This week’s WTF news is that a large crowd of QAnon believers became convinced the Kennedys would unveil themselves on Nov. 2, right around the timing of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, so they all turned up to see it happen. They seriously believed that John F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr, both long dead, would turn up. Literally hundreds traveled to Dallas from as far away as New York and California.
…They began to pick out random people they encountered in the Dallas area as celebrities in disguise, claiming one man was comedian Robin Williams and another comedian Richard Pryor….
…The list of returning celebrities grew long, coming to include not just the Kennedys, Bryant, and Williams, but also actress Debbie Reynolds and racecar driver Dale Earnhardt…
Reality is not simply a distant land for these folks, it is a completely unknown nation on the far side of a globe that they believe is flat.
Moving on, Mike Lindell is still lining himself up for yet another spectacular car crash. Raw Story reported on Friday that he still plans to somehow pop his case into the Supreme court on Nov 23rd to supposedly overthrow the Biden administration. You can hear the rolling of eyes even from this distance as yet another deadline that will most certainly fail looms.
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 cult of Trump
Delora O’Brien and Rachel Hamm are very excited by the prospect that former President Donald Trump will be returned to office and be allowed to serve a total of 10 years in office.
- That wooshing sound was the 22nd Amendment going right over their heads.
- Being this stupid is akin to being dead. While you are totally oblivious to it, everybody else is more than a little bit upset.
The Big Lie and Other Conspiracies
Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel declares that Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis is “a constitutional scholar,” “a constitutional expert,” and has “a subject matter expertise in religious liberty”: “There is no one in this country who knows more about election law.”
- Um, not quite, before being part of Trump’s team, her previous legal experience was in traffic court.
- Her claim to being a “constitutional scholar” is that she self-published a rather weird religious book that asserts that the constitution should only be interpreted using the bible.
- In March 2016 she correctly labelled Trump was an “unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag” and that arguments in support of Trump are “ridiculously illogical, inconsistent, and blatantly stupid“. Then, when he became the official candidate, she supported him.
It has now been one year since the 2020 election, but “prophet” Kat Kerr continues to insist that God is going to overturn the results.
- She, along with a few others, have gone so far down this rabbit hole that they can’t turn around and get out.
- She also has a rather elongated track record that involves making deeply weird claims. For example, she has previously said that there is football in Heaven as well as a warehouse where God keeps spare body parts and organs for those in need. She has also said that that if a woman miscarries a child, God will put the soul of that child into a second child if the woman decides to get pregnant again.
- Being this disconnected from reality means that even the Evangelical Times labels her a false prophet.
- Sadly, rather a lot of deeply gullible people lap all this stuff up as “truth”.
Huff Po (Nov 3): At Least 10 Republicans Who Were At The Jan. 6 Rally Just Got Elected To Office
- Quote: “That these candidates enjoy the support of the wider Republican Party and are winning elections does not bode well for American democracy, showing that one of the country’s major political parties, despite some initial gestures at being horrified by the events of Jan. 6, is almost completely unrepentant over its role in fomenting the historic attack on the Capitol.“
- But also this Quote: “Elsewhere across the country, at least five Jan. 6 attendees were defeated at the ballot box.“
COVID-19
Joshua Feuerstein says that men of God with “big orange pumpkins hanging between their legs” must resist vaccine mandates instead of being the sort of “sissies” who “would have bent over and taken it from Hitler right up the backside.”
- A truly fascinating bit of playground rhetoric from a guy who claims to promote the gospel.
- This is the guy who made himself famous by being deeply offended a few years ago by Starbucks having a Christmas coffee cup that was simply red, and did not have seasonal images or designs. The clip of his rant went viral and got him some attention from CNN at the time.
- In this instance his specific cult is clearly a pro-death cult … he just loves guns and hates vaccines, and is currently being investigated by the FBI for his involvement in Jan 6
MEDIAite (Nov 2): Newsmax White House Reporter Claims Covid Vaccine Contains a Satan-Involved Tracker … “Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,”
- Nobody though it was actually possible, but Newsmax has indeed successfully managed to prove that you really can be worse than Fox News by being a safe space for nutters and conspiracy theorists.
- Fact Check: You will of course already know this, her claim is grade-1 gold plated BS. If only she had access to a journalist to fact check stuff, but alas, this is Newsmax, so she won’t find any there.
Truly Bizarre
Rick Wiles Is Ready to Take Up Arms to Fight Off Invading Drug Cartels
- Wiles, age 68, has built an impressive track record of making dire predictions that consistently fail to materialize.
- Who does he blame for this latest invasion claim? Oh come now, you don’t need to be psychic to guess. It is of course Barack Obama and the old favorite right-wing boogyman, billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
- Wiles famiously promotes the rather ancient antisemitic claim that Jews seek to obtain control of countries to kill millions of Christians. It’s not lost on me that George Soros has a Jewish heritage. Such hatred that comes via Wiles is perhaps familiar to Soros, he lived through the Nazi occupation of Hungary as a kid.
- The idea that a 68 year old guy might pick up his gun and head off to Texas so that he can start shooting people should perhaps concern the authorities a bit. They might want to consider putting him on a watch list.
