Last Updated on April 11, 2024
Texas oil and gas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, known collectively as the “Wilks brothers” and who claim to be evangelical Christians, have united with admitted sexual deviant Dennis Prager of Prager U, among other “conservative” figures, to distribute political video content throughout schools and the media space.
Through the Thirteen Foundation of Farris Wilks and the Heavenly Fathers Foundation of Dan Wilks, the Texas billionaire brothers have funneled millions of dollars into mainstream conservative organizations, publications, and candidates, and were even described as the men “behind” Ted Cruz and his 2016 run for the presidency. Now, they’re joining forces with Dennis Prager, spending at least $8 million funding Prager University’s production of short-style videos that push back on the climate change hoax and cover a range of other hot-button political subjects.
Ironically though, while the Wilks brothers are presented as far-right Christian conservatives, Dennis Prager has made headlines in recent years for his embrace of sexual deviancy, even claiming in a 2021 interview that bisexuality is “the norm” among humans.
“I am not saying heterosexual is more normal,” Prager explained to Dave Rubin, a gay man. “By the way, I actually believe bisexual is the norm,” Prager went on.
Despite the sentiments from Prager, Farris Wilks, one-half of the Wilks brothers money bags team, says that homosexuality is “a perversion tantamount to bestiality, pedophilia, and incest.”
Related: Dennis Prager Says Bisexuality is ‘The Norm’
But while their paths seem to part, at least publicly, on the issue of homosexuality, the Wilks brothers and Dennis Prager stand arm-in-arm on the cause of supporting Israel, with the Wilks brothers’ Liberty Counsel, a tax-exempt religious liberty organization, running a Stand With Israel campaign that has included hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a speaker.
Related: PragerU Sides with ADL Claiming Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism
In the media space, the Wilks brothers’ influence extends beyond Dennis Prager and his Prager University operation, with The Guardian reporting last September that in 2015, “Farris Wilks gave $4.7 million to help launch The Daily Wire and remains an owner of the media company.”
As mentioned, the Wilks Brothers were also closely tied to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, before he lost the GOP Primary to then-candidate Trump.
A 2016 article that appeared in The Forward, a left-wing Jewish publication, called Dan and Farris Wilks the “Evangelical Christians behind Ted Cruz,” before describing the billionaire brothers as “Super Jewy,” detailing the various forms of “philosemitism” they engage in.
This includes an Assemblies of Yahweh church run by Farris Wilks that “combines political Christianity, messianic Judaism and ‘the morality of the market’,” while appropriating Jewish customs and symbolism, like the Menorah.
As The Forward reported:
Farris Wilks denies the mainstream Christian understanding of the divinity of Jesus. Not surprisingly, given Wilks’s connection to Cruz, his sermons have all been removed from the Assembly of Yahweh website and YouTube channel. But in a sermon given at a different church, the Mount Zion Church of God, he cites numerous passages from the New Testament showing, in his view, that the son of God and God/Yahweh are two distinct personages, that Jesus is a mediator between people and God, and that Jesus is God’s “right-hand man” but distinct from God Himself.
Second, members of the Assembly of Yahweh “keep the Sabbath, the Passover and other festivals of Lev. 23, [and] choose to eat clean foods,” avoiding pork and shellfish. (A bit like Karaites, they only maintain the biblical law, and thus do not prohibit the mixture of milk and meat or require kosher slaughter.) They sleep in tents on Sukkot, but reject Christmas and Halloween.
And then there are the trappings of Jewish observance. Each Sunday service starts with a shofar blast. The church’s logo features a menorah. And despite the occasionally risible mispronunciations of Hebrew words, the Hebrew is there. The church practices a mode of close textual reading, untethered from any particular tradition, that relies heavily on the meanings of particular words and phrases; it is, in other words, at least as Jewish as it is Christian.
