Why, And To What, Have Mike Pompeo and William Barr Sold Their Souls?
Mike Pompeo is a long-time, far-right Christian zealot with Islamophobe ties who led Trump’s CIA and now dubiously ‘serves’ as the authoritarian, Evangelical, Islamophobic, misogynistic, Trump-loving, Apocalypse-yearning, wholly compromised U.S. Secretary of State. Replacing Tillerson, also a disastrous Trump pick for the post, who gutted the agency and left it grossly understaffed with a skeleton crew and no one answering the phones during the greatest foreign policy emergencies since the Cold War, Pompeo promises to make his decisions based on his slavish obeisance to the ignoramus in the Oval Office, in keeping with his alliance with Putin as a faux-Orthodox Christian, in lock-step with the deluded Evangelical march toward the Apocalyptic denouement promised to ‘true believers’ in the Revelations of John.
‘Pompeo is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian who has said, “America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.” He believes politics is “a never-ending struggle . . . until the rapture.” He does not sound like the type of person one normally associates with the intelligence community. But this is Trump’s administration, and Trump has promised to shake things up. An apocalyptic Islamophobic fanatic at the head of CIA will no doubt bring change to the agency.’ (Heather Digby Parton, ‘Meet Mike Pompeo, the far-right Christian zealot with Islamophobe ties who will lead Trump’s CIA: Rep. Mike Pompeo is a Rapture-believing evangelical who sees “radical Islam” at work in small-town America,’ Salon, Jan. 13, 2017.)
Really? Yes. The Mercer/Koch/DeVos billionaire government coup has stuck these raving lunatics everywhere — into every nook and cranny. People keep looking to these operatives to instil order and sanity, but that’s like entrusting the chickens to the foxes. Even Kelly is a Fundamentalist Right-Wing Catholic, like Conway and Bannon, and no help with anything remotely sane will be forthcoming from their ranks. This is why Pompeo has consistently played down (ersatz) Orthodox Christian Putin’s interference in the election, and his attempts upon the Democratic process. The Religious Right love Putin, on this basis. (Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Brittany Pheiffer Noble, ‘Steve Bannon’s Would-Be Coalition of Christian Traditionalists: From American evangelicals to Russian Orthodox, they’re united against Islam. Is that enough to overcome all that divides them?,’ The Atlantic, March 23, 2017; Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, ‘Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia,’ The Washington Post, April 30.)
Robert and Rebekah Mercer have spent scores of millions of dollars on various right-wing candidates and institutions in recent years, including establishment organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. In the Republican primaries they backed Sen. Ted Cruz with the Keep the Promise super PAC and later the Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC. Both of those groups employed Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie, who later joined the Trump campaign alongside Steve Bannon, assigned their new roles by Rebekah Mercer. The Mercers fund the Ayn Randian ‘Objectivist’ think tank, The Atlas Network. ‘Atlas Network’ is a ‘think tank’ organized during Reagan’s Republican reign, and masquerading as ‘Reaganomics.’
The Atlas Network has heavily infiltrated a shadowy ‘Judeo-Christian’ secret society, called ‘The Family,’ that is centred in Washington D.C. but which maintains chapters throughout the world, including within the Vatican City. Also known as The Fellowship, the Family is a secretive Fundamentalist Christian association led by Douglas Coe. Like Bannon, The Family elevates nihilistic fascist leaders they liken to Jesus. The secret society’s basic philosophy is that, if a man is powerful, he can’t do wrong.
The logic informing this astonishing credo is that, if a man is powerful, he has been put into that position of power by God — like unto the flawed but elect figures of King David, Moses, or Solomon — and so it is The Family’s duty to serve them. For reasons of His own, God has anointed his ‘chosen,’ and so the organization must obey their edicts and serve powerful men with an unquestioning and un-judgmental authoritarianism, hence the slavish adherence to Trump. Like King David, Trump does apparent wrong [David desired Batsheba and so murdered her husband to possess her], but God in His inscrutable wisdom has appointed Trump to supreme worldly power, and so it is the duty of the Christian ‘Fellowship’ to support him in every way possible.
