Portrait of a demagogue

After Rev. Jerry Falwell’s infamous gay-baiting of the purple soft stuffed little critter, it’s unlikely that Tinky Winky or the rest of the population of Teletubbyland will shed a tear over the death of the founding patriarch of the modern U.S. fundamentalist religious right wing. No progressive person will mourn, either.

Of course Falwell is remembered, and despised, for preaching in the 1980s that “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.”

Falwell blamed the 9/11 attacks in part on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians,” and “he described warnings about global warming as ‘Satan’s attempt’ to turn the church’s attention from evangelism to environmentalism.” (msnbc.com)

Writing off Falwell as “crazy” or “a nut,” inflicts hurt and heaps insult on people who are emotionally disabled and who would never take such reactionary political positions.

Falwell rose to power when U.S. finance capital was marshalling its forces to defeat the Soviet Union. That class war was spurred by the charge of communist “godlessness.”

Falwell had been an arch segregationist who used his bully pulpit to preach his fire and brimstone against the civil rights movement and desegregation of the schools in Brown vs. Board of Education. (thenation.com)

He created the Moral Majority, a decidedly political organization. Falwell is credited with having helped foster and embody the evangelical voter migration from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

That mass migration was the foundation upon which the Southern-based GOP of Ronald Reagan and Karl Rove was built. The Moral Majority claimed a membership of 6.5 million in the 1980s, and reportedly raised $69 million for right-wing politicians, helping to elect Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980.

Falwell diverted attention from the lack of the Reagan administration’s response to a growing public health emergency by scapegoating people with AIDS.

According to a May 15 MSNBC staff and news service report, “In 1986 Falwell founded the Liberty Foundation as a way to broaden his base. Other victories attributed to his influence include the election of President George H.W. Bush in 1988, several conservative Supreme Court decisions and influencing the creation of the powerful Christian Coalition.”

Falwell showed his adaptability by shifting to Islam bashing, in tandem with the U.S. war drive.

Jerry Falwell was a right-wing demagogue, specializing in divide-and-conquer ideology—and he was one of many. Only a fight-back movement steeped in solidarity can defeat that message of hatred and division.