There’s a must-read piece about Christian rocker and gay-bashing minister, Bradlee Dean posted at The Awl. Dean is a member of the group, Junkyard Messiah, a Christian Constitutionalist radio host and the founder of “You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International,” an anti-homosexual “ministry” who have been allowed to take their hateful bullshit into 330 classrooms around the country.

This guy even wrote a book called My War (ring any bells?) and has had his “ministry” not only endorsed, but prayed for, by Rep. Michele Bachmann, one of the dumbest people ever to hold national elected office in this country. Listen here:
 

 
My War is also the title of a documentary film about YCRBUCHI and Dean, which will be premiering Thursday, October 21, in Plymouth, Minnesota.

Here’s one excerpt from piece, where the author, Abe Sauer, asks The Awl’s readers if they can tell the difference between Dean’s supposedly Christian utterings and things Hitler said. Betcha can’t tell them apart. Think about the 330 classrooms full of impressionable children being spoon-fed this garbage by someone they might perceive as an authority figure. No, of course there would be no connection between the propagation of such quasi-fascist garbage and the recent wave of gay bullying and suicides:

It’s understandable that the Bradlee-Adolf comparison might be dismissed as a lark, a Godwin’s Nazi Law meta-enablement.

So take the below selection of Bradlee Dean and Adolf Hitler quotes and try to correctly attribute them:

1) It’s time for everyone in this country to return to God and engage in His battles to take back the land that was entrusted to us.
2) We want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess.
3) It’s time to turn back to the One who gave us this blessed nation.
4) We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit.
5) It is plain to see that the judgments of God are upon our country.
6) How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.
7) Government is to be the force of law, ruling in the positive, by bringing a negative to crime. The whole purpose of government is to maintain peace in the land with righteous judgment.
8) My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers,
9) As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.
10) Christian men and women, in this fight for right you are fighting for your nation, for your liberties, your happiness, and your peace; for unless Christ and His commandments are maintained, these will most certainly be destroyed
11) I felt condemned at every step that I took, and at times, I would even try to ignore my own conscience because it was so overwhelming.
12) In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders.
13) The Jews, who heard and rejected Christ, were destroyed by Titus, and Vespasian his father.
14) They play the victim when they are, in fact, the predator.
15) All at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
16) In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections.
17) They know homosexuality is an abomination.

1 Dean; 2 Hitler; 3 Dean; 4 Hitler; 5 Dean; 6 Hitler; 7 Dean; 8 Hitler; 9 Hitler; 10 Dean; 11 Dean; 12 Hitler; 13 Dean; 14 Dean; 15 Hitler; 16 Hitler; 17 Dean

This doesn’t mean Bradlee Dean is just like Hitler. That impossible. Hitler didn’t have children. Dean has three.

Here’s a particularly ridiculous YCRBUCHI video featuring Dean’s radio compadre, Jake McMillian. Quoting Abe Sauer, writing at The Awl again: Take Hitler’s comment on Jews as criminals and his reasoning that “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord” and compare it to the following You Can Run But You Can’t Hide Ministry video reasoning on homosexuals.
 

 
Note that this dufus never lets anyone else get a word in edgewise, even when they are seen talking on camera! McMillian doesn’t have much of a career on-camera ahead of him, does he?

Read all of ‘My War’: Bradlee Dean’s Popular Struggle Against Those Criminal, Child-Molesting Gays (The Awl)

You can also follow Bradlee Dean’s “antics” at The Dump Bachmann Blog

Byron Williams prison mug shot.
 
“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.” - Byron Williams

Chilling, must-read article from Media Matters about the toxic influence paranoid wingnuts like Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck have on gullible, unstable—and potentially violent—people:

Byron Williams, a 45-year-old ex-felon, exploded onto the national stage in the early morning hours of July 18.

According to a police investigation, Williams opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers who had stopped him on an Oakland freeway for driving erratically. For 12 frantic minutes, Williams traded shots with the police, employing three firearms and a small arsenal of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds fired from a .308-caliber rifle.

When the smoke cleared, Williams surrendered; the ballistic body armor he was wearing had saved his life. Miraculously, only two of the 10 CHP officers involved in the shootout were injured.

In an affidavit, an Oakland police investigator reported that during an interview at the hospital, Williams “stated that his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”

Fifteen years after militia-movement-inspired bombers killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City federal building, right-wing domestic terror plots are a fact of life in America. Since 2008, violent extremists—many of whom subscribe to the hate speech and conspiratorial fantasies of the conservative media—have murdered churchgoers in Knoxville, police officers in Pittsburgh, and an abortion provider in Wichita.

Conspiracy theory-fueled extremism has long been a reaction to progressive government in the United States. Half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that right-wing thought had come to be dominated by the belief that Communist agents had infiltrated all levels of American government and society. The right, he explained, had identified a “sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.”

In a 2009 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the anti-government militia movement—which had risen to prominence during the Clinton administration and faded away during the Bush years—has returned. According to the SPLC, the anti-government resurgence has been buttressed by paranoid rhetoric from public officials like Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and media figures like Fox News’ Glenn Beck.

Just last month, Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—including threatening to destroy her California home—because he was “upset with her passing the health care law.” His mother told a local news station that he “frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas,” adding, “I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he—that’s where he comes from.”

Read “Progressive Hunter”: Jailhouse Confession: How the right-wing media and Glenn Beck’s chalkboard drove Byron Williams to plot assassination (Media Matters)
 

It’s always instructive to compare how a particular news story is reported by different media outlets. Case in point, how CNN covered Barney Frank’s town hall meeting with some of his less intelligent constituents in Dartmouth, Massachusetts vs. the way Fox News handled the same story. Any commentary would be entirely superfluous, but it does go to show why flipping the channels can provide interesting insight into how opinion is manufactured. (And bravo to Frank for calling these folks out on their total know-nothing idiocy).

First CNN:

Then Fox News (featuring zany idiot Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann)