I've been reading Reddit.com a lot lately - it's a great aggregation site (news, and pretty much everything else under the sun) with unpredictable, quirky content and a young-ish, smart reader base.
Today I noticed a heavily recommended submission attacking attacking the Huffington Post for (allegedly) not being a real news site. Then I noticed a less-well recommended submission with the title of Has the Huffington Post actually ever broken a story?
Well, Huffpo sure has.
In May 2008, a wrote a post titled
Audio Recording of McCain's Political Endorser John Hagee Preaching Jews Are Cursed and Subhuman. It contained audio I'd found from a 2005 sermon (which I initially dated as "late 1990's" to be on the very conservative side) in which Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee, whose political endorsement presidential candidate John McCain had been after "like a dog in heat" (as I put it in a March 2008 post) declared that "God sent Hitler... Hitler was a hunter."
About a week later, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post noticed my post and covered it, in a story prominent on the Huffington Post's front page. From there Keith Olbermann's Countdown picked it up, and pretty soon scandalous audio, from a 2005 sermon, had seriously damaged presidential candidate John McCain's already shaky relationship with the evangelical right, his key base of electoral support.
[below: Keith Olbermann, on Countdown, covers "God sent Hitler."
Within 48 hours of when Olbermann showcased my audio clip of John Hagee bellowing about how God had sent Hitler, a "hunter", to chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine, the clip was being played on news stations worldwide. And, within about 48 hours, John McCain had a national press conference in which he rejected his endorsement from Hagee and denounced pastor Hagee's statement.
This was a blow to the McCain campaign, because in the 2000 election GOP primaries John McCain had repeatedly attacked evangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agent of intolerance." McCain, of course, lost to George W. Bush, who had close ties (or better) with American right wing evangelicals.
McCain began advance work patching things up with Robertson, Falwell and the evangelical right somewhere around 2005, and it took McCain a few years to get to Hagee, who had by 2008 emerged as a major evangelical kingmaker. The McCain-Hagee rift was a blow to McCain's relationship with a major chunk of his GOP electoral base, and it arguably help tilt his campaign advisers towards their choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP running mate pick. That, in turn both electrified McCain's evangelical base and scored away independent and moderate voters. The rest is history.
Below is my writeup of the affair, which I did for my user profile on this website.
"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.
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.
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