And Hillary Clinton is a member of The Fellowship - a fascist cult that glorifies people like Hitler and Bin Laden and is associated with the anti-gay bills in Uganda, death squads, and has been undermining US democracy for decades. I've wanted to post links on other political subs to get a discussion going, but no other sub allows articles that are more than 30 days-ish old because apparently posting info about the history of candidates in a major election isn't important. I posted a comment on the Trump sub, but even there it didn't get much attention.
Here are some articles: wiki, sourcewatch, Mother Jones, truthout, Salon, alternet 1 and 2, huffpo, daily kos 1 and 2, NPR 1 and 2, New Yorker, and theocracy watch.
Some excerpts from the above.
Investigative reporter Jeff Sharlet wrote a book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,[3] as well as an article in Harper's[19] magazine, describing his experience while serving as an intern in the Fellowship. He opined that the Fellowship fetishizes power by comparing Jesus to "Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden" as examples of leaders who change the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their "brothers".
The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.
In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[82] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[83]
Fellowship member Bob Hunter gave an interview to NPR in December 2009 in which he acknowledged Bahati's connection but argued that no American associates support the bill.
Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection.
Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.
The Fellowship's long-term goal is "a leadership led by God—leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." According to the Fellowship's archives, the spirit has in the past led its members in Congress to increase U.S. support for the Duvalier regime in Haiti and the Park dictatorship in South Korea. The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators.
With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; she didn't back off even after Republican senators such as Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter pulled their names from the bill citing concerns that the measure would protect those refusing to perform key aspects of their jobs—say, pharmacists who won't fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won't guard abortion clinics.
In 1997, Coe travelled to Sudan with a former Republican congressman named Mark Siljander, and met with the country’s notorious President, Omar al-Bashir. The Clinton Administration had broken diplomatic ties with Bashir, who had declared Sharia law and undertaken a program of religious cleansing which killed two million Christians and animists, and made refugees of four million more. According to the evangelical magazine World, Siljander may have taken Coe’s Jesus-only, no-questions-asked ecumenism too seriously. Siljander wrote a book called “A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide,” in which he asserted that Bashir was “a bad man” in the eyes of the West, but “in the eyes of God, as near as I could understand it, he was just another human being, with frailties and failings like the rest of us.” In 2005, the F.B.I. began to investigate Siljander’s work for a Sudan-based Islamic charity with terrorist ties, and this July Siljander pleaded guilty to felony counts of acting as an unregistered foreign agent and of obstruction of justice. He faces a possible fifteen-year prison sentence.
If international dignitaries view the Prayer Breakfast as a reliable means of unofficial access, some Presidents—most notably, Bill Clinton—have been more accommodating than others. “Bill and Hillary got it,” says Doug Burleigh, who is Coe’s son-in-law, and a key figure in the Fellowship. “They came early, they’d meet with the groups early and do a photo op with ’em, hug ’em. They got what this was about.” George W. Bush, on the other hand, made it clear to Coe and the others from the start that he’d show up at the Prayer Breakfast but not to expect much more. “George came late, and left early—he did every year,” Burleigh says. “Now, I appreciate his honesty. He told Doug, ‘You know, this isn’t my thing.’ “After Bush’s first, perfunctory appearance, Clinton telephoned Coe to console him. “He didn’t badmouth Bush, he gave it the best spin,” Burleigh recalls. “He said, ‘Hey, Bush’ll get it. He doesn’t understand what this thing’s about.’ “
Though a review in The Washington Post calls Sharlet's thesis of an America without contraception or public schools "almost unhinged," the recent rise of the Tea Party since "C Street's" publication and legislation such as unemployment benefits held hostage to tax cuts for the wealthiest American cast doubt on whether we can dismiss the threat posed by the actions of the Family to positions such as gay rights, religious freedom or the separation between church and state.
The Clinton's are neck deep in this cult and my guess is the only reason Clinton has made it far. Read those articles and look at how well-connected they are and the amount of politicians, both republicans and democrats, that are in this group. It's a lot of information and I would encourage everyone to learn about this group on their own, read all the links, research some more, etc. They sound like they fetishize power (calling Bin Laden and Hitler good leaders?) and only use religion and Jesus as a political tool to emotionally manipulate religious people, American Christians specifically. It sounds like they intentionally cripple the government/national infrastructure, privatize everything, push neoliberal economics, and consolidate all power in the hands of a few elites. The Salon article goes into this in a lot more detail which I found to be pretty unnerving.
I tried to remain objective, but this group is fucked up. Some more stuff on Dough Coe the current leader.
How can people call Trump a nazi while supporting someone who is a member of a cult that glorifies totalitairan leaders and has connections to dictators with death squads and Islamic terrorists? And the Saudis who behead sorcerers, deprive women of rights, execute homosexuals, and still have dark-skinned slaves. How can people seriously think she's better?
And what about their ties with Blackwater? What about the fact that there are military officials going behind their backs to cooperate with Russia because they say their foreign policy is aiding terrorists?
At this point it would seriously be better if the military just took over because the politicians in office are corrupt sociopaths. There needs to be large scale anti-corruption probes and a purge of the establishment. These people are completely fucked up and I don't understand how anyone can defend them.