The highlight last week was the hilariously funny news that a bunch of incredibly gullible QAnon believers had turned up in Dallas to see Kennedy Jnr resurrect from the dead. Seriously, they really did. The latest update is that they are still there, and refuse to leave …
A group of QAnon believers who gathered in Dallas last week to see the late President John F. Kennedy and his late son reappear, are staying in the city and have begun discussing establishing a permanent base there where they could all live.
The group, led by the antisemitic QAnon influencer Michael Brian Protzman …
… When one of Protzman’s followers asked: “Are we putting too much faith in this man?”, she was immediately shut down for her “lack of faith.” Those defending Protzman spoke with a religious zeal about their belief and faith in him.
“I wish I was still [in Dallas],” one woman, in tears, said. “I’m completely and totally all in. Be true, keep holding onto the truth, and you will find your way.”
When writing about these folks last week, I suggested that reality was not simply a distant land, but was instead a completely unknown nation on the far side of a globe that they believe is flat. I now appear to have been wrong about that, I was being far too generous. Reality for these folks is simply not on the same planet they are now on, they appear to have taken up residence in Narnia.
So what else happened this past week?
Below you will find a selection of some truly bizarre claims that popped up during the last 7 days. So, with a hat-tip to my main source, Right-Wing watch, it is time to dive in.
The Big Lie and Other Conspiracies
Mike Lindell believes that the election conspiracy theory “cyber symposium” he held in August was “one of the most successful events in history.”
- Setting it on fire and then smashing the aircraft all over the runway is a rather unique definition of “success”. As described by those that attended, it was “three days of sheer boredom and weirdness “.
Hillsdale College Tells Millions of Conservatives: Jan. 6 Insurrection Was a ‘Hoax’
- One small flaw with their claim is the literally millions of witnesses who watched it live on TV
- Hillsdale College also claims … “every honest person knows that the 2020 election was tainted” . The typo there is the word “honest”. If they really wished to be evidence-based, then that sentence needs the word “dishonest”. It is very easily resolved, simply ask for credible independently verifiable evidence for the claim. All you will get is the sound of tumbleweed.
- Fact Check: Peer Reviewed paper published in PNAS (Nov 9, 2021): “No evidence for systematic voter fraud: A guide to statistical claims about the 2020 election”.
Christian Nationalists
Mark Robinson Says Conservatives Must Get ‘Warlike’ in the ‘Fight’ Against ‘The Enemies of Freedom’
- Quote: “Come and ask me what I did with my $600,” Robinson added. “Please come ask me. You can stand in my door, ‘What did you do with that $600?’ I bought ammo“
- Lt Gov Robinson does not appear to grasp that he is the problem here.
COVID-19
Michele Bachmann has some advice for parents: “I would highly recommend you DO NOT vaccinate your children.”
- Remind me again which medical school Bachmann went to
Justin Baragona @ The Daily Beast: (Nov 08) Newsmax Host Eric Bolling Freaks Out Over Big Bird and Vaccines: ‘Sesame Street Are a Bunch of Communists!’
- Eric has no monopoly on Crazy, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused Big Bird of peddling “government propaganda” while Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe, who remains unvaccinated to own the libs, claimed this was akin to “brainwashing children.”
- What is truly bizarre about all of this is that Big Bird getting vaccinated is not new. Below is a clip of Big Bird being vaccinated in 1972.
Bobby Piton, a GOP candidate for Senate in Illinois, says that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be arrested by the military for crimes against humanity: “There’s a war criminal walking around freely on U.S. soil.”
- Disinformation about Dr. Fauci, the Wuhan lab, and COVID-19’s origins have been major talking points for Republicans.
- Hot Tip: To arrest somebody you actually need “evidence” of a crime and not simply a conspiracy theory that has no substance.
- Remind me again how many people have died from COVID due to the utter incompetence of the Trump administration being combined with the current vigorous anti-mask and anti-vaccine Republican stance.
- Hint: it’s not a small number
Truly Bizarre
Washington Post (Nov 5): Glenn Youngkin’s 17 year old son twice tried to vote illegally.
- This incident hardly registers a blip on the media landscape. The kid was too young to vote and tried to vote twice in a district where his family does not live. My read of this is that he was being stupid and not malicious.
