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Of Cousin Paul, Billy James Hargis and the Internet [1]
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Date: 2025-02-26
Growing up, my sister and I didn’t have aunts and uncles. We had our mother’s cousins. As near as I can figure it, Mom was related to a third of the population of southern Ohio, Northern Kentucky and Eastern Indiana.
One of Mom’s cousins baptized us and performed my sister’s wedding.
Christmas was full of cousins, including Paul and his sister, Miriam, who came and stayed with us every year.
Paul was unusual in our family. As a young man, he left college and joined the merchant marine. Unlike most of our family, including his sister, who was a lawyer, he wasn’t interested in a degree or a job behind a desk.
Instead, he traveled all over the world. He served in both world wars. He spoke a number of languages, including Hindi. I understand he was really interesting, if there weren’t any ladies present.
If there were, he sounded like a travelog.
He liked to tell people how the Chinese made birds’ nest soup. (You do not want to know.)
By the time we got to know him, he had retired from the sea. He was studying nature. (I think these days he might be called an environmentalist.) Then he embraced right wing politics.
I can remember him warning our parents that The Beatles were Communist agents out to corrupt young America.
Paul had been at sea when girls had screamed for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Of course he was shocked by Beatlemania.
He had been just about everywhere. He had seen things I could only imagine. But he hadn’t been part of the ordinary world, and, in the sixties, the ordinary world was changing, in ways he must have found a little bit frightening.
Which explains why he was easy prey for Billy James Hargis, or the Christian Crusade.
Hargis was one of the fathers of right wing Christianity. In the fifties and early sixties, he worked with the White Citizens Councils, who fought to keep our country segregated.
All these evils were the work of communists, he assured his admirers. Which was why he started the Christian Crusade, for Christ and against Communism.
He preached on his radio show, and he published a little paper, “The Christian Crusade Weekly”.
He was famous for Project Bible Balloon. He was going to attach helium balloons to Bibles and float them over the Berlin Wall. The faithful were asked to contribute to buy balloons and Bibles.
I suspect most of the money he raised, went into his bank account.
I know about Billy James Hargis, because Cousin Paul got us a subscription to “The Christian Crusade Weekly”.
My sister and I were teenagers. We thought it was hilarious.
The paper denounced Martin Luther King as a dangerous radical. Hargis was certain that feminists were unredeemable. (My sister and I, committed feminists, were flattered to read that.)
He asked for donations so he could take out newspaper ads in various Asian countries, showing how North Vietnamese treated American POWs. (The plan was to shame the North Vietnamese.)
He was a grifter. Cousin Paul, and a lot of other older people, were easy marks.
Cousin Paul was not a stupid man. He wasn’t a monster. He was an old guy, who went birding, and didn’t quite understand how his world had changed since 1910.
Billy James Hargis didn’t have the same opportunities twenty first century grifters have.
He had a radio show, that played in some markets. He toured with a young choir. (Until he was accused of having sex with several of the members.) He published a little four page weekly paper for those willing to pay for a subscription. He didn’t have the audience people like Joe Rogan or Alex Jones can with their podcasts.
In short, it’s a whole lot easier to spread falsehoods. It’s also more profitable.
Larger audiences mean more subscribers, more marks who will buy your merch.
Their marks aren’t stupid. They aren’t evil. They are easy marks.
Their world is changing, rapidly. The news is full of scary stories. Some news outlets create threats where there are none, to increase viewership.
They aren’t hard to convince that Obama was a closet Muslim who was never a U.S. citizen.
They hear, and believe, stories about “The Deep State”, “lizard people” “Adrenochrome” and Ivermectin.
Sadly, the good guys don’t have anyone as charismatic and appealing as Rogan or the folks on Fox News.
So, the grifters get to grift.
Right now they’re grifting us into fascism, which is terrifying.
I have no idea how we reach people with the truth.
I just know that if our democracy is going to survive, we have to.
[END]
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