The organization fetishizes power by comparing Jesus to Lenin, Ho Chi Min, Bin Laden and others as examples of strong leaders who demand absolute loyalty and who change the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers.” (Bannon presented his ‘Judeo-Christian values’ laissez faire survivalist views to the Third International Conference on Human Dignity, in the Should Christians impose limits on wealth creation? panel, held in the Vatican, in July, 2014. His speech was praised in Catholic publications worldwide.)
The D.C. headquarters is a brownstone at 133 C Street S.E., a red-brick structure registered as a church and affiliated with the secretive Christian group. Tucked away on the edge of the Capitol complex, the house has functioned as a shield for the lawmakers who live and pray there. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford seriously compromised the privacy of the place, and the secrecy of the group, by revealing that he had confided in his C Street “Christian friends” the cross-continental affair that he had hidden from his wife. He seemed to feel that if these radically religious men had exonerated him for his moral peccadillo it represented some sort of defence.
The Mega-Churches organized through the De Vos Evangelical billionaire family’s ‘Acton Institute,’ comprise the religious, theological arm of the ideological ‘Atlas Network.’ Active around the world, they function as a sort of Judeo-Christian values-touting missionary task force, promulgating corporate infiltration in countries like Venezuela at the moment. Touting an Ayn Randian racial-elite ‘win with Jesus’ theology, they are very active in Central and South America with regard to promoting incendiary corporate-friendly regime change, which is where Trump’s otherwise incoherent recent statements re: imminent military operations in Venezuela came from. This faction is bucking to send in the De Vos scion and corporate mercenary militia warlord, Erik Prince, of Blackwater notoriety (rebranded as Academi Corp. after multiple law suits and war crime charges).
But their influence is especially noticeable in the Alt-Right Movement of the current White House and administration. The Family mounts the White House ‘Prayer Breakfasts,’ and has done so since the 1950s. The Acton Institute confederation of Mega Church pastors are those who have their hands all over the president in the Oval Office in these images. There is currently a documentary on Netflix about these people, based on the book written by an insider titled ‘The Family.’ The case of William Barr is no less insidiously nuts. Trump is William Barr’s ‘Imperfect Vessel’ in his bid to manifest the Kingdom of God for Opus Dei.
Betty Clerment, the author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America, wrote in her Catholic watchdog blog post of March 26, 2019 (titled “William Barr is Opus Dei”) that the Opus Dei Catholic Information Center’s members and leaders “continue to have an outsize impact on policy and politics. It is the conservative spiritual and intellectual center … and its influence is felt in all of Washington’s corridors of power,” as was also reported in the Washington Post. “Barr was on the board of Catholic Information Center. The priests who manage CIC are all Opus Dei members and it is generally believed that membership is required of the board of directors. [However] [y]ou will never be able to prove it, [since] Supernumeraries and Cooperators keep their identities secret.” Opus Dei is a wealthy and influential conservative group, and an Opus Dei priest once served as Barr’s speechwriter. “Barr’s five-year tenure on the board of directors for the Ethics and Public Policy Center — an anti-abortion think tank dedicated to framing public policy along religious lines — rounds out his profile.”
The Attorney General has consistently spoken in language and with talking points that are in line with the goals of both Opus Dei’s and the EPPC’s [the Ethics and Public Policy Center where Barr was director from 2004–2009] overlapping agendas. “This past December Americans United’s Rob Boston reminded us of Barr’s past theological screeds. These run the gamut from condemning public schools (they had undergone a ‘moral lobotomy’); in a 1992 address to Bill Donohue’s Catholic League, he called for the imposition of ‘God’s law’ in America. In that same address he went after contemporary supporters of the separation of church and state (‘The secularists of today are clearly fanatics’).”
On May 09, 2019, Laura Murray-Tjan published an article titled “William Barr’s Crusade For ‘Traditional Moral Order’” (Cognoscenti Journal) that included the following insights: ‘In 1995, Barr wrote that he was troubled by the “steady erosion of the Judeo-Christian moral system” in the United States, and argued that law should aid in the restoration of the “traditional moral order.” Roe v. Wade has contributed to the nation’s “permissiveness,” Barr argues, by causing fewer people to view abortion as “evil.” In short, the “character of the judiciary” is crucially important because, Barr believes, our morals track what judges say is legal. Although Barr wrote that article during the first Clinton administration, he’s been pursuing similar goals for a lifetime. Barr remains a member of the Knights of Columbus, an organization he joined in 1984, and where he served for years as a “Supreme Board Member.” One of the Knights’ primary objectives is to reduce abortion by funding pro-life pregnancy centers.
