A fundamentalist preacher turned to Oklahoma State senators on a mission to enforce his extreme
Christian nationalists beliefs through legislation. Dusty Devers wants to outlaw porn, criminalize abortion
as homicide, and eliminate no fault divorce. Devers sees government as a tool
to enforce God's will and view society as divided between Christian and Satanic forces.
He aims to impose his moral values on others, even proposing felony charges for
peorn viewers. Devers radical views have gained national attention, highlighting the threat Christian
nationalism poses to democracy. Despite criticism, he remains unapologetic, claiming to act
in accordance with Oklahoma Republican's will. This story is from Rolling Stone by Tim
Dickinson on February second, twenty twenty four. Jonathan, why don't you start
us? I'm sorry, infidel. Let's go to infidel first. Start us
off with this one. One of the first things that struck me with this
article was that Dusty Devers believes, and I quote that the government should tear
arise evildoers. Now, for me, that just sounds like an admission that
you're a terrorist. Starting off the top. I mean, according to him,
government's sole purpose is to promote what is good in accordance with the will
of God. And as you mentioned, Scott, you know, he thinks
that, you know, porn, it should be a viewing porn should be
a felony up to twenty years and wanted a bounty system similar to what we
have here in Texas. Horribly so on the abortion issue. He wants his
neighbors to be reporting their neighbors about, you know, their porn viewing habits.
And I couldn't help but think how invasive is this for anyone to think
that not only is it we got to peek under the stall to see what
you look like when you're in the bathroom, but now we've got to peek
through your windows so we can tell on you when you're watching porn. It
just absolutely boggles my mind that this person could not only be elected but stay
there because I had to check. I was just curious, is this guy
married? Does does he have kids? And yes, he has six or
seven kids and he's married. And my next thought was poor missus Devers.
But yes, absolutely, and you know, and even wants to criminalize sexting
except between spouses, And I'm like, you're going to say that words that
people tight to each other consensually is as bad as porn, that you should
I mean, I don't have and I'm not making a judgment on porn,
but I understand that there are certain groups of people who have an uptight mentality
towards the topic. But are you Jesus Christ, are you kidding me?
You know, even sexting and eliminating no fault divorce. I just couldn't help
but think how anti women all of his policies seem to boil down to abortion
being homicide. Once we lock you down into a marriage, you're stuck and
you got to stay. It's amazing that this passes for reasonable thought anywhere,
even in Oklahoma. You know, I guess I've grown accustomed to hearing this
type of behavior and these type of things from people in Florida and here in
Texas. I knew Oklahoma was bad, but I didn't know they were going
to try to become a subsidiary of Texas or Florida. And with that in
mind, I can only hope that people's eyes are open and realize just how
absolutely unreasonable, unhinged and incredibly invasive. Doing something like this would be I
have no idea how you would stop people from watching porn, but since this
is all cutting into my porn time, I figured I'll go ahead and pass
this over to you, Jonathan and see what you have to say about this.
When you get done with yours, you can send it to mainly before
it becomes a felony. Said it over the internet, right. I don't
know where to start with this pos and you can use your imagination on the
term. I'm getting really tired of trying to people trying to sell me a
bill of goods that really actually attempts to harm and criminalize normal human rights,
seeing government as a means to coerce the public into their dystopian desires of a
discat dictatorship of Christ. I got news, buddy, Christ don't exist.
So you know, mellow out, you know, take a chill pill.
I have some I could recommend to you. But there is unceasingly an attempt
to victimize and demonize already marginalized people. They wouldn't do it on a majority.
They have to attack a minority, some small group of people who aren't
doing anything to harm you or society and demon demonize them all for this fantasy
attachment to the chair. He picked words of a book of fables from the
Mid East Bronze Age, ostensibly written compiled in Bibelos and Lebanon about seventeen to
fifteen seventeen to maybe nineteen hundred years ago, and before that passed for hundreds
of years like a game of telephone, so before it was ever written down.
And this they think is what they think is a holy thing and is
absolutely worth trading in all the liberty, rights and equality we've gained in the
last two centuries. So I'm like Dusty Divers loudly shouts the quiet part.
