Graceless redemption
Crime isn't just forgivable for power-seeking fake "Christians" like Hannah Peterson and the CCDF; it's helpful. Their new Cross redeems them with the "armor of God." But decency can beat that armor.
Images may cause this article to truncate in email. Please click through to the actual site if that happens. The CCDF is the so-called “County Citizens Defending Freedom,” Polk County, Florida’s version of “Moms for Liberty”-type groups.
Multiple key figures in Polk County’s anti-social CCDF and CCDF-adjacent Republican universe have criminal pasts that buttress their current criminal and criminal-adjacent behavior. This should surprise no one.
Personal criminal behavior — literal crime — has become narratively vital for the fake “Christian” dictatorship movement within the Republican Party, in Polk County and beyond.
Criminals transgress order. In this emergent (but not new) strain of anti-social Christianity, all that matters is smashing the evils of secular, pluralistic civic order and imposing fake Christian disorder on neighbors.
Personal tendency to crime or extreme anti-social behavior in the name of a slandered Jesus is useful for the secular thirst of the fake Christian dictatorship movement. Its criminals are simply “imperfect vessels” for the greater good.
For the criminal himself, using religion as context for the gross, cruel pursuit of secular political dominance sells itself as divine deliverance from one’s own sins.
It sells itself as “redemption.”
The new Cross
This is a manifestation of Donald Trump’s most profoundly destructive political and spiritual innovation: a massive swath of American Christianity now enthusiastically substitutes Trump’s criminality for Christ’s sacrifice.
Trump’s influence on religion will far outlast his influence on politics. He is the most important American Christian figure, by far, of the 21st Century — thanks to the behavior of many Christians themselves.
For this mutilated Trump strain of Christianity, the Cross is the FBI — or any secular act of law enforcement or democratic governance or public accountability for the crime or immoral behavior. The “suffering” of the sinner, imposed by society for secular self-defense and moral order, becomes the vehicle of the sinner’s religious deliverance.
Atonement for the sin itself means nothing. The humanity sinned against means nothing. Indeed, the victims of sin become the sinner’s persecutors simply by objecting to his violence or theft or cruelty.
In this Trump-strain of Christianity, only the most vicious and comprehensive sinners deserve grace; and they extort it from those against whom they trespass.
This new Cross empowers the “saved” or the “redeemed” to trespass again in the name of their cruel god. They’re not perfect, just forgiven, without even seeking forgiveness.
They’re given the “armor of god,” as Trump’s scheming cardinal, Ron DeSantis, has taken to saying.
That is the rawest, most graceless form of power. The religiously elect do what they want. You don’t. God wants it that way.
“Today, I’m thankful for redemption!”
Hannah Peterson is a key CCDF “official.” The formal titles of that group’s officers elude me; but Peterson has been a board member and spokesperson. She’s the first face you see on CCDF’s web page.
I nicknamed her “Hannah Book Bannah” a few months ago because of her recent efforts to ban books from Polk schools. Peterson and the CCDF claimed that brief “sexually explicit” passages in great works like Beloved made them criminal pornography. And they sought to prevent your child/student from accessing them in a public act of raw power and dominance. Most of these book bans targeted positive representations of vulnerable children, such as LGBT kids, who truly need grace in their lives.
A few weeks ago, Peterson posted something quite curious on a social media feed. (Someone sent it to me. I don’t keep track of her.)
Peterson seems to have gotten wind that people were aware of her criminal past. (You can tell from the tag I’ve blocked out. ) So she owned it pre-emptively. It’s a smart post, politically.
But it’s the word “redemption” in the first sentence that interests me — not her arrests and her work for a strip club. (I don’t know if “working at a strip club” means stripping. You’d have to ask her.)
I, personally, would not have reported on Peterson’s 2003 and 2004 arrests for theft and violence as a young woman just for the sake of reporting on them as a political gotcha. Nor would I weaponize her employment by a “sexually explicit,” arguably “pornographic” business. Much time has passed since then. I like to think grace restrains me from stabbing someone with that for no good reason.
