#2244: Dutch Sheets

One of the central figures in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), Dutch Sheets is an anointed and apparently re-anointed (“with a fresh impartation of Holy Spirit”) “teaching apostle”, self-appointed prophet and hardcore dominionist. Sheets is critical of the current state of American churches, claiming that they spend too much time and effort on values, creating communities and supporting families, and too little time on the church as a legislative body – as God’s government on Earth. Sheets blames Satan for the current situation, but also King James, who ostensibly used trickery to downplay the church’s dominion over the government and legislation – “kind of like our government that is trying to sell us separation of church and state,” says Sheets. Accordingly, Sheets sees it as part of his role to “raise up an army” willing to make a real effort to help the church’s in their attempt “to take over everything and rule the earth completely for the Lord,” while mocking those “little sheepies” focusing on the caring and pastoral work of the church. 

And according to Sheets’s own “prophetic visions”, Jesus has called upon Christians to take over government: “Through my recent re-commissioning […] and other prophetic revelation, the Lord has confirmed to me that the door to the governmental arena – and to Washington DC, specifically – is again wide open.” For the 2012 election, Sheets accordingly expressed his support for Christian model and moral beacon Newt Gingrich. Before the 2018 midterms, Sheets reported that God told him to “war for this nation” and declared that “the kingdom of God is invading the United States of America.”

Sheets is also a firm believer in the powers of prayers. For instance, as Sheets sees things, his and NAR figure Chuck Pierce’s prayers during a tour of the country led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, Sheets’s prayers have apparently been a primary cause of various Supreme Court vacancies. “God had assigned me to pray for the Supreme Court” and told Sheets that “the greatest stronghold of the enemy ruling our nation was in the Supreme Court” for “there is no gate that has allowed more evil to enter our nation than the Supreme Court.” Meanwhile Democrats opposed Kavanaugh because “they hate President Trump because he is helping turn around the Antichrist agenda they love.” At present, Sheets is praying for God to kill more Supreme Court judges so that Trump can fill the vacancies.

Like most other NPR prophets, Sheets’s main strategy to achieve his political goals is, as suggested, prayers, including holding prayer rallies and arranging conferences to “save America”, with names like the “Appeal to Heaven Conference” (because “America’s narcissistic independence from her Creator has left us spiritually and morally bankrupt”).

Sheets also has called President Obama a “Muslim president” and said his election is bringing the judgment of God, and that “God has now turned us over to our enemies for a season”. Prior to the 2012 election, he proclaimed that the “systems of anti-Christ” that have bound the nation would be broken – he was accordingly disappointed with what actually happened, and promptly declared that God’s wholesale judgment was about to rain down on this nation because “God has put up with all of the mocking He intends to from Barack Obama”. (As for the “mocking”: “who could ever forget the mocking spirit demonstrated by our president when he decorated the White House with rainbow colors”). The election of Trump in 2016, meanwhile, was a miracle and a sign of God’s mercy, and Sheets has a warning for those who – due to the influence of evil spirits, of course – resist Trump: “You will fail! … The Ekklesia will take you out. The outpouring of Holy Spirit will take you out. Angels will take you out.” (Sheets’s rhetoric tends to be a bit violent and bloodthirsty.) You see, Trump is apparently already chosen by God, who is soon going to give him visions like St. John of Patmos, he of the Revelations; Sheets is “confident” that this will happen because a friend of his had a dream before the 2016 election in which she saw Trump sitting in a hotel room, weeping as he read the Bible. Dreams purportedly had by unnamed friends are apparently a major source of information on the state of the world for Sheets.

America is facing divine punishment for other sins, too: for instance, God will beat up America for

the promotion of “homosexuality, abortion and socialism” and the “toleration of immorality and perversion” as well. No, Sheets was not happy with the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, which he asserted would result “in the breakdown of families, along with the devastating effect this will have on children.” (Exactlyhowallowing homosexuals to marry will lead to families breaking down is left a bit unclear, of course. As always.)

Dutch’s brother Tim Sheets is also heavily involved in the NAR. Tim Sheets is apparently an expert on angels, and has led fundies in prayers for God and his angels to take out the deep state. And like his brother, Tim Sheets regularly talks with God, though God seems to be saying some very strange things to him.

There is a decent Dutch Sheets resource here.

Diagnosis: So frenzied by bigotry and bloodthirst that it is often difficult for him to stay coherent. One of the most evil people in the NAR, which is, again, one of the most thoroughly evil organizations in the Western world. Extremely dangerous.

