

On his personal Facebook page, which is open to all service users, Minnesota state representative Tim Miller shares a lurid Life News post, Former Satanist: “I Performed Satanic Rituals Inside Abortion Clinics."

Life News, which describes itself as "an independent news agency devoted to reporting news that affects the pro-life community" with a weekly readership of 750,000, picked up self-proclaimed ex-satanist Zachary King's sensational account from the Lepanto Institute, a conservative Catholic group founded last year by anti-choice activist Mitch Hichborn. It is known mostly for attempting to stoke outrage against Catholic Relief Services for employing a gay man in a same-sex marriage as its Vice President of Finance.

While King apparently first appears online in 2011 as a "Former Satanist turned Catholic Warrior for Christ", his star more recently rose when he was featured as an expert on Satanism in the March/April 2015 "The Occult and Satanism in America" issue of Crusade Magazine. Crusade is published by The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, a group that has protested Madonna videos, the DaVinci Code and Desmond Tutu's speaking engagements at Catholic universities, while blaming tornadoes in Illinois on same-sex marriage. Impeccable critical thinking skills, indeed.

Since September 2014, King and his wife Catherine operate a profit corporation registered in the state of Florida, All Saints Catholic Ministry from a single family dwelling in Lehigh Acres, Florida. The profit corporation's website isn't accessible as we write as it has exceeded its bandwidth; King's twitter account is followed by 65 people but hasn't posted since March 23.

King's claim about Satanists gathering to abort and eat fetuses isn't the only outlandish story he's peddled to gullible pro-life adherents. Elsewhere, King has asserted that face piercings and yoga are satanic, that Satan is only threatened by Baptist and Catholic churches and that First Lady Michele Obama's campaign to end childhood obesity is part of a vast Satanic conspiracy where we're Eating from Satan's Shopping Cart. He also claims to have raised people from the dead (25:55-57 time marker).

King also believes that Protestants use a "made-up version of the Bible" (beginning around the 8:30 time marker here), a statement which Bluestem suspects would not be looked upon kindly by Representative Miller's Dutch Reformed neighbors in Prinsburg.







The now-blind ex-Satanist's introduction to the demonic when he was a mere slip of a boy playing Bloody Mary and Dungeons & Dragons, but he quickly moved of Satan's career ladder to doing magic spells for the rich and powerful (discussion begins around 25 minute mark in the Youtube posted by the San Felipe Chapel in Los Angeles. King claims that Masons, the Bohemian Grove club and Skull & Bones call on satanic high wizards for magic.

Bluestem suspect that members of the fraternity at Yale, such as former President George W. Bush, would be as surprised by that claim as the good souls in Prinsburg would be about the Scripture they read, and while Bluestem thinks that no one ought doubt Representative Miller's deeply felt position on life, we hope that he acquires the critical thinking skills to match.







Tim Miller's Facebook Post

On Friday evening, Tim Miller posted this note above an article shared via LifeNews, Former Satanist: “I Performed Satanic Rituals Inside Abortion Clinics”:

Open our eyes, Lord.

While only one of Miller's friends "liked" the post, it was shared by Child Protection League founder Michelle Lentz while generating a fun conversation between Miller and a friends about evaluation of sources and the conspiratorial impulses of public figures like Bill Clinton:

Here's the screenshot in case Miller follows through and pulls the post:

Well okay then: King's schtick, promoted by groups associated with the fringe of American Catholicism, is simply another Clinton false flag conspiracy. We'll forget about those emails ASAP.

