Wingnut Christians: Analyzing their claims

Hi and welcome back! I ran across this post just a couple of days ago, and wow, it caught my eye. I’ve been wanting to write a post for a while about the various claims made by white nationalist Christians in America, and also one about how level-headed people go about analyzing their claims. This guy’s post combined both topics for us! So now, let’s take a closer look at how these Christians think, and then let’s critically analyze the claims made in it.

Related wingnuts: Ammon Bundy needs everyone’s attention again; British Israelism is seriously wackadoodle

(This post originally appeared on Patreon.com. Get early access by becoming a patron for as little as $1/month!)

Prologue: I appear to have thoughtfully packed away all my movies and recording equipment

It’s now been a few days since I got into my forever-home (for now). I’ve unpacked all of the boxes and bags that Mr. Captain and I brought with us. And my stash of Movie Night movies and my recording equipment has not surfaced. I’m guessing, based on the evidence, that that box, because of course it was just all in one box, ended up having to go to our storage unit back in Idaho due to space considerations on the drive here. I’ll figure something out for next week — I think I can record on my phone, but getting it to the computer might be a little more of a problem.

Still, Oregon is treating us well. It really feels good to be in a place full of reasonably good people with progressive outlooks on life. I knew I’d like it here, since I lived in Portland some years ago, but oh, it is a balm to my spirit. I’d just gotten exhausted in Idaho.

We’ll be bringing more stuff back in a couple of weeks, so I’ll probably pick up new movies and figure out phone recording next week. Movie Night will live again!

Also, I left Idaho just in time

Meanwhile, Idaho is getting worse and worse as the days go by. I’ve been hearing some very unsettling and scary things about how the wackadoo extremists have basically steamrolled the state’s Republican party. The Idaho Statesman, which you can probably guess is a local Idaho news site, ran a story a few days ago with a headline sure to get clicks:

In convention dominated by fear, control and cruelty, extremists take over Idaho GOP

WOW. They weren’t kidding, either. The state’s Republicans had their big meeting in Twin Falls, where a bunch of extremists basically took over. The new chair of the party, Dorothy Moon, is an actual honest-to-goodness John Bircher. RationalWiki describes this ultra-conservative political group as “basically the KKK, but with a thin, stringy veneer of political theory.” Meanwhile, Moon’s husband is on the John Birch Society’s national council!

Moon is 100% on board with Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. And she’s an anti-abortion extremist, even by the shocking parameters of today’s anti-abortion culture wars.

The John Birch Society lost favor with American conservatives back in the 1950s, when they decided that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. But now it seems like today’s Idaho GOP is ready to embrace them again.

I feel so bad for any women, LGBTQ people, and allies still in Idaho. Things are about to get really grim there. Well, grimmer. They were already grim. And we’ll be talking about some of the reasons why in today’s post.

An introduction to the common wingnut

A wingnut is someone whose beliefs, political stances, and ideology do not tether at all to reality. Wingnuts far surpass the norm for modern Republicans and evangelicals, though they tend to be both.

Quite a few people who vote Republican manage not to be wingnuts, as do a lot of evangelicals. If they can more or less function in normal life outside of specific political and religious spheres, then they avoid wingnuttery. But if they function everywhere just as poorly as they do in those spheres, then they achieve wingnut status.

A wingnut lacks all capacity for critical thinking. Every single new claim gets judged by the wingnut’s current beliefs. If the claim fits into the wingnut’s existing beliefs, maybe just stretching them outward a bit, then it goes into the pool.

Wingnuts only spin in one direction: upward and outward. Their throttle only opens further; it can’t be pulled back. It takes a helluva lot to make wingnuts realize that they’re making some huge mistakes in their thinking, much less to realize they’re dead wrong.

Conspiracy theory circles are filled with wingnuts, who behave in extremely tribalistic ways. They get a little thrill jolt out of fitting new puzzle pieces into their overarching beliefs, and they love to feel like they’re in on the ground floor of a secret conspiracy that normies don’t know. Often, their religious tribe’s culture-war enemies become the capital-T “Them” behind everything wrong in their world, since wingnuts are constitutionally incapable of recognizing their own tribe’s role in creating that wrongness.

When wingnuts mingle in great numbers, they rapidly become unstable and often dangerous.

A wingnut declares: “Progressive America is the Twilight Zone”

Initially, I spotted today’s subject on a site called CONSPIRACT, whose subtitle is “Revealed Truth.” Just that alone tells you that the creator of the site is a wingnut. Indeed, they have a whole tab for the conspiracy theories they breathlessly relate. These conspiracy theories range from space aliens to technology to government mind-control projects just on the first page.