In truth, I feel great compassion for the Hannah Peterson of 2003/2004. She is described as a troubled young woman torturing her body — while working at a business that commoditizes the female body — in a way that made her sick and unhappy and violent.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”
But I have zero compassion for the Hannah Peterson of 2022, the cruel and dishonest, fully adult political operative.
If it benefitted or gratified her, 2022 Hannah Peterson would absolutely do all the things I wouldn’t do to the Hannah Peterson of 2003 and 2004. Indeed, she did them in that post, which is why I’m writing about it.
She claims the 2003/2004 Hannah Peterson doesn’t exist anymore. “Redemption” killed her.
But what was born again?
I first became aware of Hannah Peterson when she interviewed failed Lakeland mayoral candidate Saga Stevin, another vicious, power-thirsty, fake Christian dictatorship apostle. That’s Hannah on the left.
Key excerpt from my article “When Saga met Hannah”:
I’d encourage you to watch Saga lie endlessly, effortlessly, viciously on this video interview with Hannah Peterson of the so-called County Citizens Defending Freedom (CCDF). Hannah herself is no slouch in delivering mean girl lying at mellifluous scale. Game clearly recognizes game.
I counted 111 lies by Saga and 17 lies by Hannah in their 28-minute chat. Please go count for yourself if you want. Your methodology may be different than mine; and both of these women are so self-absorbed and so lacking in self-reflection or curiosity about the world beyond their prejudices that they create a reality distortion field in which multiple individual lies flow into each other within larger sentences and paragraphs. Their lies form tapestries of bullshit so intricate that it’s almost artwork. They may or may not even know they’re lying all the time.
Managing to stay out of jail is not the biblical definition of redemption; and lying about your neighbor is a sin, clearly identified in the Jewish and Christian traditions.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is a commandment to the faithful, not a suggestion. Any public life “redemption” of anyone’s sins has to start with honesty. And I suspect it’s impossible to truly love God/Jesus if you’re willing to lie relentlessly about their divine creation.
The CCDF — and much of today’s GOP — is built entirely on bearing false witness against neighbors in the name of religion and then terrorizing them with secular state power. In the gospel storyline, they’re not Jesus; they’re the mob nailing anyone they can to the Cross, without any real purpose beyond enjoying it.
I don’t know anything about Hannah Peterson’s private life — how she behaves as a wife and mother. It’s not my business.
But in her public life, gleefully crucifying anyone she can for the sake of secular power makes Hannah Peterson a worse, more vicious, more graceless person than she was as a young woman and petty criminal in 2003.
That’s the opposite of redemption.
“A wonderful example for the minority community of redemption”
I suspect, based on scuttlebutt and observation, that Hannah Peterson both:
Recruited the unrepentant convicted felon James Dunn to run the Polk School Board campaigns of the CCDF’s gross slate of candidates, at least two of which (Rick Nolte and Terry Clark) have openly declared, in writing, that they committed election crimes. James Dunn served 33 months in federal prison for cheating veterans and students with disabilities. He is also actively defying a court order to pay back a church he recently swindled in Texas. And he collected six shady PPP loans during COVID.
Wrote the CCDF’s response when Dunn’s vast and rampant criminality and sleaze became a campaign issue.
As always, Hannah Peterson and the CCDF are welcome to verify or deny those two suppositions. But they never answer me when I ask for comment via email.
Whether Peterson personally wrote it or not, here is how the CCDF justified inflicting James Dunn on the people of Polk County. Note “redemption” in bold — and the lawyerly language of what constitutes it, also in bold:
We believe that this sets a wonderful example for the minority community of redemption and success coming out of our correctional system. We consider this to be the ideal goal for our correctional institutions, to bring correction and transformation. There are no ongoing investigations, charges, or criminal lawsuits. The case is closed, and the outcome of his life is what we would consider to be a best-case scenario.
