Puzzling Evidence, or A Response to the Crazy Millenialist Christians Who Are Bombing Us With Spam, Part 1

I’ve always known the day would come when genuine believers in the Book of Revelations endtimes would pop up and take umbrage at our co-opting of their favorite horror story for our own nefarious purposes.  And now that day has arrived.  The Truth Revealed Ministry, a Florida-based church, have taken it upon themselves to save our fun-loving, hard-drinking, drug-imbibing, more-or-less pagan souls, with daily e-mails that advertise a site so batshit insane, at first I thought Matty Watkins, Red Megan, and Big Al Colla, had put their heads together and decided to play a joke on us.  But no, this is for real.  This site is basically a hodgepodge  of every crazy conspiracy theory that you’ve ever heard of, from both right and left wing sources, with a generous dose of antisemitism thrown in, all wrapped up in a neat “I’m cuckoo for Jesus-puffs” bow.  In this series I’m going to take a close look at the content of their site, and knock them down point for point.  We’ll be sending a link back to the source and, who knows, maybe we’ll manage to bring some poor, deluded, formerly crack-addicted soul, back to the light of secular humanism.  And crack.  Follow along with the crazy site kiddies; I’ll be going in order, from top to bottom, left to right.

Click the image to “Wake Up!”

Right at the beginning they go for a scatter-shot approach, figuring anyone reading  is gonna be scared of something on the list.  Here we go:

Solomon Ashley / Solomon 1-15:
According to Rick Thorne, the purported author and compiler of this whole stinking mess, these are the chapters of his great-grandfather Solomon Ashley’s book.  Apparently serious, hard-core, religious derangement has been passed down in an unbroken line for quite some time in this family.  Mr. Ashley starts off his extended screed with the self-effacing statement, “It is with much timidity that I offer this book to the public, knowing as I do my weakness, and limited education.”  Least he knows he’s an ignorant, backwards hick.  Maybe somebody should have clued in his descendants.

Abortion:
I’m not gonna weigh in on the abortion debate.  I personally support a woman’s right to choose, but I think people of good conscience can fall on both sides of this issue.  Don’t look at this link if you’re sensitive to images of abortion.  It’s pretty nasty.  What’s interesting to me here is the stuff at the bottom.  He makes the claim that “taxpayers will pay for abortion”, but then goes on to admit that this doesn’t appear anywhere in current legislation.  He backs up the assertion by quoting some Biblical boilerplate about “Evil workers of midnight” , and Satan, and conspiracy, and . . . you get the picture.  A Moslem friend asked me the other day what was wrong with people having faith.  This kinda sums it up right here.  It’s real easy to justify any argument when your world view is based on a vague ancient text that runs all over the philosophical map, from “an eye for an eye”, to “turn the other cheek”.  Pick your quote, and whammo, blammo, instant justification for anything.

Adultery:
Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it.  I ever tell you guys about the night of the 2003 blackout?  Five times.  Once on the floor of the Marriott Marquis lobby.  Yeah, it was that dark.  So fucking hot . . . this was before I started getting those back spasms.

America Dying:
This is where all the lines of crazy start to converge into one fine point of infinite psychosis.  Where to begin with this one?  Okay, I’ll start with the obvious; where were these people during the Bush administration?  I don’t think I’m being overly partisan in observing that if you’re a conspiracy-minded wack-job, the Bush folks gave you a lot more to go on.  Apparently the Patriot Act wasn’t a problem until a black Democrat became President.

“Do you think it’s an accident that America’s debt is exploding . . . that countless jobs are leaving the country?”:
No.  No, I don’t.  I think it has something to do with a confluence of forces, including a deregulation of the banking system that started with the gay icon of the Republican party, that old reprobate, the master of disaster, the Gipper himself, Mr. Ronald Wilson Reagan (whose name has three groups of six letters, 666, in case you’re interested), and continued on through EVERY administration that followed, both Democrat, and Republican.  Add to that a Congress that lacks the moral courage to make a choice between tax cuts and the expansion of services, the coming to fruition of economic globalization putting American workers in direct competition with the much cheaper labor pools of the third world, and the normal course of Imperial rise and decline (agriculture, to technology, to militarism, to finance, to over-extension, to collapse), and it’s pretty easy to answer these questions without checking under your skin for hidden microchips. (More on those later! -Ed.)

