#914: Texe Marrs

Texe Marrs is perhaps the most aggressively insane ultrafundamentalist conspiracy theorist in the US, and the kind of person who appears to consistently face the universe by adopting the most flamingly insane false belief about how it works – as a result Marrs may not possess a single true belief, and is even willing to endorse contradictions as long as he can make sure that his beliefs stay all false. Nevertheless, his books Dark Secrets of the New Age and Mystery Mark of the New Age were both #1 bestsellers on the Christian book market in the late 1980s, when Marrs was a major promoter of Satanic Panic as applied to the New Age movement. He has continued to explore the deep recesses of his imagination in a similar manner through a long series of newsletters and ministries (e.g. “Living Truth Ministries”, “Flashpoint”, “Bible Home Church” and the shortwave radio program “Power of Prophecy”).

Marrs’s original idea, in short, is that the New Age movement was (and is) an elaborate conspiracy to set up the Antichrist's world religion based on combining all world religions (except evangelical Christianity) into one. The sacraments of the New Age movement have already been widely adopted. Abortion, for instance, is a form of human sacrifice to Satan; mainline-to-liberal Christian denominations are part of the New Age movement; universal product codes are the mark of the beast, and so on. It does indeed appear that everyone but Marrs and some select evangelicals are actually actively in on the conspiracy as well.

It may be noted that Marrs' writings on the New Age borrowed heavily from Constance Cumbey; both, for instance, argued that the imagined leadership of the New Age movement was based around the teachings of “prophet” Benjamin Creme and esotericist writer Alice Bailey. Cumbey therefore accused Marrs of plagiarism, which suggests that she is dimly aware that you just don’t come up with that idea on your own, and certainly not by independently investigating reality.

Those were Marrs’s formative ideas, however, dating from before he really got his crazy warmed up. In the 1990s he became sufficiently insane that even evangelical publishers saw the need to drop him – all his later stuff is self-published, such as his magnum opus, Codex Magica: Secret Signs, Mysterious Symbols, and Hidden Codes of the Illuminati, which covers pretty much any piece of insanity you can think of, as well as an enormous amount of material including “The Elite Serial Killers of Lincoln, JFK, RFK, and MLK”, “Saucers of the Illuminati” “Unmasking the Sexual Perversions of the Illuminati” and “Implantable Biochips and the End of Human Freedom and Dignity”. Indeed, even the RaptureReady crowd dismisses Marrs as crazy, and their standards for sanity are pretty low.

Part of the reason he was dropped from the mainstream evangelical press may have been because Marrs started to integrate Bush senior and the Republican party into his New Age conspiracy theories. In 1999, for instance, Marrs argued that former President Bush (sr.) would be involved in a black mass in a chamber within the Great Pyramid of Giza during the 2000 millennium celebrations. And in his 2007 article “Unmasking President George W. Bush and His Merry Band of Homoerotic Thugs,” Marrs argued that George Bush jr. was the first homosexual president of the US. Evidence? “Since assuming the presidency, George W. has surrounded himself with gay men. The White House is jokingly referred to as the ‘Pink House’ by the Gay Community. First, there’s Karl Rove, […] Rove himself is a queer. ‘President Bush calls me “Turdblossom,”’ Rove said. […] Bush appointed Ken Mehlman, a Jewish homosexual, as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. [… ] Secretary of State Condi Rice [… is] a reputed lesbian dominatrix. […] President Bush has more homosexuals in his Administration than Bill Clinton, and he’s more than accommodated their ‘special needs.’ […] Bush’s biggest coup was his choice to be the new Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. John Roberts, a gay judge [… who is] fanatical in his support of sodomy and gay rights.” Scooter Libby, on the other hand, is apparently an Israeli spy who writes books about beastiality.

Being his own man has apparently given him the freedom to pursue such interesting fields of study as the Illuminati, UFOs and the “Illuminati Conquest of Outer Space”, shape-shifting lizard-people, King James Onlyism, the Federal Reserve, television (“’Angels in America [is] possibly the most evil TV series of all time”), pop culture (the artist Prince’s full artist name is “Prince of Darkness”) and the Rothschild Family, as in his DVD Rothschild’s Choice: Barack Obama and the Hidden Cabal Behind the Plot to Murder America, which “documents the astonishing rise of a young, half blood ‘Prince’ of Jerusalem, a Communist adept named Barack Obama who won Rothschilds’ favor – and was rewarded for his slavish devotion to their sinister Agenda”. Among his many claims are:

- The Oklahoma City bombing was planned and carried out by the American government and Timothy McVeigh was framed.

- The D.C. street design conspiracy.

- Hillary Clinton is a “doctrinaire Marxist” who has recruited “other America-hating subversives for key administration posts.”

- Newt Gingrich is a closet Marxist as well, and member of the occult, secret society the Bohemian Grove.

- Bill Clinton is a member of the traitorous Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, and the Council of Foreign Relations. He and Hillary are deep into Egyptian occultism and Masonic magic.

- Robert Dole is a 33rd degree Mason and “a fake conservative. He's anti-Jesus Christ.”

- Bill Martin’s plans for a Christian naturist resort is evidence that Satan is subverting Christianity.

He has lately fully endorsed anti-Semitism, for instance with his book The Synagogue of Satan: The Secret History of Jewish World Domination. The Jewish world-domination is in part enforced by Catholics, who are apparently really Jews. The Pope – who is the Antichrist – isn’t really Catholic, but a mixture of Jew, Muslim, Hinduist and hippie [must have been his haircut that gave him away], whose goal is to implement the new one-world religion (you can’t avoid reading that one in Eric Cartman’s voice, can you?). On his website you can order your very own copy of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (“This Cunning Blueprint Lays Out a Secret Plan that Resulted in Over 300,000,000 Deaths and Unspeakable Horror Over the Past Century. And now, Satan’s Chosen People Intend to Use it to Once again Set the World on Fire”) as well as the standard Holocaust denial material – including his own recordings with such titles as “The Holocaust Controversy and the Falsification of History and Holocaust Dogma Unmasked – A Grim Global Conspiracy Mocking Reality and Capitalizing on Death”.

Steve Lashuk is a fan of Marrs. Do check out Steve Lashuk.

Finally, a piece of trivia: before he started criticizing the New Age, Marrs was himself writing a long series of “career preparation” book, as well as The Perfect Name For Your Pet.

Diagnosis: The whole of whale.to and RaptureReady in one single person. His influence is limited, presumably, but the fact that some people do listen is scary enough.

#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.

#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.