#2176: Samuel Rodriguez

One of the more powerful figures on the religious right, Samuel Rodriguez is a fundie pastor and founder and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC/CONEL), the largest Hispanic Christian Evangelical/Pentecostal organization in the world. As such, he is also a frequent advisor of lawmakers, wields a substantial influence on policy making, and has been a featured speaker in the White House and at Congressional meetings. Currently he also serves on the board of directors for the National Association of Evangelicals, is chair of The Congress of Christian Leaders, and one of the leaders of the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).

Though frequently portrayed as a political moderate – and despite his frequent self-comparisons with MLK (a cross between Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr. “with a little salsa tossed in,” according to himself) – Rodriguez is solidly wingnut. For the 2016 election he effectively endorsed Trump, for instance, claiming that his very freedom to preach the gospel would otherwise be at risk. (He has also endorsed Jared Kushner, but that’s a different story). Now, Rodriguez does indeed disagree with many fellow wingnuts on the topic of immigration when it suits him (he is on record defending Trump’s wall, however), though his professed reason is that the immigration of evangelical Christian Latinos is part of the salvation and replenishment of Christian America, which is currently under threat of secular persecution – “there is an attempt to silence the voice of Christianity, there is an attempt to silence the voice of truth, of righteousness and Biblical justice,” says Rodriguez – and a bulwark against Islam. Rodriguez was also co-founder and former vice president of the NAR-led, South Carolina-based political project The Oak Initiative, a religio-political organization with a mandate to save America from an imaginary Marxist/Leftist/Homosexual/Islamic enemy, and represented the Initiative on conference calls in preparation for Lou Engle’s rally The Call, Detroit, in 2011, the purpose of which was to help cleanse the city from the demon of Islam by engaging in “spiritual warfare” (Rodriguez resigned from the organization when media started to pay attention). As part of his “nonpartisan” outreach efforts, Rodriguez has participated in numerous religious right rallies, including the 2012 prayer-and-fasting-to-beat-Obama rally “America for Jesus”, filmed an ad for GOPfaith, and appeared for instance in a Champion the Vote’s “nonpartisan” mobilization DVD “One Nation Under God” with James Dobson, David Barton and Newt Gingrich. There is a good portrait of Rodriguez and his wingnuttery here. For anyone still in denial and who doubt Rodriguez’s wingnuttery, the NHCLC has a formal agreement to make Liberty Counsel their official legislative and policy arm, and Mat Staver is a board member of and chief legal counsel to the NHCLC. 

There is a good resource on Rodriguez’s involvement with the NAR here; Rodriguez has for instance asserted that Cindy Jacobs, who routinely claims that her prayers stop terror attacks, save the economy, prevent coups, heal medical conditions, cure insanity, and resurrect people, is “a legitimate prophet of God.”

Rodriguez is, of course, staunchly opposed to marriage equality and abortion, both of which he claims to be the work of demonic spirits: Jezebel, which pushes people into “sexual perversion”, and the spirit of Herod, which is responsible for abortion. He has also called marriage equality an assault on religious freedom because views he disagrees with threaten his religious freedom and are therefore unconstitutional. “This is not an issue of equality. This is an attempt to silence the church of Jesus Christ,” says Rodriguez, a claim  so dumb that it is quite superfluous to point out the laughable false dilemma on which it rests. (It is, of course, this kind of nonsense that for instance qualified him for participating on Rubio’s Religious Liberty advisory board.) “There’s a great probability that in our lifetime,” said Rodriguez, “that we may have to be imprisoned and suffer great persecution, prosecution, as a result of our commitment to biblical truth, to Jesus, to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We are there, my friend,” because America is currently engaged in modern-day Baal worship. “That’s not hyperbole,” Rodriguez asserted, which is technically correct: it isn’t hyperbole; it’s pure delusional fantasy. His evidence is that “many Christians have had conversations” about this very topic, which is not evidence. Since he is deeply confused about the difference between disagreeing with him – or making policy decisions he doesn’t approve of – and violating his religious rights, it is little wonder that he feels persecuted or thinks that marriage equality will lead to anti-Christian discrimination and hate speech laws. It doesn’t make the idea less silly, however.