“Do you think it’s by accident Obama is forming a CITIZEN ARMY (Acorn, SEIU, the Unions, etc. , . .?)”
Isn’t there this actual, totally for real, private army running around that recently had to change it’s name from Blackwater to XE, ’cause they killed a whole bunch of people in Iraq without justification?  And didn’t the last administration make sure they, and all other private military contractors working for the US government, would be immune from prosecution for crimes committed in the war zones in which they operated?  And didn’t we pay out billions of dollars to this army to do a job that traditionally would have been in the hands of the US military, whose members are accountable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice?  And isn’t Eric Prince, the CEO of this company, the scion of a wealthy Christian conservative family that’s been deeply involved in Republican politics for decades?  And doesn’t this company also have a financial services division, and it’s own private intelligence gathering operation (Total Intelligence Solutions. Inc.), that was originally headed up by Cofer Black, a former CIA director, until he resigned in reaction to some of what he discovered about the company (or some of what the public started to find out about the company)?  And wasn’t this private army actually deployed by our government into the disaster zone in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids the use of American military force on US soil?  Doesn’t this represent exactly the kind of intersection of shadowy influences that y’all are jumping up and down about?  Maybe you should look into that.

“Do you think it’s by accident that Obama has countless CZARS in his fascist government (they’re used to bypass Congress and the Senate to institute fascist policy changes in America)?”
Well, I personally blame Woodrow Wilson, who appointed the first “industry czar”, financier Bernard Baruch, to head the War Industries Board way back in 1917, probably about the same time Rick Thorne’s dip-shit grandfather was writing his nutty drivel.  The practice continued under FDR, but then had a lull for awhile until everyone’s favorite paranoiac, Richard Nixon, decided to appoint a “drug czar” to oversee national drug policy in the wake of Grace Slick’s attempt to dose him at a White House tea party.  Oh, how history might have been different if she had managed to turn that crazy fucker on.  The term itself is mostly a media creation and has never been used, outside of Tsarist Russia, as an official designation.  “Czars” have no official power, and are essentially just high-level advisers to the President.  George W. had 35 of them.  Again, it’s apparently only a problem when a black Democrat does it.

Before we move on, I’d like to examine this claim a little more closely because it’s a bit more “mainstream”, if you can call FOX News mainstream, than some of the others.  Now, when Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh, wake up one morning and decide, ” Oh, I know what’ll really scare the shit out of my uneducated, ignorant devotees.  Policy Czars!”, I assume that they’re just being cynical and know damn well how stupid this assertion is.  Does the freak who wrote this know or is he someone who picked this up on FOX and, with the inductive reasoning typical of the breed, decided to just tack it on to the list of “evidence”?  Just trying to figure out what the hell is going on in the sociological petri dish we call “the heartland”.

“Your food bills will continue to rise!  Gasoline prices will climb once again!  Utilities will go through the roof!”
Yeah, probably.  Think it has more to do with peak oil and the unsustainability of an economic model based on the assumption of infinite growth, than it does with a decline in morals, or divine judgment, or ACORN.  This is a pretty common tactic of demagogues; make a prediction that you know will come true, then use it as evidence of your foresight when it happens later.  You know, come to think of it, that sounds like a pretty sweet gig.  Let’s give it a try: I hereby predict right here, and right now, that you will stub your toe at some future date and that it will hurt.  A lot.  Remember I said that.

Next Up: Henry Kissinger, Bush Sr., and Tricky Dick party naked. (This one’s actually kinda true.)