The Week’s Weirdest Moments on the Extreme Right

‘Prayer Warriors’ for Voter Suppression, All in the Huckabee Family, Texas Disinformation

Gov Love

Intercessors for America, an “army of prayer warriors” that aggressively promoted former President Donald Trump, is urging right-wing Christians to rally around Florida’s Trumpist Gov. Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis delighted right-wing activists by recently signing a voter suppression law in a ceremony closed to all media except Fox News. He has also signed legislation and issued an executive order overriding local mask requirements.

In a May 13 email to subscribers of the “prophetic” Elijah List, IFA’s Dave Kubal urged readers to sign a “prayer card” for DeSantis. Kubal claims that IFA will hand-deliver the cards when they reach their goal of 100,000 prayers. The prayer card reads:

Together as the body of Christ in America, we lift up Governor DeSantis. We stand in agreement with heaven’s purposes concerning our nation. We stand by this governor who has declared his state to be under God’s rule and authority and seeks righteousness and justice. [Scriptural citations excluded]

Suppressionist Theology

Dave Kubal is hardly the only religious-right leader cheerleading voter-suppression efforts. My Faith Votes, another religious-right entity that is close to the immediate former occupant of the Oval Office, scored a big-name booster in the person of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — father of former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — who is also making an ostensibly religious case for suppressing the votes of Black people, and those of people in other marginalized communities.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike HuckabeeMy Faith Votes calls the For the People Act—a voting rights and election protection bill that has passed the House and is awaiting action in the Senate — “very dangerous” and “irresponsible.” The group claims that the legislation would rob states of their “constitutional responsibility to administer and manage elections” — despite the fact that the bill leaves the responsibility for administering elections to the same local jurisdictions that have done so up until now.

In a May 13 email blast, Huckabee claims that the For the People Act “codifies all the worse abuses that made the 2020 elections the most divisive and suspect election of our lifetimes.” In other words, Huckabee and My Faith Votes don’t like that the For the People Act would protect expanded access to the ballot and overturn new voting restrictions being put into place in states controlled by Republicans. In 2016, My Faith Votes co-hosted a pivotal meeting between the Republican presidential nominee and hundreds of religious-right leaders, at which the thrice-married, foul-mouthed GOP standard-bearer sealed the support of some skeptical evangelicals by promising to make them more politically powerful by abolishing restrictions on churches’ politicking and pledging to give them the Supreme Court of their dreams. On that latter item, he just may have delivered.

Texas Exemption?

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., member of the informal QAnon and insurrection caucuses, made an astonishing declaration in a May 19 appearance on an America’s Voice News program; apparently the Magical Thinking Fairy wanded away the COVID-19 coronavirus from the Lone Star State. Either that, or Boebert is just lying.

“Texas removed their mask mandate two months ago, and Sleepy Joe called it ‘Neanderthal thinking,'” Boebert told host Gina Loudon, using a derogatory name for President Joe Biden. “No, sir. Republicans are just following the science, and since removing the mask mandate two months ago, Texas has not reported a single COVID death. Not one.”

Actually, over the course of those two months, 3,400 Texans lost their lives to COVID-19.