Rodney
Morgan Howard-Browne (H-B) is a South African-born evangelist and conspiracy
theorist who has been polluting Tampa, Florida since the mid-1990s as pastor of
The River Church and founder and head of Revival Ministries International. He
is, accordingly, qualified for an entry in much the same way as other
foreign-born loons like
Ken Ham and Ray Comfort, whom he might not quite beat on
silliness but whom he outpaces on sheer hatred and evil.
H-B’s
services are characterized by an array of typical charismatic antics, like laying on of hands and
worshipers giggling in ‘spiritual drunkenness’ – as well as speaking in tongues, breaking into uncontrollable ‘holy
laughter’, shaking, dancing in the aisles, falling over, and similar behaviors
– the kind of behaviors that has made it natural for H-B
to characterize himself as “God’s bartender” or “holy ghost bartender”
(while also declaring that anyone who criticizes his revivals
are going to hell). He has apparently also ministered, under one Mike Rose, at the
Bethel Assembly of God in Juneau, Alaska, a church that Sarah Palin has been attending.
Howard-Browne
apparently came to national attention back in 1999 when his Revival
Ministries organization rented Madison Square Garden for six weeks for “an
effort to achieve a Billy Graham-style faith uprising” called Good News New
York, but his reputation was perhaps more firmly established during the run-up
to the 2012 presidential election, when his church hosted political meetings
for the Florida chapter of the Republican Party to rally for then-candidate
Newt Gingrich, with H-B leading the flock in calls for a national “rising” of
Christian Americans “that will not sit idly by and allow the killing of
unborn babies and allow Islam to take over this country”; he also
characterized Mormonism as a “cult” that used to have “death squads
that would go around killing everybody that was not a Mormon”. His own operation
has been characterized as a “cult”, with H-B as “a
manipulator leading followers into a cult; a circus ring leader making a good
living” through millions gathered from vulnerable followers. (Though he
officially distances himself from the prosperity gospel, his followers have made
Howard-Browne fabulously wealthy and he tends to become unreasonable whenever poor people are reluctant
to give him money.)
Through
their Revival Ministries, Rodney Howard-Browne and his wife Adonica also
operate the River School of Government, a degree-granting program (though
hardly accredited in any normal sense) that funds training for people seeking
to run for political office. H-B’s own educational achievments include a “doctorate of ministry degree”
from “The School of Bible Theology”, the infamous diploma mill from which a range of other
fundamentally dishonest religious charlatans and grifters (including Kenneth
Copeland, Joyce Meyer, Billye Brim and Benny Hinn) have also purchased their
“degrees”.
That H-B is
fundamentally a fraud and grifter is demonstrated not only by him flaunting a
fake degree, however, but equally well by his MLM involvement; him and his wife were
top-ranking distributors for Monavie, the infamous acai berry pyramid scheme, until that business folded in
2014, and H-B has more recently served as “North America Emerald Director”
for the MLM company Jeunesse.
Politics
and Trump
A Trump sycophant,
Howard-Browne was one of 17 evangelical pastors (frauds) who visited the White House to
pray for and lay hands on President Donald Trump in 2017. On the occasion, H-B
did his best to draw attention to himself by claiming that his blessings averted “a
planned attack on our president and that’s all I can tell you about right now;
I know what I’m talking about, I’ve spoken to high-ranking people in the
government”; he refused to tell Secret Service any specifics or what his
sources were, however, citing pastoral privilege. He had previously praised God for
giving America a “Rambo” to take on the global conspiracy
to destroy America that he claims exists (“Donald Trump Is the New World Order’s Worst Nightmare”, said Howard-Browne).
For H-B,
Trump was God’s answer to the spiritual troubles ruining America. As he laid it all out in Charisma in 2014, America (at that time)
had only “two or three years” left, due to “an increasingly rapid
decline in America’s morality” that has been going on “since prayer was
removed from schools in 1962. Abortion was legalized in 1973. Massachusetts
became the first state to legalize gay marriage in 2004.” (America is “demon
possessed”, said H-B.) That process had, for some
reason, caused God to lift “a measure of His hedge of protection around
America”, exemplified not only by Christians “meeting with persecution in the marketplace, and anti-Christ agendas are
working overtime to send America into a downward spiral of darkness” but by “natural disasters”,
“economic disasters”, “famine”, politicians and schoolchildren
being shot, “pastors are falling into sexual immorality in America” and “violent
protesters”. Enter Trump, who according to H-B, would at least delay the coming
of the Antichrist.
Unfortunately,
Trump would face massive opposition from the global elite of Satanists that
really run the world to implement “that Antichrist
one-world religion and one money system.” Throughout Trump’s first period,
H-B warned his followers not only about how
intent these elites were on removing Trump from office but of the possibility that they
might be able to recruit the assistance of Vice President Mike Pence. Indeed,
one of the major threats to Trump was always betrayals from people who should
be loyal, such as John Bolton,: H-B declared that Jesus would “beat the crap”
out of Bolton, just as described in the Bible.
