Thread by @dogemperor

@timsquirrell Very good writeup, and if I may embroider a bit on this from the other side of the pond (as someone who grew up in New Apostolic Reformation circles that have...adopted a distressing amount of this stuff and can be really considered religio-fascist in and of themselves):

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@timsquirrell So, while NAR types are a *little* more down-low on the really explicit anti-Semitism (and I emphasize a "little more down-low", because there's some very specifically NAR flavours of anti-Semitism, as I'll get into), there has (really as long as I can remember)

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@timsquirrell have been really, deeply, truly, *incredibly* anti-LGBTQIA (though in my case it may have been I was raised in a group that is actually one of a few reasons the American Family Association is listed as an anti-LGBTQIA hate group by human rights/civil rights groups here).

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@timsquirrell I've mentioned in past how one of my early memories was literally Christian Nationalists calling for rounding up LGBTQIA people (among other groups) and targeting them for genocide, what I've not gone into is some of the *extremely strong* parallelisms...

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@timsquirrell between anti-LGBTQIA groups in the Christian Nationalist movement here in the US, particularly in the NAR, and with anti-Semitism in Christian Identity (which is an extremely anti-Semitic branch of Pentecostalism that is an actual sister movement to the NAR).

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@timsquirrell To my LGBTQIA and Jewish readers, I am going to forewarn in advance that the rest of this thread is likely to be triggering, and I will try to tag, but you may want to skip out now. It's going to get pretty nasty here.

Likewise same for #exvangelicals who are LGBTQIA

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, anti-LGBTQIA

When I say there is extreme parallelism, I'm not kidding. One of the popular figures in anti-LGBTQIA circles is one Scott Lively, who is effectively the David Irving of anti-LGBTQIA Holocaust denial

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, anti-LGBTQIA

He's written a book, "The Pink Swastika"...which not only denies that the Holocaust ever targeted LGBTQIA people but that The Perfidious Gheys were its architects, and that actually got the attention of Nizkor Project back in the 90s

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@timsquirrell (For those unfamiliar with Nizkor, they are a group that has focused on fighting Holocaust denial in its forms, and started monitoring Lively when Christian Nationalists started posting excerpts/refs from "The Pink Swastika" on Usenet. He was popular in NAR circles,

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@timsquirrell including those overtly sympathetic to the Army of God terrorist movement, which (in addition to women's clinics and the Olympics) also has targeted LGBTQIA nightclubs and even adult bookstores selling LGBTQIA friendly material for similar acts of terrorism.)

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, anti-LGBTQIA

Lively followed that bit of actual Holocaust denial up with a book series called "The Poisoned Stream", and that can be best described as what happens when you take the infamous *Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion*, and you go through

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, anti-LGBTQIA

with cut-and-paste, and replace every occurrence of "Jew" with "Homosexual", and every occurrence of "Race Traitor" with "Homosexualist" (a slur of Lively's own creation, meaning "anyone not on board with Gay Genocide")

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@timsquirrell tw: anti-LGBTQIA violence

And Lively, of note, has been linked to not only attempts legally to foment a genocide internationally (Uganda's "kill the gays" bill AND Russia's anti-LGBTQIA legislation) but in other ways too

dailykos.com/stories/2007/1…
dailykos.com/stories/2007/1…

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@timsquirrell tw: anti-LGBTQIA

And such sentiments and parallel calls for violence have been a thing in the NAR for a long, long time.

They stopped being quiet about their desire to denationalize LGBTQIA people circa 2007

dailykos.com/stories/2007/8…

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@timsquirrell tw: extreme anti-LGBTQIA

This is the head of a state branch of a Christian Nationalist group I am intimately familiar with, which promoted both Army of God manuals and Lively's tripe in their newsletters in the 90s:
dailykos.com/stories/2006/1…
dailykos.com/stories/2007/1…

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@timsquirrell And like I noted, this is...not the only place where there's a disturbing amount of parallelism.

I've mentioned the Army of God, which is a particular Christian Nationalist terrorist group in the US and Canada of some notable infamy for targeting doctors for assassinations

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, anti-LGBTQIA

And one of the big things they've promoted is the "Phineas (sic) Priesthood", based on ancient Israel's own Torquemada, one Phinehas (who infamously speared an Israeli man and his Midianite wife engaging in sex in the temple, an old fertility

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@timsquirrell ritual from pre-Abrahamic religion; he also nearly started a religious war in Israel itself over one of the 12 tribes being suspected of setting up an unauthorized subsidiary temple. I am *not kidding* when I compare him to the famous inquisitor.)

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism

There's interestingly three other groups that use that "Phineas Priest" imagery:

a) Christian Nationalists in the NAR,
b) Christian Identity, and
c) the Christian Identity terrorist group "The Order" which tried to start a race war in the 80s.

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism

And literally all four groups get that same imagery from that same unsavory source--not from the Bible, but...from a Christian Identity authored source, namely Richard Hoskins' "Vigilantes of Christendom".

dailykos.com/stories/2008/5… (noting NAR usage)

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, anti-LGBTQIA, racism, etc.

