Donald Trump owed a yuuuuge political debt to the religious right. After all, they stayed loyal to him after the “Access Hollywood” tapes broke. He paid that debt bigly by giving the religious right so much say in picking personnel for his new administration that a number of old culture warriors were openly salivating at how much influence they would have.
Well, one prominent leader of a particularly extreme element of the religious right announced that he’s helping lay the groundwork to leverage that influence in the White House–and in a lot of other areas as well. He claims to have assembled a network of followers who are secretly embedded in various areas of society so they can be in a position to take it over.
Lance Wallnau is one of the most prominent leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, an overtly fascist offshoot of the religious right that seeks to bring about the Second Coming by taking over the world. He is one of the main theoreticians of the “Seven Mountains strategy,” which calls for Christians to take over the seven forces, or mountains that influence our culture–business, education, media, entertainment, family, religion, and especially government–under the leadership of self-proclaimed apostles and prophets. Watch Wallnau explain it here.
And here:
On Monday, Wallnau talked with the religious right’s favorite so-called historian, David Barton, about his latest effort to further this strategy. Wallnau found a receptive audience. Barton has been a major proponent of Seven Mountains for some time, and has stated that Christians are commanded to “do whatever is necessary” to take control of culture.
People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Wallnau told Barton and his sidekick, Rick Green, that the devil has been “brilliant” at infusing the media and education with “a socialist ideology,” and at pushing “pro-LGBT causes” through entertainment. He argued that anyone who controls all three is eventually going to take control of politics and government.
He then explained that there are “gates of influence” at the top of all seven mountains, and “whoever occupies the gates can control the traffic.” To Wallnau’s mind, Christians have been too fixated on reining in perceived enemies within the church when their real foes are “the ones shaping laws, shaping media, and shaping the next generation.”
But he has devised a way to combat those foes head-on. He has organized a network called “7m Underground,” comprised of NAR and Seven Mountains adherents who are “literally underneath” each mountain. He claimed that a number of people who were on the Trump transition team are supposedly members–and presumably, a number of people in the Trump administration itself.
Many of these people are what Wallnau described as “ninja sheep”–people who are all in for the Seven Mountains strategy, but “have to maintain discretion with their public profile.” However, they and others are united in support of Wallnau’s drive to “re-install a culture that honors God.”
Hmmm, where have we heard this before? For some time, Islamophobes have maintained that there are Taliban and ISIS sympathizers embedded throughout our society–even in our churches. For instance, as part of the effort to trash Gold Star dad Khizr Khan for daring to speak out against Trump’s Islamophobia, a number of wingnuts claimed he was only doing so because he was a closet radical Muslim. Specifically, the far right tried to convince us that Khizr was engaging in “taqqiya,” a deliberate effort to hide his Islamofascist sympathies.
And now Wallnau, in what he apparently believed to be an unguarded moment, openly admits that he’s recruited an army of stealth dominionists to help take over the country. If there’s any difference between this and what the Taliban and ISIS are supposedly doing, I don’t see it. Indeed, it seems to me that the only difference between Wallnau and the ISIS thugs who behead their captives is that Wallnau isn’t wearing a mask.
Wallnau has spent most of the time since Trump’s swearing-in waging all-out war against Trump’s critics. He claims that the media is using witchcraft to turn people against Trump, and has encouraged his followers to pray for Trump’s foes in the media and elsewhere to be destroyed. And now he boasts that he has embedded followers who are going to help him take over the country–the very thing that ISIS supposedly wants to do. This is yet another reminder that theocracy, whether it wears Islamofascist or Christofascist guise, is fundamentally un-American and undemocratic–and must be called out.
(featured image courtesy Lou Engle’s Facebook)
