L. A. Marzulli Endorses Donald Trump for President, Asks If 9/11 Was a "Shadow Government" Inside Job

For a long time now, I’ve noted the way that Nephilim theories seem to dovetail into rightwing politics through the shared medium of fundamentalist Biblical literalism. I’ve noted, for example, that the leading Nephilim theorist, Steve Quayle, explicitly uses belief in the demonic offspring of Fallen Angels and human women to push a radical rightwing agenda that includes repressive social policies and even seems to advocate the extermination of gay people. He does this under the guise of Christian love and charity in outlets like Jim Bakker’s allegedly Christian home shopping program that masquerades as a religious talk show. To that end, it’s worth looking at the outrageous and shocking rightwing statements that fellow Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli made this week.

Before we look at his promotion of rightist material, I should note that Marzulli isn’t a doctrinaire conservative. He borrows just as liberally from conspiracy theories that originate on the left, though he folds them into a reactionary worldview. Thus, on September 11, he spun a conspiracy theory that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were an inside job, evidence of which he says can be found in the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. Rejecting the findings of a 2002 FEMA report, Marzulli denies that the collapse occurred due to fires sparked by falling debris from the North Tower that burned within the building for most of that fateful day: “If planes and fires weren’t responsible, was there some weapon used that the American people don’t know about? If there is a shadow government, with a hidden agenda, is it part of the military-industrial complex?”
 
We know from Marzulli’s other, earlier claims what he thinks really happened: He believes 9/11 was the work of the U.S. government’s secret Nephilim contingent, the secret societies that worship Satan and love the gays.
 
Here, though, is where things begin to get strange. While Marzulli happily embraces anti-government conspiracy theories that assert that that the U.S. government is run by a secret cabal of Satanists, he nevertheless feels that it is of the utmost importance that America elect Donald Trump immediately. How, one might ask, could he feel so strongly about a decision that his own conspiracies assert would be pointless in stopping the coming of the Antichrist? Consistency is the hobgoblin of mediocre minds.
 
But Marzulli is incensed by Hillary Clinton, whose remarks last week identifying “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” prompted Marzulli to issue multiple blog posts expressing his outrage, weirdly interspersed with advertisements for his latest DVD about the Watchers and the Nephilim. Yet his is the pious hypocrisy of a man who cannot separate himself from his emotions long enough to recognize the fault in his own arguments. Compare, for example, the different approaches he takes to the lifestyles of Clinton and Trump, both of whom are wealthy, privileged members of the American elite, and both of whom have lived for decades cocooned in the luxury of power:

Clinton is completely out of touch with most Americans. When was the last time she actually pumped gas into her car, or driven a car for that matter? When was the last time she had to balance a check book? How about go to the grocery store and decide between two items because she can’t afford them both.
 
[…]
 
Trump stands before thousands of people who are cheering him on. From his vantage point he looks out at a sea of people who are going to vote for him, who are tired of the same old political nonsense that has crippled the country, increased our debt, and left us weak and broke. There are millions of people out of work and who haven’t worked in years. Millions more are on food stamps. Trump meets with many of these folks day after day. I would posit that this interaction is changing him, making him see, first hand, the desperate state the country is really in.

One candidate is out of touch because she doesn’t live in the real world, while the other is in touch, not because he experiences the world directly, but because he sees people at his rallies. Regardless of what you think of either candidate, one must recognize that these arguments are entirely arbitrary. The names and pronouns could be switched without affecting either argument.
 
In the interest of disclosure, I will remind readers that it is no secret that I find Donald Trump to be an ignorant vulgarian, and I take issue with his promise to “open up” libel laws to make it easier to shut down criticism of public figures, something that would make it much more difficult to offer effective criticism of quacks, frauds, and polemicists like L. A. Marzulli.
 
