#2917: Mark Gonzalez

Mark Gonzales is a fundie conspiracy theorist, head of the U.S. Hispanic Action Network and pseudohistorian David Barton’s National Black Robe Regiment project, and, during Trump’s first term as president, affiliate of Frank Amedia’s dominionist preacher network POTUS Shield. Gonzalez was, like the rest of that group, pretty explicit about its commitment to Christian nationalism: “America belongs to you. America belongs to you. America belongs to you. … God, you founded us on a Judeo-Christian ethos, and we’re declaring that yes, America is and will be a Christian nation, like never before”.

 

Gonzalez is certainly not averse to engaging in rather intense historical revisionism: He has, for instance, tried to argue that it was pastors in the “Black Robe Regiment,” not the military, that won the American Revolution: “It wasn’t the American army, it was the church that did that,” asserted Gonzalez, a claim that would be hilariously stupid and false if it weren’t for the fact that none of this is funny anymore. For the record, the ‘Black Robe Regiment’ is an invention of David Barton’s as a term for whatever pastors simply declared support for independence. (Also note that it is unclear exactly how Gonzalez’s group is related to the Black Robe Regiment group of Christian nationalists founded by William Cook and boosted by Michael Flynn; at least there is a clear and signifiant overlap in ideas and ideology.) Gonzalez has also claimed that “two-thirds of our Founding Fathers were ordained ministers” who founded the Constitution and Bill of Rights “on scriptures straight out of the Bible”; neither claim has, needless to say, the remotest connection to reality, but for fans of Gonzalez, the idea of grounding your claims in facts is precisely the kind of elitist anti-American agenda they are opposing.

 

The second core tenet for the POTUS Shield, beyond Christian nationalism, was the idea that Trump is God’s representative on Earth – Gonzalez would lead prayers asking God to expose and defeat Trump's critics, and issuing warnings that those who oppose the president are really opposing God (“God, we are seeing you expose the shenanigans of Satan that are trying to hold this country down, that are trying to get in the way of us moving forward as a country, as an administration, [under] the president”). In particular, Gonzalez prayed for God to expose what he convinced himself was the rampant corruption in the FBI, the CIA, and (in particular) the Mueller investigation that “the enemy is trying to use and connive” to bring down Trump. “The deep state will be exposed,” Gonzales proclaimed, because darn all those checks and balances; Trump’s opponents are “not messing with a man, with an administration, they are not messing with a country, they are messing with the hand of Almighty God”.

 

Gonzalez is also the kind of preacher who likes to dabble in meteorology, pointing out how various storms, blizzards and droughts correlate (they don’t) with political and legal decisions he doesn’t fancy. Indeed, he is sufficiently invested in such ideas to expect e.g. the Supreme Court to lend them weight (“We fear that the judgment of Almighty God, which is designed to be merciful, and the wrath of God, will come upon the United States of America. God hates [not really, apparently] the shedding of innocent blood”) when deciding issues pertaining to the Constitution.

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, they used to be hilarious, but not really anymore. In any case, Gonzalez embodies your by now familiar combination of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism with a distinctly post-modernist conception of facts. Completely insane, of course, but these days that seems to be an advantage rather than an obstacle to gaining power and influence.