Church. According to Mother Jones’ David Corn (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/pence-pompeo-headlined-event-mounted-by-unification-church/), “The event—called the “’Rally of Hope’—was hosted by Hak Ja Han Moon, the head of the Unification Church (whose members consider her and her late husband, Sun Myung Moon, the messiahs), and sponsored by the Universal Peace Federation, a group co-founded by the Moons in 2005 and affiliated with the Unification Church (which now refers to itself as the Unification movement).
These days, with so many right-wingers making noise, it is easy to forget about the Moon family. The patriarch, Sun Myung Moon, Paliery reported, “founded ‘The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification,’ claiming to be a messiah and eventually moving to the United States. While Sun Myung Moon became a prominent figure in the American conservative movement—founding The Washington Times newspaper—one of his sons, Justin Moon, founded the Kahr gun company in 1995. And another son, Hyung Jin Sean Moon, inherited an offshoot of the church that goes by the ‘World Peace and Unification Sanctuary’ and warns about ‘the End of Times.’”
J.J. MacNab, a research fellow at Georgia Washington University’s Program on Extremism who monitors anti-government movements, told Paliery that, “They’ve never really gotten the attention I think they should, because they’re not a white supremacy group. Anybody that’s pushing such a hearty mix of guns and religion are problematic to me. And the doomsday element is there. It’s effectively talking about death.”
According to Vice’s Cameron Joseph, the Rod of Iron Ministries “is a small offshoot of the much larger Unification Church, better known as the ‘Moonies,’ after Moon’s father.” Joseph wrote: Members “carry AR-15s during their church services and wedding ceremonies, and their leader, Pastor Hyung Jin ‘Sean’ Moon, wears a crown of polished bullets as part of his ceremonial garb. Leaders of the organization, also known as Sanctuary Church, posted videos of themselves retreating from the Capitol after getting pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed by the police who defended Congress that day.”
Joseph: “The new church was modeled after his father’s but added AR-15s and other guns into ceremonies and everyday activities. The younger Moon, who also goes by ‘The Second King,’ says he added guns because of a Bible verse about Jesus using a ‘rod of iron’ to protect himself and others, which he took as a reference to AR-15s.”
As sure as bears shit in the woods, wherever there are conspiracy–addled fundamentalists, there are Trump supporters. In late 2019, Sean Moon told Vice News that he believed God was working through Trump to rid the world of “political Satanism.”
Iron Rod Ministries “recently bought a 40-acre compound it dubbed “Liberty Rock” in central Texas, about 50 miles from Waco,” The Bulwark’s Thomas Lecaque reported (https://www.thebulwark.com/the-apocalypse-never-dies-it-just-gets-weirder/). “The church’s Twitch stream often uses hashtags like #MAGA, #Trump, and, of course, #QAnon—while Sean Moon plans to take his own messianic kingship when America falls.”