He wants that. He wants legislate what where, and what you when you
believe. To him, the government should be used whatever force necessary to uphold
his draconian Dark Age mythology. Women should be persecuted, prosecuted, even face
the death penalty for losing a baby or even having a miscarriage. How fucking
bad is that? Pardon my language, but damn, you know where does
this guy get from that? You know, he's a deranged individual. He's
even hated by mainstream pro lifers. You have to be really, really bad
to get those people afraid of you, you will poison their movement. So
the maniac sees the world as a battleground of righteous Christians, only righteous if
they agree with him, of course, on all things, and against everything
else, I mean everything. If you're not part of that, then you're
evil and need to be destroyed, including the country if possible. This is
beyond anti democracy, anti American, anti republicanism. It's anti everything we stand
for and a lot of people who died to support it and to keep it.
So as there's no doubt in my military mind, this guy is a
total idiot. We need to better Civics education in school and a mandatory class
in the history of the separation of religion and government. And that would mean
getting into the letters of people like Madison and that and telling them some of
the other literature that said that displays the mind of the founders. They just
left religious wars in the country they came from that killed thousands and thousands of
people, and they were trying to prevent that by saying you can't have a
religious government, it has to be secular. So anyway, if you think
differently than that, you are dead wrong. Not only that you've been lied
to a lot. Start digging into the actual history and you'll find out what's
really going on. I know you won't, but just friendly advice, educate
yourself free of charge, free of charge, and the immortal words of an
MMA coach. I know. Fuck this guy, of course would add,
and not in a good way, you know. So you know that's Scott.
I'm getting vulgar. You might want to take this from me. That's
to follow there, and so I'm gonna have to crank it up a notch
from the vulgarity. So if you'll turn with me and your Bibles to the
Book of Proverbs thirteen, verse twenty four, which says those who spare the
rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.
And Dusty Devers wants to be that rod. He wants to be the
shaft that's shoved in and around the face area of America, or perhaps smuggled
in through the back door of the legislative process. When we think of horrible
pricks, Dusty Deaver wants to be damn sure that we think of him.
And I tell you he's off to a great start. So in our last
segment for this week we talked about the dangers of Christian nationalism. Well,
here it is. I mean, this is what we're talking about. This
is what we're looking at. This is what it looks like. This is
what the end of that particular Well, geez, I hope it doesn't get
worse than that, but you know, this is what's happening. Okay.
He wants to put people in jail for watching porn. By the way,
infidel with your admission there, I think he just won me to ten thousand
bucks, but I'll have to double check on the jurisdiction there. He wants
to punish anybody that's involved with an abortion. He wants to force people to
stay married against their will. He wants to and this was good too.
He wants to enact what he calls an eye for an eye punishment for people
filing false police reports, meaning that he wants the accusers to receive the same
punishment as the crime for which they're making the accusation. I don't know this,
but I wonder if he happens to have a personal stake in that particular
one. But anyway, for him, obviously, it's not about justice or
fairness or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. For him, it's all about
inflicting pain via punishment. And he said he believes we talked about this already.
He believes the role of government is to protect innocent people and to punish
and terrorize evildoers. The suffering is the point to him. So I want
to hold this guy up as a warning to Christians. This is the kind
of thing that your belief supports. I know I say this often when I'm
on the show, but it's that it's those liberal Christians, the followers of
Christ, the you know, whatever you want to call it, the softer,
lovey dovey Christianity. You're providing shelter for this kind of belief if you
engage, if you endorse irrational beliefs in your philosophy, then you are giving
tacit approval for other people who have irrational beliefs, and they're not maybe not
going to be quite so nice as you are. Now. I don't know
how else we can say this does. If it doesn't persuade you, then
I don't know what does you know? It's hard to it's hard to imagine
what it would take to demonstrate the endgame, the results, the consequences,
of this kind of of accepting this type of belief. The article used this
word to describe divers and I thought it was really cool. It was Manichean.
Manichean. I had to look it up. It refers to anything related
to Manicheism, which is a dualistic religion that combined Zoroastrian, Christian, Gnostic,
and other beliefs in a theology of a cosmic struggle between good and evil.