The problem is not so much that Marzulli supports one particular candidate but that he dresses up his favoritism in the clothes of the apocalypse. His repeated refrain that we are living in the last days, that the Nephilim are on the march, and that the country “will not survive” a Hillary Clinton presidency is part and parcel of the same belief system. This casts the American election in eschatological terms and in so doing places that mantle of divine choice on Marzulli’s favored candidate. Consider, for example, the act of Christian charity he performs in forgiving Donald Trump his venality because Marzulli claims to be able to see into Trump’s soul: 

In closing todays post. Trump has heart and the people see it. You can’t fake that, you can’t summon it up like a magic genie, you can’t turn it on or off. Trump is the real deal and this campaign with all its ups and downs and strenuous scheduling has changed him.

Weirdly enough, he denies Hillary Clinton the same privilege he claims for himself in knowing another’s heart: “How can she possible know the heart of another individual? She can’t,” he wrote. Remember, these lines were all written within the last five days. He cannot see his own double standards.
 
In other words, Trump’s good intentions supersede the need for good works so long as we believe in his goodness. He is heaven bound by faith alone, a typically Protestant approach to goodness advocated in Evangelical Christianity. Even though James 2:17 states clearly that “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead,” a position the Catholic Church holds, Protestants since Martin Luther have instead favored Paul in Romans, 5:1-2, which claims that one attains the glory of God solely by faith, and works therefore have no effect. Luther thought that those with faith would perform good acts by virtue of their faith, but some today, especially televangelists, con artists, and criminals, more crudely act as if simple belief abnegates the need to act on that belief. Marzulli, as a self-described religious leader, takes this to its logical extreme, equating the perception of good intentions with a lightness of soul that marks one as a “good” person.
 
Nor are his reasons for this unclear. Marzulli makes quite plain why he hates Hillary Clinton. He refers repeated to “the gay agenda,” which he says will march “without pause” under her presidency. His comments on the gay issue leave him unable to type coherently:

Millions of Americans were taken aback by the Supreme Court’s decision—which I believe was rigged and is nothing short of judicial fiat—to allow gays to marry. Millions of Americans are against this along with allowing a 6 year old boy who identifies with being a girl into the girls restroom? This is homophobic? How about basic common sense. What about the 6-yearold girls rights? Oops, I guess the Supremes threw her under the school-bus.  (typos in original)

He rages as well against tolerance for immigrants and Muslims, but the gay issue is the only time he tries to use the argumentum ad populum and cries conspiracy. It seems to bring out a rage in him that other conservative hobbyhorses don’t elicit to the same degree. Muslims, though, are a clear second, specifically because of his fear of sharia law. The irony that the policies he advocates—from abortion bans to restricting gay rights—are in line with the stereotypical view of sharia law escapes him.
 
We know, though, from Marzulli’s earlier writings that his fear of the apocalypse is tied intimately with rightist social policy and Nephilim theory. He is strongly influenced by the “days of Noah” theology, which argues that Jesus’s statement in Matthew 24:37 that before the Second Coming things would be “as it was in the days of Noah” means that literally the Nephilim will be rampaging across the world as they did in Genesis 6, not, as the text at 24:39 plainly states, that humanity will be ignorant of the coming destruction. Because of this, he also equates the sexual immorality of the Sons of God in Genesis 6:4 with the presumed sexual sin of the people of Sodom—which he considers to be homosexuality—because Jude 6-7 compares the Fallen Angels to the lustful Sodomites. Consequently, homosexuality is for Marzulli demonic, and rightwing social policy is essential to suppress the Nephilim’s gay agenda.
 
As I mentioned at the top of this piece, Marzulli’s friend Steve Quayle is even more explicit in his advocacy of rightwing views, and he goes much further in arguing that the Nephilim are responsible for homosexuality so gay people must be destroyed. Marzulli dresses his views up in more conventionally conservative language, but the resulting implications are still the same: Giant bones prove the existence of Nephilim, which prove the truth of the Bible, which condemns homosexuality, so the gays must be suppressed by voting Republican at every opportunity. That such a vote is worthless if his other claim—that a secret Nephilim shadow government really runs America—is true doesn’t seem to cross his mind, mostly due to his overwhelming fear that society might make his preferred sex and gender roles optional rather than legally mandated.