Rodriguez also promotes right-wing positions on economics and government regulation, and has for instance taken part in a “prayercast” to ask God to defeat the ACA, signing onto declarations that oppose progressive taxation and embraced rhetoric about people being “enslaved” by government and “uber-entitlements.” He has promoted the LIBRE Initiative, saying that it is anti-Christian and anti-American to “punish success”, and embraces a prosperity gospel view of wealth. 

Rodriguez is also the author of e.g. Be Light and Agenda of the Lamb, and executive producer for the 20th Century Fox motion picture The Impossible: The Miraculous Story of a Mother’s Faith and Her Child’s Resurrection.

There is a good Samuel Rodriguez resource here.

Diagnosis: Rightwing fundie extremist. He claims to be nonpartisan and moderate, since lies for Jesus apparently don’t count. Extremely dangerous.

#1898: Avi Lipkin

Conspiracy theories involving Obama are a-dime-a-dozen, but the version(s) promoted by Avi Lipkin – who manages to be more delusionally insane even than most of the paranoid wingnut conspiracy theorists he pals around with – were more colorful than most. According to Lipkin, who promotes his ideas on speaking tours in churches and synagogues as well as on rightwing news shows across America (ostensibly, his day job is being an “author/translator in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office,” which would be scary, but which we haven’t managed to verify, and Lipkin doesn’t generally come across as particularly trustworthy), “Obama was made a Muslim man in Indonesia by age 11. He said, ‘I’ve got health care problems, I got economic problems in America, Muslims in Egypt and Muslims in the Muslim world, be patient, I will show you when the time comes what I am going to do to Israel.’” Lipkin’s source? His wife, whom he claims is an Israel intelligence officer: “My wife picked up other broadcasts, for example the Saudis were saying, ‘we will have a Muslim in the White House in 2008.’ The Saudis also said, ‘Obama has three tasks: task number 1 is to destroy the Shiite threat in Iran, task number 2 is to destroy the Jewish threat Israel, task number 3 is to destroy the great Christian Satan America and turn America into a Muslim country.’” (Later he has also claimed to have talked to an unnamed mailman who knew Bill Ayers’s parents and got a young Obama to confide in him that he was destined to be president).

So, here is Obama’s plan to destroy America (as of 2012): First, support the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in order to collapse the region’s economy after the group persecutes the country’s Christians. This will then lead to a wave of Muslim immigration to the United States. Obama will then settle the “50–100 million” Muslims (later adjusted to “100 million”) on “lands confiscated by Agenda 21” (Lipkin’s understanding of the latter seems a bit diffuse), and bring about Sharia law in the U.S. Parallel to this, Obama has built up the national debt in a way that will make the U.S. need a bailout from Saudi Arabia, who will grant it with the condition that “America will surrender its Christianity.” Apparently God is in on this, too: It is God who sends (well, sent – Lipkin seemed to think they were already here) the Muslim immigrants to the U.S. to be “hunters” of Jews and Christians, forcing them to leave the U.S. for Israel. At least Lipkin managed to synthesize an impressive number of anti-Obama conspiracy theories. We’ll give him that.

And the machinery is, by 2012, already in motion. According to Lipkin “there are between 20 to 30 million Muslims in America and this fact is not lost on the election campaign in November … What happens after they come here is that they marry Christian women, Jewish and Christian American women and then these women become baby factories for Islam because it’s the religion of the father.” Actually, Muslims constitute about 0.6 % of the population, but when your source is your own ass you’ll discover a lot of stuff no one else knows about; “this is very stealth like, it’s very insidious,” says Lipkin. Indeed.

Lipkin is probably most famous, however, for pushing (and possibly inventing) the idea that Obama is going to use the national parks to settle those 100 million Muslim immigrants and thereby create “a Muslim majority in America” in complete secrecy without anyone noticing (he seems to have a somewhat tenuous grasp of how large the “100 million” number is and the kind of air traffic importing 100 million people would require). Indeed, as Lipkin asserted in 2013, Muslims tend to settle in forests, and they are already setting up encampments in Texas and the Ozarks and will continue to do so until there are about 50 million Muslim forest dwellers. His evidence for his claim is that he (Lipkin) drives around the country and sees a lot of empty land and forests. He later added that Muslims will also buy up all the foreclosed homes in the US; they will “buy them all up.”