So he sees himself as a general in the army of God. And
you can't get more black and white than that from the article here. This
is a quote from the article. Devers embodies a threat that experts believe Christian
nationalism poses to democracy by literally demonizing his opponents and casting compromises moral corruption.
That's key there. In his eyes, compromise is moral corruption. His intent,
he's said, is to steer society away from the judgment that we deserve,
warning that otherwise the country will suffer not just from the effects of bad
policy and wicked rulers, but under the judgment of God. Brad Onishi,
author of an extremist History of a Christian Nation, recently described in an interview
with Rolling Stone. If you're a person who is convinced that the United States
is under threat by a Luciferian regime compromised, and here he hits all the
buzzwords here comprised of a Marxist, globalist, secularists, feminists, the LGBTQ
community, and so on. Democracy is not your sacred value. That's it
right there. Democracy is not the sacred value here, Infidel. Do you
have anything to add to that. I've got plenty to add. All right,
let's hear it. Let's hear it. Preach to us. I don't
think that Dusty believes in the American form of government. I think that's quite
clear. What he wants is something else, and I think that is something
that's very important for those people that we've talked about previously who they become radicalized
and they have this view that when Christianity comes to power and we do what
God wants us to do, in their mind, what God wants them to
do is what they believe is right, and that varies according to individual.
You can't even find ten people in the same church who are going to necessarily
agree where those lines are. So when you start allowing someone to make those
decisions to decide what is right and wrong. What you're doing is you're setting
yourself up. You know, I don't know how many you have ever seen
Handmaid's Tail, but I've got a sneak in suspicion that there's going to be
more than a few people with missing fingers are hanging up on the wall if
this ever were to come to fruition, because they're not Christian enough. And
the truth is is that we've seen this time and again. Christians are savage
towards non Christians, but they can be really savage towards the ones that are
their brothers and sisters. Supposedly they can really take into the cleaners. So
they need to be more careful than we are because we're already labeled we're no
good, we're bad. But when the people who are supposedly on your side
betray you, that's even worse in their mind. So be careful what you
look for. And one other thing I wanted to point out is that time
and again we hear about people who rally against LGBTQ and we find out that
they've been, you know, having relationship same sex relationships, and we're all
shocked. This is what happened. We sear people talking about all these things,
and we read about, you know, pastors who are sexually abusing and
assaulting people in their church. This isn't something new, and so I have
to wonder how long is it before we see Dusty Deb's porn hub account and
really find out what's going on? Because the truth is is that when I
was a believer, and I was growing up in a very conservative sect,
we would go to these different churches and we'd hear these preachers rail against fornication
and adultery and homosexuality and all these things they would just completely obsess over.
And then five, ten, fifteen years later you find out guess what,
and he just screams against things a bit too much. Now he may be
a true believer, he may be the real deal, because there are those
two. But if he is, I can assure you one thing, he
should never do any inside the political realm, because I don't see how in
good faith he could take that oath of office and declare to uphold the constitution
of this country because what he is standing for is completely opposed to what this
country stands for. You don't believe, you don't want to view porn,
then don't view porn. You don't think people should have abortions, well,
don't have abortions. You don't believe in same sex relationships, then don't have
one. Those are all choices you can make if those are things that you
believe you shouldn't do. But when you start crossing in and telling other people
that you can't do this and call yourself an American claim to uphold the constitution
of this country, that is what you call And I'm going to be very
tactful here. That's what you call a liar now. Having said that,
take us away, Jonathan, Oh gee, I me. He thinks he
does protest too much. You think you think, and I don't mean you
in Fidel. Yeah, there's something about Christian nationalism. I think that the
Christian nationalists may not realize. And I actually remember this from one of the
rallies they had, and one of the preachers, similar to Devers, got
up and railed against the Catholic Church. And the next person was General Flynn.
