Brother Stair
After spending a restless night after reading the latest productions
of the Dissident Right, I sought solace, at around 4 AM, in one of my
favorite entertainments: radio preachers. I was listening to some
Jamaican rabbiting on about how important the support of his Brooklyn
ministry was when there was a burst of static, a few moments of
fuzziness, and then – suddenly – the unmistakable voice and teachings of
Brother Stair!
Dog of Flanders! Had contemplating the ongoing chaos of the former
Alt Right caused my already finely-strung sensibility to snap, like Dr.
Mabuse himself?
[1] Had a rip developed in the space-time continuum, as
some have speculated happened on 9/11?
When
last we were discussing Brother Stair,
he had just been hauled out of the “radio room” at his end-times
compound – from which “The Last Day Prophet of God is reaching every
nation in the world with the message he has preached faithfully for over
forty years . . .” “Jesus Christ is Coming in Your Lifetime! This is
the Last Generation . . . The Last Hour . . . Prepare to Meet your God!”
– by agents of the secular arm of the state, to face apparently
unanswerable charges of grotesque child sexual abuse.
[2]
And yet here was the unmistakable Brother Stair, announcing the End
Times, promoting his farm community/compound, and – always my favorite
part – bitterly mocking,
Fred Sanford-style, anyone who dared to voice a doubt or question.
As I mentioned in the previous essay, Brother Stair maintained his
dominance of the airwaves by leveraging the needs of shortwave and AM
stations to fill endless timeslots with paid programming; indeed, this
was how I leveraged the essay itself, using Brother Stair as an example
of what the “Alt Right,” as it was then known, could do by insinuating
its message into willing outlets. I reasoned, somewhat implicitly, that
while outlets like Facebook and Twitter were superficially for-profit
outfits, they were run by virtue-signalers who would deplatform anyone
to the Right of Hillary at a moment’s notice; not so the hardnosed and
desperate retailers of radio time.
[3] Unless the “Alt Right” became as poisonous as child molesting, it would be a safe niche.
[4]
Such stations were usually computerized outfits, run remotely, and
would ruthlessly cut off broadcasts at the precise moment an hour
passed, insert a pre-recorded station announcement, and then cue up the
next program – even doing so in the middle of a two-hour block, with the
program continuing on as if the break was a glitch.
And such was this station, WSNR (which I thought of as “Sports News
in Russian,” as during the 6AM-6PM block, religious programming was
replaced with some kind of lugubrious Slavic ethnic news shows), whose
broadcasts from Jersey City were my link to the outside world, from my
Airstream trailer here in the Pine Barrens.
So I assumed some glitch had indeed occurred, and some old Stair broadcast, rattling around in the clouds, had intruded.
I finally reached blissful unconsciousness before much longer, so I
never learned how long this had gone on; the Slavic muttering had long
since resumed when I awoke. But overcome by curiosity, I fired up the
long-dormant iPhone app offered on his
Web page,
and indeed, there he was – and references to current events showed that
this was no rebroadcast from his immense archives; Brother Stair, like
Charlie Parker, lives! Brother Stair was on the air!
My next step, of course, was to get on the Google, where I learned that
for a mere seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, Brother Stair was out on bail in January and back at the compound – I mean, farming community.
About a month later, the parents of one of the victims were themselves arrested;
this article includes the sort of mug shot all too familiar on the Alt Right scene.
And a month after that brought the death of Craig Mack, a
long-dormant “rap star” that Brother Stair would occasionally mention,
as if he was the John Travolta or Tom Cruise of the Overcomer Ministry.
As
GossipOnThis describes it:
In 2016, the rapper resurfaced in a Youtube video giving a testimony at a church in Walterboro, S.C. In the video titled “
Craig Mack Testimony,”
Mack raps about living a life of sin before devoting his life to the
Lord at Overcomer Ministry. He also rapped about moving his family from
New York to South Carolina so that he could be a full-time member of the
church.
The church’s leader Ralph Gordon Stair (a.k.a. R.G. Stair)
preached after Craig’s rap about him being found by God.
“Craig Mack did not find the Lord. He wasn’t even looking for him,”
Stair said in the video. “He found what he was looking for: fame, women,
money, pleasure. He found it all and when he found it, he found he was
lost. He found he was lost because the Lord found him. The Lord found
Craig Mack. Craig Mack didn’t find the Lord. The Lord found him.”
In another video, Stair is seen asking Mack “What did you do when you was in the world?”
Mack responds, “Wickedness.”
Stair says, “And what are you doing now?”
“Righteousness!” Mack fires back before waving his hands and jumping up and down.
Stair also refers to Mack as a “boy” in the video and tells him he’s no longer a slave and now a servant of the Lord.
