This week I’m opening with Jerry Falwell. The news is that Gabriel Sherman @ Vanity Fair went to visit the Falwell’s and had a frank and very open conversation. On Jan 24, 2022, the details were published. Titled “Inside Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Unlikely Rise and Precipitous Fall at Liberty University“. It is a long read, but deeply insightful into who he really is, who his father really was.
Who is Falwell?
OK, here is a quick background reminder. He was the Kingmaker. He won the 2016 election for Trump. As one of the primary and very influential evangelicals, the former president of the ever so very evangelical Liberty University of over 100,000 students, astonished everybody by endorsing Trump instead of a more obvious evangelical candidate. The evangelicals then fell in step, threw all their standards under Trump’s bus, backed the pussy grabber, and the rest is history.
Why?
Well, it turns out that Falwell had deep dark secrets. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen had managed to make some very compromising nudie pictures of Falwell’s wife go away. This was not the only favor Cohen did for Falwell, there were a few others as well.
Falwell is claiming, “Gosh, no that played no part in me backing Trump”, everybody else is going, “Yea, right”.
While Liberty University was deeply strict, Falwell himself was a rank hypocrite. The scandal that finally did him in was the affair his wife had with a pool boy. The pool boy shared tapes to reporters to verify it all. Falwell knew and apparently liked to watch. Then again the picture of him with his jeans unzipped and his hand around the waist of a young woman, not his wife, whose shorts are similarly unzipped, and a glass of something that is very obviously not diet coke, did not exactly help. All this and much more resulted in him getting tossed from Liberty. It then got really messy, Falwell sued his former university for “Damaging his reputation”. It was deeply weird because they played no part in that, he did it all himself. When that was pointed out, he dropped the lawsuit.
So what does Falwell do now, does do the usual evangelical thing of going quiet for a few years, only to later emerge claiming he has found Jesus and is a new man?
Apparently not yet. What we do now have is this bombshell article in Vanity Fair. It is long, very open, frank, and littered with juicy details. The affair with the pool boy is confirmed. He also sticks the knife into the evangelical community and says he is done with all of them. He blames his name as the real problem. A core quote is this …
…“Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not”…
Er yes, no kidding Jerry, some of us had already noticed that many years ago.
If interested in Falwell Jnr and also what his father was really like, the article is worth a read. However, it is his version of events and so needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. When asked about specific things, the Falwell’s deny the bits that make them look even worse.
Moving on, below you will find my usual selection of some truly bizarre claims that have popped up during the last 7 days. Each is laced with my snarky commentary. With my usual hat tip to my main source, Right Wing Watch, let’s dive in.
Enjoy.
COVID-19
- Good luck to him finding any doctor or any nurse anywhere to treat him for anything ever again.
- Christianity, but not as most know it. He has now ramped things up even further and threatened specific violence … all “in the name of Christ”.
- Republican Jesus: “And I say unto you, after you have turned the other cheek, shoot them because they will not be expecting it“
Sen. Ron Johnson hosted a panel discussion today on COVID-19 in which “a group of world-renowned doctors and medical experts [provided] a different perspective on the global pandemic response.”
- “Renowned” indeed, but not for a good reason.
- Among the “experts” on hand was radical anti-vax activist Leah Dundas whose expertise primarily consists of delivering speeches in which she screams that vaccines are “genocide” akin to the Holocaust.
- You will of course not be shocked to learn that when it comes to any of the big ticket items of our age, Ron Johnson manages to be very solidly on the side of batshit crazy every single time; climate change – rejects it; Trump’s 2020 Big lie – promoted it vigerously, etc…
Cristina Cabrera @ Talking Points Memo: Unvaccinated Palin Gets COVID, Derailing Her NYT Defamation Suit Trial.
- Her stance was that she did not need to get the vaccine because she has already had COVID. Now she has COVID again.
- There really is no vaccine for stupid, even if she can see the vaccine clinic from her house.
Lauren Witzke declares that … “it’s time we start naming and shaming EVERY traitor we come across. Murderous doctors, corrupt politicians, and Government officials. It’s time to disrupt their lives because they have inhumanely and shamelessly destroyed ours. I’m not even entirely sure people like Dr. Fauci or CDC Director Rochelle Walensky are even human.”
- The lady who happily admits that she worked for Mexican drug cartels as a drug runner is opposed to vaccines and everybody in healthcare striving for the well-being of all those in medical need and distress.
- She is also rather famous for promoting whacky crazy stuff … the earth is flat, 9/11 conspiracies, COVID is satanic, etc…
- Hence, she was the ideal official GOP candidate for Delaware in 2020 and lost by 20 points. Yes the voters can indeed make stupid choices at times, but even the stupidest of them in Delaware turned out to be a minority.
Patrick Howley says that everywhere he goes, vaccinated “normies” who don’t even know who he is instinctively hate him because they know he’s a “pureblood.”
- Nah Patrick, people hate you because you are an obnoxious arsehole who is very very stupid, your vaccine status plays no role.
Then there was also this tweet on Jan 29th …
Jan 6
Jan 23: Joe DePaolo @ Mediaite: Newt Gingrich Says Jan. 6 Committee Members ‘Face a Real Risk of Jail’ if Republicans Win the House.
