Historian: Make no mistake — QAnon cultists are plotting a violent holy war
"Passion of the Christ" actor Jim Caviezel blurred the line between himself and his most famous role during a blood-soaked speech at a QAnon conference, and a historian signaled his alarm.
The once-prominent actor gave an 18-minute talk, titled "The Storm is Upon Us," last week at the right-wing conference "For God and County Patriot Double Down" in Las Vegas, where he called on "fellow Christian warriors" to martyr themselves against demonic forces, and historian Thomas Lecaque put the speech into context in a column published by The Bulwark.
"Caviezel does the bit that all the commentators have latched onto, performing Mel Gibson's speech from Braveheart," Lecaque wrote, "and we can laugh, but this is just yet another pulling of other words into a hodgepodge of pro-violence, pro-martyrdom, full-QAnon expression."
The audience cheers the call to arms, which is made up of a hodgepodge of religious symbolism, conservative political bromides from Ronald Reagan and QAnon jargon, but Lecaque said the speech and the reaction it drew showed how badly some Americans want to kill their political enemies.
"We can laugh about the Braveheart," wrote Lecaque, a history professor at Grand View University. "We can wonder what an actor is doing at a QAnon conference. But that ending? That ending is a crusade. That ending is the sacral blessing of the enterprise — fight for freedom, fight alongside God against your demonic foes, fight into the apocalypse QAnon believes in, an apocalypse that ends with the mass murder of your political and cultural opponents. And Jim Caviezel, JC, the actor who played Jesus Christ and whose speech blurs the lines between sacred and secular, acting and preaching, reality and fiction, walks off stage to applause, having called down the apocalypse upon their foes."
Caviezel's speech has already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, so clearly there's an audience for his apocalyptic fantasies.
"These talks are not harmless," Lecaque wrote. "These speeches are widely watched and listened to and disseminated. QAnon may have diminished as a distinct movement in the months since Q has fallen silent — despite the presence at the conference of both Ron and Jim Watkins, the people most likely responsible for creating the movement's mysterious pseudonymous central figure. But the spread of QAnon's message, especially in religious spaces, makes calls for sacred violence, for holy war, ever more dangerous. Especially if the messenger keeps promoting the possibility that he will once again take on the role of Christ."
Leave a Comment
Related Post