Disguising Hate: How Radical Evangelicals Spread Anti-Islamic Vitriol on Facebook

A coordinated network of evangelical Christian Facebook pages publishing overtly Islamophobic, conspiratorial content paints extreme, divisive right-wing rhetoric as having broad American support but is actually tied to one individual, a Snopes investigation reveals.

These pages claim that Islam is “not a religion,” that Muslims are violent and duplicitous, and that Islamic refugee resettlement is “cultural destruction and subjugation.” Just hours after the April 2019 Notre Dame spire collapse in a catastrophic fire, this network went into overdrive sowing doubt about the possible role Muslims had in its collapse. Multiple pages within this network have stated that their purpose is “message boosting & targeting.” Ten of the pages within the network explicitly support U.S. President Donald Trump in their titles and belong to an umbrella organization that “[speaks] up for a Trump-Pence agenda.” A post shared on several of those pages implores readers to “like our page and let’s roll 2020!”

These pages, however, are steeped in fantastical notions of “globalist” conspiracies linking Islam, Socialism, and multi-billionaire philanthropist and Democratic Party supporter George Soros to the decline of Western civilization. Some of these pages also claim that survivors of the Parkland High School massacre in the U.S., for instance, are on a Soros-funded “Leftist-Islamist payroll.” In at least one case, these pages have either received financial support from, or been exploited by, a high-profile GOP donor who served as a fundraiser and campaign board member for 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson.

Though the actual authorship of the posts within these pages is opaque, their titles imply diverse representation from a broad swath of American demographic groups, including “Jews & Christians for America” and “Blacks for Trump.” In reality, however, the pages in this network are all connected to evangelical activist Kelly Monroe Kullberg. But she is neither black nor Jewish, and her views appear to represent an extreme subset of the broader evangelical movement in America. Though we do not know for sure what individual or individuals created each of these pages, or if Kullberg, her family members, or various “interns” write their posts, all of them appear now to be tied financially to Kullberg or to organizations she has created. As far as we have been able to ascertain, Facebook has no problem with the existence of this coordinated network, which we will refer to here as the “Kullberg network.”