We're not surprised that Miller has heard this sort of thing before. While anything at the Patheos progressive Christian site needs to be viewed critically, Slackivist Fred Clark does seem to have done his reading for The Satan-selling con-men are boring. Their Satan-buying audience is fascinating. He notes how King's material is lifted from earlier "ex-satanist" grifters:

Yesterday I wrote about Zachary King, the latest in a long line of self-professed “former Satanists.” King is a liar and a con artist, but whatever, he doesn’t really interest me all that much. The problem isn’t con artists like King. The problem is their audience. King is just the most recent “Satan seller” stepping up to meet the unmet demand for this shtick ever since Mike Warnke was exposed as a liar and a fraud. There’s a huge audience desperate for someone to come along and take all the money and adulation they used to shovel at Warnke, and we can hardly blame a guy like Zack King for taking advantage of that opportunity. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, grifters gotta grift. . . . * We can, however, criticize Zachary King for his shoddy craftsmanship. He’s got the hair and the look, but apart from that he seems like a hack. Most of his patter is lifted, verbatim, from stuff written decades ago by guys like Warnke and Bob Larson. There’s no originality, no flair, no sense that he’s moving the story forward or making it his own. That’s just lazy. And it makes him the con-man equivalent of a joke-thief. King’s only innovation seems to be his decision to focus on a less-tapped-out niche audience. Warnke’s and Larson’s shtick played well among white evangelicals, so King seems to be testing how it works among far-right Gothic Catholics. That’s shrewd, but he doesn’t seem to have fully explored the different approaches needed to milk that audience. Warnke raked it in from evangelicals through the collection plate and scary direct mail fundraisers, plus he sold books and albums and VHS tapes. King, likewise, is working the speaking circuit and selling DVDs and, eventually, books. (He needs to get his butt in gear and finish those, even if that means hiring a ghostwriter — that’s what Larson and Hal Lindsey did and it worked for them.) . . .

We suspect that this is the material that Miller once heard. If not, perhaps he can be forthright in sharing more of the circumstances.

As Clark notes, King's been working on two manuscripts since 2011, according to a page about him from that year's Come Holy Spirit Conference:

Stay tuned as Zachary is completing his two books: Satan Loves Me, He Loves Me Not and Abortion is a Satanic Sacrifice

He's still working on them, though the DVDs appear to keep coming.

Satan's Shopping Cart

Our favorite King production online is the Excerpts from Eating from Satan's Shopping Cart on King's Youtube channel Embedding is disabled, so here's a transcript:

It appears from me doing even the smallest amount of digging, I have uncovered possibly a huge satanic conspiracy. On printed page 11 of 19 on the Wikipedia Pepsico printout, last paragraph, it states: "In 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama initiated a campaign to end childhood obesity entitled "Let's Move," in which she sought to encourage healthier food options in public schools. improve food nutrition labeling, and increased physical activity for children. In response to this initiative, Pepsico, Campbell's Soup, Coca-Cola, General Mills and others partnered in an alliance called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation." If you remember from earlier, these guys have promised to cut sugar and transfat from foods. Is it mere or simple coincidence that all of the companies partnered with the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, that's closely linked with Michelle Obama, are also linked with Senomyx, which uses aborted baby kidneys in their research and development of artificial flavor enhancers. If I might add one more link to the chain, can anyone guess than one of the most abortion-friendly presidents we've ever had is? President Obama. Now it comes full circle. Whether they were doing this to make money, to really make children happier, or to slap God in the face by using aborted babies for research, this simply cannot continue. You cannot make your body healthy while destroying your soul.

Snopes.com Urban Legend Reference Pages examined the controversy over Senomyx in a 2011 post, Senomyxed Messages, which was last updated in April 2015.

Perhaps Miller will back down and pull the Facebook share, but he could go even deeper down this rabbit hole if he's having a bad evening. Given that Lt. Gov Tina Smith started her career at General Mills, so maybe Miller will contact General Mills to demand whether they're using baby kidneys in flavor research, as well as supporting marriage equality.

There's political damage to be done here--not just an erosion of critical thinking skills--and the guy who's not King of Minnesota might be just the one to do it.

Images: Dana Carvey as the Church Lady (top); Lego Dungeon and Dragons (second from top); screengrabs of Miller's personal Facebook page, which is open to all Facebook users.

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