Trusting QAnon, Dallas actor wanted D.C. riot to bring End Times. Now he faces charges
A year of YouTube rants hallucinating about children being killed and eaten under cover of the “deep state” took the Highland Park-bred grandson of a former Texas football coach to the steps of the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6.
Luke Coffee, 41, the actor grandson of 1960s TCU and University of Texas assistant coach Russell Coffee, thought he was going to Washington for the second coming — but not of Donald J. Trump.
Based on his own words, Coffee was among Capitol attackers who went not as Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, but as QAnon activists ensnarling religion with conspiracy to impose Christian rule and trigger the biblical second coming of Christ.
“A holy purge is happening, and it’s only from Jesus — it’s not from Donald J. Trump,” Coffee said over and over in videos, some still posted on social media.
He faces charges in connection with the assault of Washington, D.C., police officers with a crutch during the attempted overthrow.
“He just got fooled as so many people did,” said friend Becky Jane Romine of Arlington, who acted alongside Coffee in a 2007 comedy, “Cake: A Wedding Story.”
She’s a Christian and a Trump voter. But she described Coffee as gullible.
“When Trump started up this ‘Follow me, don’t follow those liars’ — Luke trusted him,” she said.
“Luke thought going to the Capitol would help. .... I had no idea it would go this far.”
Coffee did not respond to a message.
In 2015, Coffee actually played a Branch Davidian sect leader in the Reelz TV show “Murder Made Me Famous” episode about the 1993 deaths of four federal agents and 82 End Times cult members in a 51-day siege at rival David Koresh’s Mount Carmel compound.
Last month, Coffee was spouting his own doomsday prophecy from a compound at a Hill Country resort where he hid out and texted back and forth with FBI agents before his arrest, according to Texas Monthly.
On social media, Coffee preached about “this beauty that’s about to happen in the world, this Jesus consciousness.”
“Mass executions” were ahead as God’s revenge to punish “deep state” government officials and celebrities, he said, once describing himself as one of “God’s undercover agents.”:
Seth Brown of the North Carolina-based Biblical Recorder has written extensively for Southern Baptists about QAnon.
“The ongoing evolution of QAnon and related conspiracy theories is deeply concerning,” he wrote by email after watching part of a Coffee video.
Nearly half of Protestant pastors have heard conspiracy theories from worshippers, according to a survey by a Tennessee-based Lifeway Research
“This is not just a fringe nuisance,” Brown wrote.
“ ... Conspiracy theories should have no place in the Christian life. As people who claim to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ, we should not risk our public witness for political fantasies. We should denounce any movement that spreads false information.”
At the conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, professor and scholar Darrell L. Bock also watched part of a Coffee video.
He said although Coffee message claims to be religious, it’s clearly political.
“If you listen carefully, this is about defending America, not about Jesus,” Bock said.
“Jesus is only window dressing to justify these claims of a ‘deep state.’ ... What you are seeing is Christian nationalism where the nationalism is more important than anything else.”
This was no show.