He's a Catholic and he says, I'm a proud Catholic. So you
can see, you can start seeing the cracks in this already. Like I
said, the Founders escaped warfare religious warfare. And now you know, if
one of these people, you know, six out of nine on the Supreme
Quarter Catholic, if this religious group manages to take power, we're going to
have another set of religious wars. It's not about all us people getting our
right steped on. It'll be about how much they can kill each other in
very gruesome way. And they'll be killing each other, you know, And
that's something that's worthy of avoiding by not trying to push your particular version of
morality or reality, which isn't reality, but it's you know, your particular
fantasy of what life should be like on the rest of the religious world,
I mean, or US atheists. But you start pushing that shit, and
what happens is you get pushed back and the other side is just as just
as adamant as you that they're right. So your guy's going to get into
a very nasty mix up. Just take a look at the eleventh through the
sixteenth century and well, you know, in European history, okay, and
you'll see that there were over I think the ones I know about, there
were thirty two crusades. And it's not just the Holy Land, it's Eastern
Europe it's Germany, it's all sorts of places, and they just flat raped
and murdered their way into Christianity. And you're going to see that happen once.
Martin Luther in fifteen hundred or so and Protestantism. Look at all the
hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered with them, and think about that
and alls it. It proved was that nobody was right. And that's what
I wanted to say about that. And again he does protest too much,
so he might start pinging on my gatar if he keeps doing that. Well,
let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. Do you
think this guy, this Dusty Devers, do you think he was inevitable?
Do you think it was inevitable that this? Is this a product of human
nature? Is this a product Were there specific things in history that happened that
kind of guided us down this path here? Or do you what do you
think, Infidel? Do you think this was bound to happen eventually? Calvin?
I think that it is absolutely inevitable. When you start moving that line
away from freedom and start going in the method of fascism, it becomes a
one up because things that were once completely unreasonable that you knew were absolutely unhinged,
become reasonable now because in the backdrop of the whole anti LGBTQ scenario,
the whole anti women's rights fiasco, all these things, I think have emboldened
them to the point where all the other things that they used to whisper among
themselves and their echo chambers. That's what we're starting to see bubble out because
I don't know if you remember this, but you know, thirty years ago
or actually more than that, forty years ago, I'm old. I remember
my dad getting these things from what was Perkins Group, and you know,
they used to go out there and stand out in front of you know,
seventy elevens and things, protesting adult magazines behind the counter, and that kind
of faded away. With the advent of the Internet and things like that.
People have kind of, you know, moved away, but I don't think
that the viewpoint that was behind it ever went away. And that is exactly
what we're seeing here. We're seeing those people who who you know, they
don't have a they don't have to stand in front of abortion clinics because they've
already criminalized that, and they think they're winning every other debate, and I
think they're saying, Okay, let's go on to new territory, let's find
a new thing that we can ran about that will get attention and get me
elected. And I don't think they care about the consequences. I think the
consequences are completely inconsequential to them. Jonathan, again, an answer question,
answer my question. Do you think this was inevitable or do you think there
was specific things in history that kind of led us this way or was it
just a product of human nature. I think that it's a I don't think
it's human nature. I think it's a product of society in general. And
I also think that it's inevitable. When people become convinced that they're being downtrodden,
they have several reactions they can take. A lot of them turn to
religion, and sometimes they turn to the most extreme form of it, and
you know, like death cults, like the resurrection shit, you know,
or the ones where they fall into we need to take over the government so
that we can stop being you know, this oppressed quote unquote group, which
is not true. Christians are not oppressed in this country. They are in
charge of this country. So you know, I'm kind of sure about that.
Are you sure about that? Because because you know, they have to
sell cakes to gay couples, right, yeah, that is bad. Yeah
yeah, well yeah, that's a whole other thing that we've done before on
here. But I'm just thinking to myself that, yeah, it's an inevitable
this is going to evolve out of a complex society and Alvin Toffler's future shock.
Add that to a religious upbringing, and they have to get more extreme.
As we said in the last article, they're getting hardened, meaning they
have to get more and more extreme because they're losing ground every year. And
they may not know this, but unconsciously they feel it happening, and they
know that their culture what they want it to be, because it never was
the real culture, but their fantasy or what the culture is is diminishing and
fading away, not fast enough, but hopefully before they do any real damage.
All right, Well, that's a great place for us to end this
conversation. I appreciate everything that both of you had to contribute.