The reason Obama could succeed in achieving this plan, is that he has “a lot of useful idiots in the Democratic Party, including many Jewish people, who don’t realize the big mistake that they’re making, thinking that the Muslims are the good guys and the blacks are the good guys.” He assures us, though, that “[a] lot of black people are good guys but the black agenda [?], which totally supports Obama, is very closely linked with this fanatic Islam.” At least he didn’t bother to claim that he has black friends.

Importantly, Obama also enjoys the support of the shadow government: “I think what we’ve been seeing over the last few decades is that America has been having its leaders chosen, Democrat or Republican, chosen by the one world government, the Masons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, whatever you want to call these people [their defining characteristic is that they hate Jesus Christ], these are people who control the world.”

Perhaps this is how Lipkin reconciles his claims about Obama’s allegiances; Obama is not only a Muslim, but “either a Communist plant, a Russian plant, which is one of the reasons he would never confront Russia; or, he’s an Islamic plant, in which case he will never go to war against a Muslim country,” because Russia is communist and the US under Obama has never been at war with or in a Muslim country. According to Lipkin, “[Obama] said this in his book that he will never go to war against another Muslim country,” citing a widely circulated and easy-to-check fabricated Obama quote. Then he repeated his claims about a Muslim invasion: “They’re going to come to the United States and the Muslim president is going to receive them, it’s a horrible situation for the United States in my opinion unless people think that selling the soul of America to the Devil is a good thing.” Of course, Obama’s actions might appear to contradict his alleged hatred for Israel, but Lipkin is ready to explain (a conspiracy theorist, after all, is one who can bend every piece of information into supporting the conspiracy theory).

In 2015, Lipkin also weighed in on the Iran nuclear deal, which was all part of Obama’s plan to make “Israel go to war against Iran.” Saudi Arabia will then emerge as the regional power since the two countries will “destroy each other,” which will allow Obama to “free himself up for his real mission, which is to make America a Muslim country.” Continued Lipkin: “President Obama is a Muslim. If you’re a Muslim, your god is Satan; if you’re a Muslim, then you are criminally psychotic. This is the plan to destroy the human race. This is something that Allah wants.” As Lipkin sees it, Muslims believe that “the only way for Allah to be greater than the God of the Jews and the Christians is to kill every last human being on the face of the earth, that’s the plan of Islam.”

Apparently Lipkin is also a prophet who prophecied 9/11 in 1998. You’ll have to take his word for it, though. He has also declared that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing as well as the WTC bombing in 1993 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996; according to himself, Lipkin was in Oklahoma at the time of the bombing and immediately knew that it was “an Islamic bomb because truck bombs are an Islamic way of doing things” (and the claim that truck bombs are Islamic is corroborated by the fact that the Oklahoma bomb was a truck bomb and Muslim, and so on). Of course, the Muslim involvement was hidden by an FBI cover-up operation that Lipkin by 2016 had decided was orchestrated by Merrick Garland, since Garland by 2016 was Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. “This whole thing about hating the Christians started not with Obama,” Lipkin said, “it started with the Clintons.” Garland was also involved in the death of Scalia. “I’m risking my life by talking about this,” Lipkin said, “because people who came forward with the information were killed.”

He is, however, frequently cited as a “scholar” by the American Family Association’s news division, OneNewsNow, and he is viewed as a legit authority by Tim Wildmon on Today’s Issues and Perry Atkinson on The Dove TV, who has invited Lipkin to provide his “high-level expertise on U.S. Middle-East policy.”

Lipkin was also an invited speaker at Jim Garlow’s 2015 “Future Conference” (attended by e.g. Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and a virtual who-is-who on the religious right, and backed by Newt Gingrich). At the conference, Lipkin told his audience that “all” churches in America have been infiltrated by Muslim spies pretending to be Christian converts. These moles, he said, are cataloguing Christians and Jews in order to kill them all when Muslim jihadists take over (which might, in fact, according to Lipkin, be a good thing, since it will lead to “a revival in this country in all Christian denominations” among all the Christians killed; internal consistency is not Lipkin’s strong suit). And though the theme of the conference was ostensibly “religious liberty”, the audience didn’t hesitate to applaud Lipkin’s call for a ban on Islam: “Until Islam is banned and suppressed and erased, the Jews will not have any chance to survive in this country.” Lipkin ended his presentation on a positive note, though: Muslim immigration to America, he predicted, would drive U.S. Jews to the Middle East, setting up a conflict in which Islam will be “finished”: “I predict Islam will be terminated very soon,” said Lipkin. The applause was enthusiastic.

