I paid the filing fees for each race. I had no campaign committee, no campaign workers, no vote for me signs in people’s front yards, no newspaper, radio or television advertising. I did not make house calls to meet my constituents.
I felt dragooned into something I detested. I felt it was egotistical and immoral to presume to run for public office. I felt anyone who actually wanted to hold public office was insane and should not be allowed to run. I felt political parties, PACs, campaign contributions, etc. should be outlawed. I felt the onus should be on the voters to dragoon candidates for public office via write in voting.
I participated in candidate forums, where I consistently was against the grain, likewise in media interviews and on my blogs, goodmoorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com, and after they went on to the cyber afterlife, afoolsworknevernends.blogspot.com, about half of which passed on to cyber afterlife.
There never was a candidate for public office like me in the Florida Keys, because no other candidate had angels known in the Bible telling them to run if they knew what was good for them. No other candidates had been turned very which way but loose and upside down and stood before endless mirrors by angels known in the Bible. No others candidates lived each day and night with this part of Proverbs 9:10 ever in their gut, heart, mind and soul:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Dreams last night had me down in Key West talking to Father Stephen Braddock, a Catholic Priest who once ran a security company in New York City, and Donald Trump was one of his company’s clients. In Key West, Steve was fully involved in trying to help homeless people turn their lives around. He ran Florida Keys Outreach Coalition’s halfway houses.
In 2003, I ran ran out of money again and was living in a tent in the wetlands near the Key West airport. I contracted MRSA, a ruthless, life-threatening, antibiotics resistant flesh-eating staphylococcus bacteria that lives in Key West and Florida Keys waters. Near death, I went to the entry level FKOC halfway house and was admitted.
The next day, I was in the city’s hospital having emergency surgery to carve two awful MRSA abscesses out of my groin and one out of my butt. I was released the next afternoon and returned to the FKOC shelter. The next day, Steve Braddock and Key West City Commissioner Bill Verge asked me if I would run for mayor of Key West? They said they would pay my filing fee.
They had heard me speak many times at city commission meetings about how the city treated its homeless people, and about other things on the city commission meeting printed agenda. They said they liked what I said.
I told Steve and Bill that I would have to sleep on it. After sleeping on it, I told Steve that I was told in a dream that he should run for major. He said he had too much on his plate. I said I needed to sleep on it again. I was told in a dream to accept Steve and Bill’s offer, and I told Steve that. They gave me money for the filing fee and I filed with the local election office.
That night in my sleep, I was told in a dream, “If you know what's good for you, you will do everything you can to get Jimmy Weekly reelected.” Jimmy was the incumbent mayor. He had pissed off some people and it was thought he might not be reelected. However, he was sympathetic to homeless peoples' plight.
Later that day, I rode my bicycle through a city park where there was a seafood festival in progress and Jimmy was there and told him what I had dreamed and for him to be prepared for me breaking that news.
A few days later, I attended the first candidate forum, hosted by the Key West Business Guild, which was started by the city’s LBGTQ community, which was not happy with Jimmy, even though he had gone to Washington, D.C. to participate in a LBGTQ march.
The first candidate to arrive at the forum, I was asked to draw a straw to see when I would get to introduce myself. I drew the longest straw, meaning I got to go first.
When the forum moderator introduced me and handed me a microphone, I looked at the audience and said I detest politics and am running because God told me in a dream to run, and what are you all thinking, talking about not voting for Jimmy Weekly, who has been so supportive of your community? Jimmy knows he made some mistakes, and he made adjustments, and you should vote for him.
When the forum ended, a lot of people in the audience introduced themselves to me and thanked me for what I had said.
The LBGTQ community made up about 20 percent of Key West's voting population. The election was over, but it took a few more candidate forums before the voters said it was over.
By then, I was pretty sure Steve Braddock was gay. He and Bill Verge did not seem thrilled with how I went about it, but through several terms as Mayor, and after he term-limited out, as a city commissioner, Jimmy Weekly remained sympathetic to the city’s homeless people, while the city government and city police and city residents grew increasing hostile toward the city’s homeless people, as they worshipped their homeless savior Jesus Christ.
Yesterday, I saw on CNN that former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the 70-year-old son of Democrat President John F. Kennedy’s Democrat brother Robert F. Kennedy, running this year as an Independent candidate, questioned whether the January 6, 2020 riot at the national Capitol was an insurrection, and said, if elected, he will have that investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice.
I thought the only investigation the stupid fuck had to do was google photos of the white mob outside and inside the national Capitol, and watch easily googled videos of same- res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.
That was discussed in the Reddit r/politics forum yesterday. Here are some of the early comments before video gamers arrived and wandered all over everywhere.
