Karoli's ongoing in-depth pursuit of the extreme right and her hard work untangling their financial connections are just a few of the reasons you come to Crooks and Liars every day. We need your help to make this happen. Please support great work like this by making a donation.
You haven't lived until you've seen a little anointing by megachurch pastors of politicians. In this short video, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are anointed by pastors at Texas megachurch New Beginnings Church. In this case, it's particularly creepy because of Papa Cruz's prophetic fantasies of what his son Rafael Edward Cruz is destined to do.
The father, speaking of his son's anointing as "king":
"There are some of you, as a matter of fact I will dare to say the majority of you, that your anointing is not an anointing as priest. It's an anointing as king. And God has given you an anointing to go to the battlefield. And what's the battlefield ? The battlefield is the marketplace. To go to the marketplace and occupy the land. To go to the marketplace and take dominion. If you remember the last time I was in this pulpit, I talked to you about Genesis chapter 1, verse 28, where God says unto Adam and Eve, "Go forth, multiply, TAKE DOMINION over all creation." And if you recall, we talked about the fact that that dominion is not just in the church. That dominion is over every area - society, education, government, economics...
"Kings who are anointed for a totally different reason than priests. Kings who are anointed to take dominion. Kings who are anointed to go to war, win the war, and bring the spoils of war to the priests. So the work of the kingdom of God could be accomplished. And I'll tell you - the king needed the blessing of the priest in order to be successful in battle... [in Deuteronomy] Before the king went to battle, the priest came and blessed the king and blessed the warriors. And the king needed the blessing of the priest in order to be successful in battle... Now, the priest also needed for the king to be successful in battle, because the priest needed the spoils of war in order to repair the temple, in order to carry out the ministry that God had entrusted him. So the king and the priest complimented each other, and they were both very, very interested in blessing one another.
Sounds like claptrap, right? Kings, priests, blah blah blah. What does this really have to do with Ted Cruz and his crazy behavior on Capitol Hill?
For Papa Cruz, this is all about a wealth transfer from your pocket to theirs.
So to pull all this logic together, God anoints priests to work in the church directly and kings to go out into the marketplace to conquer, plunder, and bring back the spoils to the church. The reason governmental regulation has to disappear from the marketplace is to make it completely available to the plunder of Christian "kings" who will accomplish the "end time transfer of wealth." Then "God's bankers" will usher in the "coming of the messiah." The government is being shut down so that God's bankers can bring Jesus back.
And here's the thing. When you get a lot of people together in a megachurch, you can do some pretty impressive things with your mission projects. You can feed thousands of people and host ESL classes and job training programs and medical clinics. And I imagine that seeing your accomplishments could give you the hubris of thinking we don't need a government at all to make our society run; our church can be the new government.
How very revealing. Papa Cruz and his son are doing this for money. For a wealth transfer from everyone to grifters who twist the Bible into something never, ever intended. They're no better than snake oil salesmen, except they're selling the snake's venom and calling it balm.
It's all just a big con to pull some money out of your pocket and slip it into theirs. Of course Ted Cruz will never stop. The combination of greed, hubris and his own narcissism make him King Grifter, but little else.
