Jim Bakker died on October 5 at the age of 86.
It probably was Jim and Tammy Bakker who first showed the world that there are millions of suckers who are so simple and so morally vacant that con men in makeup can strut and crow and mug right in front of them and the suckers will believe they’ve seen a vision of godliness and leadership.
Though con men preachers had existed for ages, it was television that made it possible to reach the sucker population in numbers great enough to support corporatized exploitation. There is a straight line from the first Christian television stations to Fox News to Donald Trump in the White House.
Though anyone with normal cognitive ability could watch the Bakkers on TV and detect within 30 seconds that they were clowns on the take, the deplorables sent the Bakkers $1 million a week.
In 1985, as the law was catching up with the Bakkers, Rupert Murdoch was starting to put together his cable network, having recognized the economic and political possibilities of both monetizing and weaponizing the deplorable population. Fox News was born in 1996.
Changes in technology combined with diabolical development in the science of propaganda made mass deception not just costless, but profitable. Thanks to the political weaponization of the deplorables with these new technologies, it took only about twenty years for billionaires, backed by the deplorables, to take over America and start systematically looting the country. Compared to the right-wing elite now looting the country, Jim and Tammy Bakker were pathetic pikers, raking in mere millions rather than billions and trillions. But they were pioneers.
In 1989, we were still a country that could put someone like Jim Bakker in prison. Let’s hope we still are.