Much of his
views on politics (and much else) is laid out in his 2018 book The Killing
of Uncle Sam: The Demise of the United States of America, co-written with
conspiracy theorist Paul L. Williams. H-B is also worried about
upcoming EMP attacks that would wipe out half the
population, which we mention mostly because it seems likely that H-B’s source
here is Chuck Holton,
whom we just covered; that H-B listens to Holton is a good reason why you
should not.
Conspiracy
theories and QAnon
“Russiagate is a complete fabrication, high
level individuals, politicians and media heads need to be arrested & go to
prison!#UraniumOne #LockHerUp #QAnon
#ClintonFoundation #CrookedHillary #FusionGPS #corruption #HumaAbedin #Comey
#DrainTheSwamp #8chan #4chan #WhiteRabbit”
- Rodney Howard-Browne’s New Year greeting, January 1, 2018
A staunch
conspiracy theorist, Howard-Browne has been a guest at InfoWars e.g. to claim, in 2018, that a series of bombings in Austin,
Texas were being used by “anarchist terrorists” in an attempt to bring “everything
under control” (a characteristic anarchist terrorist goal), that churches
and religious groups were being censored in the U.S., and that “globalist
gremlins” were attempting to thwart Trump’s agenda. He then presented Alex Jones with a handgun to show that Jones
was “protected by God” because that’s what normal people do for normal
people reasons. Later in 2018, he even co-hosted InfoWars, an opportunity he
used to assert that Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be shot for treason. (She is far from the only SCOTUS
or political figure H-B would enjoy seeing shot for treason).
Shortly
after the Christchurch mosque shootings in March 2019, H-B tweeted that it was a ‘false flag’ operation: “There is no doubt that what happened in New Zealand as
horrific as it is, is a false flag that will be blamed on conservatives when
it’s all said and done!” (he later doubled down). Meanwhile the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was “A False Flag MK Ultra PSYOPS To push for the disarmament of
America and do away with the 2nd Amendment – this is the plan of the UN Agenda
2030.”
H-B was, notably, an early proponent of
QAnon. In an October 2017 sermon, he
brought the message to his congregation that “human sacrifice and the
cannibalism has been going on for years” in Hollywood and D.C: “They
sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink blood of
young kids. This is a fact.” People like H-B, failing to fully grasp the role
that evidence and reason play for reasonable people, tend to
think of asserting the latter sentence as a sort of spell that conveys
truth on whatever just fell out of their mouths. Indeed, you’ll discern the
same gambit in several of H-B’s rants, e.g. his 2014 rant (in front of several
congresspeople) about how the US under Obama was building concentration camps and
gas chambers and preparing to institute martial law: “We’ve been taken over.
We are living in occupied territory. It’s like Nazi Germany in 1933 right now
in America. People say, ‘That’s just crazy.’ But no it’s not, it’s fact.”
(to be filed under ‘Howard-Browne loses an argument with his own imagination’).
The gas chambers were ostensibly being built “right before our eyes” –
H-B specified in particular one under construction in Kentucky – as a result, of course, of a UN Agenda 21 plot to pave the way for a “one
world government” and “the rise of the Antichrist.”
Apparently said one-world government will be based on socialism, Zionism, Masonry, the Rothschild family and owl-worship (presumably
connected to this but who the hell knows), and it
will empower the “Luciferian structure of the globe that worships Lucifer.”
But
anyways, with regard to Hollywood (and, it seems, celebrities in
general), “they’re prophets of the enemy ... These people are full of the
devil, these people can’t even be reasoned with, these are not people you can
talk to, they have already given their soul to the devil. These people go
through seances, these people drink blood, these people sacrifice children.”
Moreover, “many of the Hollywood actors that you go see on a screen, what
you don’t know [is] they bring a witch, they do a big seance right there on the
set and they worship devils and they allow devils to come into them before they
take the part of what they're going to act. It’s a fact.” (Oh, yes.)
Hilary Clinton is a witch, too. Fortunately, with Trump in
charge, these satanists are at the end of the line: “the next thing to be
exposed will be all the pedophilia that is
going to come out of Hollywood and out of Washington, D.C. The human sacrifice
and the cannibalism has been going on for years.”
Meanwhile,
ISIS is trained and controlled by the CIA. “The ISIS bases are in 49
states in America that the CIA brings them and trains them here and then ships
them out to the areas of the world where they want there to be conflict. They
are all trained here. Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA, so does Anderson
Cooper. Work that one out.”
