Alex Jones's Lawyer Says He's "Playing a Character"; Plus: "TruNews" Host Rick Wiles Calls Ivanka Trump "Kabbala Practicing Evil Woman"

​The lawyer for InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones argued in a court filing that his client is “playing a character” and that his poisonous conspiracy theories (which range from ancient aliens and Nephilim to Pizzagate) are part of his act as a “performance artist,” not a truth-teller, according to news reports published yesterday. I wonder how many of his fans would be surprised to learn that Jones is not actually a rightwing truth warrior but instead now admits to being a false-flag fake-news crisis actor making things up for cash payments. It does make one wonder how many more of his ilk are intentionally engaged in profitable “performance art” vs. having true belief in the lies they inculcate among their devoted followings.

​After the U.S. presidential election in November, rightwing Nephilim theorists, clerics, and televangelist hucksters united in praising Donald Trump as God’s anointed leader. That lasted exactly as long as the mercurial hedonist stuck to conservative extremist policies. After his recent pivot toward more traditional Republican policies, the rightwing clerics are having conniptions. On TruNews, a show we have had occasion to mention for its Nephilim coverage, Rick Wiles, who believes we are living in the End Times, tried to look for a reason that his personal lord and savior, Donald Trump, has somehow failed to bring about the return of his other lord and savior, Jesus. He blamed the Jews.
 
On Jim Bakker’s show last week, Wiles expressed his shock and horror that trump bombed Syria, and he accused Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared, both Jewish, of using “blasphemous” Jewish mysticism from the Kabbala, which he likened to witchcraft, to beguile and deceive Trump into betraying his retributionist promises:

She’s a Kabbala practicing, evil woman whispering evil things in the ear of her father. She’s going to the grave site of an old dead Kabbala practitioner and getting spirits telling her what to do … We have to pray against witchcraft in high places, witchcraft that plans to kill millions of people. … [Ivanka and Jared] are cleaning out the White House to surround President Trump with their Kabbala practitioners, and the only advice he is going to get will be from people who are evil. And the church is letting this happen.

​It's nice to know that the killing of “millions” is only an affront to God on occasion, when it aligns with conservative ideology. The anger of the clerics would carry more weight if they were uniformly opposed to violence and war instead of only conditionally and conveniently, based on the location of the war.
 
This did get me wondering, though, about Wiles’s discomfort with Kabbala, and I wondered if there is a connection between fear of Kabbala and Nephilim-panic. I found a weird sort of conflation of a number of ideas. For example, in Nephilim Resurgence (2012), Randy DeMain notes that Freemason Albert Pike considered Kabbala to be Luciferian. Nevertheless, DeMain tells us that “the practices of Kabbalah and the Mystery religion became established on Mount Moriah under the pretense of worship of God; it continues today through the Freemasons.” Obviously, he thought the Freemasons were Luciferian.
 
But it did bring up an interesting question about the connection between Freemasonry and Kabbala. According to the 2014 Handbook of Freemasonry put out by Brill, in 1726 a pamphlet called The Grand Mystery Laid Open made a connection been Masonry and Kabbala and is the oldest known text to do so. At times, Masonic literature has attempted to develop a close connection to Kabbala, but at other times, as in an 1880s Freemason’s Repository article, the Masons deny it:

That the Kabbalah as a system has some special interest for Freemasons will hardly be questioned. It may have no direct connection with Masonic science, but still there is a relation to be traced therewith; an agreement in many respects between the forms, methods and teachings of the two systems. Freemasonry as it exists to-day is a very practical institution, and cannot spare much time or thought for Hebrew mysticism and recondite lore. But it has respect for knowledge and truth, a friendly feeling for all seekers after the light, and though it may not endorse the fanciful theories of the Kabbalah, or claim any actual alliance with the system thus entitled, it can but regard favorably many of its ideas and theories.

Such disclaimers were not enough to stop a combination of anti-Semites and anti-Masons from proclaiming the whole confection to be Lucifer’s own attack on Christianity. A book called Freemasonry: The Synagogue of Satan by Leon Meurin followed the syllogism that Masonry was based on Kabbala, and Kabbala derives from Judaism, so because modern Judaism is Satan’s counterfeit of the True Faith, therefore Masonry is really the worship of Satan via Kabbala. This gets into some rather deep European anti-Semitism that is, frankly, a bit depressing. Across a series of European volumes in the nineteenth century, a variety of authors essentially argued that the Jews and Masons were in league with one another, that they were conspiring to bring about the Antichrist, and that Kabbala, among other shared articles of faith, was an instrument for promoting Satanic anti-Christian ends. The Pope himself, Pius IX, in Etsi Multa (1873), declared Freemasonry to be “the Synagogue of Satan” and blamed the Masons for the Vatican’s loss of temporal power following the conquest of the Papal States by the Kingdom of Italy:

Some of you may perchance wonder that the war against the Catholic Church extends so widely. Indeed each of you knows well the nature, zeal, and intention of sects, whether called Masonic or some other name. When he compares them with the nature, purpose, and amplitude of the conflict waged nearly everywhere against the Church, he cannot doubt but that the present calamity must be attributed to their deceits and machinations for the most part. For from these the synagogue of Satan is formed which draws up its forces, advances its standards, and joins battle against the Church of Christ.

​Regardless of the unsavory connection between our topic and anti-Semitism and anti-Masonry, what I found particularly interesting is that Wiles’s distrust of Kabbala isn’t shared among all evangelicals. There appears to be a divide between those who consider it an evil, Luciferian form of sorcery performed by wicked Jews and those who see it as a divine revelation from God and a valid path to understanding the mysteries of faith. That almost forces me to ask whether the driving force behind dislike of Kabbala isn’t mysticism and sorcery—something that didn’t bother popes, priests, and a variety of famous Christians—but rather a dislike of Jews. There is an added level of humor in that Wiles believes that the Jesuits have masterminded an anti-evangelical plot to destroy America by sending waves of illegal Catholic immigrants. Apparently everyone is conspiring against everyone else.