By “traditional moral order” Barr means the ultra-conservative Right-Wing Catholic playbook of supporting Republicans like the current faux-president, who will “sign whatever we put in front of him” (Mitch McConnell, 2016), including Supreme Court appointee referrals by the covert fundamentalist Christian organizations, The Heritage Society, The Atlas Society, and The Family. The judges of the highest court in the land can then be counted on to support the deregulation of any and all corporate restrictions on pollution, rampant environmental destruction-for-profit, and support of Zionism (so that we can have the Apocalypse and Armageddon with the Jews’ rebuilding of the 2nd Solomonic Temple, at which point all the Jews that don’t convert to follow Christ will all be wiped away). All this so that he may please his various ‘Masters’ — ‘God’ of course, and his handlers in Opus Dei and those radical Vatican factions also frequented by White Nationalist misogynistic anti-immigrant Fundamentalist Catholic nut-case Steve Bannon. By these means he hopes to realize the repeal of Roe vs Wade, see women’s Reproductive Rights repealed (including easy access to safe birth control options), obtain a return to “traditional, moral” control over women and women’s bodies, skip purgatory, evade Hell altogether, and be rewarded in the Afterlife in Heaven by being tapped to sit at the right hand of God the Father.
No shit. That’s the playbook. For real.
This is what Barr meant when he (when asked about the hit-job he’s performing on his own career and reputation by defending and protecting Trump’s overt criminality) said, “I am at the end of my career…Everyone dies, and I am not, you know… I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”
He meant that “immortality” comes when you die, and only when you die — when you gladly leave this ‘vale of tears’ in the best ascetic/Catholic ‘contemptus mundi’ tradition, and are given your ‘reward in Heaven’ by the so-called Grace of ‘God,’ due to having faithfully and obediently served your religious hierarchy’s male authoritarian masters and Church doctrine, most of which — if you look at it — concerns the rigorous suppression of women as ‘Daughters of Eve,’ maintaining an invasive degree of control over their bodies, and keeping them out of the priesthood until Kingdom Come. All else — America, American Constitutional Rights, the Constitution itself, Human Rights, democracy, human decency, the law (except for Church Law), his decades-long friendship with Robert Mueller — is immaterial.
Have you ever wondered why Attorney General Barr — the chief law enforcement officer of the United States — so wantonly, so flagrantly breaks the law? With such an air of uncaring, irrationally entitled, self-righteous justification?
This is why.
That’s why the Evangelical Far-Right doesn’t care about any of the Russian allegations. They have bigger fish to fry, they think, like fighting and killing Muslims, awaiting the Rapture, and looking forward to Holy War and Armageddon, which they believe is imminent. They believe they, and the American Religious Alt-Right, are serving a ‘higher agenda’ — that being God’s cause against Muslims, religious infidels, and ideological ‘Others.’ Not realizing that Islam actually IS a Judeo-Christian religion, by definition, they are happy to think of themselves and their president as working with Orthodox Russia and ‘devout’ Putin to bring about the Apocalypse so as to realize ‘God’s Kingdom on Earth’ in its aftermath, as prophesied in Revelations.
Many of the other top posts necessary for running an effective, U.S. government, representative/democratic infrastructure remain unfilled. The Trump/Bannon-appointed, climate-denying, ultra conservative, Evangelical Religious Right, nearly uniformly Republican heads of administrative agencies have, to a man and to a woman, for many vocal years espoused personal and political philosophies that are diametrically opposed to the offices they hold and the agencies they head, in a transparent attempt to destroy those very agencies and offices. The EPA, Education, Public Health, Public Housing, and pretty much all of the other critically important offices and agencies have been decimated by the appointments of incompetents, ill- or non-qualified executives, or individuals hostile to those agencies’ mission statements. The only real silver lining in all of this is the fact that Trump appointees and picks are so ill-equipped for their posts that they actually can’t actualize many of their most malignant and destructive initiatives; the ‘Muslim Ban’ has been repeatedly blocked or disallowed as un-Constitutional by courts at the city, state and federal levels, and neither the ‘Trump Care’ nor the 2018 Budget drafts boast even the most rudimentary qualifications to enable them to pass as actual legislation.
