For the better part of three years, Donald Trump’s most rabid supporters on the religious right have been singing the praises of Mark Taylor, a retired firefighter who supposedly got a prophecy that Trump would become president. But there’s one problem. Any competent reading of that “prophecy” shows that Taylor foretold Trump would unseat Barack Obama in 2012. As we all know, that didn’t happen. By definition, that makes Taylor a false prophet.
So how in the world has Taylor been in a position to, among other things, warning against opposing Trump and explaining that he’s anointed? Well, if we’re to believe another prominent general in the Trumpvangelical Army, we may have been barking up the wrong tree. To hear him talk, the real false prophet is–drum roll, please–the media.
When Franklin Graham proclaimed Sunday to be a “special day of prayer” for Trump, you might as well have taken it to the bank that at some point, we were going to see a barrel full of alternative facts wrapped in the cross. Sure enough, we got it from one of Trump’s most obnoxious religious right supporters, Lance Wallnau.
It came as no surprise when Wallnau was listed among the original signatories to Graham’s declaration. After all, he insists to all who will listen that Trump is a modern-day Cyrus sent by God himself to carry forward the religious right’s agenda. He also maintains that Robert Mueller caused a demonic cloud to descend over the White House.
What really came as a surprise, though, was the tenor Wallnau took when he led his Facebook followers in a “breakthrough prayer call” for Trump on Sunday night. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
The prayer call was, for the most part, classic Wallnau. He asked God to “send help from the sanctuary” in the form of angels that would surround the White House and ensure that the Trump administration would not be “a stillborn presidency.”
But then it took a bizarre turn, even by Wallnau standards. He prayed that “the wheels will come off the chariots of Pharaoh as they are in pursuit of this president.” So holding a corrupt and potentially criminal president to account is like Pharaoh trying to chase down the Israelites and herd them back to Egypt? Yeah, right.
But then Wallnau really went off the rails. He claimed the media was engaging in far worse than fake news. How’s that, you ask?
Listen to me, the media is the modern-day false prophet. Trust me on this. It’s not some guy rising up out of the one-world church. Right now that one-world church is the secular movement and it’s a false religion, and the media are the mouthpiece of the lies that are destroying the unity of this nation.
As Wallnau saw it, the nation was “confused and bewildered” because of “lies and propaganda” being churned out by false prophets–and the media was the culprit.
Really, Lance? You mean to tell us that when the media reports on the numerous instances in the Mueller report where Trump’s own aides refused to obey his more egregious orders, they’re reporting “lies and propaganda”? You mean to tell us that when the media reports on the harm Trump’s tariffs are doing to the economy, it results in the people being “confused and bewildered”? How Orwellian is this?
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that Wallnau doesn’t appear to have anything to say about the Russian-style influence campaign run by one of his compatriots, Kelly Kullberg. For seven years, Kullberg ran a network of Facebook pages that churned out hard-right propaganda–with a heavy dose of Islamophobia and conspiracy theory. She may have even rooked a prominent Christian blog into this scheme.
Operating an influence campaign of this magnitude, on the face of it, be the definition of “lies and propaganda” with the intent to “confuse and bewilder” others. But so far, neither Wallnau nor any other religious right luminary has said a word about it. And yet, he proclaims the media is a false prophet? The dissonance, it burns.
Late last week, Jim Bakker managed to convince Christian media mogul Steve Strang that he was packed off to federal prison because the government was out to get him. Never mind that Bakker was under near-constant scrutiny for, among other things, funneling PTL money into his own pocket. And never mind that the only reason he’s out of jail is because a judge got a severe case of diarrhea of the mouth.
And yet, even though Bakker’s alternative facting can be easily debunked with just a little research, Strang ran with it in Charisma magazine. I’d wondered how this claptrap could wind up in a Christian publication. Now I have my answer–in a world where holding Trump to account gets you branded a false prophet.
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