Diagnosis: Pretty mainstream by religious right standards, Lipkin is a delusional conspiracy theorist utterly unable to distinguish reality from his feverish, hate-fuelled fantasies. His barely incoherent rants seem to have impressed a wide range of people with not negligible degrees of power and influence, though. The world is insane.

#1868: David Lane

David Lane is, quite simply, one of the scariest and craziest people alive today. For years, he has been one of the leading and most influential Taliban-style dominionists (“Christian Nation” advocates) in the US, working steadfastly to increase the political power of fundamentalists and their causes. But he is still not particularly famous; as The New York Times put it, Lane is “something of a stealth weapon for the right,” who for the most part works well behind the scenes.

Funded to a large extent by the hate-group the American Family Association, Lane’s main goal is to motivate pastors and fundamentalists to take political action (“What we’re doing is the mobilization of pastors and pews to restore America to her Judeo-Christian heritage [i.e. the parts that fit with the bigotry and wingnuttery Lane happens to favor]. That’s our goal”), and to get crazies elected to public office. Lane has, as part of those efforts, organized huge Taliban rallies and political briefings with appearances by fundamentalist pastors and politicians such as David Barton (Lane served as the executive director of The Texas Restoration Project, funded by Barton), Mike Huckabee (Lane orchestrated Mike Huckabee’s surprise win in Iowa in 2008), Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann. As Lane puts it “What we’re doing with the pastor meetings is spiritual, but the end result is political. ... From my perspective, our country is going to hell because pastors won’t lead from the pulpits.” There is a good portrait of Lane (and how frightening he is) here, and another one (focusing on his extensive influence) here.

Dominionism

In a 2013 essay Lane declared that religious war may be on the horizon, and his influential American Renewal Project has continued to actively prepare for that war, hosting all-expenses paid policy briefings for clergy and their spouses to rally his forces. In addition to those mentioned above, participants have included politicians like Mike Pence, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Donald Trump also addressed one such event in August 2016. As for ARP’s efforts to recruit and train clergy with a dominionist vision to run for office at all levels, at least Lane’s own pastor, Rob McCoy, won a city council seat in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2016 (though the results of the efforts have overall been a bit lackluster). The goal is explicit: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a separation of church and state,” says Lane: “This was not established as a secular nation, and anybody that says that it is, they’re not reading American history. This was established by Christians for the advancement of the Christian faith. My goal is to return – to restore a biblically based culture and a Judeo-Christian heritage.”

Also in his 2015 essay “To Retake America, We Must Defeat Her False Religion” (for Charisma), the dominionist dog whistles sounded loud and clear. According to Lane, “[w]e just need a Gideon or Rahab the Harlot to stand.” According to the Bible Gideon, as you may recall, led an Israelite army in an ethnic cleansing of the pagan Midianites, and Rahab sheltered two Israelite spies in preparation for the fall of Jericho by Joshua’s army, where everyone but Rahab and her family were massacred. It’s worth thinking about why Lane chose those two examples.

Officially, of course, Lane advocates “religious freedom” (the goal of ARP is “to engage the church in a culture war for religious liberty”), which to him means that the Bible should be the primary textbook for public school students and that refusing to participate in school-led religious services and prayers should be banned – in the near future, predicts Lane, we will “watch Providence call for ‘punishment executed by angels’ to those who oppose His Word.” As a side note, is interesting to note how Lane juxtaposes predictions of victory and predictions of gloom – elsewhere, Lane has suggested that everything is going to hell and that we will soon have car bombs in Los Angeles and Iowa, and that such acts of terrorism will be God showing mercy on us (yes, his screeds often also veer into incoherent babble fuelled by hatred and delirious religious frenzy).

As opposed to religious fundamentalism, secularism is intolerant because secularists call people who want to criminalize homosexuality “bigots”. Secularists are also pawns of Satan. Not that Lane has a very clear understanding of “secularism”, which he thinks is simultaneously a religion and synonymous with liberalism. Ultimately, “secularism” is for Lane really just a catchall to designate anything he doesn’t like. But at least, according to Lane, “American education has collapsed under the weight of Secularism. Moral and academic anarchy now reign. Something curious has happened to those who define themselves as anti-fascist, who in reality are the fascists,” ostensibly because they criticize him and people like him for promoting the use of violence to establish a state in which everyone must bow to Lane’s religious convictions.

