I was inspired to republish one of my very earliest articles, from January 2, 2017, because of what happened tonight in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. I had only been a blogger for three months when I wrote this. At the time I wrote it, I was thoroughly convinced that the evangelicals were evil. Since that time, I have only become more convinced.
Tonight Kenneth Copeland took the stage in Latrobe, Pennsylvania to introduce Donald Trump. He brags about how the American embassy in Jerusalem is on Donald Trump Avenue “where it belongs.”
If Copeland isn’t Satan incarnate, he will do until the real thing comes along. Listen to this eight minute tape to get the lay of the land. Then read the article beneath it, published January 2, 2017, on Daily Kos. I republish it here in full. It will explain the grand plan of these theocratic maniacs. Nothing has changed, except to get worse. These men, and most of them are men, are evil. And they have been planning a theocratic takeover of this country for a very, very long time.
Congratulations, you have now heard from the Father Of All Lies, at least until you get down to the One Below, should that be your fate. And then he turned the mic over to a liar of equal stature.
Here is my piece on theocracy. It was originally published under the title “Mike Pence Is A Theocrat. His Christian Supremacist Followers Seek To Take Over America. Seriously.” Little did we know what we had in store. And believe me, little do we know what we have in store if the evangelical wingnuts ever get in power as they have been planning to do since the 80’s. That is why I publish this piece, so that you get the history of all this.
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Despite all the hand wringing and hysteria about the upcoming “presidency” of Donald Trump, the plain truth is that the Trump campaign stated in no uncertain terms that Vice President Mike Pence will in fact be in charge of “foreign and domestic affairs.” What will that look like? Again, plainly, Mike Pence is not only the de facto leader of the Republican party, which is no longer the party of conservatism but is now the party of nationalism; but more importantly Mike Pence is at the head of another, far more dangerous Republican group, the “Christian Supremacists;” who are committed to taking over the government of the United States of America. Preposterous, you say? Please read further.
Pence’s start in radio came when he lost a second Congressional race in 1988 and was commiserating in his law office when he got a call from a Rushville, Indiana woman, Sharon Disinger, who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Disinger wanted Pence to host a talk show on her small radio station in Rush County. Disinger told Pence that his hero, Ronald Reagan got his start in radio; and it goes without saying that Pence had other heros, notably Rush Limbaugh, whose fame on the airwaves Pence openly aspired to.
“During the 1980’s I began taping and transcribing Pat Robertson’s 700 Club show because of the alarming anti-Christian political philosophy he was endorsing. He began a drum beat for drastic political and cultural changes to this country.
Robertson’s guests did something I’d never seen before: they reversed the scriptures and called it immoral for the citizens to help the poor through taxation, which, by the way is expressly required in the Old Testament. The accusation was and is that taxation robbed the rich to help the poor.
If you are interested in how the movement reversed Judeo-Christian standards, see Bloodguilty Churches (which is also available at Amazon.com).
Robertson slowly introduced the idea of an American empire; he attacked pluralism, and pleaded that the people of the U.S. “must speak with one voice.” (7/19/85)
The idea of taking over and controlling the United States government began with a series of guest appearances:
On April 4, 1985, Billy Graham appeared on the show, and in a startling announcement said, “I’m for evangelicals “… getting control of the Congress, getting control of the bureaucracy, getting control of the executive branch of government. If we leave it to the other side we’re going to be lost.”
On September 25, 1985, Tim LaHaye, appeared in a film clip with Phyllis Schlafly on the show. In that clip, he laid out the plan to take over the government of the United States. He said:
“Suppose that every Bible believing church—all 110,000—decided to…raise up one person to run for public office and win… If every church in the next ten years did that, we would have more Christians in office than there are positions…there are only 97,000 elective offices.”
Though the idea of right-wing religious conservatives controlling the U.S. government appeared to be a pipedream to most observers I talked with, for the churchgoers who were listening—and by 1985 Robertson’s 700 Club topped the Nielsen ratings with a projected monthly viewing audience of 28.7 million viewers—to those viewers—the idea of gaining and holding the power in this country was a tantalizing and intriguing concept—they began to accept the idea of dominating America step by step, day by day.”
In October, a federal jury in Washington convicted four former Blackwater guards in the 2007 fatal shooting of 14 unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad. But much less well known is the marathon lawsuit in Northern Virginia between the Blackwater founder and Robert Young Pelton, a freelance journalist and owner of a survival-gear business.
[…]
For more than a year, Prince, 45, and Pelton, 59, have been locked in legal warfare over Prince’s 2013 book, “Civilian Warriors,” published by Portfolio Penguin. The memoir, which mostly justifies Blackwater’s behavior in the war zone, sold nearly 46,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen Bookscan. Late last year, the filmmaker behind “The Hurt Locker” reportedly acquired the book’s rights for a Prince biopic.
