It’s no secret that the religious right is trying to scare people into staying loyal to Donald Trump. Ever since Trump took office, leading fundies have warned that the opposition to Trump is being driven by witchcraft and demons, and that the devil himself is stirring up opposition to Trump’s drive to make America great again. Even as we’ve seen a nearly daily litany of outrages from the Donald, America’s so-called moral guardians would have you believe that opposing him amounts to opposing God’s plan for America.
Well, this line is a model of sanity compared to what one prominent fundie has started spewing. So-called pastor and talk show host Rick Wiles was among the earliest to warn us against daring to speak out against Trump. As far as he was concerned, those who oppose Trump are not only committing earthly acts of sedition, but committing high treason against God. To hear him talk, former president Barack Obama was leading a Communist revolution against Trump.
Wiles returned to this line last Thursday. He claimed that all the talk about Russia hacking the election is just an attempt at deflection. Supposedly, there was hacking, all right–but it was done by American intelligence in 2008 and 2012. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Wiles seized on a report from Judicial Watch, led by longtime right-wing hack Larry Klayman, claiming that Obama owed his 2008 victory to “illegal tampering” in Florida. Therefore, Wiles said, “Obama hacked the election.” Never mind that even if you take Florida’s electoral votes away from Obama’s 2008 total, he still would have had 338 electoral votes.
Wiles believed that Obama pulled a similar gambit in 2012. He’d had a hunch that “something really dark and sinister” happened on Election Day 2012–and it turned out that something was that “intel agencies hacked the election.” Never mind that Mitt Romney flipped two states that Obama won in 2008.
According to Wiles’ narrative, they tried a similar gambit in 2016–but it didn’t work because “all of their corruption could not overcome the will of the people.” Apparently he forgets that Hillary Clinton still won the popular vote by over 3 million votes.
Wiles then really went off the deep end. He read excerpts from the Judicial Watch report that claimed former NSA and CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery told federal prosecutors under a grant of immunity that American intelligence had been engaging in “systematic illegal surveillance” on Trump and other Americans. Supposedly, that session was videotaped. Apparently this account has been making the rounds in wingnutland; a search for “Dennis Montgomery” on Google turns up a number of links to Infowars and other sites that troll in fake news and conspiracy theories.
But that detail didn’t concern Wiles. He believed that this was hard evidence that Obama was staring down the barrel of serious charges–and has fled the country to escape them. Wiles would have you believe that Obama isn’t in French Polynesia as a tourist, but because “he is a fugitive” and “he knows he is going to be arrested.”
Wiles doubled down on Tuesday’s show. He claimed that Obama was orchestrating an effort to destabilize Trump from his tropical hideaway. Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Wiles claimed that Obama was potentially facing arrest for running a “shadow government”–which would meet the legal definition of sedition. He claimed that the recent wave of anti-government protests in Russia were part of a plan by this supposed “shadow government” to stir up chaos around the world.
To hear Wiles talk, these weren’t spontaneous demonstrations at all. Rather, he argued that they were part of an “intelligence operation” by the CIA, the UK’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad. The goal of this supposed operation is to “destabilize Russia” and set off a civil war that will end either with Putin’s overthrow or a Western invasion of Russia.
Now I know what a lot of you are thinking–right-wingers denouncing a popular uprising in Russia? Well, you have to consider that Putin is actually a darling of the religious right because of his heavy-handed policies against the LGBT community. Never mind that Russia is essentially a one-party state where opposition is barely tolerated, and both business and government are outrageously corrupt. Hmmm, fundies ignoring a president’s outrages in office because he makes the right clucking noises on social issues–sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
But then again, you have to consider that Wiles is speaking primarily to an audience that doesn’t consider any Democratic president to be legitimate. So therefore, any Democrat who is either in the White House or seeking to win the White House is automatically presumed to be a criminal. Now throw in that the religious right is convinced that God hacked the election for Trump, and it’s not too big of a leap for them to suggest that any opposition to Trump is criminal. This is more proof that the religious right has bowed before the Orange Calf.
(featured image courtesy Wiles’ Twitter)
