From the Conejo Guardian to the White House. Yes, really.
So Donald Trump just named Katie Zacharia his new White House press secretary. She’s from Westlake Village. Unfortunately, she's one of ours.
Her résumé is about what you'd expect. She worked on Trump's 2024 campaign, advised his Truth Social company, did a stint in communications at Homeland Security, and worked with Ric Grenell's Fix California. A graduate of Pepperdine University, she was even seen speaking with the Heritage Foundation in the Pacific Palisades.
But that's not the part that got our attention.
Zacharia used to serve as the director of the Conejo Guardian. You remember the Guardian, the local paper that made a splash on the Conejo Valley, and not in a good way. And look who sat on that board with her.
Bryce Eddy, who co-founded The Liberty Station Podcast with Rob McCoy, the pastor at Godspeak Calvary Chapel. And Doug DeGroote, managing director of DeGroote Financial Group, whose website has listed Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk's organization, as a principal charitable cause. McCoy, of course, has his own long history with Turning Point.
If you followed how the Conejo Guardian covered CVUSD, local elections, and LGBTQ+ issues, you know why this matters. The paper boosted handpicked far-right candidates and went after our public schools and LGBTQ+ inclusion. Assembled and distributed by Godspeak Calvary Chapel, the Conejo Guardian landed on our doorsteps like a slap in the face, fueling culture wars, stoking division, and turning manufactured outrage into a political strategy to help elect handpicked extremist candidates aligned with "biblical principles" rooted in religious fundamentalism that seeks to impose its beliefs on society while suppressing other religions and secular freedoms.
Zacharia was more than a line item on a Form 990. By her own account, she was in the thick of the Godspeak and Conejo Guardian drama, even alleging that "Antifa" was phoning the Guardian's advertisers to rattle them. (Intimidation? Maybe. Or maybe just a convenient boogeyman.) She was also a congregant at Godspeak Calvary, attended their movie screenings, and smiled for a photo with Rob McCoy and local politicians.
The networks in our own backyard have a far reach, and we are not removed from events taking place nationally. Godspeak Calvary Chapel, led by Rob McCoy, has openly promoted Christian nationalist ideas, including the Seven Mountains framework and the concept of Ekklesia, which calls for Christian dominion over government and other major institutions. This theology currently has a secure home in the White House as well.
Our own community has suffered the divisiveness that follows this theology with attacks on the LGBTQ+ and public education. The players within Christian Nationalist networks don't live in separate little worlds. They know each other, they work together, and their reach goes far beyond the Conejo Valley. Zacharia's new job proves it. Even if she flames out spectacularly, someone within these networks is already waiting in the wings to take her place and possible other positions. A fair question to ask is could it be another homegrown Godspeak hopeful?
If religious extremism worries you, and the separation of church and state matters to you, this should stop you in your tracks. The pull of these networks is hard to miss once their people start running for office or landing jobs in Washington. And as we showed in our last piece, two candidates with close ties to them are running right here in Ventura County.
We can keep shrugging this off as small-town politics, or we can clearly see that the lesson here is small-town politics don't always stay small.
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