So "Vigilantes" is basically "Turner Diaries" about a decade before that book came out; it's a typical fictionalization of a race war launched by Christian Identity types, who dub themselves "Phineas (sic) Priests"

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, anti-LGBTQIA, J6 imagery, racism

in what is basically a brotherhood of chuddery, and these "Phineas Priests" launch a guerilla war against the US government ultimately culminating in a January 6th style violent coup and violent genocide

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, racism

And "race mixers" and "race traitors" were particularly targeted, as Christian Identity considers the sin that Phinehas went full stabby over being...miscegenation, not paganism

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

And the book actively encourages readers...

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism, racism, anti-LGBTQIA

to actively defictionalize this.

NAR sorts have basically taken the book and its imagery as a call to establish Christian Nationalism by any means necessary, including by violence, and have included LGBTQIA folks to be purged

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@timsquirrell And that leads to a deeper line of parallelism between Christian Identity (which is racist and anti-Semitic as *hell*) and the NAR (its sister movement that at least attempts to put window dressing on the anti-Semitism and racism, though not entirely successfully)

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@timsquirrell As I noted before...both the NAR and Christian Identity (or more properly, the NAR in its original branding as the Manifest Sons of God--this is important, pay attention--and CI) were descendants of a particular movement within Pentecostalism in the 30s and 40s

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@timsquirrell called Lanhamism, and William F. Lanham had...some distinctly *heterodox* ideas, one of which he termed "Serpent Seed Theology" (and which became the core of Conspiracy Theology in Christian Identity, and the NAR, and QAnonsense).

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@timsquirrell cw: sexual content in discussion of heterodoxy

So Serpent Seed Theology at its core is the idea that...when Eve was tempted by the Serpent, she proceeded to *actually engage in interspecies sex with the Serpent, and carried the child to term*, and Cain was...

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@timsquirrell thus literally Satan's Bastard, and Eve then had a set of kids with Adam (Abel and Seth) who were considered descendants of God through Adam (creation being apparently enough in Adam's case to be a divine descendant).

And this is where it gets nasty

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@timsquirrell cw: antisemitism, religious trauma

So Lanham on one hand had a "super-Pentecostalism" schtick noting that God's own descendants could have superpowers, and he was *also* a racist and anti-Semitic little shit (being in Southern Indiana, which was big KKK territory)

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@timsquirrell cw: antisemitism, racism

so of COURSE he went on about how the descendants of Cain were all the Dark People, and The Excessively Jewish, and Their Fellow Travellers Like Roosevelt Et Al, and eventually the movement split into three distinct segments

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@timsquirrell You had OG Lanhamism (which had incorporated a lot of "new age"/Theosophy stuff about Egypt woo and aliens by the 60s, such that Lanham actually got buried under a pyramid), and you had CI (which embraced the racist implications of Serpent Seed theology),

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@timsquirrell and you had a branch called the Manifest Sons of God that...didn't embrace the pyramid power/aliens stuff, at least *hid* the racism under trappings, but also embraced and extended the whole Serpent Seed thing to people being *spiritually* either sons of God or Satan

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@timsquirrell (so essentially quasi-Calvinism).

That particular movement became the New Apostolic Reformation, and that's been where a LOT of anti-LGBTQIA nastiness has come from, and there's been a LOT of cross-fertilization with Christian Identity and the racist right in general

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism

As I noted: There's still very much an anti-Semitic strain in NAR Christian Nationalism, and one doesn't have to scratch very far for it to surface.

There's a weird fetishism over obviously religious, and generally Ashkenazim, religious culture,

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism

but also a *HUGE* emphasis on making effectively "kosher Charismatics", and god help the Jewish person who points out Judaism is its own religious tradition with its own commandments that's had about 2000+ years of separate evolution,

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@timsquirrell tw: antisemitism

and god help the Jewish person who is Jewish by heritage but not a member of an Orthodox or "Messianic" Jewish group or who is not religious, because they WILL be all but called "race traitors" for not playing their part in NAR endtime theology

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@timsquirrell It also does not help that there is *significant* crossover even with broader Christian Nationalism here in the US and the racist-right through neo-Confederacy (and there is a very good argument to be had that modern Christian Nationalism in the US largely started

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@timsquirrell over desegregation, and particularly "segregation academy" voucher programs that were eventually ruled as illegal by the US government in the courts: unrollthread.com/t/154078704751…)

So it's not a huge shocker a lot of BAD tropes get picked up there, too

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@timsquirrell But yeah, tl;dr this kind of nasty crossover with anti-Semitism (and arguable remixing of anti-Semitic tropes to anti-LGBTQIA tropes) has been a thing for a long, long, *long* time, arguably since the origins of modern Christian Nationalism if not before

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@timsquirrell Also not fun personal story in this regard:

Pointing out to my mom that a Christian Nationalist TV preacher was breaking out anti-Semitic tropes (and the literally violent reaction that ensued) was why I kept a bugout bag for most of my teens and early adulthood