Again, you can see at this link the full, “ongoing,” staggering scope of Dunn’s dirty dealing.
“There are no ongoing investigations, charges, or criminal lawsuits.” LOL. In addition to whatever rumored investigations may exist that State Attorney Brian Haas won’t publicly confirm because he’s protecting the CCDF and Ron DeSantis (who publicly endorsed Nolte) for November’s elections, Dunn recently lost a civil lawsuit filed by the Texas church he defrauded. This “Christian” refuses to pay back his fellow Christians in defiance of the secular court.
Nothing says “grace” and “atonement” like fraud and fine print.
“Redemption” as attack: how Herschel Walker defends his “child murder” and family violence
Perhaps the most visceral current example of Hannah Peterson’s mutilated Christianity comes from the thoroughly horrifying spectacle of Herschel Walker — a severely damaged man recruited by Pastor Trump to pursue great secular power over you and me in U.S. Senate.
If you take the fake Christian dictatorship movement at its word about what it believes, its candidate Herschel Walker has:
Fathered and abandoned several other children;
Subjected his wife and family to violence;
Pushed his son to denounce him publicly;
And lied about alot of that and other stuff.
Moreover, speaking with the fake Christian dictatorship movement’s voice, Herschel Walker wants to make sure all women and girls, including those who are raped, are punished for the same act of pre-meditated “child murder” he personally bought.
It’s an avalanche of sin and crime.
The fake Christian dictatorship movement has shrugged it off easily: he’s an imperfect vessel. Give him grace.
Walker himself goes right to weaponized “redemption” — just like Hannah Peterson and James Dunn and the CCDF. He makes no effort to atone or repent. He and his handlers in the fake Christian dictatorship movement just attack his opponent, who is a minister:
“He doesn’t even believe in redemption.”
In truth, I pity Herschel Walker. Each new revelation of his brokenness is difficult to read. But I pity the children and women in his life more; and none of us can afford to give people we pity great power over us — especially if they intend to use it to hurt us. The damaged, wearing the “armor of god,” are lethal.
Any public revulsion that Walker “murdered” his “unborn child” and abandoned his born children strengthens him as a political martyr for “Grab ‘em by the pussy” Republicans. He’s just another “imperfect vessel” for the greater fake Christian dictatorship good.
And long as fake Christian dictatorship movement imagines Herschel Walker useful or necessary in its pursuit of power, its new Cross of public shame will absolve his sins without his repentance. If they ever disavow him, it’s only because they expect him to lose and drag down others. They have zero concern for his soul, or anyone else’s.
This fact drives nice libs mad, understandably. Why don’t they practice what they preach? is a much milder form of this picture, which is an actual view of a normal person’s brain confronting this reality:
But one simple realization will preserve your sanity and equip you for the fight if you look it in the eye without delusion:
No “Grab ‘em by the pussy” fake Republican Christian has any intention of ever living subject to the rules of their own tyranny. They want the de facto right to “murder” their “unborn children” when it’s convenient for them, like Herschel Walker did, while forcing your wife or daughter to die from an ectopic pregnancy because life begins at conception.
Again, that’s what power really is, at its worst and most primal. The religiously elect do what they want. You don’t. God wants it that way.
Getting away with their own definition of “child murder” using their own definition “redemption” would be the ultimate act of fake Christian power — the ultimate way to own the libs, who are just normal people.
Don’t let them own you.
Polk’s fake Christian apostles of unredeemed crime and anti-social behavior
The tendency to personal crime or admiration for it in others is a crucial organizing point for today’s CCDF-wing of the Polk GOP. So let’s take a quick look at newly prominent CCDF and CCDF-adjacent figures with personal criminal backgrounds and declarations (that we know of):
James Dunn, CCDF-recruited campaign manager, 33 months in prison, cheated a church, 6 shady PPP loans
Hannah Peterson, CCDF spokesperson, grand theft and battery, employed by sexually explicit business.