- He is literally threatening them and attempting to stop them from doing their job.
- It will be no surpise to learn that when he was speaker he had 84 ethics charges filed against him
- He also famously went after Clinton for having a blow job and did this while Gingrich himself was in the middle of an affair with a woman 23 years his junior.
- He is also well-known for his promotion of bonkers conspiracy theories – Clinton supposedly had Seth Rich killed, promoted Trump’s big lie, etc…
- It was of course Fox News, (Unfair and Skewed), that gave him a platform to promote his latest fiction.
Truly Bizarre
Pastor Greg Locke says that children with autism actually suffer from demon possession.
- Greg’s evidence for this? – oh come now, if you read this weekly posting then you will be faimilar with him, exactly zero.
- His “reasoning” is that autism is not real because “Ain’t no such diagnosis in the Bible.”. There is rather a lot of stuff that is not in the bible, for example Australia or for that matter the US. I do look forward to him also denying that they exist.
- Hot tip – demons don’t exist literally, but Greg appears to be striving to change that by becoming one.
Greg picked up a lot of flack for his “Autism is caused by demons” claim. How did he respond to all that?
- He responded by declaring that his critics are possessed by demons.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was interviewed by One America News alongside Kirk Cameron at the March for Life, where she proclaimed that “the greatest dream of any woman is motherhood.”
- She is clearly setting the glass ceiling a tad low there.
- Sounds of many hands rising to say, “That’s not my dream”.
- Guandolo said that the “the enemies” who must be pushed out of office are not just Democrats or progressive leaders, but also anyone like Sens. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Mitt Romney who, he said, are just “as big an enemy as the Communist Party is.”
- John Guandolo is the guy who was tossed out of the FBI in disgrace after a number of ethical breaches and bizarre conduct, including admitting to having affairs with female FBI agents and a confidential source he was assigned to protect during the corruption case of former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA); he also solicited that witness for a $75,000 donation
- His gig these days is to grift by training law enforcement agencies around the country to identify seemingly anyone with dark skin and a beard as an Islamic terrorist.
Josh Bernstein prays that the military will … “turn on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and get rid of, by force if necessary, this fraudulent administration”: “That makes me a patriot.”
- Can anybody help me out here and remind me who the Commander-in-Chief of the military actually is?
While interviewing two QAnon conspiracy theorists who go by the names “In the Matrixxx” and “Shady Grooove,” QAnon conspiracy theorist Ann Vandersteel complains that her reputation is being “tarnished” and “discredited” by being “branded a QAnon conspiracy theorist.”
- Well gosh, where oh where did people ever get the idea that she was into QAnon, I do .. wonder … how … that … happened?
Sherri Tenpenny, one of the right’s leading anti-vaccine “experts,” claims that COVID-19 vaccines are creating “quantum entanglement” between those who take them and “the Google credit scores and the dematrix and all of those things.”
- When it comes to dreaming up BS, she is a true master of the art.
- For example, this past week she also claimed COVID-19 Vaccines Will Turn People Into ‘Transhumanist Cyborgs’
- Well hey, when she promised me a magnetic superpower a few months back if I took the vaccine, I got quite excited. Alas, its a dud, I’ve had to withdraw my X-Men application form.
MAGA pastor and GOP congressional candidate Mark Burns is very upset that public schools are not singing “Jingle Bells,” calling it a “direct attack” on Christianity.
- Yes indeed, how dare they not sing that encapsulation of Christian Theology, “Jingle Bells”.
- For those unaware the last verse encourages guys to go pickup some girls and find a faster horse, just like the bible says you should.
Stella Immanuel asserts that if you are properly “connected to God,” he will protect you from being killed by a drunk driver.
- Cue the “no true Scotsman” fallacy when it happens.
- It’s not the weirdest thing she has said. This is the same lady who claimed that space alien DNA is used in medical treatments.
- She is perhaps best known as the “demon sperm” lady. If curious, you can read one of the many stories that claim generated back in 2020 within The Hill.
The False Profit$
Self Appointed Prophet Johnny Enlow proclaims that … “from Heaven’s standpoint, Trump is the number one government official on planet Earth. He is the president not just of the United States; he is God’s president for Earth.”
- According to every nation state on the planet, that’s a no
- According to almost every belief system on the planet, that’s also a hard no.
- Meanwhile, if Johnny’s God really did choose a foul-mouthed thrice-married racist sexist serial adulterer billionaire con-man as his official representitive, then clearly Johnny’s God is a bit of an inept plonker.
Rob Boston @ Church & State: False Prophets: They Claim To Speak For God. They Say They Know The Future. And They Just Might Be Pushing Christian Nationalism To New Extremes.
- You would think that prophets getting all their predictions wrong would be a deal breaker. However, the gullibility of evangelicals is truly boundless, so apparently not. Even in the face of total and complete failiure, many of them simply double down. They save face by claiming he really did win, but the election was stolen.
- When faced who anybody who claims to speak for a God, your best play is to run fast and far while holding tightly to your wallet.
Statistic of the week
Quote of the week
The German Health Minister, Dr. Karl Lauterback was trending on Philosophy Twitter this past week. He beautifully obliterated the claim made by anti-vaxxes that rejecting the life-saving vaccine is “freedom” …
