Come on, fess up: you knew as soon as you saw the headline about a president weeping that it must be Jimmy Carter, right? And you’re right. X has been abuzz with a revelation from Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) on Joe Rogan’s show about the Man From Plains bursting into tears over something he learned in a CIA briefing. One post of the video featuring Burchett’s remarks was posted on Friday and has 976,000 views as of this writing on early Saturday afternoon; another has 835,000.
Yet as delicious as it may be for patriots to envision the feckless and sanctimonious 39th president moved to tears in the Oval Office, the story doesn’t even come close to being true. Burchett said:
I don't think Trump knows. I mean, these people have kept this stuff secret. Here's another thing. I was in one meeting, and a guy said, I said, what about the president on this? And he said, the president's on a need-to-know basis. Now, that's a federal employee saying that he or she has information that the president is not allowed to see. And I just was aghast, man. I said, you know, that's the kind of crap you see on the sci-fi network or something. But that would be the title of my book. I mean, that ought to tell you right there that this thing is a cover-up. And it's kind of like MKUltra. I don't think we're going to get the — they're not going to tell us everything. I really don't. I don't think they're going to give us half of what we should get.
Allegedly, when they told Jimmy Carter, he cried…. I won't go into all of it, but I was in a meeting… But, you know, here he is. That guy was president of the United States.
Burchett and Rogan don’t get into what made Carter weep. As is so often the case in situations like these, however, the internet thinks it knows. According to UFOMania, an X account with over 228,000 followers, what the shadowy CIA operatives have withheld from Trump, and what got Carter all choked up, had to do with what the aliens supposedly disclosed about the world’s religions. Carter “was told that the major religions including Christianity were programs created by extraterrestrials to prevent us from destroying ourselves while they ran their experiments on us - and that they made us.”
Sounds plausible until you expend about three seconds thinking about it. Aliens created the world’s major religions to stop us from killing each other? Don’t the people who concocted this story have even a rudimentary knowledge of history? (And the answer to that question is, Of course they don’t.) While it is true that most of the major religions teach that murder is wrong, people have been killing people in the name of those religions from time immemorial.
The idea that extraterrestrials came up with this terrific idea to keep us from destroying ourselves would actually only establish that these aliens were hardly super intellects, but actually quite inept. For if they cooked up the great religions for this purpose, why did they manufacture so many of them, instead of just one? In doing so, they seem to have increased, rather than eliminated, the possibility of conflict between human beings. Couldn’t these geniuses have foreseen that?
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And above all, why did they dream up one major religion that repeatedly tells its adherents to “kill them wherever you find them” (Qur’an 2:191, 4:89, 4:91, cf. 9:5) and “when you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (Qur’an 47:4)? This particular internet fad seems to be the product of atheists who want to score points against religion but don’t actually know all that much about what they’re trying to denigrate.
You still have to hand it to them, however. Cooking up a story featuring Jimmy Carter weeping shows a Hollywood-level sense of character development, and the bit about the CIA withholding information from Trump rings all too true in this era of the deep state. It’s a swell story, but the major religions have withstood more coherent and compelling challenges, and they’ll outlast this one as well.