Robert Anderson, “publisher” of the Lakeland Gazette, a viciously anti-social, anti-authority Alex Jones-style website with close ties to CCDF favorite Saga Stevin. Anderson has multiple convictions for theft, including theft of lawnmowers from Habitat for Humanity. In last year’s Lakeland mayor’s race, he attacked deeply Christian Mayor Bill Mutz and his wife, who have 12 children, for their parenting of their developmentally disabled daughter.
Rick Nolte, CCDF and Ron DeSantis-endorsed School Board member elect.
Nolte has reported committing 10 misdemeanors and a felony during his campaign. He also reported spending $2,700 on campaign shirts with a Missouri company that doesn’t sell shirts, which could also be a crime if he’s misrepresenting the spending. Nolte remains unarrested and uncharged, although I have filed several state elections complaints against him.
On June 6, 2001, a judge issued Nolte a temporary restraining order requested by a Jane Nolte for protection against domestic violence. He was ordered to surrender his guns. The order was dismissed on July 23, 2001. Nolte did not address this during the campaign, nor was it reported. He did not respond to an email I sent asking for comment.
Terry Clark, failed CCDF School Board candidate, who told supporters in an email that Dunn had sent out 20,000 texts on his behalf. Clark never accounted for those texts in his campaign reports, which is a crime if campaign texts exist. But he did text me this morning to say: “Billy, I just want you to know that I love you.” So there’s that.
There’s another key figure in this CCDF/Polk GOP universe who appears to have a number of charges for driving with a suspended license and criminal driving in other parts of the state; but I can’t fully nail it down yet.
Several other CCDF and CCDF-allied Polk GOP figures have been enthusiastic in their moral and financial support of more serious criminals and the Capitol Lynch Mob.
Steve Maxwell, money man and founder of the CCDF who pals around and fundraises with disgraced coup general and Trump-pardoned convicted felon Mike Flynn.
J.C. Martin, chairman of the Polk GOP, who bragged about hanging out with Trump-pardoned, convicted felon Roger Stone, who is a key January 6th figure. Recently released video captured Stone saying about the 2020 presidential election: “Fuck the voting. Let’s get right to the violence. Shoot to kill.”
George O’Neill, of Lake Wales, a key CCDF donor, a Rockefeller heir who worked closely with Maria Butina, a convicted illegal Russian agent, to set up “friendship dinners” with Russian officials.
Julie Fancelli, Publix heiress, funder of the “Stop the Steal” rally that led to the Capitol Lynch Mob. My full painful accounting of that — and the Fancelli family’s role in my own public life can be found here.
I wish I had a word for “anti-grace” that could evoke what these people who need grace have inflicted on our community in the last two years. Not one of them has shown an ounce of introspection, self-reflection, or humility about their personal failures.
They’ve just weaponized them to create a joy-destroying, community-disrupting energy field of darkness aimed at hurting whoever they can to establish a petty dominance.
Confrontation and decency first; then pity and grace
I was baptized Catholic, raised in the moderate Methodist church by my mother, and drifted away from organized religion as an adult. My relationship with God and creation is my own. But I believe in grace and atonement and redemption as fundamental human concepts.
Even as a young stupid man, I behaved with greater kindness and responsibility than any of these people have. But I had bad moments, like everyone; and I take “there but for the grace of God go I,” seriously. Everyone deserves some grace for their worst moments, especially young people growing up in an often cruel society.
That grace is consistent with the true teachings of Christianity and Jesus Christ, for which I have deep moral and spiritual respect. I consider the Sermon on the Mount a powerfully divine expression of personal conscience.
But I have no respect for those who have received grace from their neighbors — or extorted it — and then used that very grace to deny grace to others. Those who claim redemption and then contribute to the cruelty and predation of society are not the faithful. They are secular frauds, cursed with damaged souls.