Smaynard6000The more this guy appeals to Trump voters, the more I'm happy to see him stick around
AxlLight9h
How does it matter? As long as he's not siphoning democratic votes, he can say whatever he wants and Republicans can play around spinning him however they want.
But regardless, Democrats once again show they're bad at strategy with calling this guy to quit when he's doing us a world of favor. RFK, go crazier please, launch some gold shoes or something, make some playing cards, hug a flag.
jpk195
There's no clearer line in the sand between Trump's base and the rest of us than Jan. 6th. He's on the side that can only hurt Trump, and hope he stays there.Nukesnipe
It's so fucking funny to me that he was obviously pushed as a Biden spoiler but he's genuinely such a fucking stupid wackjob that he ended up as a Trump spoiler instead.
He was supposed to spoil votes for Biden, watching this shit blow up in the republican’s faces is too bloody good
Puzzled-Drop (me)
Many flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
I think it was in 2016 that two American journalists working for the British-based Guardian newspaper interviewed me and my homeless girlfriend Kari Dangler in person about homeless politics in Key West. When the Guardians' journalists met with me again, they said the people running Key West's homeless shelter declined to speak further with them after learning they already had interviewed me and my homeless girlfriend. Their ensuing article in the Guardian did not mention that.
Here’s a link to The Redneck Mystic Lawyer podcast about Kari, which has had over 500,000 complete watches worldwide:
Homeless outlaw cowgirl shaman with the blues saved Key West from Hurricane Irma obliteration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ0Dc03eksU&t=971s
The Guardian did a somewhat better job with an article in my Apple newsfeed this morning, perhaps because what’s at stake is a helluva lot more important than how Key West treats homeless people?
I added in the 2nd Trump Jesus photo and the photos of Trump with his good friend woman trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and of Trump with his good friends Bill and Hillary Clinton, and of Trump bowing to a Saudi prince who had maybe 100 wives and had a Saudi journalist sawed up into little pieces.
Below this lengthy article are my parting thoughts, for today.
THE GUARDIAN
Christian nationalists embrace Trump as their savior – will they be his?
Christians opposed to infidelity and immorality have embraced a thrice-married man who can’t name a single Bible verse
A thrice-married man who refers to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, was apparently unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness was always an unlikely hero for the most conservative Christians in the US.But in both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump resoundingly won the vote of white evangelicals. Now, with Trump having almost certainly secured the Republican nomination for 2024 and eyeing a return to the White House, his campaign is doubling down on religious imagery, securing the evangelical base and signaling sympathies with Christian nationalism.Indeed, the former US president’s relationship with the religious right has deepened so much that Trump is now comfortable with comparing himself to their messiah.
“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said: ‘I need a caretaker,’” booms a video that Trump shared on his Truth Social account, and that has been played at some of his rallies.
“So God gave us Trump.”
The video, made by Dilley Meme Team, a group of Trump supporters, continues:
“God said: ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay up past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.’ So God made Trump.”
To some, it is a baffling pairing. Evangelicals, who typically adhere to a literal reading of the Bible and, theoretically, follow a strict code that opposes infidelity, immorality and abortion and is critical of same-sex relationships, seem an odd match-up with a man like Trump.
But the pairing has had benefits for both parties: Trump got elected in 2016, and evangelicals got a conservative supreme court that has already overturned the Roe v Wade ruling, which enshrined a constitutional right to abortion.
Now, Trump is believing the hype he’s received from some on the religious right: that he has been chosen, or anointed, by God himself.
He has increasingly begun to lean into the rightwing social conservatism that white evangelicals – who make up 14% of Americans – favor. That was clear in February, when Trump spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters convention (NRBC), a gathering of the kind of conservative Christians who lead mega-churches, host televangelist shows and claim to receive prophecies from God.
Trump said in that address that there was an “anti-Christian bias” in the US, and promised that he would create a taskforce to investigate “discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America”.
While Trump easily won the white evangelical vote in his previous two presidential elections, Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University whose research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics, said this election cycle sees him leaning even further into this appeal.
Du Mez said his speech at the NRBC was “a new level we haven’t often seen”.
“He was promising [the evangelical audience] power, but in much more explicit terms,” she said. “And he was really leaning into this language of culture wars, of religious wars: that he was going to protect their interests and protect their power against the enemies – against fellow Americans, against liberals, against the enemies who were trying to persecute Christians, who were persecuting Christians.”
The “God made Trump” video is not the only example of Trump seeing himself as a deity. On 25 March, Trump said on his Truth Social account that he had received the following message from a supporter:
“It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”
It follows Trump sharing a fake court sketch in late 2023, published during Trump’s fraud trial in New York, which shows him seated beside Jesus Christ.
