This guy is incredible. I thought for a moment that the GOP had an honest to God holy roller on their ticket because about 37 seconds into this clip Mark Burns starts to shake exactly the way the holy rollers shake before they fling themselves into the aisle and start rolling. Seriously.
And when he put down the mic and began stalking the stage I thought he might grab a basket of snakes and start handling them. This is that same kind of frenetic energy and mindless fervor that you see in tent revivals.
And this guy is running for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. And of course, he’s running on the GOP ticket. No Democrat or Independent would behave like this. That sound you hear is Dwight Eisenhower rolling in his grave. This is Mark Burns, an evangelical televangelist who was an early supporter of Donald Trump and who is running for the House seat in South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District.
SC GOP congressional candidate Mark Burns today: “God is raising up armies. We are going to start having civil disobedience in America .. We are going to shut down this America led by racist, liberal, race-baiting Democrats.” pic.twitter.com/Wxq6klISyS
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 18, 2022
This is not the good trouble that John Lewis used to speak of. This is just trouble making and there is a profound difference between the two.
It won’t surprise you to know that Burns believes in the Big Lie and after January 6 he came forward to say that it was Antifa, not MAGAs, who breached the Capitol.
And here’s something cute I just picked up on Wikipedia, “In August 2016, Burns was criticized after he retweeted a digitally manipulated image of Hillary Clinton in blackface. Burns later stated, “I prayed that those who I offended really receive … a sincere apology,” adding that he believes that the Democratic Party uses black people for votes.”
I don’t know if this is Stockholm Syndrome or what, but this guy has a skewed vision of what’s going on in America. Skewed and screwed. Donald Trump and the Republicans would have this guy back in the field picking cotton if they could and if he can’t figure that much out, I fear his case is hopeless.
That’s right, preacher man, keep talking. You’ve yet to make people hate you enough. But you’re getting there. The context on this was for liberals in the 1970s but this line from Harlan Ellison’s “Reaping The Whirlwind” applies to this crowd: “You’re approaching oblivion, YOU KNOW IT and you won’t do a thing to save yourselves.”
As the Westboro Baptist Church crazies in Kansas prove, the more religious you are, the crazier you are.
Careful with generalizations that have no depth or scholarship. It’s people. People lie, deceive themselves & others, & either are too lazy or too full of themselves to seek truth. It’s not the attempt to understand the unseen or unknown or to record what they held sacred that is the problem. It’s claiming something that is not true or is contradictory. Mathematical proofs & scientific knowledge are not ‘crazy’ just because people don’t understand statistics & misuse that word to reach false conclusions. I majored in Religion & yet aced calculus, statistics, & a number of other science courses. My religion professors knew the languages, cultures, history, evolution, & weaknesses of a number of conclusions popular culture espouses based on faulty teaching. No its not religion, or the study of the subject. It’s the same lazy thinking our culture puts forth about EVERYTHING. For example, how many folks, who consider themselves patriots really know jack about our history? How many pulitzer prize winning books have they read? None. They are fervent believers but have put in NO WORK to really know our political history. It’s the same old story about most of what our citizens know about anything, or rather don’t know. For example, if u don’t know the speed of light & the distances it can travel, then u don’t even know where u are.
The dark side of recognizing racism as a lie is the fact that being born black doesn’t inoculate u from becoming a lying hypocrite & cult member. Remember the color of ur skin isn’t a barometer to the content of ur CHARACTER. As Dylan quipped, ” ur just a pawn in their game.”