Demonstrating that he is completely unrepentant of his past sins, snake oil salesman and supreme heresy platformer Jim Bakker is claiming that his spectacular downfall in the 1980s and subsequent prison sentence was simply a matter of a nascent “cancel culture.”
They canceled me. Mainly it was the media, and the media got a Pulitzer Prize for putting me in prison. That’s what they do, they reward the enemies of the gospel. And the cancel culture, we had the largest ministry of its type in the world, Heritage USA, millions of people came there and it was millions being saved around the world, and they literally took it away, put it into bankruptcy. Said they were going to care for it, it was all lies, it a takeover plan, and it was done in front of the world.
That was what cancel culture is…the federal government produced video from my show video and edited it and put me in prison…they made me say things I didn’t say. They just put pieces together – thousands of pieces of my show – the government did it! Just like now, this is cancel culture!
For context, Bakker was famously indicted in 1980 on federal charges of mail and wire fraud and conspiring to defraud the public after he sold $1,000 “lifetime memberships” to tens of thousands of people. This was supposed to let them spend three nights a year, every year, in a luxury hotel he was building, but his sales far outstripped his capacity and he pocketed tens of millions of dollars, never being able to fulfill his promise. He was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years in prison but was ultimately released after 5.
It was also revealed that he had an affair with his secretary (she said she was raped) and paid her over $350,000 to cover it up. He had several more allegations of sexual impropriety against him, all the while being revealed that he was living a life of incredible excess and wealth.
Cancel culture? Not a chance.
h/t to Right Wing Watch
