General William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin may have retired from the military in 2007 after serving as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Bush administration, but upon leaving government service he quickly found a comfortable new career in right wing evangelical politics. A conservative media darling, Boykin became an Executive Vice-President at the homophobic and fundamentalist Family Research Council hate group in 2012. The next year, he played a major role in Groundswell, a gathering of hard-right conservatives that has succeeded in lobbying Congress to investigate supposed scandals on their terms, using their prepared talking points. During a May 8, 2013 Groundswell meeting held at the Washington, DC offices of reactionary legal organization Judicial Watch, Boykin was recorded with legendary Islamophobe Frank Gaffney describing a meeting with then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) the previous evening in which they called for the creation of a special select Benghazi committee. His civilian career has been marked by religious chauvinism, a militant disregard for the human rights of non-Christians, and a series of increasingly-dubious claims.

  • Boykin served in the original Delta Force, an elite US Army combat team, and eventually became the highest-ranking soldier in the Special Forces, taking part in the killing of Pablo Escobar and commanding the infamous Black Hawk Down mission.
  • During a speech made before an Oregon church in 2003, Boykin cast the ‘War on Terror’ in explicitly religious terms as a war between “Judeo-Christians” and “Satan.” Referring to his command in Mogadishu during the 1993 hunt for Osman Atto, a rival of strongman Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Boykin declared that “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” a ridiculous statement considering that Islam originated as a reaction against pagan idolatry. Boykin’s remarks resulted in a ten-month investigation by the Pentagon which determined that he had only violated three minor rules about public speaking in uniform. The final report was never released to the public.
  • Promoted afterwards to serve under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s hatchet man, Dr. Stephen Cambone, Boykin played a key role in transferring the torture techniques used at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Boykin is now dismissive of the word ‘torture,’ insisting that the word should apply to the Groundswell-contrived IRS ‘targeting’ scandal instead.
  • In 2009, Boykin told a ‘Take Back America’ conference in St. Louis that “there is no greater threat to America than Islam.” The event was held by the Eagle Forum, a right wing ‘pro-family’ organization founded in 1972 by arch-conservative Phyllis Schlafly, who is credited with leading the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s. Her son Andrew is the founder of Conservapedia, an online resource for people who want to believe that the Earth is just a few thousand years old and that scientific evolution is just a Satanic conspiracy to convince the world that fuels are fossils.
  • During 2010, Boykin’s name appeared on a report from Gaffney’s extremist ‘think tank, the Center for Security Policy, titled Shariah: The threat to America. Gaffney is a conspiracy theorist who propagates various Cold War-inflected fantasies about supposed Muslim plots against the United States and has been kicked out of the Conservative Political Action Conference for smearing arch-conservative anti-tax organizer Grover Norquist as a subversive agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • That same year, Boykin told an interviewer that his Kingdom Warriors ministry was conducting “spiritual warfare” on a daily basis, that killing’ and ‘murder’ are morally different acts, and that a Russia-Iran-Turkey alliance would invade Israel and bring the End of Days soon.
  • Boykin is a leading member of the Oak Initiative, a Dominionist group that seeks to install ‘Christian leaders’ like himself at every level of power in the United States. Among the more lunatic ideas promoted by founder Rick Joyner of Morningstar Ministries: Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment for homosexuality; Islam is God’s judgment on America for legal abortion and “other perversions.”
  • When he was identified as the upcoming keynote speaker for the February 8, 2012 National Prayer Breakfast at the US Military Academy at West Point, the VoteVets organization led a coalition of groups opposed to his divisive proselytizing. Boykin withdrew from the event, but afterwards launched into a new campaign decrying “Christian persecution.”
  • That same year, Boykin told the Tennessee Freedom Coalition that an Islamic radical group led by Daniel Patrick Boyd of North Carolina had planned to capture and torture him before they were arrested by the FBI. However, the plot does not appear anywhere on the indictment and no source has ever confirmed Boykin’s story.
  • Boykin has repeatedly lent credence to fake ‘ex-terrorist’ and obvious con artist Kamal Saleem to support his Islamophobia.
  • Reflecting his continued efforts to keep his deranged conspiracy theories afloat, Boykin is still listed as a leader of the ‘Benghazi Accountability Coalition.’
  • Interviewed by fellow Groundswell figure Ginni Thomas, wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for the Daily Caller website in 2014, Boykin expressed surprise that the United States had not simply killed Private Bowe Bergdahl, a Taliban-held prisoner who Boykin claimed had been found guilty of desertion. In fact, the military justice system has yet to decide what to do with Bergdahl.
  • During 2015, Boykin has promoted a ‘documentary’ by auteur Curtis Bowers which posits a massive communist conspiracy is destroying America. Agenda – Grinding America Down is so awful and riddled with errors that legendary Christian Reconstructionist Gary North declares that “it should never have been made.”

Most recently, Boykin has been tweeting in reference to the husband-wife team who shot up the Inland regional Center in San Bernardino, California, killing fourteen people and wounding twenty-one. Whereas FBI Director James Comey has said that their terror attack was not directed by any outside group of jihadis, but rather appears to be the result of quiet radicalization within the United States, Boykin posits that Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik needed help to buy their guns and bomb materials, and speculates that they had support from Saudi Arabia. Despite this, he rejects calls for better gun control laws and insists that political correctness is getting in the way of effective response. Clearly, Boykin is very excited by the prospect of finally getting the ‘war on Islam’ that he has wanted for so long.

2 thoughts on “Torture For Jesus: The Dominion Of Gen. William ‘Jerry’ Boykin”
  1. Jerry Boykin is an odious little man filled with odious ideas, but unlike most like-minded lunatics—who are content to bash out the occasional semi-coherent op-ed piece—he actually works for his wingnut welfare. He has a work ethic (okay, sure, it most resembles the frenetic activity of a grifter running too many cons at once, but it is identifiably a work ethic).

    I’m not saying that should count as a point in Boykin’s favor, mind, just making an observation.

    –alopecia

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