False Prophet!

This is my last midterms post, I promise. It concerns "firefighter prophet" and guy-on-his-way-to-getting-his-own-Augoeides-tag Mark Taylor, whose laughable "prophecies" keep piling up. Like many wannabe prophets, Taylor is deliberately vague most of the time so it can be hard to explicitly call him out when he's wrong. But for the midterms, he offered up a prediction that was entirely testable. He predicted that there would be a "red tsunami" of Republican voters and that his party would sweep the midterms because God told him so. That flat-out didn't happen. So Taylor is now trying to spin a straightforward prediction into something else, and the result is completely ridiculous.

Contrary to Taylor’s prophecy of a “red tsunami” that would sweep the midterms, it was no red tsunami. While Republicans expanded their control in the Senate, the Democrats took control of the House, picking up 27 seats. The House takeover by Dems puts Trump’s agenda to a virtual halt, as many analysts have suggested. In the run-up to the midterms, Taylor was confident that his red tsunami prediction was going to come to pass. “Go back to 2016 to the presidential election – all the fake news, the pundits, the polls were all wrong as we found out,” Taylor told the Christian broadcasting network CBN News. “It was just the exact opposite of what they were saying. So the same thing’s going to happen here.”

“There will be no ‘Blue Wave.’ A lot of people are talking about a ‘Red Wave,’ but it’s actually going to be a ‘Red Tsunami’ is what the Lord is showing me,” he added. But as Right Wing Watch points out, Taylor is now kicking the proverbial can down the road after the midterm results came in, saying you need an earthquake first before the tsunami comes. “What does it take to create a tsunami? It takes an earthquake,” he said in a live webcast this Friday. “This is what God is saying: ‘The election is not over, this red tsunami has got to be started by an earthquake.’ We had the red wave; the earthquake was [Jeff] Sessions stepping aside. The delay is over. They are going after these people hard.”

I guess what Taylor is trying to say here is that Sessions stepping aside was something that only a prophet or a regular news reader could possibly know. And that's supposed to be impressive! To be a little fair to Taylor, he probably is worried because he's a Biblical literalist and technically the Bible says that false prophets are supposed to die (Deuteronomy 18:20-22). Of course, I think Biblical literalism is silly so I would never suggest such a thing. But I do suggest that anyone who considers themselves a good Christian should stop listening to him. The Bible is very clear in many places that false prophets lead their followers astray.