That last bit is especially interesting, as in our essay on the similarly unpersoned Milo,
[5]
we discussed the rather masochistic delight Christians take in being
slaves of Christ, often disguised by mistranslating the Greek
doulos as “servant”; we also began and ended with references to
Pulp Fiction, starring . . . John Travolta.
Mack may not be as big as Travolta was/is/was, but he was big enough to bring mention of the Overcomer Ministry to the
Washington Post, the
Daily Mail, the
NY Daily News, and even
NPR. Typically, the
Post and
NPR are fairly restrained, concentrating on Mack, while the
Daily Mail and
Daily News use the story as a hook for a salacious “look inside” the “sex cult” run by Brother Stair.
As the
Daily Mail puts it, it was:
[An] isolated and oppressed community, utterly dependent on Stair for
the most basic provisions, and shamed and manipulated by the
unscrupulous preacher addicted to pornography and accused of defrauding
some members out of life savings to the tune of hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
More shocking still, records show that Stair was implicated in the
suspicious death of one adult member of his congregation and charged
with illegally moving and burying the body of a two-month-old boy whose
death ‘by violent means’ he did not report. The baby was believed by
many who were present at the time to have been fathered by Stair
himself.
Well, at least he’s not Richard Spencer.
One piece of evidence for the Stairs’ broadcasts being recent and not
archival material is a new wariness of social media. Mack’s death is
being blamed on Stair because, like many Christian fanatics, he forbids
the use of hospitals or medicine. And you’ve already noticed the “back
to the farm” meme.
But like all such fanatics, Stair picks and choses what aspects of
modern life he favors: radio broadcasting and even satellites are okay,
as they enable the Gospel to be preached to the whole world, thus
bringing about the End Time (and also, along with credit cards and
banking, efficient fundraising). Now, however, he’s added YouTube and
Facebook to his list of agents of the Antichrist, though he was happy
enough to use them to promote Mack’s membership. Perhaps this is
connected with his recent self-inflicted problems; as
GossipOnThis outlnes it:
Stair’s arrest came after he posted a video of him inappropriately
groping a 12-year-old girl’s breast during a worship service. “I’m gonna
touch them things till nobody else can touch them,” he said in the
video. In another video on YouTube, a 16-year-old girl accuses Stair of
molesting her over the course of five months,
The Post and Courier reports.
Brother Stair faced similar charges of extreme sexual misconduct back in 2002, and survived.
[6]
One might think that with today’s concern – or hysteria – over
pedophilia and the #MeToo movement, he would be a goner. I mean, look
what they did to Milo, just for reminiscing about his own childhood!
[7]
But Stair, apparently, has access to powers far beyond even a Weinstein;
according to this chap 14CenturyHood on Reddit:
I was listening in on Stair the other day, he was talking about how
those people who got him arrested thought they had the authority . . .
until Stair read them the word of the gospel that reminded them that
he’s the head honcho or whatever, then they “cringed” before him.
Goddammit Stair.
I suppose the Romans felt the same way about Paul. Once more, he seems to have proven to be a true overcomer.
[8]
Notes
[1] Described
here, at 13:25.
[2]
Three counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct; one count of
assault with intent to commit first-degree criminal sexual conduct; one
count of third-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor; one count of
second-degree assault; and, in a prosecutorial burst of “oh, what the
hell,” one count of kidnapping and one count of burglary.
[3]
Brother Stair also performed a service for shortwave listeners, as his
constant and ubiquitous broadcasts served as a handy channel marker.
[4] Arguably, the subsequent antics of Heimbach, Milo, Spencer, and so on have made this a moot point.
[5] “
Milo and the Miles,: reprinted in the second, embiggened edition of my collection
The Homo & the Negro: Masculinist Meditations on Politics and Popular Culture; edited by Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017).
[6]
In 2002, he was arrested on two counts of second-degree criminal sexual
conduct after two women alleged he raped them on numerous occasions. He
pleaded guilty to two lesser counts of misdemeanor assault and battery
and was sentenced to time served.
[7] “Far-right activist
Milo Yiannopoulos had
debts totalling more than $2m (£1.6m) during 2018, according to
documents put together by his former Australian tour promoters,”
says Harry Cockburn, who should know.
[8]
“To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which
is in the midst of the paradise of God. . . . He that overcometh shall
not be hurt of the second death. . . . To him that overcometh will I
give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in
the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that
receiveth it. . . . And he that overcometh, and keepeth My works unto
the end, to him will I give power over the nations: And he shall rule
them with a rod of iron. . . . He that overcometh, the same shall be
clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the
book of life, but I will confess his name before My Father, and before
His angels. . . . Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple
of My God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the
name of My God, and the name of the city of My God, which is new
Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from My God: and I will write
upon him My new name. . . . To him that overcometh will I grant to sit
with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My
Father in His throne” (Revelation 2:7,11,17,26-27; 3:5,12,21). See the
outline of the “overcomer” heresy
here.