But CONSPIRACT is simply copying wholesale a post from another similar blog, American Thinker (OH don’t we wish). American Thinker has a million billion trillion contributors, all of whom seem like carbon copies of each other. The writer of the post we’ll be checking out today, J. Robert Smith, has written roughly tons of posts there. I noticed he gets reprinted often by hardline conservative culture-warrior Christian sites, like the incongruous-sounding “Orthodoxy Today” and “Intercessors for America.”

And, it seems, CONSPIRACT.

This J. Robert Smith fella definitely tells his TRUE CHRISTIAN™ audience what they desperately want to hear. (To put it in Christianese, he tickles their ears. And that’s not a good thing.)

This time around, Smith told them that America is totally falling apart because of dem durn ol’ libruls. Yes, dem durn ol’ libruls are totally seizing control of America from its rightful owners, who are of course Smith and his sympathizers. Worst of all, the people behind that takeover are very clearly “a corrupt, ideologically pushed, incompetent — dare say, venal — elite.”

Uh oh!

Wingnut Claim #1: Real Clear Politics surveys can be trusted

Smith begins by citing a poll from Real Clear Politics. For years now, Real Clear Politics has leaned very heavily toward alt-right conservative political stances. They’ve even become really pro-Trump. In 2020, New York Times wrote a story about its shift, noting with alarm:

As the [Trump] administration lurched from one crisis after another — impeachment, the coronavirus, a lost election the president refuses to concede — Real Clear became one of the most prominent platforms for elevating unverified and reckless stories about the president’s political opponents, through a mix of its own content and articles from across conservative media.

Then, in the wake of the 2020 election, Real Clear Politics ran stories that supported Donald Trump’s lies about his loss — including stories claiming that some states’ results would be “overturned” in Trump’s favor.

So, we can safely assume that any poll or survey from Real Clear Politics will be biased.

Claim #1a: Obviously only alt-right fundagelicals disapprove of America’s direction

Using this Real Clear Politics survey, Smith tells us that “an eye-popping” 70% of respondents felt America was on the wrong track, while 22% felt it was on the right track. Even a non-statistics person like me can see that Real Clear Politics chose its surveys very carefully here. For example, their YouGov numbers come from an absolutely huge report. They don’t say exactly where in the report we can find these numbers (perhaps p. 6 of the PDF?), and we don’t know why so few people said that.

As for that 22%, he assumes that these are his tribal enemies:

Other than D.C. lifers, welfare moochers, and people wanting their college debt loans erased, who are these 22%?

Nice dogwhistle there with “welfare moochers,” eh? But a 2020 story from Insider tells us that most welfare recipients are white — and many are technically part of the middle class. As for “D.C. lifers,” I think he means long-term Congresspeople — and this La Wiki list tells us that there are definitely some Republicans in that group.

But it’s his assumption of who thinks America’s going in the right direction that really cracks me up.

See, I’m a liberal who is all for reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality. And I don’t think the country is going in the right direction at all, largely thanks to alt-right fundagelical conspiracy theorists — like J. Robert Smith.

So, it’s entirely possible that both liberals and conservatives are upset with the country’s direction, just for different reasons. Real Clear Politics’ inclusion of YouGov in this poll doesn’t give the whole picture — not even close.

Wingnut Claim #2: The venal elite is behind all of this!

Next, Smith tells us who is causing this awful decline:

America’s accelerating tumbling is the handiwork of a corrupt, ideologically driven, incompetent — dare say, venal — elite. Don’t doubt that most of the incompetence stems from an irreparably flawed leftist worldview and age-old, mind-twisting power- and money-lust.

Hmm.. where have we seen elite-blame laid recently? Oh yes. Fundagelicals in the Southern Baptist Convention. The Old Guard’s extremists super-want to blame the “elites” in their denomination for everything they see wrong in it. In fact, one of the sites pandering to those extremists even thinks that “Southern Baptist Elites” will be on the wrong side “in America’s civil insurrection.”

I wonder what a Venn diagram for those extremists and Smith’s readers would look like? I’m guessing it’s damned near a circle.

Wingnut Claim #3: Only his tribe can say they are “We the People”

Moving on past a few paragraphs full of doom-and-gloom hyperbole, Smith next decides that only his tribe can possibly call themselves “We the People.” Yes, seriously.

America’s troubles aren’t from “We the People.” We the People are decent, law-abiding folk. We’re working jobs and raising our kids. We’re good neighbors. We play between the lines, as they say.

Is he certain that “America’s troubles” can’t be coming from his tribe? And is he certain that every other American outside his tribe can’t lay claim to being part of “We the People”?