Covid
antics, misinformation
Howard-Browne
really rose to national fame during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he used for all it was
worth (and in utter disregard of human life) to promote his status. H-B
famously kept his church open and encouraged his congregants to continue to
shake hands because they were “revivalists, not pansies”. His loud and flagrant violations
left the Hillsborough County Sheriff with no choice but to place him under arrest because “his reckless disregard
for human life put hundreds of people from his congregation at risk and
thousands of residents who may interact with them”, something that allowed H-B to play the
persecution card and gain the sympathy of the usual crowd (fuck the people he
probably killed).
H-B would
otherwise dedicate COVID-era sermons to misinformation about COVID and mocking those who were
concerned with the spread of what he called a “phantom plague” deliberately
designed to shut down churches and terrify people into receiving a vaccine that
would cause mass deaths as a population control scheme – he claimed to find evidence of
such an agenda in a 2010 document produced by The Rockefeller
Foundation and Global Business Network that few of those listening to him would
bother to read anyways. Apparently, the whole COVID debacle was a strategy
initiated by the globalists after they had been forced to conclude that the “climate change narrative for global governance failed”. The COVID vaccine, specifically,
is a satanic plot to change your DNA and “remove
the God factor out of people so they won’t feel God.” Also, you have to
recognize the connection between COVID measures and the racial war they are
whipping up; the goal is to “disband our police department
so that they can bring in a United Nations police force of 500,000 people” to
implement “gun confiscation, ultimately. That’s why they’re trying to push
this thing with COVID-19.” (Even H-B seemed to struggle to connect the dots
he wanted to connect here.) Anyways, “[t]hey’re trying to drag it out so
they can put masks on every single person because that is the forced compliance
that will come, and then everybody will have to get a vaccine. If you go and
get the vaccine, you'll be dead within a couple of years.” It is apparently
all so clever that ordinary people struggle to grasp even how the suggested
plan is supposed to be in any way coherent. H-B declared that he would “not
compromise”.
He also
claimed that he would cure Florida of coronavirus. After all, he had previously, in
a 2019 video, delusionally claimed that he and other worshippers at his
church had cleansed Florida of the Zika virus.
It is worth
noting that H-B’s antivaccine views predate and go way beyond
COVID. According to H-B, vaccines are really just an
eugenicist effort to impose population control on the world by sterilizing
people and giving them diseases, and he vowed “go Old Testament” if
anyone ever tries to forcibly vaccinate him, something H-B of course believes
is likely to happen.
Meteorology
In
September 2017, Howard-Browne received some media attention after referring to Hurricane Irma as a “nothingburger” after his and other fundie
dingbats’ “prayer took the teeth out of the storm”. Irma caused the
death of fifty people in the US and Caribbean and resulted in power outages
affecting 5.5 million people in Florida, but whatever.
Howard-Browne
has also weighed in on climate change, asserting that
climate change is not real because the Book of Genesis says that the seasons
will never end, which is an argument most websites providing answers to questions about climate change don’t seem to have explicitly
addressed. Indeed, he has devoted whole sermons to the issue of climate change,
which, as he sees it, is “a total fabrication”; H-B can for instance inform you that all the scientists are lying and
that “the ice caps are not melting”, based on information he has
personally gotten from his “Eskimo friends.”
As for the
weather patterns, “we have to get into the whole thing of weather
modification, what they’ve been doing with the chemtrails, what they’ve been doing with
creating drought, manipulating weather,” explained Howard-Browne, adding – predictably – that “this
is not some conspiracy theory, this is fact”. Well, then. The goal of this they
is “all about creating food shortages. We used to be in a place where the
world's food supply was six months in backup; it’s down to days, one crisis and
people are starving. I mean, you can go within 11 days from today into people
eating each other.”
Yes,
they’re really out to get us. The food we eat, it’s “got all
the GMOs in it ... It’s not even a food,
it’s a chemical. That is what’s killing our people.” And “the water supply that’s
in many of the cities, it’s got fluoride in the water. Fluoride in the water. Fluoride is not there to protect
your teeth. Fluoride causes cancer. Fluoride lowers people’s I.Q. Fluoride
makes people passive.” And on top of that, there’s “the stuff
they spray in the air.” So “people are poisoned everyday through the
food supply, they’re poisoned through vaccines, injections, their poisoned
through the food they eat, the water they drink, even the sodas they drink –
and I can go on and on and on – and then the air.”
Diagnosis:
That anyone would believe that Howard-Browne is anything but full of shit is
one of the things that comes closest to a miracle these days, and it is, like
many things these days, a shit one. A bloodthirsty, legitimately insane fraud,
huckster, misinformation merchant, conspiracy theorist and cult leader; a
suitable villain for a spoof of a YA fantasy novel, perhaps, were he not so
obviously cognitively malfunctioning.
