Heidi Swander, sidekick to full-gonzo lunatic Jan Markell, explains for the readers of Christian Worldview Network how health care reform fits into Satan's centuries-long scheme for creation of the Antichrist's One World Government.
You have to understand the background, Swander says, which begins with "laying the foundation":
Now it just so happens that a woman named Alice Bailey (1880-1949) who founded a publishing company named The Lucifer Publishing Company, communed with a demon known as "The Tibetan."
Now it just so happens that Bailey, in reality, was a wannabe-Blavatsky, a spiritualist with all the enduring influence of, say, Uri Geller. But for Swander, obsequiously following Christian Worldview Forehead-in-Chief Brannon Howse, this obscure woman is the key to understanding the Antichrist's diabolical plot of near-universal access to affordable health care from private insurers.
I've said it before, and I'll doubtless say it again: It's all coming together. If you read Brannon's book — and I really, strongly encourage you to read it — you will see how we're being set up. All of the building blocks needed to construct this world system have been molded for hundreds of years to bring us to this place and this time. As you see him put each of these bricks in place, a structure will form that looks amazingly like the one-world system needed to usher in the Antichrist. And folks, it looks to me like they're ready to dedicate the building and cut the ribbon.
Yes, job-lock due the precariousness of overpriced employer-based health insurance was the last obstacle to the tyranny of the Ten-Horned Beast. Armageddon is coming.
Picking on the third-tier third-string of the whackjob fringes of the religious right isn't very sporting, but there are two things Swander's delirious punditry illustrates that seem worth pointing out.
1. Brannon Howse doesn't believe a word Brannon Howse says.
The only difference between the radical clerics of the Christian Worldview Network and the violent Christianist extremists of the Hutari militia is that the Hutari, unfortunately for them and everyone else, really believed this crap.
"There is a war against Christianity in America right now," Swander writes. And like the Hutari, she says that the Antichrist is coming, soon, to seize control of the entire world, spelling the end of freedom. Like the Hutari, she says President Obama and health care reform are servants of this Antichrist agenda. But unlike the militia idiots she doesn't see this as requiring any sort of actual response.
Both the Howsians and the Hutarians claim to believe the same thing, but only the latter group decided to act on those beliefs because only the latter group really believed them. The Howsians are just pretending, just role-playing. Followers like Swander do it for the kick of self-righteous umbrage and their leaders, like Howse, do it for the money they can collect from indignation-addicts like Swander.
Lest you think its a stretch to connect the views of these two groups, note that one of the arrested Hutari militia members was angered by a viral e-mail scaremongering about H.R. 1388. This is a second-generation e-mail hoax mutated from Brannon Howse's original scaremongering over that legislation (in reality, a modest expansion of Americorps funding). Howse got the ball rolling by claiming the bill created a domestic army of Hitler Youth recruits who would come to take away your guns and your freedoms and pave the way for the Antichrist. By the time this news reached Hutaridiot Tina Stone, it had expanded to include the creation of Hamas colonies in the United States.
Howse, of course, wasn't trying to get people like Stone to take up arms against the police — he was simply lying to his followers in order to sell them overpriced videotaped lectures and to con them into investing in his precious metals schemes. He wasn't trying to incite violence, just to extract money from gullible people whose desperate need to feel self-righteously significant made them easy marks. Which brings us to point No. 2.
2. Swander and Howse pretend to believe in theosophy.
Spiritualist Alice Bailey "communed with a demon," Swander writes. Not that she claimed to do this, but that she actually did so.
It might be possible to account for this uncritical acceptance of Bailey's folderol as a demonstration of the naivete of those desperate for supernatural explanations of the world around them. It might just be that Swander and Howse have a "worldview" that regards New Age spirits as manifestations of actual demons from some strange extra-biblical mythology that they have come to regard as an integral part of their purported Christian faith. But I doubt it.
I think this refusal to question Alice Bailey's claims of communing with spirits is really just professional courtesy.
Bailey was a con artist, a grifter carving out a modest living by separating the gullible from their money. Brannon Howse has to respect that. It's all in the game.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In