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 AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal interviewed the former chair of the Alaska Independence Party, Mark Chryson, about how well he knew Governor Palin.
MARK CHRYSON: There were a number of times I had to do stuff over inside the city where I just showed myself up over at City Hall and said, “Hey, Sarah, we need to talk to you.” And I think there was only one time where I was not able to talk to her, and that was because she was over in some other meetings on there. But any other time, she made—the door was open. I do; I consider her a friend.
All—she knew mine. The entire—the entire state knew mine. I wasn’t afraid of being on camera in front of the news speaking my views.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, you’ve got to be proud of it
MARK CHRYSON: And I was not afraid of saying my views. However, that doesn’t mean that just because you say, hey, you’re a friend to somebody who’s got those views, it means you—it doesn’t mean that you share those views.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Chryson, the former chair of the Alaska Independence Party. And again, Max Blumenthal, for people just joining us, explain what the Alaska Independence Party is. And wasn’t Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, a member of it?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: The Alaskan Independence Party is a neo-secessionist political party in Alaska that has links to thirty other neo-secessionist groups, including neo-Confederate groups and white—and parties that have served as havens for white nationalists and theocrats across the country. It’s essentially a fringe right party that’s gained a political foothold in Alaska because of anti-government sentiment in that state. And a lot of people have joined that party, because they were sympathetic to parts of its party platform. Todd Palin was among those people; however, he was not an active member. But that’s besides the point.
In 2007, Alaskan Independence Party Vice Chair Dexter [Clark] unveiled the party’s new strategy at a neo-secessionist convention in Tennessee, which was attended by all the neo-Confederate groups that the Alaskan Independence Party affiliates with. And his new strategy was called the infiltration strategy, that because these fringe parties can’t get anyone elected running under their own party banner, he urged them to infiltrate the other two, the two major political parties, the Republican and Democratic parties. And he pointed to Sarah Palin as the most successful example of this strategy, that she was essentially—this is in his words, and I’m paraphrasing his words—she was essentially an Alaskan Independence Party cadre, boring from within the Republican Party’s infrastructure.
And while the McCain campaign was able to discredit his claim that she was an AIP member, they weren’t able to discredit the fact, and they haven’t even addressed the fact, that she worked hand-in-glove with the Alaskan Independence Party during the early ’90s and throughout her governorship. And when she spoke before the Alaskan Independence Party in 2008, she pointedly refused to or just did not address the Democratic Party. So that raises questions in itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I wanted to play the report you referred to earlier about Governor Palin’s former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. It begins with a clip from a 2005 sermon by the visiting Kenyan Pentecostal preacher Thomas Muthee. He is praying over Sarah Palin.
BISHOP THOMAS MUTHEE: In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, every form of witchcraft is what we’re revoking in the name of Jesus. Father, make our way now, in Jesus’ name, amen.
REV. HOWARD BESS: I probably have paid a real price for my speaking out. The name of the book is Pastor, I Am Gay. I describe myself as a born-again evangelical Christian in the tradition of American Baptist. The book was published, and the religious right in the community decided to pursue the book, and they were successful in keeping it out of all of the bookstores here in the valley, including Walden Books. And it was in that context then that we know that Sarah Palin came and put pressure on the librarian to get rid of certain books, and one of them was Pastor, I Am Gay. If she is elected vice president, it is going to be a rough four or eight years for all of my gay friends.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Why is that?
REV. HOWARD BESS: Because she believes they’re evil.
BISHOP THOMAS MUTHEE: We come against that python spirit. We come against that spirit of witchcraft as the body of Christ right now in the name of Jesus. Oh-raba-saka-tala. Pray, pray. Raba-sandalala-bebebekalabebe. Shanda-la-bebebeka-lelebebe. That’s why we come against all forms of witchcraft. All the python spirits that are released against the body of Christ and bring this nation into the kingdom.
UNIDENTIFIED RUSSIAN PASTOR: …seriously, and right now we exercise our power. We go against the spirit, and we put our feet against the heads of the enemy in the name of Jesus.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’ve been attending Sarah Palin’s church, that she attended since she was four, for the past few days, seeing a guy named Bishop Thomas Muthee speak. How did the theology of Sarah Palin’s church influence her decisions in dealing with people who she sees as her political enemies?
ED O’CALAGHAN: That’s not a fair question. And—
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think it’s a very fair question, and she wants her life to be an open book, and she wants to tell her story, and we have to go through you.
ED O’CALAGHAN: If that question was posed in a—
MEGHAN STAPLETON: And she’s waiting for the appropriate and nonpartisan manner in which to tell her story.
ED O’CALAGHAN: Thank you. Thank you.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think this would be an appropriate time to tell her story.
REV. HOWARD BESS: During this same period of time, they also organized and took over the area politically. They took over the Wasilla City Council, the Palmer City Council, the borough assembly, the school board and the board of our local hospital. It was in that context in which Sarah Palin was fully active, was very involved in the political takeovers of all of the community organizations. In the case of the hospital, they were able to pack the board, and at their very first meeting passed a resolution banning all abortions.
AMY GOODMAN: Retired Baptist minister, Reverend Howard Bess, talking to journalist Max Blumenthal. Bess’s 1995 book Pastor, I Am Gay was among those Governor Palin tried to remove from the Wasilla Public Library when she was mayor. Max Blumenthal, how do you know this?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Howard Bess, you know, described to me three separate occasions when Sarah Palin went to the Wasilla Public Library to demand the removal of that book, and I went to the library myself, and they told me it wasn’t there for space reasons. But Howard Bess and people in the community know otherwise. Howard Bess estimates that he has lost, you know, $500,000 for his church, which was de-fellowshipped, because he allowed gay people to pray there. And Sarah Palin was, you know, working—was directly involved with the forces that have worked to destroy and demonize him simply for tolerating homosexuals in his church. And this is the context in which, you know, she was groomed and cultivated as a political leader.
The character you heard at the beginning and whose kind of garbled preaching you heard in the middle of that video, for your radio listeners, is a Kenyan pastor named—a Pentecostal pastor named Bishop Thomas Muthee, who claims that he cast a witch out of a town named Kiambu, Kenya, and then, you know, miraculously planted eighteen churches there. When the Wasilla Assembly of God, Sarah Palin’s church for over twenty years, found out about him through a popular video disseminated through Christian right channels, they flew him over there to bless Sarah Palin when she was running for governor. And he blessed her by saying that we need more Christian leaders in all of the seven spheres in society, and he complained that there are too many Israelites—that was his, you know, obvious codeword for Jews—in government and that Sarah Palin would be a remedy to that. She, after he said that, walked up and turned her hands up to the sky and closed her eyes and allowed him to lay hands on her and protect her from the spirit of witchcraft.
Now, this is the language of spiritual warfare that comes out of her church, the idea that behind reality is a secret spiritual world, a clash between Satan and God. And this is what they believe, and this is, you know, the Manichean worldview that informs Sarah Palin’s extreme conservatism. It’s why she treated someone like Howard Bess so harshly.
And I went to this McCain-Palin press conference, which you heard and saw there, about the firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to ask how the theology of her church influenced her decisions in dealing with perceived political enemies like Walt Monegan. Of course, they treated it like an illegitimate question, but I think it really is an essential question to understanding how Sarah Palin thinks about the world. In a way, she’s more George W. Bush than George W. Bush was.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I want to thank you for being with us, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute. His website, maxblumenthal.com. His latest article, “Meet Sarah Palin’s Radical Right-Wing Pals,” online at Salon.com. Source: http://www.democracynow.org/
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