#2741: Zach Dasher

Though he is perhaps not considered extreme by 2024 standards, Zach Dasher was generally considered a notably colorful candidate when he ran for Congress in Lousiana in2014. He didn’t win that one, but he did get to serve as an at-large delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention. Dasher’s hopes were mostly based on his Duck Dynasty reality TV fame – Dasher is the nephew of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, an anti-gay conspiracy theorist and defender of Jim Crow. And Dasher has stated that “We share a very similar background and philosophy, and our spiritual beliefs are the same as well.” (His wife, Jil, is an advocate for conversion therapy.)

 

As Dasher saw it, “my platform begins with God. That’s really what this whole thing is about. In Washington, when we look at what’s going on, we see an erosion away from that platform.” Of course, people who believe they are representing God in politics have a tendency to project wildly, and Dasher followed up by accusing the federal government – not himself – of “believ[ing] that they’re God”; government is, according to Dasher, intent on “gain[ing] control over every aspect of our lives” as part of a plan to create a “culture of dependency.” And the “swift drift away from God will usher in tyranny and death”: “Tyranny will get its foothold – if it already doesn’t have it – and in the end, there will be mass carnage and mass death. It’s inevitable.”

 

He then went on to blame the Sandy Hook shooting on atheists and post-modernists (though the shooter “was made in the image of God. But somewhere along the way he believed what the atheist says. He reduced humanity to nothing more than a collection of atoms” – Dasher cited no evidence, of course, since evidence is an atheist post-modernist tool), whom he also accused of “brainwashing a generation” through rap music and general “moral decay” and erosion of liberty (whatever he means by ‘liberty’). He also advocated for schools to “arm the teachers” but warned that government officials intend to repeal the Second Amendment in order to eliminate all other freedoms.

 

Apparently, the disturbingly insane documentary Torchbearer, a “Christian war film” about Phil Robertson directed by Steve Bannon, was the brainchild of Zach Dasher.

 

Diagnosis: Possibly old news. Dasher is a fanatic loon and conspiracy theorist, but might not possess the level of unhinged frenzy that seems required to make it into the limelight in 2024. Still, he does apparently have some powerful allies.