If Jim Bakker's On Your TV Screen, Hide Your Wallet
Welcome to another episode of "Grifting for Jesus"
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
Bernard Baruch
We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.
Stephen Hawking
If you buy into both
“Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me.” and
“There’s a sucker born every minute,”
Then it probably comes as no surprise that Jim Bakker, who really should be in the Grifting Hall of Fame Shame, is still up to his old shenanigans.
Maybe Bakker doesn’t want to get a “real” job. Or perhaps he really knows his audience and how to fleece them. And, yes, by now, he’s probably reasonably sure there IS a sucker born every minute.
After all, it’s all pretty damned easy to ridicule
Jim Bakker's doomsday food buckets, along with all the other bizarre things he sells to his gullible fan base — like that time he was pushing colloidal silver, a substance likely to turn their skin blue, as a COVID cure.
To be fair, he is far from alone in this. All the hip right-wing grifter pundits are pushing food buckets to their fan bases these days, warning them that they will come in handy during the apocalypse or for when they have to go into hiding from the jackbooted thugs dispatched by the New World Order to turn their children into drag queens. Or, for some of them, a race war.
"Nootropics," magical miracle drinking bleach, other kinds of miracle supplements, and gold investment schemes are to these people what Home Shopping Network and QVC product lines are to celebrities you kinda forgot about.
Bakker, however, has apparently been blissfully unaware of the fact that people make fun of him on the internet, until recently. You see, he went and checked out one of those newfangled social media sites, because he heard his show was on it, typed in his name and found that, in between clips of his show, there were people making fun of him — and not just him. His precious, precious food buckets. Which go for up to $4500 on his website.
Under normal circumstances, I’d only have one comment of substance, and then I’d do a mic drop and walk away SMDH:
IF YOU’RE WILLING TO SPEND $4500 ON A BUCKET OF JIM BAKKER’S EMERGENCY FOOD BUCKETS,
you have far more (and more significant) problems than I’m legally qualified to help you with,
you’re dumber than a box of Mike Pence’s magic underwear,
you deserve to lose whatever money you have left, and
wait…DID YOU SPEND $4500 ON A BUCKET OF JIM BAKKER’S EMERGENCY FOOD? I HOPE THE ZOMBIES COME FOR YOU FIRST, ‘CUZ YOU’RE TOO STUPID TO LIVE FOR LONG WHEN THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE ARRIVES.
I’m unsure whether Bakker was referring to the mocking or the food buckets as “satanic.” I suspect it doesn’t matter.
And then there’s that one person who was prescient enough to ask the one question that gets to the heart of just how ridiculous this all is:
Right????
But, when all is said and done, grifters gotta grift, eh??
Yep, Bakker saw the Light. Except it wasn’t the Light that you might’ve thought a man of God would’ve seen while sitting in prison reflecting upon his sins.
No, he saw the Light of Capitalism- new and different ways he could fleece his flock once he regained his freedom. And so, when he left prison, he upped his game. No longer would he ask people to throw money at him. No, he thought, he’d give them something in return.
Sure, it might have been something that would turn their skin blue (BUT IT WOULD CURE COVID…spoiler- it didn’t). Or something that would keep them from starving during the Zombie Apocalypse…probably so they could become Zombie snack food later on. Of course, he was still a grifter- but he was far more sophisticated than before he did a stint in the Big House.
But he’s convinced himself that he’s trying to protect people…and that’s why he believes people making fun of him on Da Interwebz is SATANIC! PURE EVIL, I TELL YOU!!
Hmm. Maybe some of that colloidal silver would help cast out those demons? And for the low, low price of…oh, never mind….
He believes it's Satanic — though it is not clear whether it is Satanic because Satan wants people to make fun of Jim Bakker or because Satan doesn't want people to have access to Bakker's 30-day Mexican Fiesta bucket while he's trying to conduct an Armageddon. Could be both!
I do, however, like the idea that Satan is wasting time he could be using to encourage people to go homicidal or genocidal or to steal or lie or cheat to discourage others from buying overpriced dehydrated meals that are reportedly inedible and disgusting, for an apocalypse that is never actually going to happen.
Of course, Bakker wants people to buy his meals even though he’s never intended for them to be eaten. So when customers comment that they’re “inedible and disgusting,” well…who did they think they were buying them from, Gordon Ramsay?
The bucket is the only thing from the meal buckets that’s of any value. Growing up in northern Minnesota, we’d take buckets like that and walk out onto a frozen lake. Then we’d cut a hole in the ice, flip over the bucket, and- voila!- we had something we could sit on while we dangled our line in the water and waited for a perch, walleye, or a frozen dead body to bite.
What else could you do when everything else was frozen and your brother was monopolizing the family snowmobile?
‘Course, you could also use five-gallon pickle buckets. They’re a whole lot less expensive and work just as well. And you could spend the money you saved on bait.
Or warm gloves and socks. Hey, it’s winter in Minnesota; a guy’s gotta stay warm and protect his extremities- and it’s not like Jim Bakker was selling gloves and socks. However, I know many people from northern Minnesota who’d probably stock up if he were.
It’s what Jesus would sell, don’tchaknow??
"IT’S A DESSERT TOPPING…AND A FLOOR WAX!!!" -- That gave me quite the chuckle. Several good lines in this one.
The one thought I could not get away from was how much that bucket looks like the ones they use to sell cat litter. I do hope the shipping department never gets them confused ...