#2601: David Brody

David Philip Brody is a fundie evangelist and Chief Political Analyst for the Christian Broadcasting Network. Brody is most famous for working as a microphone and publicity agent for various wingnut political figures, including David Lane, Jenna Ellis and – not the least – Donald Trump; Brody has been aptly called “Trump’s court journalist”. In addition to providing air time for Trump to hold campaign rallies, Brody has for instance, in fawning terms, expressed his admiration for Trump’s “bravery”, “guts” and “moxie” in calling for a ban on all Muslims from entering the US, and he has offered suggestions for how to turn it into a full-scale religious war.

 

Someone’s got to promote such views. Brody is generally disappointed that other media won’t, and was furious when the “hipster soy boys” (oh, yes) at Twitter, who are sitting on “their satanic beanbags somewhere in their soy latte cafe,” suspended the personal account of conspiracy theorist and white supremacy-sympathizer Marjorie Taylor Greene – Brody has a long history defending her, in particular her feeble and stunningly idiotic attempts to compare Covid-19 mask mandates to the Holocaust. Brody is, in fact, a big fan of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Stella Immanuel too, and yes: he is antivaccine, and has repeatedly promoted an impressive range of antivaccine tropes in multiple tirades against Covid-19 vaccines – ostensibly against vaccine mandates, but when you lead with the government “risking the health and safety of millions of Americans” when promoting “this very experimental vaccine”, you are an antivaccine conspiracy theorist. Brody also pushed the standard antivaccine delusion that vaccine “mandates” would be in violation of “the Nuremberg code”, which concerns medical experiments (which the vaccine is not and never was after having been made generally available). He also cites the Cutter incident to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt – effective, of course, to those unaware of the legacy of the Cutter incident and why nothing similar could happen with the Covid-19 vaccine. (Interestingly, he complains about the profit-driven Big Pharma, but – being unwilling to criticize capitalism – quickly leaps to claim that  the government is to blame that the Big Pharma’s quest for profit has negative consequences; barely dodged a head-exploding cognitive dissonance there, eh, David?) He was, obviously, mad as hell over face masks, too. Where he did want the government to intervene with force and censorship, however, was access to internet pornography during the pandemic, which Brody called “a major, major issue”.

 

Brody has more recently promoted numerous QAnon conspiracy theories, such as baseless conspiracy theories about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. When met with apposite mockery, Brody and guest at his program The Watercooler, Anna Perez, accused their critics of not “getting your facts straight”, relying on QAnon material to determine what said facts should be.

 

As an author, Brody has written the wingnut campaign manual The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of How the Evangelicals and the Tea Party are Taking Back America (2012) and The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biograph (2018, with Scott Lamb), which is as good an example of the fundie wingnut genre of Donald Trump-finds-God fan fiction as any. Trump endorsed it, calling it “a very interesting read”. We’re sure he would have found the claims in the book both interesting and surprising. But we are even more sure Trump didn’t actually read it. Brody is, by the way, also on the record praising Trump’s “1950s mindset” in relation to BLM protests.

 

There’s a good David Brody resource here.

 

Diagnosis: A rather central figure on the religious right crazy clown circus circuit, Brody does epitomize contemporary religious wingnuttery pretty brilliantly, complete with intense paranoia, anti-democratic and almost romantic yearnings for Strong Men as leaders, and endorsements of any and all ridiculous wingnut conspiracy theories, up to and including Qanon-nonsense.