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Bruce Wilson is Co-Founder, with journalist Frederick Clarkson, of the website Talk To Action, which covers the intersection of religion and politics.

In May 2008, Wilson posted a 3 and 1/2 minute video widely credited* in mainstream media with precipitating then-GOP presidential candidate John McCain's decision to reject his long-sought political endorsement from influential Christian evangelist, Texas megachurch pastor and Christians United For Israel founder John Hagee. The video featured an audio excerpt from a late 2005 Hagee sermon (broadcast internationally on Christian networks) in which pastor Hagee claimed that God sent Hitler and the Nazis to force Europe's Jews to Palestine. The audio excerpt from Wilson' video was broadcast widely both by domestic US media and also foreign media.

In Fall 2008, as part of a two-person research team, Wilson and researcher Rachel Tabachnick correctly identified the specific religious tendency which then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is most closely associated with, the New Apostolic Reformation. Wilson's effort was the first to publicize Palin's association with Kenyan evangelist Thomas Muthee, a professed witch hunter, and also Palin's personal friendship with Alaska evangelist Mary Glazier, who heads Sarah Palin's personal prayer group and also claims, like Muthee, to have used prayer to fight a witch. Muthee and Glazier are top leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, which purports to be the most radical change in Christianity since the Protestant Reformation. NAR leaders advocate forced wealth transfer and the the driving unbelievers from "the land."

Bruce Wilson is currently working on his first book.



*For a description of the genesis and impact of the "God Sent Hitler" video, see Eric Boehlert's 2009 book Bloggers on the Bus (pages 105 through 116), my twin accounts at Religion Dispatches and my The Personal Democracy Forum, which the LA Times noted in a June 1, 2008 post.

Relatively few national news outlets (such as Salon.com, CBS, CNN, Wired Magazine, JTA News and The Huffington Post) noted my authorship of the video, but many attributed the video to Talk To Action. The following news outlets credited Talk To Action: Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and MSNBC, The New York Times, The San Antonio Express News and Newsweek. ABC News credited "a website" while a other news outlets credited a "blogger" or, in the case of the Jerusalem Post, a left wing blogger. To the best of my knowledge, none of the news outlets which identified the source of the video acknowledged that I had been writing on John Hagee, at that point in time, for approximately a year and a half and generated enough text to fill a decent size book.

Without the advice and input of Rachel Tabachnick, who to my knowledge likely has the deepest understanding of Christian Zionism of any scholar, journalist, reporter or pundit currently alive, the video might never have come about and so the "God Sent Hitler" video, which precipitated the McCain/Hagee rift, should be properly be regarded as our co-production.

It was early in May 2008 that Tabachnick and I began what has become fruitful research partnership, and since that time we have collaboratively explored the trajectory of Christian Zionism, traced its origins, and begun to map out a new understanding of the contemporary American and world Christian right which examines how a parallel stream of charismatic Christianity has largely overwhelmed the influence of traditional fundamentalism and is increasingly changing the face of Christianity on a worldwide basis.

    Back in 2012-2014 I did a lot of writing and research on The Gathering, the yearly meeting of elite evangelical right philanthropists who collectively distribute upwards of $1 billion dollars a year in grants and function as the funding wing of The Fellowship, which hosts the National Prayer Breakfast.

    My research was based, at least initially, on an audio archive of talks at The Gathering which went back to 1996. That archive, along with a trove of The Gathering newsletters back to '96, used to be publicly available at the official website of The Gathering. Around 2013 or so, most of that archival material vanished. Fortunately, I had harvested it and have since made it available to select researchers.

    (27 comments)
    For readers clicking on the first link in Paul Rosenberg's Salon.com interview with Bruce Wilson, here is a link to my recent report (first published here at Talk To Action on June 23rd) concerning Donald Trump's recent meeting with William S. Lind. Below is an image from my report, which shows Trump with Lind and highlights some of the especially disturbing aspects. In the body of this short introduction are the first several paragraphs of my extended report, titled "Trump Meets Man Who Inspired 2011 Terror Attack Deadlier Than Orlando Shooting".

    For relevant, detailed academic writing concerning William S. Lind and his theory of Fourth Generation Warfare, see this 95-page monograph by Sociologist and retired U.S. Army intelligence analyst Dr. James Scaminaci, whose extensive writing on this and related matters can be accessed at https://independent.academia.edu/JamesScaminaci.

    (6 comments)
    "It appears that the shooter was inspired by various extremist information that was disseminated over the internet" -- President Barack Obama, June 13, 2016, referring to America's biggest mass shooting in history, in Orlando, Florida on June 12, 2016.
    A photo, attached to an opinion column dated April 16, 2016 that was published on a political website, shows Donald Trump standing with an even taller, neatly dressed, unsmiling man with a strangely intense gaze. Trump is smiling, and, according to the author, he holds the man's 2009 book. The book contains a conspiracy theory -- about an alleged Marxist plot behind "political correctness" -- which provoked a 2011 terrorist attack that killed and wounded almost 400 people.