‘In each of these cases, Mr. Bannon’s preferred outcome was thwarted by rather ordinary political forces, the same ones he promised to circumvent and transcend. In a way, to believe in Mr. Bannon’s genius is to adopt the president’s belief in a sort of vulgar technocracy — the belief that the “best people” can solve any problem put in front of them, whether they have expertise in that field or not. A newspaper publisher can broker peace in the Middle East and revolutionize the government. A neurosurgeon can run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A life as a real estate mogul and celebrity businessman is adequate preparation for the presidency. But the ability to grab power does not grant the wisdom to wield it, and ungrounded grandiosity is just pretension.’ (Ezekiel Kwekua, ‘Steve Bannon Isn’t a Genius.’ New York Times, April 6, 2017.)
Joshua Green, author of “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” explained how mega-donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, in aid of establishing what they and Bannon refer to as ‘Judeo-Christian values’ for all of America, were crucial to Trump’s rise to the White House in an interview with Business Insider. Following is a transcript of a statement he made in the video. (Noah Friedman, Josh Barro and Lamar Salter, ‘How two ‘Alt-Koch’ mega-donors helped Trump become President, Business Insider, Jul. 26, 2017.)
Everybody knows about the Koch brothers and their effect on Republican politics. The Mercers are a different strain, I think of them as being kind of the “alt-Kochs.” They have very strange and sometimes bizarre conservative beliefs. Initially, they were Koch donors, but they became frustrated with the fact that Republicans didn’t win anything in 2012.
The day before Bannon left the White House, he met for five hours with Robert Mercer at his mansion, the Owl’s Nest, on Long Island. The evening of the day Bannon left the White House, Mercer met with Trump for dinner, ostensibly to assure him of his continued support. Despite this, it is not a stretch to suppose that, just as Mercer’s loyalties shifted to Trump from Cruz when it became obvious his ideological ‘bread’ would be better buttered on that side, he will readily shift over to a newer, better spokesperson for his incalculably well-funded agenda.
The Team Trump cult’s manifesto is no less bonkers than that of Scientology, Jim Jones, or the Children of God. Their and their followers’ unwitting ideology is basically Steve Bannon’s, built up out of a personal phobia, which is fuelled by a xenophobic fear of immigrants. His abiding creed, all through his panned cinematic attacks on the Occupy Movement and his founding of the Tea Party, is as sickeningly put forth in his personal bible, the 1973 French novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” an obscure and revolting narrative by French author Jean Raspail touting his racist Hate theories as ‘Judeo-Christian values.’
The reason Evangelical operatives like Pence, Kelly, Flynn, Pompeo, De Vos, Prince, the Mercers, Conway, Bannon, Sessions and others are happy to commit immoral acts and are ethically non-responsive, their eyes glazing over when journalists ask them if they support the president’s most recent atrocity, is because they are members of a fully brainwashed, behaviourally conditioned cult. The Fundamentalist Catholics in Trump’s train, like Attorney General William Barr, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (now commandant at the South Florida concentration camp for immigrant youth for profit), Steve Bannon, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh work for tips, Brownie points with St. Peter, and a get-out-of-Hell-free card to use like the Borgia pope’s corrupt indulgences at the Judgement. Their cognitive dissonance is like that of any post-traumatic Stockholm Syndrome sufferer. They are being told that they are an heroic part of bringing about a New Order, founded on ‘Judeo-Christian values,’ with a frighteningly militant, fundamentally deranged Old Testament/Book of Revelations-apocalyptic picture of what, exactly, these values are. They are being abjured weekly, from the pulpit, that Trump has been sent by God and that to fail to support him amounts to defying Him — to sinning, to falling off the wagon into eternal damnation.
They are rallied daily by televangelists and The Family — or, in Barr’s case, his Opus Dei handlers — who promise them soaring highs, amounting to the Rapture and the Second Coming, if they just stay true to Trump. It is a heady fix, and they are badly addicted. The reason they are morally incontinent is because they are effectively subsumed by a long-term, low grade fugue state, triggered by mindless, soulless, conditioned terror of Hell, from which they can only escape through a near complete abdication of individual responsibility and personal volition to a deeply sociopathic, apocalyptic world-view.