Unless your soul is as damaged as Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, you will never be able to harness that damage from afar to exploit or co-opt or negotiate with damaged folks like Rick Nolte and Hannah Peterson. Do. not. try.
That way lies madness for normal decent people. You’ll just destroy and gaslight yourself for them. You can’t out-maneuver sociopaths — either born or made — because you operate under basic humanity rules; and they do not. I never want to lose my basic humanity to anyone.
Speaking only for myself, as a comfortable 50-year-old man, from the quiet safety of my office, I’d rather these people murder me than drive me insane with lamentation.
Neither you nor I will ever out-redeem Hannah Peterson. We’re not wired like her; and our life experience didn’t mangle us like hers did.
We can only confront and defeat these people, constantly and openly, with a coalition of decency. When we’ve neutralized their capacity to impose gross disorder and abuse on decent people and decent communities, then we can pity and forgive them with grace — both secular and religious.
Why we’re beating them in Polk
You can’t debate anyone out of this mutilated form of Christianity, any more than you can debate a river out of flowing. But you can obstruct the flow, channel it, even dam it completely at times so that you can live with it safely.
We’re not going to change these people by appealing to their better natures; but we can beat them with our own. To paraphrase a great football coach line: decency has beaten better with worse.
And decency in Polk has many advantages in pushing back the CCDF universe, some of which explain why we’ve already had much success. These advantages include:
No normal person wants to live in their fake Christian dictatorship, especially the CCDFers themselves.
There are very few of them. Their “power” comes from: inherited money, protection by law enforcement, connection to Ron DeSantis, and their outsized, shock troop, transgressive disorder. That’s how they seized mechanical control of the Republican Party from its timid elected officials and traditional power sources, who both fear them and despise them. But CCDFers haven’t filled a room in a very long time.
Personally, they are terrible people that no one likes, although lots of powerful/normalish people either 1) Find them useful as shock troops 2) Dislike their fantasy idea of “libs” more than the reality of CCDFers. 3) Just see them as “R” with no real understanding of their behavior. 4) Have no idea any of this is going on because just getting through the day is hard.
They’re weak cowards who cannot handle moral, public confrontation at the community level. We’ve demonstrated that in largely silencing them and chasing them from any meaningful public debate space. They apparently name-drop me constantly within their little bubble, when I’m not around, and refuse to answer any question I ever send them. That’s weakness. And it’s hard to build public momentum when you spend all your time hiding in your crank bubble calling me “Bully.”
Aspiring dictatorships can never afford to lose. We can. Indeed, the biggest setback to the CCDF so far, other than Saga Stevin’s Lakeland humiliation, is Rick Nolte’s narrow win and James Dunn’s hiring. Nolte’s open, self-declared criminality has vastly ratcheted up the public, moral pressure I can bring to bear on the CCDF’s legal and political protectors. Along with Dunn, Nolte has severely damaged the CCDF and GOP brand in Polk County, as the August primary election results showed. Nolte and Dunn have given me greater public moral leverage with political law enforcement and Republican power than I have ever had.
I think, more than most places, here in Polk, people on the ground have taken the moral fight to the fake Christian dictatorship movement by exploiting these advantages. But we have to continue, as dreary and unpleasant as it is.
The Redemption they most resemble
When white supremacist gangs and para-military criminals like the Ku Klux Klan overthrew multi-racial democracy in the South and replaced it with Jim Crow, they gave this victorious Southern extension of the Civil War a particular name: Redemption.
Since the 1870s, American “Redemption” has meant violence and crime in taking what you consider yours by religious or racial right. It sanctifies murder and theft.
I don’t know if the CCDFers — and the January 6th-types with whom they closely align — know the history of Redemption. I doubt it. They’re into banning books, not reading them.
But they certainly imagine themselves imposing fiery fake Christian disorder on a society and community they despise. In that, they are the direct emotional heirs of the Ku Klux Klan of Redemption and the later Revival Klan (which was dominated/led by preachers) of roughly 1915-1930. See my books about it here and here.
