#2662: Joshua Charles

Joshua Charles is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute at William Jessup University, co-author of Glenn Beck’s 2011 book The Original Argument: The Federalists’ Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the 21st Century (as well as a number of other titles), Catholic fundie, former speechwriter for Mike Pence, and occasional writer for the WND. Charles is most notable for his views on LGBT rights, claiming that gay couples having children is a “profound, disgusting, vile evil” from “the pit of Hell”.

 

As an “advocate and defender of Christian civilization”, he isn’t very sympathetic to divorce either, but, taking more than one page out of David Barton’s books, he has argued extensively (e.g. in videos for PragerU) that the United States was founded to be the opposite of a secular nation.

 

What about conspiracy theories? Well, but of course: One of his upcoming books (2023) is The War of the Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization, a republication of a 19^th century rant that describes “the Freemasonic plot to de-Christianize the world” and which, according to Charles, “reads like prophecy”. Charles’s own contribution to the publication is apparently to describe in more detail the dangers of “Freemasonry, and the Church’s warnings about it.”

 

And of course he is anti-vaccine – nominally, he is opposed to COVID vaccines because they are “being produced using old cell lines that were created from the cells of aborted babies” but he also wrongly refers to them as “experimental vaccines” and cannot help suggesting that the vaccine is dangerous (e.g. to pregnant people), thus shredding any doubt one might have had that he has drunk deeply of the kool-aid offered by antivaccine conspiracy websites.

 

Diagnosis: This is what counts as ‘an intellectual’ among fundie wingnuts, and it’s pretty telling.