Let's talk for a second about Trump Derangement Syndrome. A friend just sent me this video that a Trump supporter they know (a boomer with a college degree who works as a scientist) had sent them. It claims to show Congresswoman Tlaib advocating for a Muslim takeover of America.
Ted Nugent's FB feed is probably a key source for this fake story. The video has been viewed 3.1 million times so far. The date stamp clearly marks it as 1989. Congresswoman Tlaib was born in 1976. The most basic google (or math) skills would reveal this to be a hoax.
Even a basic google search for "Tlaib cspan hoax" immediately turns up 3 stories debunking this video. Here's the first one that comes up. factcheck.org/2019/05/decade…
Let me repeat, the person who circulated this to my friend in order to convince him of the serious threat Islam supposedly poses to America is a white middle class scientist with a college degree. And they are suffering from a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
This same person also sent along a chain email attesting to the same point, that Islam and America have always been at war with each other. Take a snippet of the email, google it, and you'll never believe what turns up first in your google search. politifact.com/truth-o-meter/…
One section of the email is taken verbatim from Brad Thor's work of fiction, "The Last Patriot."
On the left is Thor's book. On the right is the email.
Ted Nugent's fake post is still up on Facebook. That fake email chain is still making its rounds amongst conservative Trump fans. Neither "thought leaders" like Nugent nor highly educated Trumpers like this email forwarder give a single hoot about truth.
The irony, of course, is that such people like to think of themselves as the defenders of "Western Civilization" with its belief in reason and science.
Hoaxes like this, fake news, and conspiracy theories have long been with us. What's new is the power that social media gives to misinformation agents like Nugent to quickly and broadly disseminate propaganda like this.
The other thing that feels new is that we have a sitting president whose primary communication strategy is to nurture this sort of derangement in his supporters, to encourage them to suspend their rational faculties in the name of being "patriots."
Trump didn't turn this email forwarder into an Islamophobe. But he's given focus and intensity to this guy's bigotry...made him feel like he's not alone in his "patriotic" hatred of Tlaib. And all of it rests upon 100% made up bullsh*t, debunkable with a simple google search.
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In 1978 the chair of the Oregon Republican Party was a conspiracy-obsessed, Holocaust denying white Christian supremacist with longstanding ties to neo-Nazis and right wing domestic terrorists.
I'll admit, he was a bit of an outlier. But he campaigned hard for Goldwater in '64, was a Reagan delegate in '76, '80, and '84, and was a huge fan of Dan Quayle and Pat Buchanan in the 90s.
More importantly, he spent the years 1960-2000 driving hundreds of thousands of miles across the state of Oregon--forging connections with local activists in churches and American Legion lodges, taking far right speakers on tours through every major town in the state, etc.
I think I may have found the most perfect illustration of that common variety of American centrist journalism that attributes agency and responsibility only to the left and never the right. It's from the Atlanta Constitution, 12 August 1970. For context....
The columnist notes that there is a far right, grassroots movement that was working to take over the historically moderate Oregon Republican Party. I've been researching that illiberal and anti-democratic insurgency for a couple years now.
The leader of that movement was Walter Huss, a conspiracy-obsessed white Christian nationalist and virulent antisemite who worked his tail off for decades to drive the OR GOP to the right. But according to that columnist, Huss bears no responsibility.
I've become a bit of a collector of these obits of wealthy "conservatives" like Robert Olney. Unmentioned is the fact that by 1966 Olney thought the Jews had turned the US into a Communist country that could only be saved by a violent coup led by Christian Patriots like himself.
In the mid-1960s Olney was corresponding with Pedro del Valle about the Continental Congress they were setting up with white nationalists & antisemites like John Crommelin, Richard Cotten, & William Potter Gale. The idea was that the US Gov't was illegitimate & it was 1776 again.
Here's a letter retired Lt. General Pedro del Valle wrote to an Alabama chiropractor in 1967 explaining how the UN rendered the US Constitution null and void, and how Dr. Olney was organizing a new government to return the country to its origins as a "White Christian Republic."
Few things more convincing than “rules and standards matter” bloviating about how wearing shorts in the Senate will be the downfall of Western Civilization from the party of President “grab em by the p*ssy.”
Real clear eyed sense of proportion from the party who nominated the guy who opened his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists.
Highly recommend this discussion of Bill Buckley's very bad book, God and Man at Yale. I have one friendly amendment to add that makes Buckley look even worse!
The hosts talk about how Buckley was reading the batshit conspiratorial rantings of Lucille Cardin Crain as they appeared in a short-lived periodical called Educational Reviewer. You'll never guess who was the main funder for it. William F. Buckley, **Sr.**
As Buckley, Jr. is feverishly reading and annotating copies of Lucille Cardin Crain's Educational Reviewer in the Yale library ca. 1950, what he's doing is ingesting wingnut propaganda that has been bankrolled by his father. I'd be interested to know if Jr. was aware of this.
When did the "MAGA doom loop" cycle inside the GOP begin? There's no single "right answer" but in this thread I will propose in June 1962, inside the Multnomah County (OR) GOP. I'm only slightly kidding...bear with me as I try to explain.
In June 1962 a grassroots far right insurgency tried to take over the Multnomah Co GOP. These two fairly pablum stories from The Oregonian at the time are just a barrage of names, all of which I'll bet you've never heard of. But let me introduce you to some of them.
The organizer of the insurgency was Syl Ehr, a sign painter by trade and a fascist Silver Shirt from the 1930s who was active in the America First movement and would become a leader of the right wing domestic terrorist/anti-tax Posse Comitatus movement in the 1970s.