Televangelist and President Donald Trump acolyte Kenneth Copeland has found a way of cope with former Vice President Joe Biden winning the 2020 presidential election: laughing himself senseless with his congregation.
Copeland is once again responsible for one of the weirdest church scenes captured this year, following his April pronouncement that he could blow coronavirus away with the “wind of God.”
“The media said what?” Copeland asks before laughing in apparent disbelief. “The media said Joe Biden’s president.”
Copeland then continues his hysterical laughter as the crowd rises and joins him. Even onscreen, however, the maniacal laughs appear calculated and forced.
Redditors had a field day with the video, which, along with last week’s heavily memed video of a prayer led by Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain, puts televangelists closer to “cultish huckster” territory.
“This is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a long time. I’m done with the internet today,” commented u/AtomicRoosterFetus.
u/peppermintmeow wrote, “He looks like he’s about to unhinge his jaw and swallow a toddler.”
“Every time a new Copeland video comes out about 90% of the comments say something nearly identical to this,” u/unphamiliarterritory said. “Copeland exudes creepy, and I’ll never understand, as long as I live, how anyone in their right mind (and I’m thinking that’s the key phrase here) can see this guy and think he’s not Satan himself.”
Like many in the lineage of rich televangelists, Copeland—who has an estimated net worth of $300 million—has been accused of bilking his congregation into funding his lavish lifestyle.
But there’s more to this, according to writer Laird Barron.
“This filtered excerpt might seem cheesy. It’s not,” Barron wrote in a quote tweet of Right Wing Watch’s Copeland video, which has been viewed nearly 10 million times. “It’s a variation of command voice/presence techniques employed by law enforcement and the military. Motivational speakers use it, albeit less violently. This is professional brainwashing for your viewing pleasure. It works.”