WHEN GOD LAUGHS, IT'S NOT FUNNY'
Abramsky, Sasha
'When God Laughs, It's Not Funny' The U.S. Taxpayers Party prepares for doomsday BY SASHA ABRAMSKY Monty Python's Flying Circus used to run a skit introduced by two newscasters entitled, "And...
...Now he spends most of his time back in the United States, giving speeches on his pet conspiracy theory: radical Islam's attempt to subvert the West...
...Born in New York, Lipkin moved to Israel twenty-eight years ago...
...Are Clinton and Dole a part of this...
...NOUN...
...This preacher was still replaying the Scopes trial...
...There is coming a time when He who sits in the Heavens shall laugh...
...I felt I'd landed in the midst of this skit when I attended the convention of the U.S...
...he was about to hitchhike back, convinced that the end was nigh...
...Prepare...
...There were many fine products of home-schooling who made their way through the crowd, distributing true-blue Howard Phillips For President banners and selling plastic lapel flags...
...they were an array of full-time Christian fundamentalists...
...Prepare for victory...
...Demanding "freedom under God, not freedom from God," Phillips said abortionists should face "the same death penalty which they have imposed on countless innocents...
...Like his friend Buchanan, Phillips is a former Nixon aide, and it was during the run-up to the 1992 election that Phillips decided to launch the U.S...
...Who are those people...
...While Rushdoony gave an academic-style lecture, Dennis Peacocke of the Strategic Christian Services held forth at full volume...
...Many believed that God and Satan are marshaling their armies for a final confrontation that will either usher in the millennium or end with Armageddon...
...I'm working for a Christian America which will support Israel...
...He was forced to walk because, not believing in paper money, he had no means of buying a ticket to San Diego...
...Sasha Abramsky is a freelance writer in New York City...
...The convention began the day the GOP shindig in San Diego ended...
...One woman from Bakersfield, who wished to remain anonymous, detailed the satanic, pedophilic background of one of her local Republican officials...
...In my book, Is Fanatic Islam a Global Threat?, I say the blowing up of the Oklahoma building was an Islamic plot...
...Larry Pratt, head of the Gun Owners of America, and a man who routinely berates the National Rifle Association for being too moderate, informed the delegates that the current crisis facing America is every bit as serious as the one during the War of Independence...
...Like many of the speakers, Peacocke claimed the mantle of the persecuted...
...We are, as it were, the next set of Jews in this fascist situation...
...The New World Order is a very, very organized network...
...And in the area outside the ballroom, where delegates milled between speeches, an old man with a yellow beard confided that a neighbor had been told by God that unless he...
...For them, the devil's work was everywhere to behold, and they were eager to accept the existence of various diabolical plots, no matter how fanciful...
...which outlines why Hillary Rodham Clinton is a satanist...
...And then "Free-dom...
...in his 900-page book...
...Conventioneers snapped up the newsletter of self-proclaimed intelligence expert Don McAlvany...
...Taxpayers Party prepares for doomsday BY SASHA ABRAMSKY Monty Python's Flying Circus used to run a skit introduced by two newscasters entitled, "And Now for Something Completely Different...
...The July convention brought together 500 people—including delegates from all fifty states and the District of Columbia— for four days of theocratic vitriol and a hodge-podge of conspiracy theories not much in evidence since the heyday of John Birch...
...For that reason, Topham had walked all the way from Salt Lake City to claim his ordained office...
...Every so often, when a speaker called for the IRS to be abolished, or America to withdraw from the United Nations, the audience went wild...
...Theirs was a world view dominated by an omnipotent, omnipresent God, and by the equally real physical presence of a Great Satan...
...members of the audience shouted out...
...It claims about 12,000 members...
...NO U.N...
...they bellowed...
...Lawrence Rey Topham...
...Former Congressman Bill Dannemeyer, Republican from California, set the tone by calling for the impeachment of the six Supreme Court Justices who had ruled Colorado's homophobic Amendment Two to be unconstitutional...
...Taxpayers Party traces its modern roots back to a book by new-right guru Richard Viguerie, The Establishment Versus The People, published in 1983...
...Taxpayers Party convention...
...By the time of its 1996 convention, the party had won ballot status in twenty-three states and was shooting for eight or nine more...
...It's time for every Christian parent to get their children out of the government schools...