Unfortunately, however, God is at present “holding up His deliverance from pagan secularism in America” because of “flagrant sin” (indeed, “Barack Hussein Obama just might be the agent of the judgment of God on a nation that abandoned its Biblical-based culture”). Here is Lane claiming that the only alternative to Christian theocracy is Nazism. Here is Lane claiming that America is the great Satan.

Lane on American history

The main element in his case against the separation of church and state is that the Mayflower pilgrims were religious extremists and explicitly tried to create a theocratic British colony. That the US later decided to split with the British and write a Constitution not based on the Mayflower document is less relevant (and Lane tends to handwave and lie a bit about that part). In particular, he argues that the pilgrims, who believed that their undertaking was “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” created a covenant with God that America must currently renew in order to survive, and that “the Founders established America legally as a Christian nation at the state level, rather than the Federal” – “Founders” here of course meaning those who established the colonies before the Constitution (Lane explicitly calls the 1607 Jamestown British colony charter “America’s foundation” and no, he really doesn’t seem to know the difference between a British colony charter and the Constitution) – and approvingly cites state constitutions at the time that required officeholders to be Protestant Christians (Catholicism is of course as bad as secularism – i.e. catholics are pagans; Lane doesn’t distinguish between non-Christians and Christians who don’t advocate religious theocracy – and other “dead religion[s]”). Some of Lane’s lies about history are briefly discussed here.

And Lane probably knows that he is lying when he claims that currently “The Pledge of Allegiance is forbidden” and that “Christmas carols are banned”, but the lies serves their intended purpose, which is to scare those delusional enough to listen to him to begin with.

The gays

Lane has a long career of vigorous opposition to gay rights; “homosexual fascism” will destroy America, says Lane, apparently not caring too much about what “fascism” could possibly mean beyond the fact that he imagines his audience associates something bad with it. And back in the days he achieved some substantial victories. In the 1990s, Lane helped (with the California Restoration Project) place Proposition 22 on the ballot in California 2000 to restrict California marriages to heterosexual ones, which  passed. And together with Laurence White he later helped pass opposite-sex-only marriage amendments to the state constitutions of Ohio (2004), Texas (2005), and Florida (2006). Moreover, in November 2010, voters in Iowa removed three Iowa Supreme Court justices over their constitutional stance in a 2009 decision allowing same-sex couples to marry; The New York Times reported that Lane was the “unheralded mastermind” of the campaign against the justices, directing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Gingrich and the American Family Association. To motivate people into action against marriage equality Lane has of course realized that lying is a good strategy, and he has claimed for instance that ministers will be forced to “give approval” to “the homosexual lifestyle” or go to jail.

In 2013 Lane called on the “moral majority” to “wage war” against the “pagan onslaught imposing homosexual marriage,” apparently (or pretending to be) oblivious to the fact that the majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage. According to Lane, “those who embrace homosexual marriage and homosexual Scouting,” along with “pagan public schools, pagan higher learning and pagan media,” are ushering in America’s collapse with their “multicultural false gods.” “America’s survival is at stake,” said Lane, adding that “this is not tall talk or exaggeration,” apparently dimly suspecting that some might think otherwise. He also called on Christians to “risk martyrdom” to stop same sex marriage – apparently “American Christianity has not done a good job of producing martyrs” (oh, the Taliban envy) – and concluded that America has to choose between wholesale slaughter of Christians and adopting a theocracy (and rejecting “the fabricated whopper of the ‘Separation of Church and State’”).

Here is Lane calling for a boycott of Frito-Lay over their Rainbow Doritos, claiming that Frito-Lay has proclaimed “solidarity with sexual anarchy” and is fueling America’s “rebellion against God” by spreading “Carcinogenic Secularism”. (The Rainbow Doritos were introduced to benefit anti-bullying projects).

Other political views

For the 2017 election, Lane supported Trump because Trump, according to Lane, would bring “moral, principled leadership”.

As for education, Lane has helpfully explained the purpose of public education (picture a Taliban-sympathetic imam saying this, if it helps): “Once we return to God, He will then attend to the honor of His name. Public education and universities will again focus on the principal component of education: incorporating the character of the Father into our children, thus creating an exceptional and virtuous people. Test scores in education will soar for, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.’” (More here)

There is a good David Lane resource here.

Diagnosis: Delusional madman and hysteric fundamentalist theocrat, Lane is also among the most powerful people in the US. Quite simply one of the scariest loons we have covered thus far.