• The title of this post was written correctly and appears correct in the WordPress edit screen I use here. The abomination above is a New Thing that WordPress or Patheos now does, automatically, as though Capitalizing Every Letter That Follows A Space isn’t self-evidently hideous.
Oddly, this new imposed style choice seems to happen only with titles/headlines on the pages of the individual posts and not on the home page listing multiple posts. So it’s a style rule, but not a consistent one, which is not how style rules are supposed to work.
Anyway, I offer this as an apology, not an excuse. Because There Is No Excuse For This Sort Of Thing.
• As we pass the fourth anniversary of the beginning of lockdowns during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, I’d like to also remember the upcoming four-year anniversary of this classic Charismanews essay from demon-sex columnist Jennifer LeClaire: “Is Sorcery Defying Prophetic Words About the End of Coronavirus?”
That’s from May 5, 2020 — five days after Charisma’s holiest and most respected “prophets” had assured their followers that the pandemic would end. God told them it would end on April 30, 2020. Multiple prophecies from multiple prophets had confirmed this date as What God Said To Me, Too, Because God Also Speaks Directly To Me And So You Cannot Question What I Say, Either.
And the date had been even further confirmed by multiple Charisma readers who reported that God had also revealed this April 30 prophecy to their young children in dreams.
“But science is flying in the face of the prophetic utterance,” LeClaire wrote, struggling for some explanation of how this could be. And then she found that answer: Witches.
The prophets hadn’t been wrong — that was an impossibility. But their prophecies had been interfered with by witches. See, God had planned on ending the pandemic way back on April 30, 2020. That’s why God told his Very Special prophets that’s when it was going to end. But then God’s plan got delayed and derailed by those pesky witches. Once their sorcery got involved, God was powerless to do anything because, as we all know, God is powerful, but not as powerful as witches.
• On a related note, back in the present of 2024, Utah’s Republican state legislature seeks to outlaw Satanic baby-killers.
They’re going full Warnke. Never go full Warnke.
Eddie Munson didn’t sacrifice his life just so Utah Republicans could replay the low points of 1980s-style Satanic Panic.
• Sad to read that the atheist/secular site OnlySky Media is shutting down. Here are some final posts from a few of my favorite writers over there: Captain Cassidy, Adam Lee, Jonathan MS Pearce. All have links to where we can find their writing going forward.
• Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. died in 2022 just months before he was set to go to trial on more than a dozen criminal charges involving ballot-tampering in the 2018 Republican primary in North Carolina.
Dowless was — to use a term used by former Christianity Today columnist Charles Colson — a ratfucker. He was a dirty trickster who was notorious for bending or breaking the law to create some advantage for whatever candidate hired him. The candidate who hired him for the 2018 Republican primary was Southern Baptist pastor Mark Harris, who initially thought he’d won his party’s nomination for a congressional seat but then learned that election officials were forced to toss out those results and schedule a new special election because of Dowless’ ratfuckery.
Dowless “allegedly” (that qualifier would not still endure if he’d lived to see trial) collected absentee ballots, promising to hand them in for voters in North Carolina’s 9th District. But if those ballots supported anyone other than Harris he “allegedly” destroyed them. Dowless also “allegedly” convinced many voters to sign blank absentee ballots, which he and his associates then forged in support of Harris.
Mark Harris claimed that he had no knowledge of Dowless’ “alleged” actions, but that claim was contradicted by his own son who testified that he’d warned his father against hiring the notorious scammer because he was infamous for doing exactly what he then went on to (“allegedly”) do again. (See this 2018 post, “The pastor and the stolen election,” for more on that story.)
Harris opted not to run in the special election and instead went to work for The Liar Tony Perkins as vice president for the Family Research Council’s “Association of Churches and Ministries,” promoting the MAGA-liturgy for which FRC is famous.
But he was back on the ballot in this year’s Republican primary in his old North Carolina congressional district — which has since been redrawn to make it a safe Republican seat. Harris got just over 30% of the vote in a multi-candidate race — enough to secure the nomination and thus an almost certain win in the general election in November.
Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. is dead. His disgraced former employer will soon be a member of the United States Congress.
• Kudos to the students of Raymond Hall at Providence College. Well done. (via TaMara at Balloon Juice)
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