The Religious Right civil war, the devil’s in the “no-fly” list, and a white supremacist tells Trump exactly how to “Make America Great Again.” Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Frank Amedia
The man Trump tapped to be his Christian policy advisor doesn’t quite know if Barack Obama was born in the United States, saying that such inscrutable questions were “above my pay grade.”
In an interview with Alan Colmes Tuesday, flagged by Buzzfeed, Frank Amedia dismissed the notion that his orange godhead candidate had been the slightest bit racist when he propelled himself top of the fringe nutter trashheap back in 2011 on a contrail of birther nonsense. “I think that we’re too quick to put the race card on everything, we should be careful with that,” Amedia said.
When Colmes asked if Obama was born in this country, Amedia feinted: “That’s so far above my pay grade,” he said.
Hat tip and audio courtesy of Buzzfeed
4. Bryan Fischer
Bryan Fischer, perennial TWIC favorite and proverbial angry old man in residence at the American Family Association, is at it again. “It” being disgorging whatever septic cocktail of Old Testament wrath and cranky Dixiecratic paranoia he has brewed up this week.
On his radio show this week Fischer explicitly likened the effort by a bipartisan coalition of senators to pass legislation that would forbid anyone on the no-fly list from purchasing a gun to the machinations of Satan himself.
“That’s exactly how Satan works,” Fischer said. “That’s how he deceives us. He never tells us, ‘Look, if you do this thing I’m dangling in front of you, it’ll destroy you.’ He never says that because he knows we wouldn’t go for it.”
In pushing for “No fly, no buy” Democrats were not literally being Satan, he clarified — he just wants us to know that “this is how Satan works.” Fischer wouldn’t want us to think he’s nuts or anything.
Hat tip and audio courtesy of Right Wing Watch
3. Rush Limbaugh
But enough about amending our laws, which currently make it laughably easy for anyone to pick up a gun and start firing in a crowded place. The real problem is Sharia law, Limbaugh helpfully explained on his show.
“If Obama, if the president of the United States is serious about using the law to stop acts of terror, such as what happened in the gay bar in Orlando, then he had better try to change Sharia law, because that’s the only law those people listen to. They don’t care about U.S. law. And no criminal does,” Limbaugh said.
There’s a tired illogic to this idea that making it more difficult to buy a gun wouldn’t, you know, make it more difficult to buy a gun. And Limbaugh’s sly insinuation that Obama has some kind of jurisdiction over Sharia law is pretty old hat.
Rush is starting to sound like his own worst tribute band. Just a friendly reminder, Rush, that your sponsors are fleeing you in droves — and why shouldn’t they, when the median age of your listeners hovers around 70 and you can’t even be bothered to cook up fresh nonsense for them?
2. Jared Taylor
Jared Taylor, fervent Trump enthusiast and the face of well-scrubbed American white supremacists, reminded us that what Americans really long for, and hope to return to under a Trump presidency, are the good old days of Jim Crow.
In an open address to Donald Trump, dredged up by the blog Hail to the Gynocracy, which tracks the white supremacist “alt-right,” Taylor encourages the GOP’s presumptive nominee to deport all illegals and “take a hard look at” Muslim Americans.
“Mr. Trump, your campaign slogan is ‘Make America Great Again.’ I have bad news: You can’t make America great with a Third World population,” he declared.
He says that while, sure, white people want their jobs, “what they really want is their country back. The country they had in 1964.” As in, before the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. When things were “Great,” like the baseball cap sez.
Taylor, whose American Renaissance webzine is a cesspit of pseudoscience proclaiming the supremacy of the white race, once expressed his enthusiasm for a President Trump in an interivew. Trump’s elevation to the Oval Office, he said, would be “extremely useful to us.”
Read more gems at HTTG and watch the video below.
Hat tip and video courtesy of Hail to the Gynocracy
Next: Religious Right Can’t Deal With Trump
1. Religious Right Civil War
One of the small pleasures of the election has been watching the great minds of the Religious Right twist themselves into knots making a tepid peace with the crass and blatantly secular Trump.
Despite his naked and incompetent pandering to the conservative Christian movement (“Two Corinthians”), more and more evangelical figureheads are exposing themselves for the craven and feckless stooges they are by turning tail and voicing their mealy-mouthed support for the thrice-divorced Orange Julius in a red cap.
So it was this week when Trump summoned evangelical leaders to New York in order to convince them that he was their guy. Tony Perkins, virulently anti-gay leader of the Family Research Council, was charmed by Mr. Trump, writing in a blog post that “one thing Trump and social conservatives do have in common is the shared experience of being the target of vicious and often vile attacks from the Left for refusing to surrender to the terms of political correctness.” It’s true that Trump as well as Perkins and his FRC ilk are often criticized from the left. Espousing retrograde beliefs that consistently demean other people will reliably attract that kind of “attack.” Perkins added that he hoped this “ongoing conversation” between Trump and evangelicals “results in a concrete plan to protect the values we hold dear.”
Not everyone on the Religious Right can stomach Trump, of course. Glenn Beck, the #NeverTrump stalwart, who once averred that God killed Antonin Scalia in order to pave the way for President Ted Cruz, posted a lament on Facebook in which he even called out Trump for his reprehensibly hypocritical tack of trying to debunk Clinton’s religion: “For leaders to endorse and tolerate the lecture of ‘no evidence that Hillary is a Christian’ is obscene,” he wrote.
Michael Farris, writing in the Christian Post, was more blunt: “This meeting [with Trump] marks the end of the Christian Right.” He added: “In 1980 I believed that Christians could dramatically influence politics. Today, we see politics fully influencing a thousand Christian leaders.”
“This is a day of mourning,” he concluded.
Pass the popcorn.
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Image: DonkeyHotey
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PhotoUniversity of the Philippines students display glasses with lit candles and a placard as a tribute to those killed in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, during a protest at the school campus in Quezon city, Metro Manila, Philippines June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Erik De Castro
