February 11, 2021: God Pranks Pastor Who Predicts Trump Will Return to White House

 

2/11/21: These are tough times for many of the most vociferous leaders of the right. That includes Jeremiah Johnson, 33, a star of the Christian prophecy movement. Like many in that milieu, Johnson had predicted a second term for the God-chosen Mr. Trump. He was one of the first to take Trump seriously in 2015. As a result, hundreds of thousands followed his predictions.

Okay. Maybe not.

 

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God is apparently pranking the poor dope.

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[They] took comfort ahead of the presidential election last fall when Mr. Johnson shared a prophetic dream of Mr. Trump stumbling while running the Boston Marathon, until two frail older women emerged from the crowd to help him over the finish line.

 

“I was wrong, I am deeply sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness,” he wrote in a detailed letter he posted online. “I would like to repent for inaccurately prophesying that Donald Trump would win a second term as the President of the United States.”

 

According to The New York Times, there are hundreds of men and women who now believe they can channel communications from God. 

Many are independent evangelists who do not lead churches or other institutions. They operate primarily online and through appearances at conferences or as guest speakers in churches, making money through book sales, donations and speaking fees. And they are part of the rising appeal of conspiracy theories in Christian settings, echoed by the popularity of QAnon among many evangelicals and a resistance to mainstream sources of information.

 

The past year has been riddled with prophecies that did not pan out. As the coronavirus swept the United States in the spring, several prophets issued public assurances that it would decline by Passover; Cindy Jacobs, one of the most influential American prophets, led a global day of prayer to “contain” the virus in March. And by the fall, so many prominent prophets had incorrectly predicted the re-election of Mr. Trump that the apologies and recriminations now constitute a crisis within the movement.

 

The backlash to Mr. Johnson’s apology was immediate. On Facebook, he reported that he received “multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry.” He also said he had lost funding from donors who accused him of being “a coward, sellout, and traitor to the Holy Spirit.”

 

Prophecy is a facet of the fast-growing charismatic Christian movement, which has an estimated half-billion followers worldwide and is characterized in part by the belief that the “gifts of the spirit,” which also include speaking in tongues and supernatural healing, continue into the present day, rather than being an artifact of biblical times.

 

Trump’s own spiritual advisor, Paula White, is one of the so-called “charismatic leaders.” Or, as this blogger would put it: “A charlatan.” 

A few weeks before the 2020 election, [the president] attended services for the third time at a “healing, prophetic” megachurch in Las Vegas, where speakers shared predictions and visions about his second term, to applause from Mr. Trump and the congregation.

 

Astrology is exploding in popularity. More than 40 percent of Americans believe in psychics, according to Pew.

 

In Crystal River, Fla., Scott Wallis had read Mr. Johnson’s prophecies on Facebook and was encouraged by them. He trusted Mr. Johnson in part, he said, because of two recent prophecies that had proven true, including one about the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the World Series. (Mr. Johnson reported the prophecy two days before the team clinched the championship.)

 

For Mr. Wallis, a pastor and prophet himself, it made perfect sense that God would be involved in the outcome of the American election, just as he is involved in every human life. “Some people, like deists, believe God created the earth but abandoned the people and left them alone,” Mr. Wallis said. “I don’t believe that.” When a friend prophesied to him in 2014 that he would soon marry, he did not even have a girlfriend, but he was married by the end of the year.

 

Jennifer Eivaz, who calls herself “the Praying Prophet,” realized in college that she could hear God’s voice in a way she could “prove out.” When she and her husband started to lead a church in Central California, she would have dreams and receive specific information about people who attended. She was careful not to scare people, she said, often opting to check in with them rather than launch into specific predictions or insights into their lives.

 

She also started recording training videos on prayer and prophecy, which caught the eye of Steve Shultz, who had founded The Elijah List and invited her to contribute. As her profile rose, she became an internationally sought-after conference speaker at events with names like the Inner Healing and Deliverance Institute and the Prophetic Wisdom & Prayer conference, where believers pay to gather for music, prophecy and inspiration.