- So why highlight it here? – Well the point is this, imagine the reaction, a total right-wing media frenzy, if his dad had been a democrat.
Josh Bernstein is promoting the idea that the deaths at the Astroworld music festival were part of a “Satanic sacrifice.”
- Cue this weeks bit of tragic news being repurposed as a soapbox to promote a weird claim
- This is of course the guy who encouraged his talk-show viewers to resist COVID vaccination, “at all costs”, and then ends up getting COVID himself.
Shane Vaughn used his Sunday sermon to rant about the pagan roots of Easter: “They would take one child and sacrifice that child to Baal. And then they would take the eggs and dye it in the blood of that child. That’s where dyeing Easter eggs comes from.”
- I have honestly no idea why he thought that “Easter” was the right topic to bring up during a November Sunday sermon.
- Fact Check: Oh come now, you know Shane, you can more or less guarantee that if he said it, then it is not true. The actual history of it all can be found here on Wikipedia.
David Barton claims that the lesson to be taken from the biblical book of 1 Samuel in which Saul is anointed king of Israel is that spiritual leaders should be choosing our elected officials.
- If “spiritual leaders” are simply picking officials, then these officials have not been “elected”, that’s not how elections work.
- He is literally arguing that we need to completely do away with democracy and instead have a religious dictatorship, and his evidence is an ancient text of religious mythology.
Kat Kerr demonstrates how to send 100 million angels to unleash “waves of the terror of God” upon the White House.
- Why only 100 million, why not 100 trillion?
- 42 second mark via that link above … quote: “Go host, make toast”. That’s it, those four words was her unleashing.
- Meanwhile over at the White House absolutely nobody has noticed her 100 million angels, but over in a nearby department store, customers are startled to observe bread flying into toasters.
David Badash @ The New Civil Rights Movement: (Nov 10) ‘Throw Those Books in a Fire’: Virginia Conservative School Board Members Call for Book Burnings.
- On Monday in a unanimous 6-0 vote the board ordered any books housed by the school, including online material, that contain “sexually explicit” content, to be removed immediately.
- Do you think they realise that one of the books that falls into that category is the bible.
The False Profit$
It is apparently perfectly acceptable for Pastor Greg Locke to call President Joe Biden a “demonic-possessed pedophile” during his sermon, but people chanting “Let’s Go, Brandon” during a political rally in his church is “an embarrassment to the body [of Christ].”
- Hypocrisy is one of Greg’s specialist skills, he has spent lots of time practising.
- I’m really not kidding, this is the “Man of God” who dumped his wife and kids, claiming that she was crazy, so that he could run off with the church secretary he had been bonking.
- Nobody is “trying” to discredit the “prophetic community”, they scored that goal themselves. We are simply sitting here on the sidelines with a bag of popcorn watching and laughing.
- Nathan has been popping up on a regular basis to claim that God is just about to restore Trump to office, and each and every time … (insert drum roll here) … nothing happens, so he moves the date.
Robin Bullock screams that he will not apologize for falsely prophesying that former President Donald Trump would win reelection in 2020: “You are going to answer for trying to regulate the Lord’s prophets. You, with your big educations.”
- When it comes to regulating prophets, the book that he embraces as “unchallengeable truth” states that false prophets should be stoned to death. Does this perhaps explains why he can’t admit that he was wrong? No, not really. The actual reason is that it would impact the donations he gets.
- He does know that he is a fraud, but he will never admit it.
- He also this past week issued this plea ‘Donald Trump, Call Me’ because he wants to pass on the word from God that Trump was “anointed from the day you were born to be president.”. For those unfamiliar with the term, the word “Messiah” literally means anointed one. All Robin really wants is a bit of attention from Don the Con so that he gains more clout and keeps his donations rolling in from the MAGA cult.
An insightful quote
One blindingly obvious quote to finish with is of course this one …
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s. clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
These days the guy who said that would not be welcomed by them for several reasons. The first is that some of his other recommendations, such as helping the poor, would instantly merit him being labelled a “dirty communist”. The other is that he was a foreign middle-eastern guy who only spoke Aramaic, and so he would simply not be white enough.