When they met, Pelton was the solicitous journalist, and Prince was his profile subject. Pelton landed one of the first extensive interviews with Prince for his 2006 book “License to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.” He portrayed Prince as an energetic entrepreneur determined to “deliver a lighter, faster, smarter army.”
In the summer of 2010, Pelton scored another interview with Prince for Men’s Journal magazine, in which he described Prince as “an ex-CIA assassination point man” who must be asked the same question multiple times before coughing up an answer, “like starting a car with a dead battery.”
…his close relationship to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. In December 2007, three months after Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square; Pence and his Republican Study Committee, which served “the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives,” organized a gathering to welcome Prince to Washington. But their relationship is not just forged in wars. Prince and his mother, Elsa, have been among the top funders of scores of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives across the country and have played a key role in financing efforts to criminalize abortion.
Prince has long given money to Pence’s political campaigns, and toward the end of the presidential election, he contributed $100,000 to the pro-Trump/Pence Super PAC Make America Number 1. Prince’s mother kicked in another $50,000. […] Erik Prince…portrays himself as a mix between Indiana Jones, Rambo, Captain America, and Pope Benedict…
Bear in mind that the $150,000 from mother and son to Mike Pence was a routine gesture; not a one-time contribution. Also bear in mind the number of anti-gay bills and anti-gay legislators and do the arithmetic on what kind of money it takes to be “among the top funders for scores” of those fund raising drives and campaigns across the country. A bit more background on Prince and his family, also from The Intercept article:
The Prince family’s support for Pence, and the Christian supremacist movement he represents, has deep roots. Erik Prince’s father, Edgar, built up a very successful manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, and became one of the premier bankrollers of what came to be known as the radical religious right. They gave Gary Bauer the seed money to start the Family Research Council and poured money into James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” Bauer recalled soon after the elder Prince’s death. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.” Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team. The two families merged together like the monarchies of old Europe and swiftly emerged as platinum-level contributors to far-right Christian causes and political figures.
The Prince and DeVos families gave the seed money for what came to be known as the Republican Revolution when Newt Gingrich became House speaker in 1994 on a far-right platform known as the Contract with America. The Prince and DeVos clans also invested heavily in a scheme developed by Dobson to engage in back-door lobbying activities by forming “prayer warrior” networks of people who would call politicians to advocate for Dobson’s religious and political agenda. Instead of lobbying, which the organization would have been prohibited from doing because of its tax and legal status, they would claim they were “praying” for particular policies.
The Princes consistently poured money into criminalizing abortion, privatizing education, blocking gay rights, and other right-wing causes centered around their interpretation of Christianity. The family, especially Erik, was very close to Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles “Chuck” Colson. The author of Nixon’s enemies list, Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the dirty tricks campaign against Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison, and after his release, he started the Prison Fellowship, which sought to convert prisoners to Christianity to counter what Colson saw as the Islamic menace in U.S. prisons. Erik Prince funded this as well and went on prison visits with Colson.
Mike Pence’s political action committee is called “Principles Exalt A Nation.” It has been opined that this would be Pence’s slogan in his own run for the presidency. And the principles which exalt the nation of Mike Pence and his followers’ dreams are not the principles of inclusivity, diversity and tolerance, not by a long shot. Mike Pence and his radical religious right wingers seek the establishment of a Christian theocracy in the United States. They are thrilled at having the White House, House and Senate under Republican control and seek only to impose their fanaticism on the Supreme Court, hopefully swerving it to the far right for decades to come.
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Jeff Sharlet, the author of “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, said: “The enemy to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government. So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained.” In Mike Pence’s God-ordained economic system the serfs will labor and tithe for the good of the theocrats on top, because that is how a theocracy works. And the warrior class will stand ready to destroy the infidels because that, too, is a fundamental part of a theocracy. The White House is going to need a mass exorcism when this group is finished. May God truly help us all in the days to come.
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Now you have read the background and seen the blueprint. Now you know how we got here. Do not underestimate these people.
How did we get here? That’s an easy one to answer. Our species is, in general, an extraordinarily stupid species (see the planet Earth). When looking at the species one notices some areas of the planet attract certain types of the species: some not quite so stupid, some really fucking stupid. The U.S. attracts the creme de la creme of stupid humans. There are some other countries vying for that stop slot–Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. come immediately to mind. For now though the U.S. is safe in its stupidity supremacy.
Pence became a right-wing nut job in college,long before he became a,politician. He told Mother he doubted he could marry her because she had previously been married. Guess he could handle not marrying a non-virgin. He was,raised ConservaCatholic,became an evangelical in college and has been a pompous,judgmental.hypocrite ever since.