 

Ms. Eivaz occasionally offers public prophecies about national or international events. In May 2015, she announced that the yearslong drought in California was over and that “the rains are coming back.” The message tied together the biblical prophet Elijah’s experience on Mount Carmel; Ms. Eivaz’s recent trip to Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif.; a vision of a mother bear fighting for her cubs; the California state flag; and Gov. Gavin Newsom. (The drought did not formally end until 2017, although the state experienced unusually high rainfall over the summer of 2015.)

 

 

“You’re going to have to pray for the rightful president”

 

And then, to cite just one more example, there’s Pastor Robin Bullock. Poor Bullock has been running up a string of impressively bad predictions, despite his claim that his predictions are based on signs from God. God is apparently pranking the poor dope because Bullock says he was told Joe Biden would not be elected. Then, after he was, Bullock claimed that the fact Biden stumbled while walking up the steps to Air Force One was a sign God planned to “remove” him from office.

 

Bullock has said that whereas voting in November failed – and more than sixty court cases filed, claiming the election had been stolen, were rejected – and recounts in several states showed Biden getting more votes than previously tabulated – well, there was still one sure way good Christian folk could stand the U.S. Constitution on its head.

 

In one of his regular YouTube videos Bullock explained:

 

You’re going to have to pray for the rightful president [Trump], whether he wants to walk back into this or not. You must pray that he wants to do it, because God won’t make him do anything. Is it his will? Yes. Is he the president? Yes. That’s why he could just walk right back in, and God will supernaturally move things out of the way.

 

Yeah. Who needs the Electoral College?

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Democratic House managers finish laying out their case for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump.

 

Try #2!

 

The New York Times highlighted developments:

 

One impeachment manager, Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado, talked about her experience during the attack and how as she and others ran to safety, she saw a SWAT team with guns pointed at rioters on the floor. Ms. DeGette said she wondered: “Who sent them there?”

 

She shared comments from rioters, including from a Texas real estate agent named Jennifer L. Ryan. “I thought I was following my president,” Ms. Ryan said. “I thought I was following what we were called to do. He asked us to fly there, he asked us to be there, so I was doing what he asked us to do.”

 

In another clip, Ms. Ryan said, “President Trump requested that we be in D.C. on the 6th, so this was our way of going and stopping the steal.” 

After Joseph R. Biden Jr. denounced the attack on television and made a plea to Mr. Trump to speak on national television and “demand an end to this siege,” one rioter asked, “Does he not realize President Trump called us to siege the place?”

 

Rightly so, Democrats credited the Vice President for his stand on constitutional grounds. Had Mr. Pence been willing to overturn the electoral vote, every future Vice President might be inclined to do the same. Vice President Joe Biden could have turned the same trick in 2017, for that matter.

 

(Trump fans were too clueless to grasp that fact.)

 

“Vice President Pence showed us what it means to be an American,” Mr. [Ted] Lieu said on Wednesday. “What it means to show courage. He put his country, his oath, his values and his morals above the will of one man.”

 

“During the course of the attack, the vice president never left the Capitol, remained locked down with his family — with his family — inside the building,” said Representative Stacey E. Plaskett, a manager and the Virgin Islands’ nonvoting House delegate. “Remember that, as you think about these images and sounds of the attack. The vice president, our second in command, was always at the center of it. Vice President Pence was threatened with death by the president’s supporters, because he rejected President Trump’s demand that he overturn the election.”

 

Would enough Republican have the nuts to join Democrats and convict? “The impeachment trial is dead on arrival,” Senator Rand Paul, predicted last month. So was the senator’s GOP soul, and the soul of a once-great political party.

 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE, 1/25/22: Defenders of President Trump will later insist that the people who surrounded Capitol Hill that day were no more than ordinary tourists. Trump himself will say they were hugging and kissing police.

 

The plain fact remains: Mr. Pence’s secret service detail had to take him to a secure location in the bowels of the Capitol.

 

These weren’t tourists in the building that day – and the question really boiled down to who sent them to attack.