Huckabee’s Loyalists: Where Are They Now?

Since dropping out of the Republican Primary last year, Mike Huckabee has settled into a lucrative career as a television host, radio commentator, author, public speaker, and political pundit. While he is enjoying his new-found roles, his former supporters are increasingly going off the deep end.

When he was running for office, he rounded up a gaggle of second-tier Religious Right figures to serve on his Faith & Family Values Coalition and increasingly that list seems to be becoming the primary source for much of the craziness that is engulfing the movement. 

Since Huckabee’s campaign ended, Jerry Jenkins has been seen discussing whether Barack Obama is the Antichrist or merely a pre-cursor to the Antichrist; Star Parker has been heard declaring that public schools are “cesspools” designed to indoctrinate students with “anti-Christian worldviews”; Mat Staver has been proclaiming that letting gays get married will lead to a whole generation of violent criminals; Jerry Cox has been hard at work ensuring that gays cannot adopt children; Kelly Shackelford has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars defending Sarah Palin and warning that gays are out to destroy Christian businesses; and Rick Scarborough has been complaining about the relentless persecution of Christians in America.

But nobody has gone more off the rails than Janet Porter, the co-chair of Huckabee’s coalition (though her last name was Folger at the time). Starting with her declaration that anyone who voted for Obama was going straight to hell and her prayers to God to keep him out of office and continuing through to her joining up with the Birthers and allegations that Obama’s presidency was the culmination of a decade-long Communist conspiracy, Porter has been a one-woman source of right-wing lunacy.

Just last week she declared that our nation is currently being cursed by God for electing Obama and now she is warning that a massive catastrophe is on the way. Citing Teen Challenge founder David Wilkerson, who claims that weeks before September 11th he had been warned by God that a calamity was coming and so he stayed up all night on Sept. 10th making sandwiches, Porter declares that another, even worse, catastrophe is on the way because Wilkerson has prophesied it and, as she says, “we’d be crazy not to listen” to him.

Here is Wilkerson’s warning:

For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires—such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago.

There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide. There will be looting—including Times Square, New York City. What we are experiencing now is not a recession, not even a depression. We are under God’s wrath … God is judging the raging sins of America and the nations. He is destroying the secular foundations

First, I give you a practical word I received for my own direction. If possible lay in store a thirty-day supply of non-perishable food, toiletries and other essentials. In major cities, grocery stores are emptied in an hour at the sign of an impending disaster.

As for our spiritual reaction, we have but two options. This is outlined in Psalm 11. We “flee like a bird to a mountain.” Or, as David says, “He fixed his eyes on the Lord on his throne in heaven—his eyes beholding, his eyelids testing the sons of men” (v. 4). “In the Lord I take refuge” (v. 1).

I will say to my soul: No need to run…no need to hide. This is God’s righteous work. I will behold our Lord on his throne, with his eye of tender, loving kindness watching over every step I take—trusting that he will deliver his people even through floods, fires, calamities, tests, trials of all kinds.

Unfortunately for us, Wilkerson says he does not “know when these things will come to pass,” but does know that they are coming and it is up to each of us to “do with the message as you choose.”

Most people would choose to ignore it, but not Porter:

With the election of the most pro-abortion president (and Congress) in history, there’s no question that we deserve God’s judgment … The bottom line is that we are economically and morally bankrupt. And it’s reported that Iran now has all they need to build nukes.

So, when the guy who made the 2,000 sandwiches on Sept. 10 warns us: “AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN,” I think we would do well to heed it.

So it is just worth pointing out once again: Porter was co-chair of Huckabee’s faith coalition and hailed by him in his book as “one of the main catalysts” for his success in the Republican primary.