The Klan of Reconstruction was defeated tactically, for the most part, by the U.S. Army. But with the support of virtually the entire white Southern leadership class, the Klan and allies achieved their strategic social and political goals: “Redemption” of the South and 100 years of Jim Crow.
By contrast, after a powerful launch, the deeply corrupt “Revival Klan” of 1915-1930 eventually got its ass kicked tactically and strategically by communities (and by citizens like my great grandfather).
The Revival Klan’s fuzzy “populist” goals — mostly violent and hypocritical enforcement of alcohol prohibition, along with racial/social norms — became unpopular. And its brutal means — drunken mob abductions and beatings and killings of women and men, black and white — came to be viscerally despised as the physical terrorism it was.
People in communities came to oppose the Klan’s disorder and decadence and pursuit of dominance more than they indulged their own prejudices. They fought it on the ground and voted that way enough to defeat it and chase it out of open governing space.
How to press our advantage to protect ourselves
To be clear: while the 2022 CCDF universe shares Redemption and Revival Klan fantasy goals, it has nothing close to their capabilities. The CCDF universe cannot organize systemic mob violence, in collaboration with police, to coerce our community with terror. They lack that juice.
But they want it; I promise you.
You can tell by all the January 6ers they roll with. Remember, here’s the chair of the Polk Republican party, after the Capitol Lynch Mob, hanging with: “Fuck the voting. Let’s get right to the violence. Shoot to kill.”
And the J6ers demonstrated they could marshal that capability against the U.S. Capitol on at least one day.
Those of us taking the moral fight to the CCDFers and their enablers are trying to prevent the CCDFers from ever getting “Fuck the voting. Let’s get right to the violence. Shoot to kill” capability at the local level.
And we know that the longer our political law enforcement — that means Sheriff Grady Judd and State Attorney Brian Haas — allow them moral and legal and political cover and impunity, the bolder and more dangerous they will get if we stop confronting them.
If law enforcement resists protecting us from these people, we must push back relentlessly and publicly — against the CCDF/J6ers and against the leaders unwilling to take them on.
It is absolutely crucial to make real civic power as uncomfortable as possible with the anti-social cranks it allows to inject disorder into our civic life.
That’s how the Floridians of the 20s broke the power of the Florida Klan. They elevated law enforcement and politicians who would protect them and pressured those who wouldn’t. Eventually all official power, from the governor down, officially turned against the Klan in public. It was barely enough.
Who will they use that “armor of God” against?
Today, exactly one 5-minute joint public appearance from Sheriff Grady Judd, State Attorney Brian Haas, U.S. Congressman Scott Franklin, state Rep. Colleen Burton, and state Rep. Melony Bell denouncing the criminal tendencies and admiration of CCDF and CCDF-adjacent GOPers would end both immediately.
It would get these gross, damaged people out of our daily public lives and community business in Polk County. And I firmly believe, based on more than just belief, that all five of those people would love for the CCDF and CCDF-adjacent folks to just disappear. That includes Grady Judd, although he is clearly the most sympathetic to them.
You’ll have to ask them why they won’t take that step. But I assure you it’s a mix of fear, weakness, power, and status.
I would also like for CCDFers and CCDF-adjacent folk to disappear from my life. But I don’t have the luxury of just sitting back and hoping somebody disappears them for me, while they strap on the Trump/DeSantis “armor of God.”
Unlike those five public figures I mentioned, CCDFers think of me (quite a bit, apparently) and people like me as religious enemies in some addled parody of a holy war. We are the embodiment of an order they think they hate.
Listen to how they and their heroes talk about their communities and the people who live in them: “Fuck the voting. Let’s get right to the violence. Shoot to kill”
They want to Redeem us by force, which is fitting.
Because these followers of the new Cross, these apostles of crime, have no more “redeemed” themselves with grace than the Redemption Klan “redeemed” Mississippi.
You nailed it again.
This article is a home run Billy.