Tribalistic people love to make lines of exclusion. They create us-vs-them squabbles and fights. Meanwhile, the people who really cause problems just sit back and let the rabble fight for scraps. Smith doesn’t seem to understand that he’s just playing his leaders’ game of “let’s you and him fight.”

Smith’s rhetoric is the kind that leads to serious conflicts and problems. It leads to one small group deciding it must “take back their country.” To violence in the Capitol, and terror in the hearts of lawmakers just trying to do their jobs.

Wingnuts could not possibly be part of these specific social problems!

Next, Smith gets to the fun part: he names a bunch of social problems, all while being utterly oblivious to his tribe’s share in those problems.

He begins with drug fatalities:

The U.S.-Mexico border – what border, you say? What’s replaced the southern border is a Biden-created superhighway for illegals and gangbangers. Fentanyl, meth, and other poisons ride that highway with ease. Drug overdoses killed 107,000 Americans in 2021. What will the grim tally be this year?

He doesn’t say how Joe Biden created this superhighway. That’d be because he didn’t. The guy’s only been in office a year and a half. Chances are very good that some previous president caused that problem, perhaps through a very poorly-advised wall.

Further, who’s buying and taking these drugs? Hmm… let’s check a list that arranges by state. Oh dear. It seems like states dominated by fundagelicals have a whole lot of deaths. Another graph on that site reveals that it’s overwhelmingly white people dying of opioid overdoses. Smith might argue that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ aren’t dying, but it seems clear that religion has nothing to do with addiction.

Crime grows worse and keeps spreading. How about the mass shootings in Philly, Chattanooga, and other cities last weekend?

Gosh, that sounds awful! Let’s look up an unbiased table of violent crime rates per state… Oh dear. Southern states, which are heavily dominated by fundagelical culture warriors, lead the pack there.

How oh how can an ordinary wingnut fix this terrible situation?!?

Having completely misdiagnosed all the social problems he’s identified, Smith now offers his readers a path to victory:

Winning elections, though critical, won’t alone fix things. The culture needs to be retaken. Institutions need to be recaptured — or routes around them created.

Ohh, my. Did you notice there’s a hyperlink given for “or routes around them created”?

That hyperlink leads to a site called “Parallel Economies.” The term means alternate ways for alt-right fundagelicals to exchange money and information with each other.

Often, these groups end up getting blacklisted from regular social media and payment processors. So, they make these substitutes and use those instead. Instead of YouTube, they use Rumble. Instead of Twitter, they use Gab. And so on and so forth. We’ll get to their PayPal substitute in a moment.

It all sounds just like those “Benedict option” communities for a reason. But alt-right Christian culture warriors have more pushing them toward these substitutes than those guys.

Parallel Economy, in a wingnut shell

A conservative Christian named Dan Bongino has been going on about parallel economies for a year or so now. He’s even made a business called Parallel Economy. This is like PayPal, but for people who keep getting blacklisted from PayPal. And he claims it is completely immune to cancellation or censorship from dem durn ol’ libruls. (It’s also drawn some interesting criticisms. Pic related.)

According to a 2021 Washington Post story, Bongino himself has aspirations of creating a Rush Limbaugh-style media empire. Somehow, this guy’s gotten tangled up with the right-wing Christian nationalist social-media platform Gab. The guy behind Gab, Andrew Torba, talked about how TRUE CHRISTIANS™ (like himself, of course) needed to establish a “parallel economy” that was safe from dem durn ol’ libruls, but he seems to have had a falling-out with Bongino.

Ah well. Such is the path of the martyr.

Alas for Bongino and his pals, it might be hard to “retake institutions” if one must use one of these substitutes. That’s especially true when those substitutes have worse problems than the problems they’re trying to solve.

(Of note: Torba himself is a hardline Catholic who heavily censors Gab users. But hypocrisy becomes okay if you’re a TRUE CHRISTIAN™, obviously.)

A wingnut doesn’t think like the rest of us

J. Robert Smith has definitely given us a good look at how a wingnut thinks. His belief system is made up entirely of self-reinforcing memes and talking points, all of which he embraces without a second thought. He takes utterly for granted that his tribe is blameless and good, while everyone else is ickie and bad — and wants to hurt and take stuff from his tribe.

It’d do him some real good to seek out unbiased sources for his information, and to assess what he finds with critical thinking skills. Just asking, “What else might explain this data point?” would do him good. But he can’t do that. It might threaten his beliefs.

If his fears of boogeymen and shadows weren’t influencing so many people to think in terms of raising arms against their country, he’d be a hilarious little puppet to watch spewing frothy hate in every direction.

As it is, though, he’s the natural and expected outgrowth of his tribe’s worst malfunctions and shortcomings.

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