We ignored this last week when it first popped, since it was always ludicrous to think that Tony Spell, the pastor of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge who’s been in the news so often since the state of Louisiana became a COVID dictatorship where the freedom of religion went into the lurch, would suddenly become a credible opponent to John Kennedy for the Senate. But then it just got to be too amusing not to mention.

If you didn’t pay attention to this, here’s a timeline for you…

June 6: Spell was a guest on Jim Engster’s radio show. Why anybody right of the political center would do such a thing is beyond us, because Jim Engster is a Democrat political operative whose show is a platform to spread the narratives of the white Democrat elite, but Spell made that mistake. During the show, after buttering him up a bit Engster asked Spell about running for governor in 2023.

He did this for a reason, which was to drum up talk about another conservative who’d split the primary vote with Jeff Landry, who right now the white Democrat elite are terrified of – particularly after the momentum Landry picked up a couple of weeks ago at the LAGOP’s Victory 2022 event. But Spell didn’t take that bait.

June 7: The very next day, Engster had The Advocate’s news director Mark Ballard on. And he and Ballard changed course and claimed that “insiders say Spell could run against Kennedy for Senate.” The narrative was that if Spell entered the race, qualifying for which comes on July 20, it would make Kennedy vulnerable.

Here’s how that works – if Spell got into the race, it would mean that Kennedy – who has raised $29 million for the race so far and is sitting on more than $16 million in his war chest – might be forced into a runoff. Because somehow Tony Spell, who’s never run for anything before, is going to suddenly raise enough money to cut into Kennedy’s 55-60 percent of the vote he’s currently holding. And to add more delusion to the mix, because Kennedy would then be forced into a runoff, it would mean that Luke “The Alpaca” Mixon, the airline pilot from Baton Rouge whose campaign has been lifeless since he declared almost a year ago now, would find new life against Gary Chambers, the black activist who has so far swamped Mixon with the third of the vote in Louisiana which is black.

Literally a double delusion. When we saw that we ignored it as a waste of our time to even bother with.

June 8: Then, the Advocate’s Tyler Bridges put out a story about Spell running for Senate against Kennedy, using the idle idiocy of the Engster/Ballard conversation as its basis.

June 9: The Advocate publishes that story in its Saturday print edition.

June 10: Spell is interviewed in a piece by Woody Jenkins in the Central City News, in which he utterly and completely burns down this entire fraud by saying he’s not running for Senate. From the article…

“This story is not coming from me but from a talk show host and a reporter who said, ‘You would make a great candidate for the Senate against Kennedy. Why don’t you run?’ The talk show host even sent a political consultant to see me! The only ‘discussion’ I’ve had about the race is with them, answering their questions. However, as I told all of them, why would I want to take a step down? Being a pastor is the highest calling there is, and I’m not running for anything, certainly not this year.” Rev. Spell said.

Pastor Spell said that overall Sen. Kennedy has done a good job. “I was disappointed that he did not support Life Tabernacle when we were being persecuted. When I talked to his staff, they said ‘You mean you were arrested for holding church?’ I was surprised they were unaware of the tremendous persecution we were enduring. However, that aside, he has been a solid voice for Louisiana. If anyone needs an opponent, it is Sen. Cassidy, but that is four years away, and I’m confident we’ll have good candidates to take him on.”

“Anyone who actually knows me knows that my work is that of a pastor. At the local level, we run bus routes, work on our facilities, have daily home Bible studies, music rehearsals, Bible study, reading, memorizing, bus maintenance, lawn care, sermon preparation, and a hundred other works. You don’t run a church of 10,000 members and 41 acres part-time! In fact, it runs you! At the national level, my work is mentoring pastors and missionaries, discipling, advising, counseling, and working with ministers. At the international level, my work is meeting the needs of missionaries spiritually and financially and fulfilling the Great Commission. That is who I am and what I do.”

“Although I comment from time to time on political matters, I am not involved in politics directly, and I don’t see it likely that will change,” he said.

June 11: Tyler Bridges, in a story about Kennedy raising the $29 million so far in the race, actually repeats the narrative about Spell which had been refuted by Spell himself.

It’s clownish. It’s ridiculous. There was literally never a drop of substance to Tony Spell running for anything. All he did was go on Jim Engster’s show, which as we noted above was a mistake nobody on the Right in Louisiana should ever do, and that was enough for the supposed journalists Mark Ballard and Tyler Bridges to play political operative and attempt to bootstrap a story about Spell running.

In an effort to…split off evangelicals from Kennedy, or something. Which was never, ever going to work.

There is no daylight between the Louisiana Democrat Party, which is run by white leftists despite 60 percent of its members being black, and the Jim Engster/Advocate media operatives who pump out their trial balloons and disinformation.

The best response is not to participate in any of it. Hopefully that’s a lesson Tony Spell has learned.