Donald Trump fits the National Breakfast well, too well perhaps. You can watch his speech this morning at the NPB here.
But first, consider these three videos. One is a short 2007 special report from NBC on The Fellowship, featuring longtime Fellowship head Doug Coe.
The NBC report features footage of Coe, from a talk he gave in 1989, stating,
“I’ve seen pictures of the young men in the Red Guard… they would bring in this young man’s mother… He would take an axe and cut her head off. They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of their father, mother, brother, sister, and their own life. That was a covenant, a pledge. That’s what Jesus said.”
The NBC report explains, “In his preaching, he repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus, commitment he compares to the blind devotion Hitler demanded.” The report then showcases more of Coe’s 1989 talk:
“Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies, from nowhere.”
Now, let’s turn to Fellowship member Rick Warren, who this evening will speak at a closing dinner to cap off the events surrounding the National Prayer Breakfast celebration.
In 2005, in California’s Anaheim Angels sports stadium, before thousands of members of his Saddleback Church, Rick Warren talked of the blind devotion to Adolf Hitler displayed by his Hitler Youth, who spelled out in a Munich stadium, with their bodies, the words “Hitler we are yours” (footage starts at 2:50 in video below).
Warren also told the same anecdote in a video I found in 2008 posted at his P.E.A.C.E. Plan website. In that footage (Warren talk starts at :50 in video), Rick Warren retells the “Hitler we are yours” anecdote and then says,
“When I look at that I think, what if Christians, what if just North American Christians would say ’Jesus we are yours’ “
Now, let’s turn to Betsy DeVos’ dominionist teen summer politics camp.
It was back in the early 1990s that Betsy and Dick DeVos began financially supporting and promoting the Michigan-based Foundation For Traditional Values, which by the mid-1990s would launch as its main project something called the Student Statesman Institute.
In 2014, with Betsy DeVos still listed on SSI’s advisory board, SSI founder and head James Muffett posted a striking video titled “SSI Celebrating 20 Years”. The video featured footage, from what appears to be an SSI event, of former Michigan Lt. Governor Richard Posthumus who explains,
“Sometimes it seems like it’s very hard to change the world. The world is so big. But what SSI has done is equip young people with the tools to go out and be ready for the competing ideas that’s in this world.”
So far, so good. Then, it gets weird. Fast. Muffett’s video cuts to a later point in the speech by Posthumus, who is now MI Governor Rick Snyder’s top aid on legislative affairs. Posthumus, eyes gleaming, proclaims,
“Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, they knew one thing — that to change a culture, to change a country, they had to reach the children.”
Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Stalin.
In 2008 I began to notice the motif, the fascination that the American religious right shows for the leadership of most violent political movements of the 20th Century, and the movement’s teaching that its followers should show the same dedication as the zealots who followed Hitler, Lenin, and Mao even, per Doug Coe, to the point of murdering their own parents for the good of the state.
I began collecting examples. I now have many.
This is not a movement bug. It is a feature. An ethos.
And, it has now come to power.