    In early Spring 2016, Donald Trump appears to have met a man whose 2009 book anticipated most of Donald Trump's key campaign positions. That man has disseminated over the Internet "extremist information" that inspired an even deadlier massacre than the 2016 Orlando, Florida mass shooting -- a meticulously planned 2011 neo-Nazi terrorist attack which killed 77, wounded 319, and shook Europe, an attack intended as a "marketing method" to promote that man's conspiracy theory concerning an alleged plot behind "political correctness", said to have been launched nearly a century ago by Jewish Marxists, to destroy America and Western Christian civilization.

    That man has suggested his ideas on non-traditional "Fourth Generation" warfare (4GW) may have inspired the strategy behind al-Qaeda's 2001 terrorist attacks on America.

    He has also provided, according to sociologist and authority on the Tea Party and the American militia movement Dr. James Scaminaci, the "blueprint for the development of the patriot militia movement" which hopes to one day overthrow federal authority; and in a key 1989 article that may have inspired al-Qaeda, he forecast that "The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil." In 2014, he published a novel depicting such a war, that starts in 2020, in which white Christian militias overthrow the federal government and carry out the ethnic cleansing of American cities.

    (11 comments)
    On the same day in 2011 during which he single-handedly blew up and shot to death 77 Norwegian citizens (mostly teenagers) and injured an additional 319 people -- with a truck bomb and automatic weapons firing hollow point bullets designed to inflict maximum tissue damage -- neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik electronically distributed a 1518 page manifesto titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence that called for the deportation of Muslims from Europe and identified - as the arch-enemies of Western and Christian civilization - two forces: "cultural Marxism" and Islam.
    (20 comments)
    Even as Donald Trump seeks to tack to the center, and leave behind his earlier, wildly controversial statements on Hispanics and Muslims, mounting evidence concerning the Trump campaign's ties to racist white nationalists threatens to undermine Trump's re-branding effort.

    Media has recently showcased a Trump campaign link to a director of the American Freedom Party (AFP), William D. Johnson, whom the Trump effort had picked as a delegate in the upcoming California primary. Johnson's AFP has run racist pro-Trump robocalls in at least six primary and caucus states.

    But the Trump for president effort has more direct, high-level contact with another AFP director, James Edwards - whom the Trump campaign vetted for VIP press credentials in late February. Edwards then broadcast his Political Cesspool radio show live from a Trump rally in Memphis. On March 1, 2016, Edwards co-hosted a radio show featuring a 20-minute appearance by Donald Trump Jr.

    On the show, Edwards suggested that the Trump, Jr. radio show appearance could light up his white nationalist movement "like Napalm on a grassroots blaze".

    (9 comments)
    Since 2013 (and with growing interest, especially since Ted Cruz mounted his bid for the presidency), various authors have sought to address Cruz' ties to the diffuse but widespread movement known as Dominionism.

    But most of these various treatments seem to share common flaws - they typically focus on a few details but miss the extensive range of evidence tying Ted Cruz and his campaign to dominionism and its advocates. They also typically neglect to answer an obvious question - why is dominionism a bad thing ? Isn't it just a healthy expression of Christian engagement in the democratic process ?

    In the piece below, I've tried to address those shortcomings and also contextualize dominionism a bit.

    (8 comments)
    This is a transcript, of pastor Larry Huch and Rafael Cruz, father of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, from an appearance Rafael Cruz made at the Irving, Texas New Beginnings megachurch on August 26, 2012.

    First, Huch and Cruz discuss Ted Cruz as one of the "anointed" who will bring about a "great wealth transfer" from the "wicked" to the "righteous" (see transcript). Towards the end of the ceremony, Huch prophesies to Rafael Cruz that Ted Cruz, who had just won his senate seat, was destined for greater things. One day, Huch prophesied, Ted Cruz would be Vice President or a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

    (7 comments)
    [welcome, Thom Hartmann Show fans, here is a short introduction to my past coverage on Ted Cruz and the dominionist Christian right]

    Did you known that Ted Cruz and his father helped establish the presidencies, respectively, of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan ? Today, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz' announcement of his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination renews the relevance of reporting I did on Cruz in mid-2013. Senator Cruz' announcement has triggered an eruption, from the America left, of mockery and attacks on Cruz, for a wide array of reasons.

    But there are more important stories to be told - on Cruz' longstanding ties to the elite leadership of the religious right and Christian right that has included a friendship, tracing back to the 1990s, with one of the movement's top architects who helped launch America's culture wars, and concerning the role of Ted Cruz and his father Rafael Cruz, in giving America George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

    (5 comments)




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