Say you’re a poorly educated little man with no redeeming qualities, but you want to be rich and famous. You aren’t very talented or skilled, but you are able to talk fast and with confidence about very little at all. So you open a church. That’s the limit of your abilities.

But most churches are local two-bit affairs, and church pastors who are nice and try to help their communities are going to go nowhere. Yeah, you might have the respect of your neighbors, and you might be able to have some self-respect, but kindness never pays, and if you want to skyrocket to national attention and get donations from really rich people (you know, the people who matter), you’ve got to have some pizzazz. So you add this to your statement of faith.

We believe that the human race was created as genetic male (man) and genetic female (woman) by a direct act of God; that marriage has been established by God; therefore, marriage is a sacred covenantal union between one man and one woman, for life. We also believe that legitimate Biblical sexual relations are exercised solely within marriage. Hence, sexual activities such as, but not limited to, adultery, fornication, incest, polygamy, homosexuality, transgender, bisexuality, cross-dressing, pedophilia and bestiality are inconsistent with the teachings of the Bible and the Church. Further, lascivious behavior, the creation, viewing and/or distribution of pornography and efforts to alter ones gender are incompatible with a true Biblical witness.

Now you’re talking. Now you’ve got a juicy topic for many sermons, and you’ve succeeded in drawing the most venomous, petty people to attend, and they’ll take action against all the people outside your church, getting you more and more attention. It’s such a simple formula, and it works. So many big-time preachers have launched careers that buy them private jets and mansions and yachts off this basic approach! You’d think people would catch on, but no, there are always more little angry people who want to get a trivial sense of power by tormenting The Other.

The latest parasite to leap unto this bandwagon is Pastor Tim Thompson. He’s going to go far, because he has hitched his star to the MAGA message, which is going to draw in the dumbest and most gullible people in America.

Earlier this year, a Southern California pastor named Tim Thompson welcomed former President Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba to a stage. “I gotta say this is really refreshing from New York City,” Habba chirped at the fancy wedding venue and equestrian center in Temecula. “I’m in God’s country now.”

“Knowing the president the way you do,” asked Thompson, who runs the nonprofit ministry Our Watch, “can you give us three things tonight that we as a group can be praying for him?”

Habba told Thompson’s flock they should pray for America, non-believers, and Trump’s family, adding that, “He’s gonna go down as the best president this country has ever had.”

I’ll save them some trouble and tell them they don’t need to pray for us non-believers.

His first target has been school boards, of course. Every promoter of a crank ideology knows that local school board elections are cheap, low-profile springboards to get influence and promote stupid beliefs — people just don’t pay much attention to them, but they do have an over-sized effect on the community. Thompson has already packed the local school board with right-wingers, and a common feature of his sermons and Twitter ranting is to name queer teachers and mobilize protests against their existence.

Indeed, Thompson speaks frequently about battling “evil” on Our Watch—usually in public schools, but he’s also sounded off about tarot cards at Coachella and videos of people “sticking laser beams into their anus.”

In late March, he created a video urging California viewers to run for their local school boards. “We’ve seen Satan creep in, strip away the rights of parents and try to indoctrinate children into filth,” he warned.

Thompson already tipped the scales of the Temecula Valley Unified School District in 2022, helping to give three new right-leaning board members a majority. That year, IE Family PAC raised more than $206,000, filings show. His candidates included Dr. Joseph Komrosky, who is facing a special recall election on June 4.

After the trio assumed office, they immediately banned critical race theory (CRT) and shelled out at least $15,000 in district funds for a consultant to teach staff why CRT is harmful. The panel also passed a policy that forces teachers to “out” transgender kids to their parents and rejected a social studies book because its accompanying teacher materials included gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

We don’t know much about Thompson’s background. There isn’t much information on his education (which makes sense — he hates education) or history, and he seems to have simply grown up in Temecula and never gone anywhere else. Temecula has a bit of a reputation.

The Temecula Valley of Thompson’s youth was awash with racism and neo-Nazi activity. In the 1980s, Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger founded a white supremacist group in nearby Fallbrook. In the ’90s, a pair of 14-year-olds tied to local white supremacists were charged in two drive-by shootings targeting Latinos, while members of Hammerskin Nation, identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a neo-Nazi skinhead organization, were convicted of assault in the gang beating of a 21-year-old Black man as dozens of others watched. The district attorney called it “one of the most egregious incidents of racial violence that has occurred in Riverside County.”

There’s little public record of Thompson’s early years, other than he attended Temecula Valley High School at least in his freshman year and worked as a chaplain for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, a relationship that served him well. A campaign committee for Sheriff Chad Bianco later gave $5,000 to the pastor’s political action committee. Bianco was a member of the Oath Keepers during the time Thompson was a chaplain but said he left the extremist group because “it did not offer me anything.” Thompson, as well as his adult son, Timothy Jacob, have been photographed or filmed sporting patches affiliated with the Three Percenters, a far-right anti-government militia.

In 2012, Thompson began cultivating his church. At that time it was called Venia, and met in rented spaces across the Temecula Valley, for a while in a bar. The congregation eventually found a building in 2016, and changed its name to 412 Murrieta and later to 412 Temecula Valley.

Before long, Thompson became a fixture at far-right rallies across the state. He spoke at the state Capitol in 2019 to a group opposed to sex education in public schools and returned a few weeks later to speak at another protest over California’s Health Education Framework. Days later he attended another rally on the matter outside of the Riverside County office of the California Department of Education.

So he probably attended at least a year of high school, attached himself as a chaplain (do you need no qualifications whatsoever to be a police chaplain? I guess not) to the conservative sheriff’s department, and mastered everything he needed to know to found a church, make life hell for gay people, and steadily move into the orbit of the Trump crime family.

I told you it’s an easy formula that works.

If you want to find the most horrible, awful, evil people in your community, all you need to do is pop into the fundamentalist church in your town on a Sunday morning, and there they all are, growing fat as ticks on the blood of your fellow citizens.

It’s too bad we don’t have any laws prohibiting non-profit, tax-exempt entities from lobbying for political causes.