About 85% of white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump in 2020, Pew Research found, as did 81% of those who attend less frequently.
Securing, and adding to, that vote could be key to a Trump victory. Du Mez pointed to research by the Public Religion Research Institute that shows how crucial the evangelical vote is in swing states. Evangelicals make up about a quarter of residents in Georgia and North Carolina, 16% of the population in Pennsylvania and about 12% of voters in Wisconsin.
…so the Guardian won’t cover this election like a reality show. With so much at stake, support fiercely independent, reader-funded journalism – it only takes a minute.
Biden beat Trump in all but North Carolina in 2020. Given the lack of enthusiasm for both candidates, both men are desperate to win every possible vote in what is expected to be a tight election.
It helps Trump that evangelicals feel under attack. Since 2015, he has told his supporters that they are looked down on by liberal elites, and that their rights are threatened. That same message resonates with some religious voters, Du Mez said, who could also resent the mockery of Trump’s imagining himself as Jesus Christ.
“It only reinforces the scripts that they’ve been handed, which is that the left is out to get you and they are mocking and they have no respect for your faith,” Du Mez said.
While Trump has long enjoyed popularity among evangelicals, and has been courted by leaders including televangelists and pastors at mega-churches, this is the first election cycle in which he has been confident enough to compare himself to Jesus Christ. So, what’s changed?
Trump “has been getting this message from these folks for years now”, said Matthew D Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, recalling the sight of evangelical leaders praying over Trump during his time in office.
The thirst for Trump as a biblical figure can be traced to the unique way he ascended to become an evangelical favorite, Taylor said: when he launched his campaign in June 2015, few in “respectable evangelical circles” wanted anything to do with the brash, twice-divorced, self-proclaimed billionaire.
It made sense. This was a man who, during his first presidential campaign, memorably misnamed the body of Christ, and while at church put cash in a plate that is meant to hold the communion. During his early forays into religious outreach, Trump was asked to name his favorite verse in the Bible, and couldn’t name one – asked again three weeks later, he named one that doesn’t exist.
He enlisted Paula White as his spiritual adviser, and charged her with bringing the evangelical elites onboard. The problem was that White, herself a thrice-married multimillionaire who preaches the idea that God will bestow wealth on his followers, didn’t move in those circles.
Taylor noted that White’s allies were among fellow prosperity gospel preachers and “new apostolic reformation leaders” – a movement that seeks to inject Christianity into politics, the judiciary, the media and business.
“These folks were really on the margins not only of American Christianity, but of American evangelicals. They were seen as kind of lowbrow and prosperity gospel types and televangelists. They were seen as kind of a laughable sector of evangelicalism in respectable evangelical circles,” Taylor said.
As Trump won primary elections in state after state, the respectable evangelicals were able to overcome their moral objections to him being the Republican candidate.
But by this point, Trump’s main advisers were cemented as the type of religious leaders once scoffed at by the religious elites. Trump continued to rely on the Paula Whites of this world, and the more far-out religious leaders won influence – and are set to have even more if he wins in 2024.
“Those are the type of people I think Trump would be bringing in to help shape policy, help shape identity,” Taylor said.
“These aren’t the kind of people who are policy wonks, but there are Christian nationalists who have very clear agenda items, especially on topics like abortion, on topics like support for Israel, on topics like religious freedom, on topics such as LGBTQ +rights.
“Trump has surrounded himself and has brought into his White House advisers echelons some very, very extreme Christian voices. And he seems to be at the very least playing footsie with them, if not overtly endorsing some of their ideas.”
This bodes poorly for a Trump second term, when abortion rights, the rights of LGBTQ+ people and even the right to access IVF treatment could come under attack.
There are also warning signs, Taylor said, should Trump again refuse to concede the election – and if his supporters once more interpret his rhetoric as a call to attack the home of US democracy.
Trump’s religious supporters were among those at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Taylor said he was seeing “more and more of this cross-pollination between far-right and even overtly racist elements and these spiritual warriors”.
“When you are mixing white nationalism and neo-Nazi ideas with very heavy religious fervor and processes, that is a very, very dangerous mix,” Taylor said.“Because it’s encouraging more and more people to do extraordinary things, if they feel like their country is slipping away from them.”
The Brits ought to know, since once upon a time, Americans did extraordinary things to rid themselves of their brutal British king.
What I don’t get is why THE GUARDIAN didn’t hone in on Ivana Trump told VANITY FAIR that when she was married to Donald, he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed, and sometimes he read it at night.
What I don’t get is how any God-fearing American supports Donald Trump.
Or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Or Joe Biden, who helped Israel destroy Gaza.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