...During the Pledge of Allegiance and "The Star-Spangled Banner," a self-proclaimed "hard-right" delegate from Arkansas whispered to me that Jewish bankers were controlling the world, that he wasn't at all sure the Holocaust took place, that slavery "might not have been that bad," and that the KKK members he'd been hanging around with lately had "some of the finest families" one could hope to meet...
...This is the same man who...
...Children should not be taught that humans are "slime balls," but should learn that they are created in the image of God, he said...
...Taxpayers Party, the nation's premier party of the right...
...Rush-doony, head of the Biblical-literalist Chalcedon Institute, explained how modern-day America bore striking similarities to the morally corrupt Roman Empire in the days before the Barbarian hordes swept away the emperors...
...Free-dom...
...Other people wandered through the hall, proudly displaying T-shirts reading Gun Control-Mind Control and Intolerance Is a Beautiful Thing...
...I think Clinton and Dole are both part of the New World Order, the old boys' club that controls the world...
...Phillips promptly reaffirmed the party's commitment to seeking the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions...
...I ask...
...When I got to him...
...Prepare for the collapse of the godless two-party system that has become nothing more than slaveholders...
...It advocated defunding liberal organizations, ending participation in the United Nations, abolishing the federal income tax, balancing the budget, and passing a right-to-life amendment...
...But the star speakers were not the onetime politicians...
...As one, his followers rose and screamed out, "How-ard...
...The humanists are aborting their children or sending them to public schools to become pagans and have premarital sex," said Blumenfeld...
...This is the same man who once wrote, "Democracy is the great love of the cowards and failures of life...
...That's right...
...the leader of Operation Rescue screamed...
...It's part of the sabotaging of America," the Orthodox Jew explains...
...The forty-seven-year-old Lipkin was one of the more restrained voices at the U.S...
...Now, many of its suggestions have been adopted by the Republican Party as well as the U.S...
...Sam Blumenfeld, one of the religious right's foremost education gurus, also roused the crowd...
...Free-dom...
...became the President, the apocalypse would descend...
...Those people who would work with the Muslims and the petrodollar would destroy Israel...
...Lord Sandwich was a flagrant homosexual, and he was also Lord of the Admiralty...
...Schools that drug children, cripple their intellect, and deprive them of knowledge of God deserve to be destroyed...
...NO U.N...
...And he was more interested in his own peccadilloes than in maintaining the Navy...
...Just across the bay, in the huge Hotel Del Coronado, the militant anti-abortion leader Randall Terry addressed the party...
...He says he was a senior editor and translator in the Israeli government press office during Yitzhak Shamir's premiership...
...How-ard...
...This is the party that had tried to recruit Pat Buchanan as its standard-bearer, but Buchanan stayed with the Republicans...
...This manifesto called for the abolition of the alphabet agencies—the IRS, FDA, EPA, and so on...
...On August 15, while the Republican delegates prepared for Bob Dole's big speech, Avi Lipkin sat in the Hotel Del Coronado's Pembroke Room and distributed his literature...
...Then Pratt elaborated on his theory of history: The colonists' victory, he announced, was due more to chance than skill...
...And when God laughs, it's not funny...
...The crowd erupted, just as it did several hours later when it nominated Howard Phillips, the founder of the U.S...
...He concluded his acceptance speech by calling on his followers to be "faithful stewards of God's sovereignty, fierce warriors for God's justice, and fearless exponents of God's truth...
...Righteous men and women will be left standing on the heap of rubble that the slaveholders are making this country...
...The One World Government...
...He has people killed," she whispered...
...That question is the foundation of all politics...
...At the time, it was dismissed as a rant from the lunatic fringe...
...An absurd mock news report would follow...
...Howard...
...Arizona's former governor Evan Mecham, who refused to acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a public holiday, addressed the audience on the crisis facing American freedom-lovers...
...Taxpayers Party, to be its candidate for the Presidency...
...The fire and brimstone of fundamentalist Christianity seemed to underlie the sentiments of the delegates...
...The Institutes of Biblical Law, called for the restoration of an Old Testament social order that would stone to death adulterers, atheists, homosexuals, and disrespectful children, and would create a slave class made up of those criminals whose offenses did not warrant death...
Vol. 60 • October 1996 • No. 10
