Regarding his antisemitism, see this piece on Robertson and "New World Order" conspiracism middlebury.edu/institute/acad…
Among the many terrible things Robertson did in life was his decades of persecuting and lying about queer people. Here's @RightWingWatch's clip of Robertson claiming that gay men wear rings to infect people with AIDS in order to kill them
One of the worst things Pat Robertson regularly engaged in was his "Answers to Prayer" segment pretending to heal people through the TV.
He made millions of dollars telling elderly shut-ins that he could magically fix them if they just had enough faith. One example:
Pat Robertson was such a con man that he even pretended to heal people through their DVR.
Conveniently, these people he claimed to have healed (if they existed at all) never did video interviews or talked in public about their alleged miracles. Another clip via @RightWingWatch
Throughout his entire career and into retirement, Pat Robertson routinely promoted lies and hatred against LGBT people, whom he accused of being agents of Satan.
Pat Robertson was also one of the most important Christian media figures to mainstream the extra-biblical Rapture theology.
He constantly pushed End Times obsessions. Literally any foreign policy event was a harbinger of the Rapture:
Pat Robertson also routinely gave medical and health advice to people, despite having zero medical training whatsoever. In 2020, he claimed that you didn't have to worry about covid-19 if you had "a healthy gut."
Pat Robertson also often told his evangelical audience that Donald Trump was God's servant and that they needed to support him.
He weaponized Christianity and used it as a spear for the Republican party.
Pat Robertson constantly slandered lesbians and gays, frequently making false claims that they wanted to "destroy the whole fabric of society" by wanting to have rights.
The billionaire-class lifestyle that Pat Robertson enjoyed was financed by millions of gullible people who believed his lies, especially the faith healing ones.
This clip of a Robertson fan whose MS hasn't been prayed away is heart-breaking. He just flicks her away.
Pat Robertson frequently promoted ludicrous superstitions to his followers, including the idea that "demonic spirits attach themselves to inanimate objects." He said it wasn't a bad idea to do exorcisms on thrift store clothing, just in case.
Demons were everywhere in his mind.
Pat Robertson routinely blamed natural disasters on human wickedness or lack of faith. He would often claim to have prayed hurricanes away. In this clip, he claims that the 2010 Haiti earthquake was caused by a centuries-old pact Haitians made with Satan.
I'll end the thread here w Pat Robertson & Jerry Falwell talking about how much they hated America right after 9/11. Falwell claimed the U.S. "deserved" terrorism because we had not enacted Christian supremacism.
Thanks to @RightWingWatch, the source of most of these clips!
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As most people know, the right has evolved into a minoritarian politics that loves failure and hates the public.
But a similar thing is happening in some quarters of the political left. Social media has enabled the rise of what Masciotra calls the "fanfiction left."
The internet is filled with fanfiction, stories and books set in other people's universes where fans can have characters and stories operate the way they imagine them to, rather than their authors.
But while fanfiction stories are simple fun, fanfiction politics is harmful.
1) "Reactionary extremism" is the best term to describe the far-right attitudes that keep the Republican party in business, but a second-best term for them is "Confederate Christianity."
There are other useful terms for this, but I think they exclude too much...
2) Standard-issue conservative Christianity has nothing to do with the Confederacy per se, what we are dealing with presently is obsessed with the Confederacy, and it's why you see such obsessions over obscure monuments to traitors.
Normal conservatism shouldn't care about them.
3) What happened, however, is that as anti-government extremists affiliated with Barry Goldwater began turning their attentions toward boosting Republicans (previously, they pursued multiple parties) in the former Confederacy, it changed who they were and what they wanted.
🧵 Dominion and Fox have settled, we'll see what the details are shortly, but undoubtedly, there will be apologies, hopefully at least one on every Fox program for multiple months.
Let's review what we've learned in the meantime...
1) The lawsuit has proven that Fox's critics were right from the beginning about what it was and is.
Fox is not news. It's a political propaganda operation whose purpose is to manipulate and monetize fundamentalist Christians and uneducated people.
Fox was created by Republican media consultant Roger Ailes who never for a moment abandoned his efforts to advise and control Republican politics.
All of these efforts to use Fox as a political tool continued after Ailes was fired for sexually assaulting women.
Our conversation is centered around Tim's important new book, "Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy."
Realigners is a history of political change in the United States, starting at the very beginning. That's important because in order to change the game, you must first learn all of the rules. Far too many people today w/progressive views refuse to do this work.
1/x. Alvin Bragg working to preserve the rule of law by indicting Trump is what every single DC Republican has been yearning for secretly for the past 5 years.
They "hate him passionately" as Tucker Carlson put it. But they are almost uniformly too cowardly to stand up.
Republican elites are in the exact same position they were in following the Capitol Putsch.
"The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us," Mitch McConnell was reported to have told associates at the time.
They've hated Trump non-stop since 2015, including his pretend supporters like Josh Hawley & JD Vance.
And of course they should. The guy is a loathsome, ignorant criminal. But he's exposed Republican elites for who they are: craven, power-mad ideologues willing to do anything.