- When literally anything happens, almost anything at all, then for this guy it becomes (checks notes), a “‘Satanic Ritual’ to Protect the Clintons“
- The mental gymnastics required to make this leap is truly Olympic class
- Behold his “logic”: The husband of Halyna Hutchins worked for a massive law firm that has literally thousands of lawyers. One of those other lawyers at one time represented another lawyer from another firm who at one time might have worked on a Clinton Foundation case at some point. Oh, and let’s not forget that it is not just a conspiracy, but also a claim that it was part of a ‘Satanic Ritual’, so that (checks notes once again) Baldwin could “move up a level” within the Freemasons. That takes this all the way up to level 12 on the wacky scale.
- Quote: “Is it shocking to you“. Er, yes Clay, it really is, but only because you think this is credible.
Lance Wallnau: ‘Wokeness’ Is an Antichrist Religion, Systemic Racism Doesn’t Exist
- “Systemic Racism Doesn’t Exist” says the ever so very white guy.
- Now here is a fasinating quote, “Racism is evil. And so is the manipulation of racial issues for the acquisition of political power.“. That’s a good quote, so who said that? This same guy did roughly about a year ago, but now that he needs to play the racal card for the acquisition of some influence, all bets are off.
- Least you wonder, he is simply flogging his new book. The above is designed to sell it to a specific demographic by pressing their emotional buttons.
- Incidently, Wallnau also asserts that COVID-19 was engineered as a biowarfare weapon to ruin Trump’s presidency, and he is also of course a big fan of Mike Lindell.
Robin Bullock claims that COVID-19 vaccines are designed to condition people to eventually get microchips implanted in their brains as part of the Mark of the Beast.
- In Robin’s case, a microchip in his brain just might help because without it his brain appears to be unable to grasp reality.
- The MOTB (Mark of The Beast) is a rather old trope that has been doing the rounds for rather a long time and has been commonly repurposed to whatever is currently going on. Most scholars familiar with the Bible text generally recognise it as a reference to Nero by the author of Revelation.
Stew Peters and Lauren Witzke are convinced that GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham is “a communist sympathizer” who wants to see MAGA activists hunted down like dogs and killed.
- If indeed from their viewpoint on the political spectrum “GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham is “a communist sympathizer” then I can only conclude that they are so far to the right that they would also consider Genghis Khan to be a soft socialist.
- And yes, Lauren is the GOP candidate who was arrested in 2017 for running drugs and admitted that she worked for the Mexican drug cartels.
DeAnna Lorraine says that Colin Kaepernick has no business protesting racism because he “was adopted by mostly a white family” and so “he’s the least Black person, traditionally.”
- In her universe adoption changes your skin color. Does this mean that hanging out with white folks cause your skin to gradually lighten?
- If stopped by the police, will flashing a picture of two white people be an immediate get-out-of-jail free card?
- A fundamentalist white lady on a conservative whack “show” gatekeeping someone’s blackness truly is a mark of the Trump era.
The False Profit$
Pastor Shane Vaughn claims that “every signer of our Declaration of Independence—every one of them—were descendants of the tribes of Israel,” which he claims means that “America was a church before she was a nation.”
- And here it is, this week’s dose of stupid from Shane to ensure that he maintains his $$ from his YouTube rants.
- Translation: Google, show me somebody who flunked history in high school.
- Pastor Shane, who went to jail for insurance fraud after he found Jesus, has clearly discovered that historical fraud is really not a problem these days as long as be sells it using religion.
- He himself openly confirms that he was an evangelist when he went to jail for Fraud. This past week he also bragged that he is “a doctor of theology. I was the youngest ordained evangelist in America at 14 years old, [and] I’ve lived for the Lord my whole life.”. What should we make of this except to conclude that he was “living for the Lord” when he committed insurance fraud and went to jail for that a few years back.
God has been speaking to Glenn Beck, prompting Beck to urge his audience to start collecting physical copies of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and “The Founders’ Bible,” a version of the Bible mixed with essays by right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton.
- By “collecting”, he actually means, click the associate link he provides so that you can buy it for $230 and he gets his cut of the $$$
- Regarding Barton, Vox did a fact-based expose of this fake historian. Barton has no credentials. He literally makes up quotes that then attributes them to the founding fathers so that he can promote his false narrative..
- If you do decide the buy a copy of the founders bible, then Spoiler Alert, Jesus dies.
“Prophet” Donna Rigney declares that former President Donald Trump is a modern-day Moses who will be returned to office, while also announcing that God told her that “after Trump, there is going to be another president and he will be even greater than Trump was.”
- Being a better president than Trump is about as low as the bar can possibly go.
- Trump is indeed like Moses. Around both a great deal of mythology exists, and none of it is actually true at all, yet lots of people believe it.
An insightful quote
This time I will finish with the following quote. It is by Vance Berger and Sunny Alperson, and comes from their 2009 scientific paper titled – A General Framework for the Evaluation of Clinical Trial Quality. While they wrote this in the context of clinical trials, I find that it is far more generically apt.
‘In many cases, flawed or misleading evidence is worse than no evidence at all. This is because the state of ignorance resulting from a lack of evidence is recognized as a state of ignorance, whereas the state of ignorance resulting from misleading evidence is not so recognized.’